New trend on the move -- Going incognito
JAKARTA (JP): The daily student demonstrations across the nation have inspired certain parties, including security forces and state employees, to hide their identities for different reasons.
Many state employees, who have been accused of playing a part in bringing the nation to the brink of bankruptcy through corruption, only wear their uniforms at work.
They hastily remove any telling sign of where they work whenever they have to leave the office.
In an attempt to avoid trouble on the streets, red number plates, which identify a vehicle as belonging to the government, are often changed with black plates to identify the vehicle as a private one.
In some cities, top government officials have temporarily left their luxury cars at home and are being driven about in Kijang vans, the standard vehicle for middle-class Indonesians.
As part of their jobs in apprehending possible rioters among protesters, security forces have been instructed to set up a special team whose duty is to penetrate the demonstrations.
So far, only a few of them have been recognized by protesters, who apparently hate the presence of the infiltrators.
The latest case was recorded Thursday when intelligence officer Second Sgt. Teguh Rochman, 27, from the Jakarta Military Command was badly beaten by dozens of students at the Rawamangun Teachers Training Institute in East Jakarta.
The plainclothes officer was caught red-handed by protesting students as he tried to sneak into the rector's building.
The officer was found with a fake student identification card, a blank student card, a pistol, a walkie-talkie, a tape recorder and several notes in his possession.
He was forced to apologize in front of a sea of students, who were yelling at him.
On the same day, student protesters rallying on the streets of Jember, a small town in East Java, were attacked with sharp weapons by a group of mysterious men driving by in three cars and three motorcycles.
Some of the students, who were marching to Muhammadiyah University from IKIP PGRI Teachers Training Institute, were badly wounded.
Local police chief Lt. Col. A. Madjid Tawil said he was surprised by the mysterious attack and vowed to investigate it.
"Please do not instantly have negative thoughts about the security forces," he warned, asking the students to learn something from the incident.
But the tension in the continuous antigovernment rallies have also affected innocent victims, such as Momon Karyana, a tofu seller in the West Java capital of Bandung.
The 27-year-old street trader, who usually runs his business on Bandung Institute of Technology's campus on Jl. Ganesha, suffered serious wounds to his face and genitals after being beaten Thursday evening by students, who thought Momon was an undercover officer.
"I was confused at the time and even more confused when the students accused me of being an intelligence officer," Momon told reporters in the emergency room of the Hasan Sadikin hospital.
"They just dragged me down to the campus and forced me to admit to their accusation," Momon explained.
Antara quoted the trader as saying he was spoken to abusively and badly beaten by the students.
"I couldn't believe that the students, who are said to be expressing people's agony, are now violating people like me," Momon said.
The student demonstrations, which often end in clashes with security forces, have also left at least six reporters injured.
Three reporters were injured in Bandung and one in Jakarta, Surabaya and Samarinda respectively.
The first five journalists claim they were beaten by security officers. The one in Samarinda, identified as Bakrie Djafar from Forum Keadilan weekly, said he was attacked by protesters. (bsr)