Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Suharto was in Egypt when, on May 12, four students from Trisakti University were shot dead in the streets of Jakarta, even though the police were then armed only with blanks and rubber bullets. Eyewitnesses nonetheless saw snipers armed with rifles with telescopic sights and dressed in police uniforms fire on the students from a road overpass. The students were buried immediately without autopsies. As Business Week magazine reported, “On May 14, trucks loaded with muscular men raced to shopping centers and housing projects owned by ethnic Chinese. The men doused the shops and houses with gasoline and set off devastating fires. At least 182 women were raped or sexually tortured, some of them repeatedly, by men with crewcuts whom the victims believe to be soldiers.”¹⁶ At the Chinese-owned Lippo Karawaci Mall, security cameras tape-recorded six truckloads of men breaking into banks and cash dispensers, then inviting in thousands of looters. These actions were reported at more or less the same moment at forty different shopping malls across the city, resulting in 1,188 deaths, the looting and burning of 2,470 shops, and the destruction of 1,119 cars.

The Indonesian military high command and other top Indonesian officials would have liked the world to believe that this savagery was the result of visceral anti-Chinese feelings, “spontaneous outbursts of a crowd run amok,” in the words of Maj. Gen. Syafrie Samsuddin, then military commander of Jakarta. Far too many American pundits also found this explanation convenient. For example, in the New Republic, Jonathan Paris, an international lawyer connected with the Council on Foreign Relations, typically attributed the “riots” to “racial hatred and economic jealousy.”¹⁷

But there are obvious problems with this explanation. As George Hicks, an Australian economist who has written extensively on Indonesia, points out, it is unlikely that mobs could simultaneously attack forty different Chinese-owned shopping malls spread around more than twenty-five kilometers without planning and coordination, not to speak of “without a single culprit having to face any police or military units in a city of ten million normally crawling with heavily armed forces of law and order.”¹⁸ The Indonesian scholar Ariel Heryanto has observed that the events of May were not “racially motivated mass riots” but “racialized state terrorism.” The evidence, he believes, indicates that “racism among members of civil society was not responsible for the recent riots, nor for most other major anti-Chinese riots in past decades.”¹⁹ Instead, he argues that these, like the massive anti-Chinese pogroms that accompanied Suharto’s rise to power in 1965-66, were incited by the army. This time, as Asiaweek put it, General Prabowo believed “that he could take power in exactly the same way as his own father-in-law wrested power from Sukarno,” by appearing to restore order in the face of uncontrolled ethnic rioting.²⁰

Rather than a race riot, William McGurn, senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, compares May 1998 in Jakarta to Kristallnacht, when in November 1938 Hitler sent Nazi thugs into the streets to attack Jewish stores and homes.²¹ One of Hitler’s intentions was to see how the rest of the world would respond, and he concluded, correctly as it turned out, that the democracies would not interfere with his genocidal plans for Europe’s Jews. Many have noted that in the weeks before the Indonesian riots, hundreds of young men trained by Kopassus were brought into Jakarta from East Timor. The theory is that Prabowo, either on his own or on orders from Suharto, organized the chaos to create an excuse for a crackdown. It was, however, Prabowo’s rival, General Wiranto, who proved to be the main beneficiary of the chaos. On May 21, Wiranto persuaded Suharto to resign in favor of his vice president, B. J. Habibie, and on May 28 he relieved General Prabowo of his command. According to Allan Nairn, during the week these events took place, General Wiranto rather than General Prabowo was observed “consulting nonstop with the U.S. Embassy.”²²