Hazing steps up tension in UKI

JAKARTA (JP): Dozens of members of the university military group (Menwa) of the Indonesian Christian University (UKI) raided several buildings belonging to Forum Kota (City Forum) activists on Saturday evening. The raid followed a clash which happened during a university student initiation earlier in the afternoon.

No fatalities were reported during the attack. All the windows of the three Forum Kota's buildings located on the university compound in Cawang, East Jakarta, were broken, and all the contents of the rooms were scattered on the floor.

Remnants of burned clothes and papers were seen outside the fences of the buildings.

The university authority has issued a warning letter, posted on the fences surrounding the area, notifying that the buildings were temporarily sealed off from any activity.

"I saw Menwa members in uniform come to the Forum Kota's buildings around 12 p.m. on Saturday," Mrs. Maruli Simanj untak, a wife of a UKI lecturer whose house is only a few metres away from the buildings, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

She said Menwa members brought wooden sticks and sharp weapons with them. "But no guns were seen."

Earlier on Saturday evening, three members of the UKI student initiation committee were injured by stones and hard objects thrown in a clash between Menwa and committee members at UKI's other campus on Jl. Diponegoro in Central Jakarta.

The three injured committee members were identified as David, Horas and Hendra. Horas and Hendra were taken to the UKI Hospital in Cawang, but were released the same evening.

The clash started when a freshman was asked by an initiation committee member to sing a song, which insulted the Menwa corps. Upon hearing the song, several Menwa members who were present hit the committee member.

Their action led to a clash between the two camps.

Initiation committee leaders then decided to move the closing ceremony to the university's Cawang campus.

Pangiutan Silalahi, a Menwa member, said he saw initiation committee members along with dozens of Forum Kota members carrying machetes and wooden sticks on Saturday evening.

"They took Menwa uniforms out of the Menwa secretariat and burned them. They left the university compound around 7 p.m," he told The Post at the campus on Sunday.

Pangiutan said the Forum Kota members also vandalized another Menwa secretariat, destroying all its windows. "The second was renovated just a month ago."

Eli Salomo, a senior Forum Kota activist, confirmed that many Forum activists were also members of the initiation committee.

"The clash was not between Forum Kota and Menwa. It was the committee members against Menwa," he said on Sunday.

Forum Kota, a loose alliance of several university students, is a radical student group which helped tumble the former country's strongman, Soeharto, in May last year.

The presence of Menwa has repeatedly been criticized by many.

In 1995, the South Jakarta District Court sentenced four students of the National University in South Jakarta for five to seven months in jail, after the judge declared them guilty of destroying and assaulting Menwa members in Oct. 1994.

The jailed students defended that they attacked the members because the latter often bullied them. (asa/04/anr)