State loses control over 'preman'

This is the first of two articles on protected crime by Dr Tim Lindsey, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

MELBOURNE (JP): The toughs, or preman, were central to the illegal systems of violence and corruption by which the New Order operated. But look in any shopping mall or city park: they are still here and they still have their hands in your pocket.

Derived from the Dutch for "free man" and originally used to refer to irregular or demobilized soldiers, the term preman came to mean bandit and then gangster or, more commonly, standover man. Today, preman or, in their own slang, jawara, are the toughs found throughout Indonesia who extort illegal rents from people living or carrying on a business in territory they have "won" by fighting and defeating other preman.

Even pickpockets working a demo feel obliged to pay the local jawara a tenth of their take.

Under Soeharto's New Order, state officials protected street- level preman through a system known as dekking or bekking ("backing"). Rival criminal "gang" structures linked political and business elites through the military to preman.

Sometimes these gangs mutated into private armies or militias linked to political and business leaders.

The "backing" system gives preman state protection. It also forces them to pay their own dues. Having extracted their rent from citizens, they in turn pay rents to government representatives, usually members of the military or police, in return for the right to operate.

A typical approach to creating "backing" mechanisms has been for government or military associates to create formal youth groups or work-related associations as bases for criminal gangs.

In Medan, for instance, the army-created anti-communist youth gang, Pemuda Pancasila (PP), and a splinter group, Ikatan Pemuda Karya (IPK), contest access to standover rents in the city's markets. Despite PP's dekking by the police mobile brigade, IPK now seems to have gained control of important political posts.

The dekking system operated outside the law but often overlapped official, formal structures of state. Invariably, it subverted any state structures with which it came into contact. And eventually it permeated virtually every aspect of public life under the New Order, from contracting to law enforcement to narcotics -- and even the operation of public transport.

The Tanah Abang Microlet network, for example, was run for years by the local government and police as a mafia-style protection racket.

The post-Soeharto reformasi era succeeded in publicly identifying the essential criminality of many state systems and in some cases forced the state to close down the more public and outrageous "rackets" like Tommy Soeharto's clove monopoly. It failed, however, failed to achieve real systemic change.

In many cases, rackets pushed out of the state's systems have been "privatized". New Order-approved gangsters now operate now as covert enemies of the government.

An ironic consequence of this is that it is now much more difficult for the state to control preman activity because the state is no longer the "boss".

This is one of the reasons for the surge in violence across the archipelago since Soeharto. Militia activity in Eastern Indonesia, standover violence by so-called "Islamic" groups against nightclubs and discos in urban centers and the rise of vigilantism in Jakarta.

All of these can be seen in part at least as responses to a weakening of state control over preman groups, resulting in violent battles over territory and attempts to find for new sources of income.

Of course, the current violence across the archipelago is also part of a pattern of violence between Indonesians that the American scholar James Siegel has described as "an intermittent civil war", usually involving violent state action.

It can be seen in events in Aceh and Timor and can be traced back through events like the recent "ninja" killings of suspected practioners of black magic; the state-ordained shootings of alleged criminals (petrus); the 1984 Tanjung Priok shootings of Muslims in Jakarta, the massacre of more than a million "leftists" in the mid-1960s, the PRRI-Permesta rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi; and so on, back to the revolution in the 1940s.

Just as the events reach back to the revolution, so too does the political ideology that justifies the state acting so often and so harshly against its own citizens.

The 1945 Constitution adopted Raden Soepomo's idea of the integralistic state, portraying the relationship between the Indonesian state and its people as one of total unity.

Soepomo was adopting the same "legal romanticism" that the Nazis relied on, only in Indonesia the ideas of volk (people) and fuhrer (father, leader) were filtered though Dutch jurisprudence.

If the state and the people are one -- "there can be no difference between the State and the people", Soepomo said -- then it follows that the state is infallible and above the law. This means that if something goes wrong, it must be a result not of bad policy but of sabotage and betrayal by enemies of state, who are thus enemies of the people: outlaws.

The state is therefore entitled to act beyond the law and with extreme violence to protect the people and, by extension, itself.

Under the New Order extra-legal violence to defend the interests of the state -- or rather, the crony elite who ran it -- became so pervasive that only a widespread acceptance of imminent crisis could make it tolerable.

This means that the regime had to become a "state of insecurity", creating a fear of invisible and nameless subversives on the verge of toppling the Republic.

The quintessence of this genre was the notion of "organizations without form" (organisasi tanpa bentuk, OTB) that had to be destroyed by aggressive force in order to maintain the union between state and people.

The state's obsession with OTB was, of course, directed at the political left, but official insecurity went much wider than increasingly unbelievable claims of secret Communist conspiracies.

For example, Soeharto claimed the petrus (acronym of mysterious shootings) killings of the tattooed "wild street youths" (gali, or gabungan anak liar) on his orders were required as "therapy" to protect the people from criminals who threatened public order.

Carried out by disguised members of the military who left the corpses with multiple bullet shots or stab wounds in streets and rivers, the executions were an attempt to appropriate the power of preman by asserting that the state was the only institution that could go beyond the limits of the law.

Although the state has rarely experienced real limits on its authority, it is clear that it emerged from these events as the unchallenged possessor of lawless power -- the mediator of violence.