Why I No Longer Remember May 98
There's no justice, but we have prevailed.
In university, I wore a black ribbon every 13 and 14 May. Nobody ever asked what it meant, but Indonesians who saw it would understand. On those two days back in 1998, the movement against the Suharto regime escalated into riots that targeted Chinese Indonesians who were blamed for the financial crisis. In the conventional narrative, lootings were followed by mass rapes and murders. About 1000 people died in those two days. One week later, Suharto resigned after 32 years of presidency/dictatorship.
How it got there: The end of the Cold War brought a decade of financial boom in Asia Pacific. Pundits talked about the Asian Century. The Asian Pacific Economic Community ranged from India to Chile, and Suharto proudly hosted the 1994 conference. Affluent Asians went to Australia to study, to Europe for a holiday, and to Singapore and Japan for business. If you’re old enough to remember the 1990s, you know how Asian it was. Sushi. Art of War. John Woo. Asian grocery and Asian classmates.
One didn’t have to be Chinese to go ahead in Southeast Asia. Malays and Indians and Javanese and Balinese went ahead too and probably had more Western contacts than the Chinese. Many Chinese in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam don’t see themselves as Chinese.
But it is undeniable that the Chinese run the economies of Southeast Asia, and that’s been that way for one and half centuries, if not longer. Students of Southeast Asian politics and economies learn that the partnership of native bureaucrats and Chinese merchants runs Southeast Asian economies. In other words, while any Southeast Asian tourists and investors touring Los Angeles, Zurich, and Perth in the 1990s could be of any religion and ethnicity, their wealth was made of this postcolonial system.
Southeast Asians spent and invested a lot in the 1990s, and we were convinced that we could be the next Asian Tigers, just like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The party ended in July 1997, when the Asian Financial Crisis began.
The crisis was soul-crushing for Asia. In Japan, it deepened the Lost Decade. In South Korea, supposedly men went out in the morning in office suites and spent the day sitting in the parks because they couldn’t tell their families they were laid off. It is still remembered as the IMF Crisis, a moment of national humiliation. Mahathir Mohamad, then the Prime Minister of Malaysia, blamed a Jewish conspiracy personified by George Soros, expertly shifting the Malay ire away from the Chinese – and Malaysian Chinese thanked him for that. In Indonesia, it snowballed into unrest.
The anxiety in Indonesia had begun years before, as everyone pondered on the future of Indonesia beyond Suharto. Would another general replace him? Would a technocrat? After seeing what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, would a religious or ethnic war break out too?
The road to 1998 began in 1994 in Medan, Sumatera, over minimum wages; followed by riots in provincial Java in 1996 over a public dispute with the police, and yet the mobs ended up attacking Chinese shops and churches. After all, it is easier to attack shops and churches than precincts and town halls.
Meanwhile, Islamism was on the rise, just as Chinese Indonesians embraced charismatic and evangelical Christianity. Indonesians had been on the edge by 1996, amid The Nanny, the English Premier League, and Michael Crichton mania. Generals showed their sympathy for the Islamists, including Indonesia’s upcoming president Prabowo Subianto. Evangelical Christians believed that the devil was lurking over Indonesia. I told the school around that I might have a Jewish ancestor and freaked out my family (hmmm who are you, Michiels Arnold?).
If you went through the Great Recession and the early 2020s, that was what the Asian Financial Crisis felt like. It was hard for every class, naturally harder the poorer you were, with no authority you could rely on. And the Chinese were blamed by all sides. Islamists hated their Christianity (to this day Buddhist and Confucian Indonesians are rare). Intellectuals hated their gated communities and malls. Artists hated their tastes. The middle class hated their attitude, their tones, their presence. Those who left Indonesia, mostly but not all the rich, seemed to prove their disloyalty to a struggling Indonesia.
It all boiled into the dry season of 1998 as Suharto had lost control of Indonesian politics. By May, student protests had gone together with riots and then lootings, and shops put on “Indigenous property” signs to save themselves. Students were shot on the twelfth, and the Jakarta riots happened for the next two days, before spreading to other cities. My city, Bandung, was spared from riots, credited to our strong Army garrison.
I don’t remember what happened. I saw the riot news. I saw the online pictures. It was 7 October, 25 years too early. When Suharto stepped down, I was more concerned about exams.
The 1998 FIFA World Cup supposedly calmed the masses. Everyone who was a political pundit in May turned into a football pundit in June. I went to Melbourne to visit my sister, while seeing my future college city. Between Friends and Blue Heelers, we traded stories on what we heard online and through classmates.
The crisis was topped by the violent death of 17-year-old Ita Martadinata Haryono on 9 October, just days before she was set to testify at the United States Congress. The police quickly established that a burglar killed her in panic, and the case was closed.
While Chinese Indonesians continued to fear further riots, and maybe even a coup or civil war in 1999, the actual bloodshed happened to other communities: Literal witch hunts, religious wars, and the scorched earth retreat of the Indonesian military from East Timor. Throughout all this chaos, I had the normal life of an American teenager: Watching MTV Alternative Nation, hanging out with Americans in the Natalie Portman newsgroup, and basking in Treble-era Manchester United.
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Alright, so that’s how we got there. Fast forward to a series of bombings, and murders, and 9/11 itself, and the Reformasi went well in Indonesia. We turned liberal. We were not Balkanized. We came to appreciate Chinese people and their culture.
And being a college student, I became a proud Chinese Indonesian. This was a lonely venture, since other Chinese Indonesians went to different faculties, lived on the other side of the CBD, and never heard of the liberal Catholic priests I read. May 98 became my cause, a cause I talked about with Australians and native Indonesians. I never asked other Chinese Indonesians about their experiences. It’s like the fable of the innkeeper who asked Napoleon about his Russian exit.
Seno Gumira Ajidarma chronicled the bloody road of Reformasi through his short stories and novels, while the age of Asia Extreme, Cool Japan, or Korean Wave began. Western academics investigated the popularity of the Taiwanese drama Meteor Garden in Indonesia. ‘Oriental’ became a buzzword in Indonesia to describe what sold: Anime. Japanese game shows. Chinese Indonesian models and hosts. Kopitiam and sushi bar. Anime hair. Imagine that after 7 October, instead of the intifada chic, America is having Jewish chic, where Jerry Seinfeld and Eden Golan are celebrated instead of booed.
And yet, while I took the Honour program on the Holocaust to understand May 98, and then weeping alone on sunny Sunday afternoons between Primo Levi and Maus, the Oriental years had passed. The world had become tired of them, including Indonesians.
I went to the launch of Jemma Purdey’s Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996 – 1999, and my autographed copy became my white paper on what happened. Along with the book that made Amy Chua famous, World on Fire, where Chua connects the murder of her aunt in the Philippines in 1994 with the anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia four years later.
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I turned my one-man activism into one-man writing, and it worked. The memory of May 98 lives on, but not for the public or average Chinese Indonesians. It’s the memory of the chattering class. We knew there would not be actual investigations. But so many mass murders went on buried in time, and the chattering class itself moved from one topic to another according to the calendar and the current events.
Who was responsible for May 98? Elements in the military remain the primary and the most convenient suspect. Indonesians have their favourite generals as the suspect, including Prabowo Subianto. My favourite suspect is Suharto, who wanted to disgrace the students and remove international support for them.
The May riots might have professional fingerprints all over it, and again this is very convenient. It absolves the poor from responsibility. It absolves common Indonesians from responsibility. It absolves the students and the activists from the responsibility. Only the right-wing military is guilty.
Now the Chinese have been removed from the memory of May 98. Questions directed to Prabowo during the latest presidential campaign interrogated his involvement in the abduction of activists and shooting of students, not in the riots. “Survivors of May 98” in this decade are mothers of missing activists and looters, not raped Chinese women.
It’s always impossible to find Chinese Indonesians who testify, for good reasons. From their trauma to their fear of repercussions to the defensive gesture from the Islamists, who somehow think the riots are about their honour. Cynically, Western academics have sympathies for activists and even looters these days, but not for average Chinese families.
No media commemorated May 98 this year, while some people remembered their late friends on Twitter. I thank them for that, and again this is convenient for the chattering class, who could lament that Indonesians have forgotten the dark episode and voted Prabowo as the next president.
Ironically, while I studied the Holocaust to understand May 98, my understanding of May 98 helped me to understand the ignorance regarding 7 October. The same denial that mass rapes and sexual violence happened. The instinct to defend Islamism. The refusal to centre women.
On 13 May 2024, I was in a mall and the Chinese Indonesians lived their lives. They talked with their friends in hijab. They dated at Starbucks. Even the day before that, a video of Bandung Chinese speaking in Sundanese went viral, as Jakartans were amazed to see Chinese youth talking fluently (and coarsely) in fluent Sundanese while eating durian. We’ve happily assimilated. My work is done. We’ve survived, and we’ve made ourselves at home.