Hoodlums, from Majapahit to Kampung Rambutan

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE (JP): Indonesia has been hit by rolling violence, spreading from province to province.

It is not possible to speak of violence in the country without looking into a phenomenon of thuggery known as premanism, which is sometimes outwardly visible, and other times hidden in society.

A timely conference and workshop which attempted to address violence in Indonesia was held last week at the University of Melbourne.

Tim Lindsey's paper on the issue stirred up a great deal of discussion and debate at the talks. Titled "From Soepomo to Prabowo", it helped place premanism in the broader sense, in an historical and legal context.

Lindsey, deputy director of the private Asia Law Center, traces violence, often perpetrated by the state itself, to the failure in the reality check of Soepomo's romantic concept of the integralist state.

Soepomo, the chief drafter of the 1945 Constitution, believed that there was no need for any guarantee of protection of individuals against the state, because the individuals were nothing else than organic parts of the state, having specific positions and duties to realize the grandeur of the state.

The state, according to Soepomo, was the people, or the spiritual manifestation of the people.

This, Lindsey indicated, has been a common approach in Indonesian statutes: the executive can overrule any policy "in the national interest".

And individuals acting against the state, manifest as the government, are, therefore, acting against society, and the people. This basic concept has been used, it appears, by those charged with preventing violence, such as the prosecutors, intelligence agencies, the police and the courts, who often work to sabotage the prosecution of acts of violence with political slant, if they feel that it could weaken the state.

The stand-over tactics used by the New Order government found justification in this concept. According to Lindsey, they operated on the same basis as the premans (hoodlums). Quoting another paper by David Bourchier, Lindsey pointed out how intelligence chief Ali Murtopo used his pool of wild or criminal youths, known as gali, to attack, intimidate and sabotage opponents of the regime.

Yet later on when these gangs had become an embarrassment, the same treatment was meted out to them. Protection against gali was mentioned in the same breath as protection against communists.

Punishment against them was meted out in the form of brutality as with Marsinah, a trade union activist who was fighting for fair wages, and Muhammad Fuad Sjafruddin, a journalist who dared write about corruption allegedly committed by a state official, for example.

Speakers said the cooption by the state of hoodlums appeared in the forms of security enforcers, such as in the control of territory for rent extraction, sanctioned by an arm of the state.

A recent example is a body known as the Union of the Big Family of Tanah Abang. This newspaper, on June 28, reported that it was set up in 1997 at the initiative of the Central Jakarta mayor, "to solve problems at the Tanah Abang market."

The Rp 2,000 collected daily from each public minivan driver was used to pay local youths so they would not create trouble, such as asking for money from drivers entering the area.

However, the establishment of this body has not been able to contain the protection racket within the "official" agency. Illegal traffic wardens sprung up from different corners, adding untold burdens to the already financially stressed drivers.

The unpopularity of these bullying tactics was obvious in instances of backlash, such as the mobbing and burning of five men near the Kampung Rambutan intercity terminal in East Jakarta.

Society has also seen premanism getting out of control. It happens when the state gives power to private premans and turns them into militias for the purposes of the state. Rival groups and factions quickly develop. The hoodlums on one elite member's payroll can threaten another elite member's position.

Some participants in the session traced the genesis of premanism to an era as far back as the Javanese kingdoms of Singasari and Majapahit, where many of the kings began their "careers" as either village bullies or village strongmen.

This proposition was opposed by others who stressed that, unlike the Japanese yakuza, premans in Indonesia had yet to become rulers or members of the power elite, though they were often close to the power holders.

The part that most concerned participants was that according to Lindsey, reformasi has succeeded in publicly identifying the essential criminality of many state systems, including law, and has even brought the legitimacy of the state into question, but has failed to effect any real change.

The conference and workshops were sponsored by the Australian Research Council, the Asia Foundation, the Australia-Indonesia Institute, the Ford Foundation, the university's department of history, the Indonesia Forum and the Asia Law Center.

The writer is a journalist and novelist based in Melbourne.