During the first five months of 1998, Indonesia underwent a destabilizing but ultimately successful transition that culminated in 1999 in the seating of a new democratic government. The process that led to Suharto’s resignation on May 21, however, was marked by some extremely heavy-handed interventions in contentious politics by elements of his regime that included the purposeful orchestration of anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta, Medan, and Solo. We endeavored in this essay to explain why Medan and Solo, in particular, were wracked by anti-Chinese violence while the similar cities of Surabaya and Yogyakarta were spared the escalation of sparking events into full-blown ethnic rioting and illustrate that anti-Chinese riots were a conscious tactic employed by state security forces. In the face of unmanageable student demonstrations that (a) began to attract large mass followings off campuses and (b) focused their rhetorical and geographical energies on the regimes’ inability to cope with the economic crisis, security forces and especially army special forces units deployed preman with whom they had standing ties. These preman took preexisting mass mobilization-against the regime—and actively shifted its rhetorical and targeting frame to one focused on ethnic Chinese businessmen and their property. These actions by no means created anti-Chinese prejudice out of thin air. A long historical legacy of active construction of ethnic cleavages by Dutch colonial authorities and then by both the Sukarno and Suharto regimes, along with a seriously skewed concentration of capital in the ethnic Chinese commercial community in most major Indonesian cities, generated a sense among pribumi Indonesians of economic favoritism toward the Chinese. However, nearly all the time interethnic relations are peaceful, if not always harmonious, and antiChinese violence has been rare. Only when mass politics began to grow out of the army’s ability to control it in May 1998 did it turn to anti-Chinese riots as a solution. This carries one positive implication: given the transition in 1999, the successful second elections of 2004 and upcoming third elections in 2009, and the increasing retrenchment of the Indonesian armed forces from politics, it seems unlikely that such political crises would again catalyze state-orchestrated ethnic riots against Chinese. Looking more broadly at the dynamics of ethnic riots, the May riots in Indonesia suggest that we ought to refine and expand our focus on states as not just passive builders of 240 WORLD DEVELOPMENT structural conditions but as central and proximate actors in the development of riots. Where Brass (1997) notes that scholars of ethnic politics can learn much by asking who stands to benefit from the labeling of events as “communal violence,’’ we concur. Moreover, in authoritarian settings, especially ones marked by preexisting ethnic prejudices like these, crisis periods are among the most likely ones for state actors to play central roles. What does this mean for the comparative study of ethnic riots? For one, it suggests a need for renewed and more systematic attention to local state actors alongside the already well-developed theories focused on political competition, civic life, and ethnic identity construction. To be frank, data collection, especially of the quantitative sort, is likely to be more dif- ficult in this direction than in others but is no less important
thanks the lord for helping indonesians stop that f***ing regime. imagine what else might happen if indonesian didn't.
