Army Ordered to Shoot Rioters in Early May

by Andreas Harsono

Medan police chief Lt. Col. Nono Priyono said sharpshooters had been assigned to take part in patrolling the city on motorcycles. "They had a standing order to shoot troublemakers on sight. They can be dispatched to the scene of trouble instantly," said Priyonoon May 7.

Witnesses and victims have earlier complained that the troopers did almost nothing to prevent looting. The soldiers reportedly sat and looked on while the burning and looting took place right in front of them.

"These actions should be seen as the result of the growing critical scrutiny of the U.S. military relationship by Congress and the increasingly brutal behavior of the Indonesian military," said John Miller, a spokesman for the East Timor Action Network, one of many Indonesian-oriented groups opposed to the Suharto regime.

The United States currently bans the sale of small arms, armored personnel carriers and helicopter-mounted weapons to Indonesia. However, it provides other forms of military assistance, including a Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program under which special Indonesian troops have learned sniper techniques, psychological operations, and urban warfare.

Last week, the Pentagon announced the indefinite suspension of JCET exercises in light of the continuing unrest, in what reporter Allan Nairn, who revealed the special military training program two months ago, called "a breakthrough victory for the pro-democracy movement."

However, the JCET program is not yet formally banned, although New York Representative Nita Lowey is sponsoring a bill in Congress to prohibit its use in countries barred from receiving military aid.

Other major Indonesian cities including the capital, Jakarta, and Surabaya in eastern Java also saw larger street rallies protesting the 71 percent price hike on petroleum-based products such as gasoline and demand ing the resignation of President Suharto, who has been in power since 1965.

In Jakarta, students burned the 77-year-old leader in effigy, saying that Suharto is a major cause of the economic crisis currently hitting Indonesia. Some student leaders said in speeches that the economic crisis has created massive unemployment, sharply increased the cost of staple goods and prompted many firms to close down.

In Yogyakarta, about 400 km east of Jakarta, about 20,000 students clashed with police. "Hang Suharto, hang Suharto," chanted the students.

Indonesian media, however, reported Friday that Medan was mostly calm, albeit tense, on Thursday after three days of rioting which began on Monday when thousands of Medan students went to the street to protest the gasoline price hike.

A significant presence of policemen and troopers was noted on most of Medan's main roads as the city struggled to restore normalcy, but most shops and banks remained closed. Prices of basic commodities also increased due to the closures.

The riots began on Monday when the Medan students clashed with the police. The protesters, however, managed to get past police barricades and go off their campuses into the streets, where others joined the rally and turned the initially peaceful protest into an anti-Chinese riot.

The protesters attacked Chinese-owned buildings and looted various everything from spring beds to sacks of rice, often burning down the Chinese shops afterwards. Some Chinese shopkeepers were also beaten when they persuaded the mob not to loot their shops.

According to the police, around 170 shops were destroyed and 38 cars and 21 motorcycles were set on fire. The police confirmed only one death, although other witnesses put the death toll at six mostly because of trapped in the fire.

Police spokesmen said a total of 423 people were arrested during the three-day riot, including 145 university students and 28 high school students. The other arrestees were described as workers.

"Some of them were just kids. Just imagine, children looting," said North Sumatra police chief Brigadier General M.A. Sambas in disbelief.

Timor and Bimantara are actually South Korean-made cars whose sole distributors are firms controlled by businessmen Hutomo Mandala Putra and Bambang Trihatmodjo, respectively the youngest and the middle sons of President Suharto.

Medan is the third largest city in Indonesia. The city's principal business is are trading and agriculture; palm oil plantations are plentiful in the region.

Government officials feared that the sale and distribution of palm oil, which is widely used in cooking, would be affected in the next few days because of the riots.

Medan city administrators have closed the highway leading to Belawan port, some 20 kilometers north of Medan, to prevent the riots from spreading. But that also caused around 350 tons of crude palm oil to fail to reach the port.

Analysts in Jakarta, however, said that the Medan riots, which had made the Indonesian rupiah to tumble over than five percent on Thursday, is unlikely to be repeated in other protest-dominated cities.

Medan is different in the sense that the culture is more militant than in other Javanese-dominated cities. Medan is also widely known to be an area controlled by Indonesian notorious premans, or gangsters.

The word "preman" was initially derived from the phrase "free man," which were used during the Dutch colonial period to refer to Robin Hood-styled bandits.

After the islands gained independence in 1945, people organized into several government-sponsored youth groups that eventually came to control several business sectors in the area, oncluding retailing.

"It's impossible for big businesses to enter Medan without dealing with these mafias," said analyst Hidayat Jati of the Castle Group in Jakarta.