Indonesian way of dying

Indonesian way of dying

Despite the long absence of natural disasters, bad news
continues to bombard us from different directions.

The latest news of the drowning of 14 high school students in
a Bogor river came after an apparent lull in ethnic clashes in
West Kalimantan, which broke out after bloody religious conflict
in Ambon. Hundreds of people were killed in the two latter
tragedies.

The Bogor accident took place on Friday when 14 students
jumped into Cisadane River and drowned. They leapt into the river
in an effort to escape arrest after 41 of their colleagues were
apprehended by police officers. The students traveled from
Jakarta to avenge an alleged attack on a fellow student by Bogor
students. The tragedy was all the more tragic because the
students mission was based on rumor.

However, student brawls are nothing new here. The ugly
tendency has become somewhat fashionable among our young people.
In Jakarta alone, perhaps dozens of them have been killed in
brutal brawls over the past years. Authorities have cracked down
on brawling students, but police operations have not yielded a
long-term solution.

Experts have said that aside from having to cope with their
youth and emotions, urban students -- especially those of less
privileged families -- live under a lot of pressure. Many of them
regard violence as an effective solution to their problems.

But in this case they are not the sole members of society to
blame because using violence or force to solve a problem is a
common phenomenon in Indonesia. So common is the trend that
parents and educators are finding it more difficult to educate
today's youth.

Viewing the Bogor tragedy as a part of a national problem, one
tends to conclude that many of our people lose their lives in a
useless and worthless fashion. Bogor itself had an earlier tragic
incident which claimed the lives of 10 young people. In 1992, 10
youths drowned in Cikeas River during a training session
organized by a church.

Two weeks earlier, 11 young people were caught in a flash
flood near Ciliwung River, also in Bogor. Only one of them
survived.

And about two decades ago, some transvestites jumped into a
river and to their deaths in Menteng, Central Jakarta, in fear of
being arrested by city security officers. The officers denied
staging a raid, but an investigation later found they had lied.

In all these cases, the most obvious cause is that most people
of this country, which is surrounded by oceans and criss-crossed
by many rivers, have never learned to swim.

Many other tear-jerking incidents have in Jakarta through the
years. In West Jakarta in 1987, 26 workers died in a fire which
swept through a clothes factory. The workers, who included five
women, met a fiery death because the exit door had been locked by
the manager.

On Jakarta roads, where reckless drivers behave like devils
behind the wheel, the number of accident victims could surpass
that of war casualties. The most frightful of them was the death
of 33 passengers and the injury of 29 others when a minibus
careened into a river in North Jakarta in 1994.

Although the driver was sentenced to 16 years in jail, it did
not deter another reckless bus driver from getting behind the
wheel and causing an accident which claimed the lives of 35
people three years later on a Jakarta-Bogor expressway.

The list of the loss of innocent lives would be very long
indeed if we were to include those killed during an election
campaign fire in South Kalimantan in 1997, riots in Jakarta and
in military operations in East Timor, Jakarta's Tanjung Priok
Port, Lampung and Aceh.

The government saw fit to apologize to the Acehnese people for
inhumane acts by the military, but military authorities are still
reluctant to investigate last year's student killings at Trisakti
University and on the Semanggi clover bridge, both in Jakarta.

This reluctance shows that to military leaders, loss of
innocent people's lives has ceased to have meaning and they are
too insensitive to care about justice and human rights. This has
also made the people believe that many more such incidents will
take place in the future.