RI: The evolution of revolution

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Everybody by now knows the drill for non-violent revolution -- in the past decade it has picked off tough targets like the South Korean generals, the Soviet Communist Party, and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

But it is still very hard to do, as the survivors of Tiananmen Square know to their cost -- and as the students in Jakarta have just learned.

The trigger for four days of bloody rioting, looting and arson in the Indonesian capital was a non-violent demonstration against the 32-year rule of Soeharto by 5,000 students from Trisakti University on May 12. They marched off the campus in good spirits but with high discipline: Most had seen videos of how this sort of thing was done, and they understood the psychology of it.

Police blocked the road and were soon reinforced by armored cars but no student threw a stone or a bottle, or even shouted rude comments about the policemen's mothers. Instead, they went up to the police with roses -- thoughtfully purchased beforehand -- and pushed them into their gun-barrels.

It is all highly predictable, even ritualistic stuff, but it usually works. It is hard to shoot somebody who has just given you flowers. It's even harder for an officer to give the order to shoot, especially if he has to do it on live television. Non- violence is not naive good-will. It is a tough tactic for real politics, based on acute observation of how human psychology actually works.

Non-violence has come a long way since the time of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, when the opponents were democratic governments that basically knew they were in the wrong. Now it has to take on the far tougher challenges of military dictatorships and even communist regimes, but the basic principle is the same: You do not want to fight the police but to win them over to your side.

If the non-violent revolutionaries end up controlling the streets, or just key symbolic areas of the capital city, and the regime cannot get its troops to shoot them, then the regime is finished. By the same token, however, the regime's interest lies in pushing the scene on the streets from disciplined protest into random violence -- because it then becomes legitimate to use far greater amounts of official violence to "restore order".

The policemen who serve dictatorial regimes have done their homework, and nowadays they understand the dialectic of non- violence too. There is evolution in revolutionary tactics, as in everything else: It is not as easy as it was in 1986 in Manila, or in 1989 in Prague.

Nobody knows if the plainclothes policeman who started a scuffle with some students from Trisakti just as they were heading back to the campus was under orders to create a pretext for the police to start shooting, but it would not be surprising. At any rate, he did the job.

The police opened fire and chased the students back onto the campus, killing four of them -- but then the whole city of Jakarta blew up in their faces. About 500 people were dead by the weekend, and large areas of the city had been pillaged.

Every big city contains some people who will seize any pretext to riot, just to create the right conditions for looting: You are never that far away from chaos anywhere. But poor countries in acute economic distress -- the normal end-of-regime situation in Third World dictatorships -- contain millions of desperate people.

If a regime under siege by non-violent methods cannot shift the dynamic to violence, it loses automatically, so it is bound to try. But violence, once unleashed, is hard to confine -- and if it gets completely out of hand, the regime is discredited anyway.

That is what occurred in Jakarta last week.

The problem now is that the violence greatly complicates the transition process. There will probably still be a democratic Indonesia in the end, but other outcomes have become more possible, and ugly things may happen along the way.

It will get very ugly indeed if Soeharto hangs on for weeks while the mobs rage, the army splits, and separatist tendencies gain ground in places like northern Sumatra and Irian Jaya. Sixty percent of Indonesia's 202 million people live on the island of Java and speak only three closely related languages, but the rest of the sprawling archipelago is a linguistic and ethnic patchwork quilt of huge complexity.

Worst of all, the mobs will turn on the Chinese minority, with the regime's tacit blessing. (So long as they are looting Chinese shops, they are not attacking the presidential palace).

In the year of violence that marked the 1965 transition from Indonesia's first leader, Sukarno, to its present one, Soeharto, many of the estimated 500,000 dead were from the Chinese minority, though Chinese-Indonesians are only 3 percent of the population. If something like that happened again, a more powerful, better armed China might even be tempted to intervene militarily this time. But this is the nightmare scenario, and not very likely.

The sooner Soeharto's opponents can get back to non-violent tactics, the better, but for that they need both boldness and unity. "We would need hundreds of thousands of people on the street under a single program before we can begin to think of a February 1986 Manila ("people power") scenario," said University of Sydney academic Gerry van Klinken last week, and so far that has not happened.

Neither of the two most important opposition leaders, Amien Rais of the Muhammadiyah movement and Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno, has yet dared to make an uncompromising public commitment to Soeharto's overthrow. Without that, the Indonesian revolution will drag on for weeks, killing more and more people, wrecking what is left of the economy, and threatening the peace of Asia.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose articles are published in 45 countries.