The ghost street in Glodok
This Guardian article by Kate Lamb with photographs by Roni Zakaria, looks at a street in Glodok with a historical perspective that includes, for many who live, or used to live there, the memories of the dark days of May 1998.
After the riots in 1998 spread to the Chinatown area of Jakarta, many Chinese-Indonesians fled. What’s left is a street of boarded-up memories.
The riots of 1998 were an echo of historical events that took place in Dutch administered Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1740. Is this a repeating history driven by colonialism and capitalistic exploitation?
The 1740 Batavia massacre, so called, (Dutch: Chinezenmoord, literally "Murder of the Chinese"; Indonesian: Geger Pacinan, meaning "Chinatown Tumult") was a pogrom in which Dutch East Indies soldiers and native collaborators killed ethnic Chinese residents of the port city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The violence in the city lasted from 9 October 1740 until 22 October, with minor skirmishes outside the walls continuing late into November that year. Historians have estimated that at least 10,000 ethnic Chinese were massacred; just 600 to 3,000 are believed to have survived.
Migration, economic needs, financial crisis in the sugar market, and the manipulation of the politics of envy in 18th century Dutch colonialism results in the murder of 10,000 Chinese
During the early years of the Dutch colonisation of the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), many people of Chinese descent were contracted as skilled artisans in the construction of Batavia on the northwestern coast of Java; they also served as traders, sugar mill workers, and shopkeepers. The economic boom, precipitated by trade between the East Indies and China via the port of Batavia, increased Chinese immigration to Java. The number of ethnic Chinese in Batavia grew rapidly, reaching a total of 10,000 by 1740. Thousands more lived outside the city walls. The Dutch colonials required them to carry registration papers, and deported those who did not comply to China.
The deportation policy was tightened during the 1730s, after an outbreak of malaria killed thousands, including the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Dirck van Cloon. According to Indonesian historian Benny G. Setiono, the outbreak was followed by increased suspicion and resentment in native Indonesians and the Dutch toward the ethnic Chinese, who were growing in number and whose wealth was increasingly visible. As a result, Commissioner of Native Affairs Roy Ferdinand, under orders of Governor-General Adriaan Valckenier, decreed on 25 July 1740 that Chinese considered suspicious would be deported to Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and forced to harvest cinnamon. Wealthy Chinese were extorted by corrupt Dutch officials who threatened them with deportation; Stamford Raffles, a British explorer and historian of Java, noted in 1830 that in some Javanese accounts, the Dutch were told by the Dutch-appointed Chinese headman of Batavia, Nie Hoe Kong, Kapitein der Chinezen, to deport all Chinese wearing black or blue because these were thought to be poor. There were also rumours that deportees were not taken to their destinations but were thrown overboard once out of sight of Java, and in some accounts, they died when rioting on the ships. The deportation of ethnic Chinese caused unrest among the remaining Chinese, leading many Chinese workers to desert their jobs.
At the same time native occupants of Batavia, including the ethnic Betawi servants, became increasingly distrustful of the Chinese. Economic factors played a role: most natives were poor, and perceived the Chinese as occupying some of the most prosperous neighbourhoods in the city. Although the Dutch historian A.N. Paasman notes that at the time the Chinese were the "Jews of Asia", the actual situation was more complicated. Many poor Chinese living in the area around Batavia were sugar mill workers who felt exploited by the Dutch and Chinese elites equally. Rich Chinese owned the mills and were involved in revenue farming and shipping; they drew income from milling and the distillation of arak, a molasses and rice-based alcoholic beverage. However, the Dutch overlords set the price for sugar, which itself caused unrest. Because of the decline of worldwide sugar prices that began in the 1720s caused by an increase in exports to Europe and competition from the West Indies, the sugar industry in the East Indies had suffered considerably. By 1740, worldwide sugar prices had dropped to half the price in 1720. As sugar was a major export, this caused considerable financial difficulties for the colony.
Initially some members of the Council of the Indies (Raad van Indië) believed that the Chinese would never attack Batavia, and stronger measures to control the Chinese were blocked by a faction led by Valckenier's political opponent, the former governor of Zeylan Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, who returned to Batavia in 1738. Large numbers of Chinese arrived outside Batavia from nearby settlements, however, and on 26 September Valckenier called an emergency meeting of the council, during which he gave orders to respond to any ethnic Chinese uprisings with deadly force. This policy continued to be opposed by van Imhoff's faction, and the tension between the two colonial factions played a role in the ensuing massacre.
On the evening of 1 October Valckenier received reports that a crowd of a thousand Chinese had gathered outside the gate, angered by his statements at the emergency meeting five days earlier. This report was received incredulously by Valckenier and the council. However, after the murder of a Balinese sergeant by the Chinese outside the walls, the council decided to take extraordinary measures and reinforce the guard. Two groups of 50 Europeans and some native porters were sent to outposts on the south and east sides of the city, and a plan of attack was formulated.
After groups of Chinese sugar mill workers revolted using custom-made weapons to loot and burn mills, hundreds of ethnic Chinese, suspected to have been led by Kapitein Nie Hoe Kong, killed 50 Dutch soldiers in Meester Cornelis (now Jatinegara) and Tanah Abang on 7 October. In response, the Dutch sent 1,800 regular troops, accompanied by schutterij (militia) and eleven battalions of conscripts to stop the revolt; they established a curfew and cancelled plans for a Chinese festival. Fearing that the Chinese would conspire against the colonials by candlelight, those inside the city walls were forbidden to light candles and were forced to surrender everything "down to the smallest kitchen knife". The following day the Dutch repelled an attack by up to 10,000 ethnic Chinese, led by groups from nearby Tangerang and Bekasi, at the city's outer walls; Raffles wrote that 1,789 Chinese died in this attack. In response, Valckenier called another meeting of the council on 9 October.
Meanwhile, rumours spread among the other ethnic groups in Batavia, including slaves from Bali and Sulawesi, Bugis, and Balinese troops, that the Chinese were plotting to kill, rape, or enslave them. These groups pre-emptively burned houses belonging to ethnic Chinese along Besar River. The Dutch followed this with an assault on Chinese settlements elsewhere in Batavia in which they burned houses and killed people.
The Dutch politician and critic of colonialism W. R. van Hoëvell wrote that;
"pregnant and nursing women, children, and trembling old men fell on the sword. Defenseless prisoners were slaughtered like sheep".
Troops under Lieutenant Hermanus van Suchtelen and Captain Jan van Oosten, a survivor from Tanah Abang, took station in the Chinese district: Suchtelen and his men positioned themselves at the poultry market, while van Oosten's men held a post along the nearby canal. At around 5:00 p.m., the Dutch opened fire on Chinese-occupied houses with cannon, causing them to catch fire.
Some Chinese died in the burning houses, while others were shot upon leaving their homes or committed suicide in desperation. Those who reached the canal near the housing district were killed by Dutch troops waiting in small boats, while other troops searched in between the rows of burning houses, killing any survivors they found. These actions later spread throughout the city. Many of the perpetrators were sailors and other "irregular and bad elements" of society. During this period there was heavy looting and seizures of property.
The following day the violence continued to spread, and Chinese patients in a hospital were taken outside and killed. Attempts to extinguish fires in areas devastated the preceding day failed, and the flames increased in vigour, and continued until 12 October. Meanwhile, a group of 800 Dutch soldiers and 2,000 natives assaulted Kampung Gading Melati, where a group of Chinese survivors were holding up under the leadership of Khe Pandjang. Although the Chinese evacuated to nearby Paninggaran, they were later driven out of the area by Dutch forces. There were approximately 450 Dutch and 800 Chinese casualties in the two attacks.
On 11 October Valckenier unsuccessfully requested that officers control their troops and stop the looting. Two days later the council established a reward of two ducats for every Chinese head surrendered to the soldiers as an incentive for the other ethnic groups to assist in the purge. As a result, ethnic Chinese who had survived the initial assault were hunted by gangs of irregulars, who killed those Chinese they found for the reward. The Dutch worked with natives in different parts of Batavia; ethnic Bugis and Balinese grenadiers were sent to reinforce the Dutch on 14 October. On 22 October Valckenier called for all killings to cease. In a lengthy letter in which he blamed the unrest entirely on the Chinese rebels, Valckenier offered an amnesty to all Chinese, except for the leaders of the unrest, on whose heads he placed a bounty of up to 500 rijksdaalders.
Outside the walls skirmishes between the Chinese rebels and the Dutch continued. On 25 October, after almost two weeks of minor skirmishes, 500 armed Chinese approached Cadouwang (now Angke), but were repelled by cavalry under the command of Ridmeester Christoffel Moll and Cornets Daniel Chits and Pieter Donker. The following day the cavalry, which consisted of 1,594 Dutch and native forces, marched on the rebel stronghold at the Salapadjang sugar mill, first gathered in the nearby woods and then set the mill on fire while the rebels were inside; another mill at Boedjong Renje was taken in the same manner by another group. Fearful of the oncoming Dutch, the Chinese retreated to a sugar mill in Kampung Melayu, four hours from Salapadjang; this stronghold fell to troops under Captain Jan George Crummel. After defeating the Chinese and retaking Qual, the Dutch returned to Batavia. Meanwhile, the fleeing Chinese, who were blocked to the west by 3,000 troops from the Sultanate of Banten, headed east along the north coast of Java; by 30 October it was reported that the Chinese had reached Tangerang.
A ceasefire order reached Crummel on 2 November, upon which he and his men returned to Batavia after stationing a contingent of 50 men at Cadouwang. When he arrived at noon there were no more Chinese stationed at the walls. On 8 November the Sultanate of Cirebon sent between 2,000 and 3,000 native troops to reinforce the city guard. Looting continued until at least 28 November, and the last native troops stood down at the end of that month.
Most accounts of the massacre estimate that 10,000 Chinese were killed within Batavia's city walls, while at least another 500 were seriously wounded. Between 600 and 700 Chinese-owned houses were raided and burned. The massacre was followed by an "open season" against the ethnic Chinese throughout Java, causing another massacre in 1741 in Semarang, and others later in Surabaya and Gresik.
Glodok was designated a ghetto for ethnic Chinese and located outside the walls of Batavia
As part of conditions for the cessation of violence, all of Batavia's ethnic Chinese were moved to a pecinan, or Chinatown, outside of the city walls, now known as Glodok. This allowed the Dutch to monitor the Chinese more easily. To leave the pecinan, ethnic Chinese required special passes. By 1743, however, ethnic Chinese had already returned to inner Batavia; several hundred merchants operated there. Other ethnic Chinese led by Khe Pandjang fled to Central Java where they attacked Dutch trading posts, and were later joined by troops under the command of the Javanese sultan of Mataram, Pakubuwono II. Though this further uprising was quashed in 1743, conflicts in Java continued almost without interruption for the next 17 years.
Sugar production in the area suffered greatly after the massacre, as many of the Chinese who had run the industry had been killed or were missing. It began to recover after the new governor-general, van Imhoff, "colonised" Tangerang. He initially intended for men to come from the Netherlands and work the land; he considered those already settled in the Indies to be lazy. However, he was unable to attract new settlers because of high taxes and thus sold the land to those already in Batavia. As he had expected, the new land-owners were unwilling to "soil their hands", and quickly rented out the land to ethnic Chinese. Production rose steadily after this, but took until the 1760s to reach pre-1740 levels, after which it again diminished. The number of mills also declined. In 1710 there had been 131, but by 1750 the number had fallen to 66.
After the 1740 massacre, it became apparent over the ensuing decades through a series of considerations that Batavia needed Chinese people for a long list of trades. Considerable Chinese economic expansion occurred in the late eighteenth century, and by 1814 there were 11,854 Chinese people within the total of 47,217 inhabitants.
Glodok, May 1998
The night of the riot, some who stayed in the office tower actually did see military styled guys getting off some trucks and set the shopping mall on fire. I was at the office lobby, in the darkness, watching people in hundreds, laughing and looking happy looting the mall. Young and old, even grannies. Like an army of sugar ants. Taking everything they could, freely.
Not a single police or any law enforcement was seen during that day. Not a single soul. A mystery until today to this average Indonesian. Maybe one can tell about it here, in Quora.
A week later, I and some collegues had to go into a burnt and abandoned mall to retrieve some documents. Foulest stench I have ever had. The smell of death. We saw some dead bodies. Burnt. One holding an electric guitar. One hugging a washing machine. One having a TV set. And some others. The scene I had to relive only when I went to Aceh as part of relief force during the tsunami. Another story for another time. Quora
Reflections of May '98 Looters, Victims of the New Order's 'Organized Riots'
A week before the fall of Gen. Suharto, riots broke out in Jakarta targeting the country's ethnic Chinese communities and their businesses. Now experts say rioters and looters were tricked into escalating the unrest by the government.
Between July 1997 to May 1998, the US dollar-rupiah exchange rate went up about 800 percent. Indonesia was unable to pay its debts, and within a year the country's GDP had fallen by 13.5 percent. Amidst the economic crisis, the New Order government raised gas prices by 70 percent. Unemployment rocketed. Indonesians' dissatisfaction with Gen. Suharto's policies during the economic crisis were taken to the streets, where people demanded the president's resignation.
Ethnic Chinese Indonesians, who were seen as dominating the country's economy, were turned into scapegoats by the New Order government. The Anti-Chinese sentiments led to the kidnappings of activists, rape of ethnic Chinese women, and riots that experts say were organized by the government.
A report by the fact-finding team tasked to investigate the cause and effects of the May 98 riots found that the shooting of Trisakti University students had created a martyrdom that triggered the riots. The "riots", which occurred throughout Jakarta had similar patterns: peaceful protesters gathered and provocateurs came and encouraged the crowd to burn wheels and start fights. They made each situation worse by destroying public facilities, and provoke others to do the same.
The report also mentioned that the provocateurs were physically trained men who came with weapons to destroy buildings and other public facilities. Some wore school uniforms but didn’t loot anything. This was what happened in Klender—Samsul told me that the riots were initiated by high school students throwing punches in a gang fight and ended at Yogya Plaza Klender.
A day after the riot outside Tristakti University on May 13, more took place throughout Jakarta from 8 to 10 AM. Department stores were raided and burned. Public facilities, like gas stations and traffic signs, were destroyed. Vehicles and police stations were burned. In three days, in Jakarta alone, 1,188 people were reported dead. There were many more unreported deaths.
Unfortunately, none of the provocateurs were brought to justice after the fact-finding team's report was published in 1999.
“The May 1998 tragedy was basically a military operation," said Sandyawan Sumardi, a member of the fact-finding team. "It wasn’t a racial conflict, and definitely wasn’t caused by economic crisis. People misinterpreted what happened. It’s pretty stupid. Our hatred was led by a superficial problem. It's been proven that the tragedy was purely a military operation. They caused the conflict, so the New Order government can continue to rule Indonesia.”
Sandyawan and his team discovered that there were trainings three months before the riot that included not only the armed forces, but also civilians. They were called the "stealth unit".
“They were telling people things like, ‘You’ve been discriminated for so long. They made you poor. Take back your rights! Go to electronic stores. Take anything you want,'" Sandyawan said. "They were encouraging people to take revenge. Some said those people were very well-built. They looked really militaristic.”
Feri Kusuma, a deputy at the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KontraS), was part of the team that provided rehabilitation to the victims’ families, especially the ones who were killed during the riots. Feri said that the most difficult thing he had to do was helping families handle the stigma that's attached to them and their fallen family members until today.
"It’s like hiding the truth of what really happened," Feri told me. "This tragedy was human rights violation and systematically made by the New Order."
Feri said that there must have been individuals leading the looting, because otherwise others would have been too intimidated by the soldiers and police officers present.
"How could they have been that brave?" Feri said. "The riot wouldn't have happened if there were no leaders who pushed them to do it. Indeed there were people who became 'looters' in the tragedy, but was it really their fault?"
The resignation of President Suharto in 1998 was preceded by riots and demonstations
Against the backdrop of the impact of the Asian Financial crisis, and the mismanagement of the Indonesian economy by President Suharto and his political and military cronies, there were riots in various parts of Indonesia in 1997 and 1998. While these riots were aimed against the Chinese-Indonesians, even when they looked spontaneous, it seems that they had been planned to displace the widespread anger and resentment caused by economic hardship, away from the government and and encourage hostility among the "pribumi" Indonesians towards the "peranakan" Chinese Indonesians.
It is thought that these were moves that pro-Suharto generals were using to try and weaken the forces of democracy by increasing the divisions between the orthodox and the non-orthodox Muslims, between the Muslims and the Christians and between the Chinese and the non-Chinese. At the same time it is likely that certain generals were trying to topple Suharto, and civil turmoil would contribute to this end.
Human Rights Watch Asia reported that in the first five weeks of 1998 there were over two dozen demonstrations, price riots, bomb threats, and bombings on Java and that unrest was spreading to other islands.
An Islamic school and four Mosques were apparently set ablaze by Christians in retaliations for Church fires started by Muslims.
At the start of May 1998, students were holding peaceful demonstrations on university campuses across the country. They were protesting against massive price rises for fuel and energy, and they were demanding that President Suharto should step down.
On 12 May, students at Jakarta's Trisakti University, many of them the children of the elite, planned to march to Parliament to present their demands for reform. The police prevented the students from marching, and a little after 5 pm, uniformed men on motorcycles appeared on the flyover overlooking Trisakti. Shots rang out, killing four students.
On 13 and 14 May rioting across Jakarta destroyed many commercial centres and over 1,000 died. Ethnic Chinese were targeted. The riots were allegedly instigated by Indonesian military members who were out of uniform. Homes were attacked and women were raped by gangs of men. The US State Department and many human rights groups have argued that the Indonesian military and police participated and incited the rioting and violence against ethnic Chinese Indonesians.
However, most of the deaths occurred when Chinese owned supermarkets in Jakarta were targeted for looting from 13–15 May and were not the Chinese targets of this violence, but the Javanese Indonesian looters themselves, burnt to death by the hundreds when fire broke out.
Estimates vary but it is likely that between 1,000 and up to as many as 5,000 people died during these riots in Jakarta and other cities such as Surakarta. Many victims died in burning malls and supermarkets while others were shot or beaten to death. A government minister reported the damage or destruction of 2,479 shop-houses, 1,026 ordinary houses, 1,604 shops, 383 private offices, 65 bank offices, 45 workshops, 40 shopping malls, 13 markets, and 12 hotels.
An independent investigation
Father Sandyawan Sumardi, a 40-year-old Jesuit priest and son of a police chief, led an independent investigation into the events of May 1998. As a member of the Team of Volunteers for Humanitarian Causes he interviewed people who had witnessed the alleged involvement of the military in organizing the riots and rapes.
A security officer alleged that Kopassus (special forces) officers had ordered the burning down of a bank; a taxi driver reported hearing a man in a military helicopter encouraging people on the ground to carry out looting; shop-owners at a Plaza claimed that, before the riots, military officers tried to extract protection money; a teenager claimed he and thousands of others had been trained as protesters; a street child alleged that Kopassus officers ordered him and his friends to become rioters; there was a report of soldiers being dressed up as students and then taking part in rioting; eyewitnesses spoke of muscular men with short haircuts arriving in military-style trucks and directing attacks on Chinese homes and businesses.
In May 1998, thousands of Indonesian citizens were murdered and raped... The Joint Fact Finding Team established to inquire into the 1998 massacres found that there were serious and systematic human rights violations throughout Jakarta. The Team also found that rioters were encouraged by the absence of security forces, and that the military had played a role in the violence. The Team identified particular officials who should be held to account. The Special Rapporteur on violence against women... also pointed to evidence suggesting that the riots had been organized.Asian Human Rights Commission - Statement
The day after the riots . . .
In the wake of the riots in May 1998 and the revelation that more than one hundred rapes – mostly of Chinese Indonesian women – took place, sensationalised representations of this sexual violence emerged in some parts of Indonesian society. Pornographic novels and tabloid stories surfaced, depicting Chinese Indonesian women as exoticised, lascivious Orientals somehow deserving of the hate-filled violence unleashed upon them. Images were also circulated on the internet of a beaten naked woman’s body, upon which the words ‘Cina’ or ‘Chink’ were inscribed. Whether these were ‘real’ photos or manipulated is unknown and in some ways irrelevant. What was alarming was the way in which these women’s bodies were used as markers of cultural, ethnic, and racial difference.
The day after the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, photographic artist Paul Kadarisman took photos in Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown. Glodok was one of the worst hit areas of the city in the destruction that took place on 13 and 14 May. Its malls and markets were ransacked and severely damaged and the large Glodok Plaza mall set alight. In a pattern repeated elsewhere in Jakarta and other cities, urban poor looters from nearby slums perished in the fire. Kadarisman has previously exhibited works of photography that critically engage with social concerns but these Glodok images have not been exhibited.
I was invited by the photographer to write a commentary to accompany the photos – as it was put to me, a personal note about the event. As an Indonesian with a mother of Chinese (peranakan) descent and a Javanese father, the riots had a very deep and profound affect on me. Like the photographer, I write this commentary with the awareness that it is only a limited representation of the atrocities that took place. Both textually and visually, this is only a partial record of what took place.
Quora:
How does the average Indonesian today view the 1998 riots in Jakarta that targeted the Tionghoa population?
Ghosts of Pogroms Past Haunt IndonesiaI am a Chinese Indonesian that’s not very affected by these events at the time of happening (in 1998). I live in the southern part of Jakarta, which happens to not be as badly affected as the northern, central or western counterparts or anywhere where most Chinese-Indonesians live. I have literally zero memories of that time; I was 5 and a half years old though, so maybe that’s why. But, a friend who’s a year younger remembered that strange day where the whole school was sent home early.
From personal experience only, I do not have any specific feelings for the event (before reading and finding out what really happened) and actually can’t really relate to people who are deeply traumatized by it.
However, after reading about 1998 riots, I am sad, angry, and maybe resentful. Why? Because the main perpetrators will never be sentenced. Because the victims will stay miserable for the rest of their lives as this is a huge trauma to endure. And because the truth of this part of Indonesian history will forever stay a mystery officially. Officially as in history books; they will forever fool the whole Indonesian population with official goverment stories instead of the ugly truth. I am angry that the truth will never be spoken, because those criminals totally deserved the worst of punishments, and be exposed to public about what monster they really are. I am saddened to hear what happened to the victims and their families; imagining what went through them is more than enough to break anyone’s heart. The helplessness is traumatizing and very scary. Some are lucky to be able to escape Indonesia, but even after escaping, some of them still lived a miserable life because of the trauma from the harrowing event. It’s really heartbreaking.
After the jailing of Jakarta's former governor, Chinese Indonesians are caught between age-old prejudice and fears of a rising China.
By Sebastian Strangio | August 11, 2017, 11:04 AM
Protesters face Indonesian riot police as they move to break up a gathering outside the Indonesian High Court building in Jakarta on May 12, 2017, to demand the release of Jakarta's governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama better known as "Ahok". Jakarta's Christian governor was jailed for two years after being found guilty of blasphemy, in a shock decision that has stoked concerns over rising religious intolerance in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.
JAKARTA — Nearly two decades after anti-Chinese riots tore through this part of Indonesia’s capital, one busy road still bears the scars. Amid the clamor of heat and traffic of Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, a row of shop-houses lies abandoned, an octagonal feng shui tile still attached to a bricked-up window. Across the street, through locked steel shutters, one can still make out the charred beams and blackened walls of rooms gutted by fire in 1998.
A nearby three-story building stands in ruins: a former furniture store destroyed during the rioting. “It’s been empty since 1998,” said Iskandar, 60, a street-side portrait painter who stores uses the space to store his wares. While the building has a Chinese owner, he said that they appear to have abandoned it. “Maybe it’s because they have bad memories,” he said. “Some of them have very bitter memories here.”
But anti-Chinese feeling in Indonesia is more than just a matter of memory. A rising tide of Islamic conservatism is now opening up the country’s ethnic fault lines as well as its religious ones. That leaves Indonesians of Chinese descent, who make up around 1.2 percent of the population and are traditionally one of the country’s most prosperous groups, dangerously vulnerable — and might magnify local tensions into international clashes.
In May 1998, when Indonesia’s dictator Suharto fell from power after 31 years, much of the popular anger was directed at Jakarta’s small but wealthy ethnic Chinese community. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, many of them Chinese; dozens of Chinese women and girls were raped. The Chinese were targeted on the assumption that they had grown fat from Suharto’s rule, even though many of the victims were small-scale traders.
Latif Yulus, 67, the owner of Kopi Es Tak Kie, the oldest café in Glodok, which his grandfather opened in 1927 after migrating from Guangdong, recalled a city on fire. “People were yelling, ‘burn, burn, destroy!’” he said. “It was chaos. There were fires everywhere. They took everything that they could from the Chinese.”
For many of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese, echoes of May 1998 could be heard in the recent maelstrom surrounding Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the jailed former governor of Jakarta who convicted of blasphemy in May and ousted from office.
The 51-year-old, better known by his nickname “Ahok,” was both ethnic Chinese and Christian — the first “double minority” to govern Indonesia’s capital for half a century. A brash, polarizing figure, his reelection campaign became the center of a sectarian storm after he referenced a passage of the Quran during a speech last September. (Around 42 percent of Indonesia’s Chinese are Christian; very few belong to the majority Muslim faith.)
After an edited version of the speech went viral, hard-line Islamist vigilante groups, including the Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, mobilized; in late 2016 hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets, calling for Ahok to be charged under Indonesia’s controversial blasphemy law. After losing an April 19 runoff election to his opponent Anies Baswedan, a court found him guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to two years in prison.
Underpinning the anti-Ahok backlash was the creeping rise of Islamic conservatism in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. This has been fueled by decades of funding from Saudi Arabia, which has poured billions into the construction of mosques and pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) that promote its austere brand of Wahhabi Islam.
During the Jakarta election, Ahok’s political opponents used the public’s growing piety as a weapon against the governor and his ally, President Joko Widodo. Like other Chinese in Indonesia, Latif Yulus, the café owner, now fears that the politicians and Islamist radicals who railroaded Ahok will cause further difficulties for his community in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2019. “In the end, they will target the Chinese,” he said.
Ahok was in many ways the ideal target for sectarian troublemakers. Ethnic Chinese have been a part of Indonesian society for centuries, but have long been perceived as occupying a privileged perch in the country’s economic hierarchy. Michael Vatikiotis, the author of the new book Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, likened the Chinese of Indonesia to the Jews of Europe. “They are seen as a people apart,” he said, “and in their pursuit of commerce often become the victims of periodic bloodletting — pogroms, if you like.”
It is a pattern that dates to the beginning of Dutch rule in the 17th century, when Chinese merchants were granted a preferential role and helped develop Batavia (today’s Jakarta) into a flourishing entrepôt, prompting occasional eruptions of violence from other locals. These prejudices persisted after independence, and Chinese were singled out during the 1965-1966 anti-communist bloodshed that preceded Suharto’s takeover. At the time, they were seen as fifth-columnists for Communist China, then in the midst of exporting revolution throughout Southeast Asia. Since then, anti-Chinese rhetoric has tended to go hand in hand with paranoid imaginings of a renascent communism.
Suharto’s “New Order” government subsequently shuttered Chinese schools and newspapers, and banned the use of Chinese dialects. At the same time Suharto cultivated Chinese tycoons, who became economic pillars of his rule. When the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in 1997, setting off protests that culminated in Suharto’s overthrow the following year, popular anger was directed at the familiar scapegoat.
Charlotte Setijadi, a fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said that Ahok came to embody many traditional stereotypes about ethnic Chinese — a perception only amplified by Jakarta’s widening gap between rich and poor. “He was kind of like the perfect embodiment of all of that: a Chinese Christian, an impolite man in a position of power, who insulted the faith of the majority of Indonesians,” she said.
As a result, opinions about Ahok are divided among Jakarta’s Chinese. While many people express pride that one of their own could rise so high, others accuse him of disturbing the city’s delicate ethnic balance. “It’s better to stay quiet,” said Ie Tiat Fo, 57, a Hokkien textile merchant in Glodok. “When he chose to be quiet, everything was okay.”
But this defensive crouch may be harder to sustain in an era in which China has become a formidable economic and political power in Southeast Asia. China is now Indonesia’s top trading partner, and recently overtook the United States to become the country’s third-largest source of foreign investment. These ties are straining relations on the ground, where Chinese are resented as newcomers and interlopers.
President Joko Widodo has generally welcomed Chinese investments, including a $5 billion high-speed rail line connecting the capital to the West Java city of Bandung. But Chinese firms’ importation of mainland workers to complete infrastructure projects has recently fanned the flames of anti-China sentiment.
During the Ahok affair, rumors circulated on Facebook claiming that the governor was reclaiming land in northern Jakarta to house 10 million mainland Chinese workers (according to official figures, 21,271 work permits have been granted to Chinese); another “fake news” item involved a purported Chinese plot to import dried chilies infested with bacteria. Many of these claims were repeated to me in a recent interview with Habib Muschin Alatas, a senior FPI leader, who denounced Ahok quite openly as an “agent of Chinese imperialism.”
Setijadi, the scholar in Singapore, said the emergence of China has put Chinese Indonesians in an awkward position. They are well-placed to act as an economic, cultural, and linguistic “bridge” between mainland China and Indonesia. But in doing so, they run the risk of reinforcing old prejudices about their divided loyalties. She has observed that positive perceptions of China rarely transfer to Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese, “while negative stuff almost certainly gets connected to Chinese Indonesians.”
One prominent Chinese-Indonesian businessman, who requested anonymity, said that Indonesia had a great deal to gain from China: “There’s real meat there. You have Chinese who have lots of capital … and we need that capital to invest in infrastructure.”
While anti-Chinese sentiment would probably never go away, the businessman said that the outcome of the Ahok election was actually a sign of the resilience of Indonesian tolerance. “A Christian Chinese governor, who was extremely divisive and rude, still won 42 percent of the votes,” he said.
Still, the Indonesian situation hints at the ways in which China’s rise might affect the Chinese diasporas scattered across Southeast Asia. Next door in Malaysia, where ethnic Chinese make up around a fifth of the population, a $38 billion Chinese real estate megaproject in the state of Johor, bordering Singapore, has become the focus of fresh anti-Chinese politicking by Malay politicians.
Among them are nonagenarian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has turned on his former protégé, Prime Minister Najib Razak, accusing his government of selling off the country’s “most valuable land” to foreigners — an issue that now looms over elections due in 2018. Significant Chinese diasporas also exist in Myanmar and Vietnam — two nations that are apprehensive about China’s rapid rise, and also have histories of anti-Chinese attacks and discrimination.
Vatikiotis said that in Indonesia, fears of China have yet to really connect with local anti-Chinese prejudice, which remain overwhelmingly rooted in local economic inequalities, perceived or otherwise. A more pressing question was what Beijing might do in response to another round of bloodletting.
The 1998 riots prompted a nationalist backlash on the Chinese mainland, where the incident is now remembered as “Black May.” In August 1998, demonstrators in Beijing defied a government ban to protest both the Indonesian violence and what many saw as the lukewarm response from their own government, which initially forbade domestic reporting on the riots.
Christine Susanna Tjhin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, who has done extensive research in China, said that the incident still resonates there. From taxidrivers to students to members of the business community, she said, “the image of May ’98 is firmly ingrained in the minds of mainland Chinese.”
Though the Chinese reaction was muted in 1998, a far more powerful Beijing is unlikely to take such a hands-off position today. In 2006, when anti-Chinese violence tore through Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, Beijing responded immediately by evacuating 312 ethnic Chinese residents by air. The episode received extensive coverage in Chinese state media, which declared that “the government attaches great importance to the security and rights of the overseas Chinese.” Though it is hard to say just what Beijing’s reaction would be in Indonesia, Vatikiotis said that “there is every indication” that Beijing is watching closely, and would be “willing to do something to help its fellow Chinese.”
Despite their uncertain place between rising domestic tensions and a rising China, most Chinese Indonesians say their loyalties are clear. In Glodok, I talked with the owner of a small restaurant selling soto betawi, a local beef soup. Giving his name only as Afung, the 73-year-old spoke about his parents’ migration to Indonesia from Guangdong in 1940.
Afung said he was proud of his heritage — “everywhere we can see the sunrise, the Chinese are there,” he said — but it was hard to feel allegiance to a country that he has never seen with his own eyes.
“I was born in Indonesia,” he said, “and I will die in Indonesia.”
Jakarta's violent identity crisis
The minority group has had a huge impact on Indonesia’s capital. But the success of its small elite has led to recurring discrimination and bloodshed – which has come to a head as Jakarta’s ethnic Chinese governor runs for election
Before Jakarta, there was Batavia, the 17th-century capital city of the Dutch East Indies, built with the skill of just a few hundred ethnic Chinese artisans who had settled as traders along the shore.
How little has changed.
Many big projects in modern day Jakarta, a city of more than 10 million, have been built by developers from the minority group, the descendants of the original merchants and other Chinese who have arrived since.
Chinese-Indonesians – estimated to make up 1% to 4% of the country’s 250 million people – have had an impact on Jakarta which is vastly disproportionate to their physical numbers. The economic success of the group’s small elite has led to repeated bouts of resentment, discrimination and even violent assaults.
Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnam, a Chinese-Indonesian known as Ahok, has proven that despite a history of political exclusion, high office is also achievable. He is running for election in February.
Yet a racially charged anti-Ahok protest this month has forced Jakarta to confront whether the minority has truly been accepted after three sometimes prosperous – but always uncertain – centuries.
A mini market was raided in a Chinese-Indonesian neighbourhood, bringing back painful memories of riots in 1998 in which more than 1,000 were killed.
The 4 November anti-Ahok protest.
Protesters, many of them hardline Islamists who are unhappy Ahok is both Chinese-Indonesian and Christian, have promised another rally for next Friday – and hope to beat their attendance of more than 100,000 people on 4 November. Police say they will block them this time, but observers worry it may further raise the potential for violence.
Sibarani Sofian, an urban development specialist, says the city has since been divided into pro and anti-Ahok factions. While he is ethnic Chinese, he prefers the term Tionghoa, which means “of Chinese descent” and attempts to avoid assumptions of links to the Chinese state, another prejudice sometimes thrown at the minority.
He says the demonstration was the apex of unhappiness among some Indonesians with Ahok being governor. “I personally think there is still considerable risk today facing Tionghoa society, although people already learned the lesson of the ’98 riots,” he adds.
"There is still considerable risk today facing Tionghoa society, although we have learned the lesson of the '98 riots" Sibarani Sofian
Batavia repeated
When the Dutch ruled Batavia, they granted special concessions to a handful of Chinese living in the port.
François Valentijn, a Dutch historian, wrote in the 1720s that “if there were no Chinese here, Batavia would be very dead”. And two decades later, that situation was almost realised.
In 1740, bitterness from native Indonesians and the Dutch to the growing wealth of a small portion of Chinese people led to open bigotry against the minority population, most of whom were extremely poor themselves.
In October that year, Chinese sugar mill workers finally revolted; the response was a pogrom in which nearly the entire population were killed.
The persecution lasted after Indonesia declared independence from the Dutch at the end of the second world war. Many were denied citizenship by laws that labelled Indonesians of Chinese descent who had lived here for generations as “aliens”. Even the communist party in the 1950s – popular among ethnic Chinese – would not allow them into its leadership.
Indonesia’s second president and dictator who ruled for three decades, Suharto, attempted to deal with the “Chinese problem” by forced assimilation under his New Order government, banning Chinese schools, books and languages.
Ethnic Chinese-Indonesians make up 1-4% of the population
On the side, though, he copied the Dutch colonisers by making deals with ethnic Chinese businessmen, providing them with monopoly rights to grow his economy.
In his book Asian Godfathers, author Joe Studwell said Suharto had decided he would dole out concessions to “people who would get a job done and who posed no political challenge to his authority. These individuals tended to be Chinese immigrants.”
Among the most prominent is Mochtar Riady who founded the Lippo Group, a conglomerate in real estate, banking, healthcare and natural resources reputedly worth more than $10bn.
Sudono Salim, once considered the richest person in the country, ran Salim Group, the world’s largest instant noodle maker; while Eka Tjipta Widjaja founded Sinar Mas, a conglomerate that owns Asia Pulp & Paper, and works in 120 countries.
Yet Chinese-Indonesians were forced to conceal their identity, with Chinese-language newspapers banned and Chinese festivals cancelled. While these tycoons made billions, they kept low public profiles and went by their Indonesian – not Chinese – names.
They had good reason to be cautious.
Domestic bitterness grew from rumours that Chinese-Indonesians controlled 70% of the economy, despite no comprehensive research to back that up. This was further entrenched in a 1995 study by Australia’s foreign affairs department which said “Sino-Indonesians” controlled 68% of the top 300 conglomerates.
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Finally, in May 1998, Suharto’s balancing act backfired. Mobs targeted Glodok, the historic Chinatown of Jakarta, looting shops and burning buildings.
They left more than 1,000 dead and an estimated $300m of property damage. Scores of ethnically Chinese women and girls were raped.
Krishna Linarda, a 53-year-old tax consultant, whose grandfather owned a Chinese-language book shop in Glodok, was there that day. When he heard where the rioters were heading, he drove to pick up a friend just in time before her house was burned.
“As I drove to get her, I saw the rioters were flipping cars with their hands,” he says.
An ethnic Chinese man in what remained of his shop after the 1998 riots
He checked into a hotel where he thought he would be safe but the mob spread. “I could see them from our room on the fourth floor, breaking into a music shop and stealing guitars and a keyboard. Some took a set of drums.”
A shop he worked in was also smashed, he later found out. “We opened again a week later,” he says with a hint of pride. “But after that, the community built iron gates at the entrance to every alley and a local resident would keep watch at night.”
Ahok’s rise
Since then, ethnic Chinese have been able to express their heritage after successive leaders abandoned the assimilation policy. Chinese New Year is a public holiday and in Glodok, Mandarin and other dialects are spoken openly. But the iron fences remain, some with fresh spikes added on top.
This year the community is again facing a challenging test, as Ahok is accused of blasphemy for comments he made about his political enemies exploiting verses of the Qur’an. He has been formally named as a suspect, making it likely that he will face charges and could even be jailed.
This month’s demonstration, which ended in violence with one person dead, appeared to be backed by his political opponents, interested in halting his popular rise by exploiting simmering sectarianism.
Indonesia’s Ulama Council, the country’s top Muslim clerical body, announced a non-Muslim should not become a leader of the capital of the world’s largest Muslim majority nation. As an outspoken and brash politician, Ahok is divisive, even among Chinese Indonesians.
His stubbornness in relocating thousands of slum residents along Jakarta’s dirty river banks has led to an outcry, and many Chinese-Indonesians worry that negative perceptions of the governor might reflect badly on them.
Linarda, the tax consultant from Glodok, argues it is all just politics and that the protests “would not have happened if there wasn’t an election”.
“I can say 100% of my Muslim friends don’t agree with the protesters,” he says, adding that he believes entrenched racial divides are broadly over in Indonesia.
“My blood is red and my bones are white,” he says, referring to the colours of the national flag. “Only my eyes are a different shape.”Christine Susanna Tjhin, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies says that while the Ahok phenomenon has “highlighted the sad reality that scapegoating and stereotyping are still alive and kicking”, she does not think there are big dangers for Chinese-Indonesians.
“Circumstances now are very different to May ’98. The economy is still growing and on the right track, with the main focus on infrastructure development, particularly in previously neglected areas. Politics is fundamentally still stable despite pre-elections dramas. Security apparatus is more present and accessible. And, more importantly, society is now less prone to be provoked by racial agendas.
“The danger that I’m concerned with is less about physical threats, but more about how [Chinese-Indonesians] fit into the narratives of Indonesian pluralism. What has happened is that, as Jakarta’s election approaches, race and religious identity are dominating public debates, rather than issues related to social justice and good governance.”
China reaches out
Indonesia prides itself on moderately practiced religion and pluralism, its motto being “unity in diversity”. President Joko Widodo, a close ally of Ahok’s and the person who handed him the governor’s office when he ran for president, has sought to quell the recent furore.
After the 4 November protest, he cancelled a long-planned trade trip to Australia at the last minute so he could attempt to placate political opponents and religious leaders.
But it’s not just the anti-Ahok movement that is rehashing tired racist tropes. Old resentments are reappearing as Chinese business takes a growing interest in Indonesian investments.
Anti-Ahok protesters are planning another demonstration on 2 December
Some Chinese-Indonesians are facilitating deals between the two countries, often through their positions on Indonesian public and private business associations.
Charlotte Setijadi, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak institute, has been researching how the shared ethnicity between a small elite of Chinese Indonesians has allowed them to assume a “bridging” role.
“Some also have personal networks and reputations as businessmen so they get asked for investment advice by both Chinese government officials and businesses,” she said.
"Most Chinese-Indonesians do not speak Mandarin and cannot read Chinese letters" Evi Sofian“The majority of the time, they do not engage in the business deals themselves, but they get asked for advice or introductions to the relevant potential local partners and businesses.”
Chinese money is still not flowing into Indonesia as some would like. While on paper the number of China’s investments is growing, less than 10% actually go ahead.
Regardless, the perception of close ties has created tension. The association of Chinese-Indonesians with a foreign country, especially one that has been a sometimes overwhelming power in the region, has often been used to reinforce suspicion from some native Indonesians, or pribumi, of outside interference.
“Even among the ethnic Chinese business community, there are those who are worried about Chinese-Indonesian businessmen being perceived as being too pro-China,” Setijadi says.
“So this is a complex and ongoing issue, and reflects the persistent undercurrent of suspicion towards Chinese-Indonesians, as well as their perceived belonging and economic dominance.”
There are frequent attacks in the media by various right-wing and Islamist pribumi groups that accuse Chinese-Indonesian businessmen and politicians of being China’s puppets.
Evi Sofian, an editor and journalist with the English-language Jakarta Post, is Chinese-Indonesian but has not been able to trace how long her family has been in the country.
“Many people are uncomfortable being associated with Beijing, as if we have our nationalism questioned,” she says. “Most Chinese-Indonesians do not speak Mandarin and cannot read Chinese letters. I am sure we are as blind as any Indonesian when it comes to Chinese culture.”
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