RI: The evolution of revolution

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.