University students break political chains

By A. Wisnuhardana

YOGYAKARTA (JP): "Welcome to the Campus of the Struggle for New Order" was recently sprayed in black paint by protesting students of the University of Indonesia (UI) in their Salemba campus. The act seems to have become a symbolic milestone.

Around the same time, over one thousand students of Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta held a similar demonstration demanding lower prices and political reform.

The Yogyakarta demonstrators used phrases similar to those of their Jakarta colleagues and rejected the authority of the New Order.

These acts by UI and UGM students have a deep significance in the present situation and illustrated a new mode of protest. They deligitimized the power of the New Order government.

The acts raise the utopian possibility of the New Order, which was built by the military and university students, also coming to an end at the hands of university students.

However, with the crisis affecting all strata of society, is it possible to establish a new social order as a reaction to the failure of the New Order government to solve the economic crisis?

When the students delegitimized the political power of the New Order, it provided empirical proof that they have become more politically focused throughout the course of the last decade.

Students are now asserting a conviction that their political ideology runs counter to the philosophy of developmentalism practiced by the New Order political system. By demonstrating, they are expressing dissatisfaction with the New Order's policies on development, particularly those which are not oriented toward people and which are undemocratic.

Under the New Order, the word student is a relatively new political term. During the days of the Old Order government, student groups were closely identified with political parties. An active political role continued in the early days of the New Order, but students, a prominent political force, were denied access to formal political structures.

This handicap has bestowed a symbolic importance on university political activity and has made it a barometer for popular political sentiment in the dialectical relationship between the state and civil society.

Student politics have had a checkered history during the New Order era. In the early days of the New Order, students viewed the regime as one which promised improvement and reform. The rhetoric of the New Order regime at that time was firmly opposed to political and economic misdemeanors practiced by the Old Order administration.

However, this harmony was short lived. In the 1970s, students began to show their true colors. They became critical of expensive development projects which yielded little or no benefit to the people.

The New Order at this stage did not yet have as full a grip on the community as it does now. University students escaped full censure for demonstrating because they could not yet be shown to be a political grouping opposed to the government.

Once the public was fully in the grip of its power, the government made efforts to control student criticism of the government. Independent student organizations were banned in 1978, a move which lead to their demise.

Students after 1978 were depoliticized by the New Order policies on education and only in the mid-1980s did some university student groups once again begin to construct a culture of resistance to New Order policies.

There is a relationship between radical student sentiment and repressive, domineering and careless political actions taken by the establishment. Students have once again become more radical as a reaction to corruption, collusion and nepotism.

In the history of a number of developing countries, students have not been the telling factors in forcing political reform. However, in Indonesia it is in student groups that the government has first found resistance to inappropriate and detrimental actions.

Student political awareness, born out of theoretical discourse, has given rise to a new wave of resistance to New Order policies which are not to the benefit and welfare of society. University students will continue to act as a buffer to state domination of the public.

The writer, an alumnae of Gadjah Mada University, is now working as a researcher in Yogyakarta.