Remembering/Forgetting the May Riots: Architecture, Violence, and the Making of "Chinese Cultures" in Post-1998 Jakarta

Abidin Kusno

“Serbu. . .serbu. . . serbu” [attack] the massa [crowds] shouted. Thus, hundreds of people spontaneously moved to the shops. Windows and blockades were destroyed, and the looting began. The massa suddenly became crazy. After the goods were in their hands, the buildings and the occupants were set on fire. Girls were raped. The wave of massa ransacked the whole city, but the Glodok area suffered the most. The festival ended in pain. So many materials are lost. Immeasurable are the pains that have been inscribed in the mind and feelings of the victims. Torn are the feelings of many of the children of the nation. This is just a small part of the story of the tragedy that took place on 13 and 14 May. Really! Those two days were the dreadful history that will never be forgotten for the rest of our lives, not until the end of the world. Three years have passed. But is there any “justice”? No! All the investigations have ended in nothing. The promise to search for the masterminds has never been conducted. There seems to be an attempt to forget the tragedy ofMay. This is certainly not what the victims wanted, but they do not have any power to bring justice. Indeed, the tragedy of May cannot be illustrated through kata-kata [words].

Fajar, “Tangisan Mei Itu Mulai Dilupakan”

[The tears of the May riots have begun to be forgotten]

For five years now, Indonesia has celebrated the May 1998 demonstration (known as reformasi) as a triumph of courage if not of democracy in the nation. To the amazement of the Indonesian people, the authoritarian and repressive regime of Suharto was toppled by a bold group of students together with a provisional, loosely connected “coalition” made up of frustrated middle-class families, calculating military figures, opportunistic ministers and bureaucrats, street hoodlums, and the urban poor. Yet, in spite of such stirring success and solidarity, for many others the May reformasi remains a forgotten tragedy. Riots, which took place over thirty-five hours and in approximately fifty locations throughout metropolitan Jakarta, involved the state’s security apparatus as it sought to create a basis for the declaration of martial law as a “final” strategy for saving the collapsing regime. Thousands were killed in the ensuing disorder— including hundreds of poor looters trapped in ransacked lots—and hundreds of women and girls were gang-raped and tortured in these riots. This violence was directed, both systematically and spontaneously, at Indonesians of ethnic Chinese descent, whom many (including segments of the Suharto regime) deemed responsible for the nation’s problems. The burning and plundering of Chinese property, as well as the gang rapes of ethnic Chinese women, were carried out by certain military groups and ordinary Indonesians who were transformed into a violent mob, often at the incitement of the Suharto army itself.1

The targeting of Indonesian Chinese has been attributed to the strength of their economy, the weakness of their political position, and the sense that Indonesian Chinese are not Indonesian enough—though few citizens would think of driv-ing them out of the country entirely.2 The Chinese, simultaneously admired and disliked by the Indonesians, have been a frequent target of rioting. Indeed, anti- Chinese riots have taken place since the formation of Indonesian nationalism in the early twentieth century under Dutch colonial rule, and perhaps even before.3 Over time, they have become a familiar phenomenon, so familiar that the reason( s) for anti-Chinese riots have never been clear even to those participating.4

However familiar anti-Chinese riots may have been to Indonesians, the gang rapes of ethnic Chinese women in May 1998 were without precedent and went well beyond the recognizable framework of violence created by the long history of anti-Chinese activities.5 The gang rapes introduced new, more extreme and lasting violence into the vocabulary of anti-Chinese sentiment. Unlike previous anti-Chinese riots, which were forgotten after a few days by returning to “business as usual,” gang rape does permanent damage that cannot be erased, replaced (like commodities), or simply put out of mind (like other, more recognizable forms of Indonesian riots). Stories of rape, as James Siegel points out, continue to haunt the public through narratives of the victims’ depression, disease, suicide, pregnancy, and family rejection.6

Though the gang rapes have generated immense outrage and shame at all levels of society, Indonesians have not yet found a language to respond to or articulate this new mode of violence. Silence perhaps constitutes the only language for these events, thereby enacting still further violence through the suppression of the stories themselves. Siegel sees this silence as a form of national trauma, an effect of the failure of the national community to cope with its own barbarism. This “failure appears in the lower class people who raped and in the upper class elements of the political class who allowed them to do it.”7 Meanwhile, the majority of the victims still suffer from the event, and various new governments have kept quiet or denied its occurrence.8 The state hopes that the nation will arrive at a condition of normalcy by stifling the violent memories of past horrors. In the words of former president B. J. Habibie following his visit to the most damaged riot site at Glodok, a retail business center known as the Chinatown of Jakarta, two weeks after the riots: “We should all quickly get out of this problem. We are all Indonesians and live in the land of Indonesia. We do not discriminate against any race, religion, and ethnicity. We do not have to worry about that.”9 The rapes have profoundly shaped the ways in which the riots as a whole are understood, remembered, and forgotten. Rudi, an Indonesian Chinese whose shop in Glodok was burned out, indicated that “it is difficult for me to describe [the event] and furthermore, I don’t want to remember what had happened. It is just too painful.”10 The nation’s government, the larger populace, including the Indonesian Chinese and the victims, are all variously involved in the suppression of trauma. They all share the difficult task of integrating the gang rapes that have marked the May riots into their own narratives of the past as well as the future.

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Notes

Thanks to Wastu Pragantha and Rudy Surya for their provisions of some of the images and documents used here. My thanks also to Sepideh Bajracharya, Eileen Chow, Enseng Ho, Nick Kaldis, Tony King, Sumit Mandal, Farish Noor, Patricia Spyer, and Wang Gungwu, as well as the readers and editorial staff at Public Culture for their insightful comments and suggestions. For our valuable discussions on remembering and forgetting, I would like to thank Hong Kal. I am also grateful to audiences of the spring 2002 workshops at Binghamton University, Harvard University, and National University of Singapore. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original Indonesian are my own.

1. One estimation suggests that more than two thousand people were killed during the riots. The victims of rape are calculated to be somewhere between 168 and 468 people (of whom 20 to 60 died). See Freek Colombijn, “What Is So Indonesian about Violence?” in Violence in Indonesia, ed. Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhofer (Hamburg: Abera, 2001), 34. For a report, list of documents, and discussion of the riots in Indonesia, see Rene L. Pattiradjawane, “Peristiwa Mei 1998 di Jakarta: Titik Terendah Sejarah Orang Etnis Cina di Indonesia” [The May 1998 incident in Jakarta: The most devastating in the history of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia], in Harga yang Harus Dibayar: Sketsa Pergulatan Etnis Cina di Indonesia [The price that has to be paid: A sketch of the struggles of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia], ed. I. Wibowo (Jakarta: Penerbit PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama bekerja sama dengan Pusat Studi Cina di Indonesia, 2000).
2. For a discussion of the causes of the May riots and the pattern of anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in the late Suharto period, see John T. Sidel, “‘Macet Total’: Logics of Circulation and Accumulation in the Demise of Indonesia’s New Order,” Indonesia 66 (October 1998): 159–94. For a discussion of Indonesian (including ethnic Chinese) perceptions of the May riots, see James Siegel, “Thoughts on the Violence of May 13 and 14, 1998, in Jakarta,” in Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, ed. Benedict Anderson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2001), 90–123; and “Early Thoughts on the Violence of May 13 and 14, 1998, in Jakarta,” Indonesia 66, (October 1999): 75–108.
3. For a discussion of anti-Chinese activities in the formation of Indonesian nationalism in the early twentieth century, see Takashi Shiraishi, “Anti-Sinicism in Java’s New Order,” in Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe, ed. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). On the massacre of Chinese during the beginning of Dutch colonial rule, see Leonard Blusse, “Batavia, 1619–1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12 (1981): 159–78.
4. Siegel suggests that anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia have taken the form of looting goods, burning houses and properties, and killing those identified on the spot as Chinese, as if the word Chinese itself legitimizes the practices of theft and violence. As Benedict Anderson has stated in relation to Siegel’s work on the peculiarity of the ethnic Chinese position, “few Indonesians dream of wiping them out or of expelling them wholesale from the country.” On the contrary, believing that “Chinese have unlimited access to goods . . . looters who ransacked small Chinese neighborhood stores allowed themselves to feel surprised and even annoyed when they discovered that the stores had not reopened for business the following week.” Anderson, Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, 15.
5. Gang rape, as a technique of subjugation, was first exercised in parts of Aceh and East Timor by elements of Indonesian military under Suharto’s regime. The rape of Sino-Indonesian women has been attributed—though without proof—to these elements of Suharto’s security apparatus. It appears, however, that nonmilitary Indonesians of lower classes also participated in the rape. For a discussion of Indonesians’ perceptions of the May gang rape, including the reception and denial of these aspects of the riots, see Siegel, “Early Thoughts on the Violence” and “Thoughts on the Violence.”
6. Siegel, “Thoughts on the Violence,” 111.
7. Siegel, “Thoughts on the Violence,” 109.
8. Groups of Indonesians of ethnic Chinese descent have demanded that the government acknowledge the gang rape of ethnic Chinese girls and women during the May riots. For a report of the protest in front of the Presidential Palace during the rule of Abdurrahman Wahid, see “Keturunan Tionghoa Berdemo di Istana Negara” [Indonesian Chinese demonstrate at the presidential palace], Indonesia Media, June 2000, 10, 54. For a discussion and a list of references on the denial that gang rapes occurred during the riots, see Pattiradjawane, “Peristiwa Mei 1998,” 239–47.
9. “Habibie Temui Pedagang” [Habibie met traders], Kompas, 27 May 1998, 1.
10. “Trauma Mematikan dan Membangkitkan” [Trauma that destroys and constructs], Sinar Glodok, 12 May 2001, 10. The victims of May riots, especially of the gang rapes, often do not want to speak about the event. I would like to mention that there have been dishonesties concerning the fact of gang rapes and in the circulation of the voices of the victims of the gang rapes through the Internet. The most troubling one has been the circulation of gruesome pictures of mutilated bodies of women. These pictures were taken from the violence in East Timor. They were, however, used by the mobs and the Chinese community, mostly overseas, to represent the gang rapes of the May riots and to gain the attention of the public.