Foreign Bases Project on Sun, 2 Aug 1998 19:19:02 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Flaws of riot media coverage |
This offers a rare analysis about the riot and rape of May 13-15 in Jakarta. The writer is an Indonesian (of Chinese descent) professor at National University of Singapore. His dissertation is about State terrorism. ---------- The Jakarta Post 15 July 1998 Flaws of riot media coverage by Ariel Heryanto The mid-May violence in Jakarta and several other cities could be best described as a racialized state-terrorism, rather than racially-motivated mass riots. Failure to recognize the difference has been alarmingly endemic in media coverage. This is especially rampant in the foreign media, otherwise sympathetic towards the victims and the future of Indonesia. Not only can such misleading coverage boost racial antagonism, more seriously, it implicitly exonerates the real culprits. State-terrorism is a series of state-sponsored campaigns that induce intense and widespread fear over a large population, involving minimally these three elements. First, fear is derived from spectacularly and severely violent actions conducted by state agents or its proxies. Secondly, the violence is directed against individuals or social groups, as representatives of a larger population. Third, the violence is displayed as public spectacles, so that the intended message of victimisation is widely disseminated. The aim of a state-terrorism is to spread greater fear among the large population against whom similar violence could happen at any time. At present we have less than unequivocal evidence to indicate who exactly must bear the greatest responsibility for the violence last mid-May. Nonetheless, reports of independent investigations by non-governmental organisations and testimonies from witnesses confirm a widespread suspicion that the case has the qualities of state-terrorism as characterised above. Eye-witnesses described the riot instigators as heavy-built males with crew-cut who wore military boots. Some rape victims saw security uniforms in the van where the rape took place. While such testimonies may be sincere, they are not adequate for any conclusions to be drawn. Other indicators are called for. Any one familiar with Indonesia is fully aware that no social group outside the state can possibly have even half of the capacity to conduct the violence of the magnitude and effectiveness as taking place in Jakarta and Surakarta two months ago. No racial or ethnic groups in Indonesia, no matter how agitated, could possibly inflict a systematic violence in which 1198 lives (of which 27 died from gunfire) were lost, 150 females were raped, 40 shopping malls and 4,000 shops were burned down and thousands of vehicles and of houses were set afire simultaneously in 27 areas in a capital city of 10 million inhabitants in less than 50 hours. All was done without the culprit having to confront the state security forces or face indictment! The violence was just too perfect to leave any doubts about the narrow range of potential suspects. To have a better perspective, the following points are helpful. First, while no civilian groups in the affected areas had either the power or experience to take any active involvement such violence, the Armed Forces has both in politically-trouble spots of the nation: Irian, Aceh, and East Timor. Second, May's violence was not the first of its kind in Java. It was a recurrence of a series that followed a pattern. This century has witnessed periodic attacks against the ethnic Chinese. None of these attacks appeared to have been conducted spontaneously by local, angry, and poverty-stricken masses of other ethnic groups. In 1983 thousands of convicted criminals across Java were systematically slaughtered in front of their families, and their dismembered bodies were displayed in the busiest spots of public places (schools, shops, or movie complexes). The qualities of state-terrorism look glaringly obvious I many of these events. Locals are aware of what happened. Yet, what appeared in the media both inside and particularly outside Indonesia curiously betrays the phenomena. Most news reports, investigative journalism, interviews, or opinion columns on the events of May have focused only on racial issues. The history of the Chinese immigrants, their relations with locals, and their disproportional control of the nations' economy have all been discussed. Central to the dominant media coverage of Indonesia's riots is an allegation of who was responsible for the mass destruction: ethnically the so-called pribumi (natives), economically deprived, and angry at the Chinese. These allegations sometimes come with condemnation, sometimes with defence. The former portrays the Chinese as purely innocent victims. The latter recite the problematic mantra to the effect that the Chinese constitute only 3 percent of the population but controls 70 percent of the nation's economy. Either way, the society is perceived to consist of only the good and bad guys. Those blaming the poor masses are not only being unfair to the accused, but unwittingly helping the state-terrorism by protecting the perpetrators. These high-moralising journalists and observers are free to expand their imagination, because the accused have no access to rebuke their accusers, especially in foreign media. Those who defend the pribumi are being self-defeating. Underlying their act of defending the pribumi by rationalising the act of looting, burning, or raping, is an acceptance of the accusation that it was the pribumi masses who had actually committed the crimes. Either way, both camps in the debate miss the point. By locating the riots in the racial framework, both intensify the familiar tendency to racialize the population and people's imagination in various directions. Some militantly promote Chinese identities in culture, arts, history or party politics. Others emphasise exacerbating inter-racial hostility. Both exempt state agents from serious questioning and possible prosecution. No wonder gang rape continues well into the second month following the mid-May unrest. Once entangled in a racial framework, many commentators draw comparisons from Indonesia's situation with unrest in Malaysia in 1969 or the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Such comparison is useful, but for reasons that are contrary to those commonly presented. In both Malaysia and Los Angeles violent conflicts involved primarily segments within the civil society, each generally identified with ethnic markers. That is precisely what distinguishes them from the Indonesian case. In Indonesia the agent provocateurs had no ethnic identity. Nor did they come from any particular groups within the civil society. They victimised more than one ethnic group, although those of Chinese descent were their primary targets. In this sense, the violence can better be described as racialized than racist. It adopted racial colorings, apart from patriarchal brutality, but the motive was not genuine racism. No wonder the so-called pribumis were not left entirely untouched by the violence. Many pribumis risked their own safety when offering a helping hand to individual Chinese strangers both during the violence as well as afterwards. Public condemnation against the state, and aid campaigns for the victims have flourished among pribumi activists. As repeatedly aired in public in Indonesia, the state suspiciously came out late with any remarks about the gang-rapes. All the aforementioned is not to deny that racial problems in Indonesia exist, more specifically the problems between the Chinese minority and self-proclaimed pribumi majority. What I am arguing is that existing racism among members civil society was not responsible for the recent riots, nor most other major anti-Chinese riots in past decades. This racism must be clearly distinguished from the effective racialized, masculine, and militarized state-terrorism that most analysts choose to ignore. As elsewhere, racism in Indonesia flares up in household conversations, jokes, gossips, or private quarrels. Such pervasive sentiment partly explains the ease with which terrorism evolved last May. However, it did not cause the mass burning, raping, or looting. It simply does not have the capacity. Rather than causing the May riots, civilian racism has been affected and intensified by both the patriarchal state-terrorism and the racializing media coverage. (The writer is with the Jakarta-based feminist journal, Jurnal Perempuan) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl