Shootings Rally Anti-Suharto Forces

by Farhan Haq

Pius Lustrilanang, coordinator of the People's Democratic Alliance which supports opposition leaders Megawati Sukarnoputri and Amien Rais, contended that the killings May 12 actually have strengthened the hand of students protesting the Suharto regime.

"With the student killings, I believe we do not have to wait any longer" for the end of the nearly 33-year Suharto dictatorship, he said. "It maybe can take just weeks or months, not years...I think it is beyond the power of the military to control."

Student demonstrators continued to protest and battle authorities at a funeral service for the six slain students, Lustrilanang noted. Students and the Indonesian middle and upper classes are frustrated by the ongoing economic crisis and increasingly support the democratic opposition, the activist added. The result has been heavy pressure on the Indonesian military to dump Suharto.

"The military is the most opportunistic element," argued Lustrilanang, who testified to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee last week that he had been kidnapped in February and detained for two months by people he believed to be members of the armed forces.

"If (the military leadership) thinks the winds of change blow very high toward the students, I think they will shift toward the students," he said. As a result, Indonesia has a chance to duplicate the 'people's power' movement that ousted Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 -- rather than to suffer the fate of the student movement crushed in China's 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

At a time when the Indonesian rupiah is worth 70 percent less than its mid-1996 value, the increased brutality has sparked a growing clamor in the United States, a key trading partner and military supplier, to cut off further aid.

"The Suharto regime should not receive one more bullet, weapon or dollar from the United States," argued John Miller, spokesman for the East Timor Action Network, a rights group which yesterday called for Congress to freeze all U.S. transfers of weapons, spare parts and ammunition.

"We would not give a gun to a parent who had killed a son or a daughter," Miller said. "Neither should we arm a government that brutally guns down its country's own children in the streets."

Lustrilanang, who told Congress that he received electric shocks and beatings when he was detained between February and April before being released and leaving Indonesia, conceded it may be difficult to change U.S. policy toward Suharto. Nevertheless, he added, "I am urging the U.S. government to use every resource they have to make the government and military refrain from using violence against the student movement."

Despite his optimism that the military eventually will side with the students, the 30-year-old student leader cautioned that the signs of a crackdown are apparent in the capital, Jakarta, and throughout Indonesia.

He said that, in the period before Suharto's re-election as president was announced in March, at least a dozen other people beside himself were kidnapped, while 35,000 additional troops were stationed in Jakarta. "Holding a peaceful protest on the streets of Jakarta became a virtual impossibility," he said.

The atmosphere in Indonesia in recent days has unnerved many Western governments previously supportive of the Suharto regime.

British Deputy Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently called on the government for restraint during a visit to Jakarta, while U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned May 12 that "Indonesia needs to break the cycle of violence which appears to be emerging...Political reform can only be achieved through dialogue between the Indonesian government and its citizens."