POLITICS-INDONESIA: Backlash Feared Against Ethnic Chinese

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 14 1998 (IPS) - Indonesia’s economic and political crisis again has raised fears of the threat of harassment and violence aginst the country’s ethnic Chinese minority, according to U.S. and Indonesian-based activists.

Although reports of Sino-Indonesian control over the country’s wealth may be exaggerated, President Suharto’s authoritarian regime is signalling its intention to scapegoat the ethnic Chinese for the sharp economic downturn, the activists say.

A new report prepared by U.S.-based activists – Charles Scheiner of the East Timor Action Network, Matthew Jardine of Global Exchange and Sidhawati of Justice for All – contends that the Indonesian military, or ABRI, may be responsible for a recent wave of attacks against Sino-Indonesian stores.

“A few military officers, Lieut. Gen. Prabowo (Suharto’s son-in- law) most notably, appear to be fomenting anti-Chinese sentiment, presumably to distract the people from the Suharto family’s much larger wealth,” the report argues.

“Some of the riots appear to have been engineered by the military,” says the team, which visited Jakarta and East Timor from Mar. 3-13. In a country with such a pervasive military and spying system, it is almost impossible for a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people to riot for hours without there being an element of official connivance.”

The rioters, the report adds, attacked only property and did not physically harm the Sino-Indonesians.

Since the East Asian financial crisis began last year, and resulted in the collapse of the Indonesian rupiah by some 70 percent of its early 1997 value, several groups – including right- wing Muslim organisations – have blamed the Sino-Indonesians for dominating the country’s economy.

Recent newspaper asrticles in New York,vate wealth of Indonesia.” Scheiner, Jardine and Sidhawati counter that “even as an estimate, it is absurd,” and argue that the Sino- Indonesians – who account for some 4 percent of the archipelago’s 200 million people – “do not, as a group, occupy any special occupational niche.”

Nevertheless, they may provide a handy target at a time when the price of basic goods, including milk, eggs and vegetable oil, have doubled or even tripled in recent months.

Jaffar Siddiq, an Indonesian human rights lawyer, warned recently that Suharto seems willing to pit the country’s majority Muslims against the Chinese community to prop up his 33-year dictatorship.

“Suharto has been adept at playing the Muslim card,” Siddiq said. “In 1965, when Suharto came to power, it was able to eliminate the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) by mobilising the Islamic element.” At least half a million people, including thousands of PKI members, died in the ensuing bloodbath, human rights groups estimate.

Siddiq argued that some Muslim leaders, including Amien Rais, the main Islamist opposition figure, have been supporting Suharto’s more aggressively nationalist and anti-Western statements in recent months. “Suharto is using the rhetoric of nationalism to transform anti-Suharto protests to anti- imperialism,” he said – finding convenient targets not only among the ethnic Chinese, but among Western banks and institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

Jeff Ballinger, head of Press for Change, a New Jersey-based group which monitors labour conditions in Indonesia, argued that the ABRI has often used a populist tone and pointed the finger of blame for the country’s problems at ‘foreign’ elements. “For example, they criticise the (South) Korean bosses of sweatshops,” he noted.

The scapegoating of the Chinese is ill-founded, the U.S. team says in its report. Some Sino-Indonesians, including Trade Minister Bob Hasan and businessman James Riady – the latter of whom was linked to illegal 1996 campaign payments to U.S. President Bill Clinton – are among the wealthiest Indonesians. But “the real wealth-holders in Indonesia are the Suharto family, the military officers…and the select handful of Sino-Indonesian and non-Chinese cronies of the Suharto family,” the report asserts.

Even if the focus on Sino-Indonesians is misplaced, however, the populace is clearly wondering whom to blame. The mood in Indonesia following the fall of the rupiah is an angry one, in which there have been unprecedented public demonstrations against Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime and a demand for an explanation of the rising level of poverty.

“There is a lack of food, but this time the poor don’t have anything to be pawned and sold for the hungry children,” said Father Sandyawan Sumardi, executive director of the Jakarta Social Institute, at a meeting in West Java last month. “The worsening conditions have even forced parents to send their children to look for their own food. They come to us so many times, asking about the condition of this country, ‘What is happening’?”

According to the Indonesian Writers’ Syndicate, more than 16 million industrial workers have lost their jobs since November 1997, including 4.6 million construction workers and nearly three million people each in the garment and shoe manufacturing industries.

“Almost all activists whom we met suspect that the companies use the economic crisis as a reason to fire workers,” the U.S. team wrote. “In many cases, it appears as if the companies were simply using the crisis as a convenient excuse.”