Remembering Black Saturday

In the early hours of July 27, 1996, several hundred people belonging to a splinter faction of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), allegedly backed by the military, attacked the PDI headquarters on Jl. Diponegoro in Central Jakarta, brutally assaulting supporters of the legitimate leader of the party, Megawati Soekarnoputri.

The bloody riots that ensued quickly spread to other parts of the city, leaving five people died and at least 149 injured. Another 23 people disappeared during the violence and remain missing today, according to the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM).

That is why July 27, 1996, is remembered as Black Saturday.

To better understand the event, it is helpful to recall what was happening during those years. During the mid-1990s, Megawati, the eldest daughter of then-disgraced founding president Sukarno, was elected chairwoman of PDI in a congress in Surabaya, despite efforts by the Soeharto regime to forestall her election. Still, the Soeharto government refused to recognize the decision of the Surabaya congress and began to plot how to remove Megawati from the chair.

A new congress was accordingly convened in Medan, during which Soerjadi was elected chairman of the PDI. The party's democratically elected chairwoman, Megawati, and her supporters not surprisingly refused to acknowledge the Medan congress, and persisted in claiming Megawati as the party's legitimate leader. The Megawati camp continued to occupy the party's national headquarters on Jl. Diponegoro, where almost daily free speech forums critical of the Soeharto government were held, right up until the brutal attack of July 27, 1996.

On the occasion of the second anniversary of the attack, several months after the downfall of president Soeharto, Megawati told 30,000 cheering supporters that "the truth cannot be hidden and will finally prevail. That day will forever be part of the nation's history"!

She also lashed out at the Habibie government, which had banned her supporters from holding the commemoration at Senayan stadium in the center of the capital, forcing the party to move the event to her home in Kebagusan, South Jakarta.

Black Saturday, then, is a milestone not only in the history of the Republic, but also in the political career of Megawati. The "free speech forums" from June to July 1996 on the premises of PDI's headquarters contributed substantially to the reawakening of the people, who for decades had been oppressed by the Soeharto regime. This began the snowballing of popular movements, which eventually forced Soeharto from the Presidential Palace.

At the same time, almost overnight, it made Megawati a living hero -- a symbol of the oppressed, a leader who could bring democracy back to the country, who could give sovereignty back to its rightful and legitimate owners, the people of Indonesia.

Seven years have passed since the brutal attack, and it has been two years since Megawati was elected Indonesia's fifth President, and democracy is muddling along up an unclear path. Sovereignty has not been returned to its legitimate owners, but instead has become subject to political jousting between the executive and legislative branches of the state.

No less seriously, there has been no serious follow-up to the Komnas HAM report on the attack, even though seven years ago chairwoman Megawati urged the government to look into the matter. There were arrests in the first few weeks after the assault, however not of the attackers but of the supporters of Megawati, more than 120 of whom were detained for months without due process of law.

The government reluctantly set up a National Police team to investigate the attack after the Komnas HAM report was released. But every dossier submitted by the team was rejected by the prosecutor's office. In July 2000, the National Police team was replaced by a joint military-police team, comprising 70 members from the Military Police, military prosecutors, the Jakarta Police detectives unit and the National Police. This joint team handed over its dossiers to the prosecutor's office last year. None were approved.

The team named 10 military suspects, including former Jakarta Military chief Lt. Gen. (ret) Sutiyoso and 12 civilian suspects. Sutiyoso was reelected governor of Jakarta recently, ironically thanks to the political support of President Megawati, who dismissed one of her own recalcitrant city councillors for opposing Sutiyoso.

Looking back through Indonesia's history, the Black Saturday tragedy is sadly not an isolated event. Moreover, it seems that this is not just a problem of upholding justice. Disappointing as it may be that President Megawati has turned out to be no better than her predecessors in upholding justice, promoting democracy and respecting people's sovereignty, the average Indonesian has to admit that our value system is vague concerning the basic tenets of human life.

Probably because Indonesia is such a populous country, Indonesians tend to look at people in terms of quantity. In this case, the fact that five people were killed and 23 went missing easily becomes less relevant as millions more Indonesians are still alive. This argument is easily moved even further into a justification for killing people, hundreds or thousands of them, "for the sake" of 220 million other Indonesians -- especially if those being killed are perceived as criminals, traitors or other evildoers.

But closing the book on Black Saturday would not only be a betrayal of the people's expectations regarding democracy, justice and sovereignty; it would also confirm our disrespect for the basic values of individual human life.