Jakarta (fear of the street, part 3)

 Trisakti Monument, Trisakti University, Jakarta

Turun ke Jalan!

This is the third part of my review of Chapter 4, The Violence of Categories, in Abidin Kusino’s book Behind the Post Colonial Architecture, urban space and political cultures.

I end where Kusno begins: the economic crisis of 1997-1998, the student demonstrations, and the fall of Soeharto. In this coming month of May the tenth anniversary of those events which took place in Jakarta will pass.

Ten years ago Jakarta was in the midst of sever economic crisis resulting from property speculation and overvaluation, systemic corruption of the banking sector, systemic corruption in the government, devaluation of the rupiah, and the weariness of 32 years of Soeharto rule. It has been said that during this economic crisis the poverty rate increased by 300%. Thousands of people were without work. Political discourse descended to the street.

Ten years ago the university students were in the streets protesting for human rights and economic justice, for what they called “reformasi”.

What crackled in the background were violent riots and the deaths of perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people.

Ten years ago Jakarta was burning.

Kusno emphasizes two violent incidences in Jakarta at this time, the first was the student protests culminating in the shooting deaths by the Indonesian army of four students from Trisakti University and second the violent riots which followed and which emerged from the street.

Kusno: “Soon after the shooting, major rioting broke out in about 50 places in metropolitan Jakarta. The main targets were Indonesians of Chinese descent. For more than 35 hours, the “underclass” of Jakarta, from which the student distanced themselves, ran amok, burning and looting places that apparently belonged to Chinese Indonesians. This took place regardless of the presence of the police and military who apparently allowed the riots to occur”.

The downfall of the regime was close at hand and because this is Java there was some mystery in this violence as well. People took advantage of the violence to settle old scores. Some have reported direct government involvement in inciting to riot. The violence was such that no one knew what was going on, who was behind it, where it was coming from, and where it was going. For a real good firsthand account of this and other events in Indonesia that were taking place during this time I highly recommend Richard Lloyd Perry’s book In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos.

Two categories emerge out of these events, “student protestors” and “underclass rioters”.

Kusno: “These two overlapping instances immediately appeared as the unspoken frame work of events in the Indonesian media, thereby reinforcing the categories of violence that were already in place”.

Kusno’s questions are these.

“Why are two difference bodies of protest constituted in one city: the “student ” (and behind them the national media) and the “massa” (considered by the national media as “perusuh”, a term for those who “lost their self control and sense of morality” as a result of the “immediate situation” of the riot)? How are these categories produced? And more particularly, what is the relation of these categories to the ways in which the space of the city is constructed?”

Answers to those questions are discussed in part one and part two of Jakarta (streets of fear).

Perhaps those events at Trisakti are remembered most clearly while is the violence of the street has been lost to a collective amnesia, as Peter Nas suggests.

Still, after the initial protests at Trisakti University and the street riots the scene shifted to Jalan Sudirman, Semanggi, Senayan, and the Parliament Building.

This is the subject of Taking the Streets: Activism and Memory Work in Jakarta, Doreen Lee, Indonesian Studies Working Papers, No. 3, September 2007, University of Sydney.

From Lee:

“The discourse of public space in Indonesia contains both the anxieties and the hopes of the social classes affected by this idea of ‘public space’ and what it promises.

The first idea of public space takes place in the interior zone of a shopping mall, shaped by middle-class ideas of comfort and safety, an idea which operates against the fear of the hot, dusty, and dangerous streets. The second and more recent development, the revival of street politics, uses these dislocations to its advantage, as activists use the street to gain proximity to the rakyat (the People) and to disseminate their political rhetoric in a most spectacular fashion. The city is the setting for these contestations for public space by different groups, made up of multiple and heterogeneous components, which nonetheless approach the street with a shared sense of its wild possibilities. One could say that a metonymy is being established, where increasingly the conditions of the street have come to represent the city.

Sudirman, as well as the destination points of the Semanggi Cloverleaf bridge and the Parliamentary Building at Senayan, became sites of physical outbreaks of violence, with rubber bullets, teargas, water cannons, and batons deployed by the state security forces, and molotovs and rocks thrown back by student demonstrators. This paper takes up one of these addresses and the events marked by its name: Semanggi, the gathering point of the Student Movement during the mass demonstrations of 1998 and 1999. 13 November 1998: The First Semanggi Tragedy. At the gates of Atma Jaya Catholic University, a crowd of student demonstrators and ordinary people protesting the Parliamentary Special Assembly (Sidang Istimewa) were fired upon by state troops. Fifteen reported killed,6 and more than 100 demonstrators hospitalised.

The Second Semanggi Incident, 23 September 1999: protesting the ratification of a new emergency act giving the military unprecedented power, 6 people were killed. In both cases, the military denied issuing live bullets to their soldiers (van Dijk 2001: 453). By now, 8 years on, the violence of the events of Semanggi I and II have attained a finished quality. Finished but unresolved. What happened on that major thoroughfare, Semanggi?

In 1998 Indonesia felt these political reverberations; the feet of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators hitting the street in different cities throughout the archipelago. The call was ‘Turun ke Jalan!’, ‘Descend to the Streets!’. The most dramatic and well-documented of these demonstrations culminated in the violent encounters between state armed forces and student-led demonstrators in Semanggi”…

Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta: fear, trust, and amnesia in urban development. University of Leiden. Leiden, that “This concept of fear, as we have described it, has shaped the social and physical environment of Jakarta. It dominates the streets and the mental maps of the streets people construct in their heads. The old gated communities that came into existence during the colonial era and the Soeharto period have been complemented by new ones of a simpler type: the abundance of steel gates that close off the many small roads to the kampongs, such as at Jalan Gadjah Mada. These gates have recently been added to the large gated communities, such as the new towns in the periphery of Jakarta, and the condominiums of the super rich, for example Taman Anggrek. Moreover, the new architecture of malls almost without front windows, or just very thick glass blocks, can be considered a new trend which will probably lead to experiments with malls completely walled on the outside, with windows on the inside in order to receive natural light from an inner courtyard. Spanish architecture could be taken as an example for this new architecture. However, apart from the ‘architecture of fear’ and the ‘planning of trust’, the desire for amnesia is also very strong. People try to forget what happened in 1965 and 1998 and during the many other riots in between. They do not want to talk about the victims and their fate. However, their mental maps still include information on where to go and where not to go, as well as where to contact each other in case of danger. The mental maps of the streets of Jakarta are burdened by both fear and trust, but in order to continue daily street life this is balanced by a strong drive toward amnesia”.

Lee: “The uncertainty of the streets, they claim, has become a part of daily life, as Jakartans retain a mental map of escape routes. People connect with each other to obtain information via remote technologies (cell-phones, radio, and for a time, high-frequency walkie-talkies) out of a sense of flight from danger. Rumors of mass riots and theft feed these uncertainties, creating urban myths and material changes to the architecture of the city, with gates and walls demarcating ever more sharply the lines between the street and non-street spaces.

If, as Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta that “ordinary (middle class) Jakartans are compelled to talk about the 1998 riots and to point out the ruins of that violence, their mental maps are of a variety driven by rumour and distance from the event. The middle class subjects of Nas and Pratiwo’s article are devoid of encounters with the street and the productive spaces of alternative politics contained in the activist accounts of that same time period. But this disparity in understanding arises as an effect of the street itself, where rumors of crime and violence bring with them a recognition and rejection of the otherness of those who belong on the streets: namely, the mad, the destitute, and the criminal. Contra to the singularity of ‘I was there’, the repetition of the riot stories say, ‘it could have been me -because I am middle class’. Such avoidance of the street plays out in the urban development of malls, as the upwardly-mobile educated and political classes build fortresses of ‘public space’ that the rakyat cannot afford, even if they might enter to look…

…Shopping malls are ‘like prescriptive institutions such as civil service training institutes’ (Young 1999: 69), where urban sophistication is learned and practised. In Young’s observation, malls in Jakarta are being described as public parks, and serve the function of public space, drawing both the rich and the poor. Note his description of the burgeoning of luxury malls in Jakarta in the late 1990s: In the most opulent malls of central Jakarta (such as Plaza Indonesia, Plaza Menteng, Sarinah Store), or in prestige locations like Pondok Indah, Pasaraya Blok M or Citraland Mall, one can spend hours walking past a seemingly endless array of specialist boutique shops, large national and international department stores, supermarkets, banks, franchised food outlets and the like…Yet, even here, there is an admixture of teenagers in school uniform, sightseers, couples on dates in the restaurants and fast-food outlets…What is being studied most assiduously are the elements of middle-class style”.

And after ten years from “reformasi”?

Lee concludes that, “Malls create a sense-repertoire that can be replicated across the archipelago. While these ‘academies’ of class socialization enable the rakyat class of people to experience the lifestyle of the upwardly mobile, the experience of the mall itself encourages a specific uniformity. Well-dressed youth are the target audience of these malls. It is a uniformity that points to a standard experience and a standard fear; the expansion of air-conditioned sanctuaries is ‘closely connected to middle-class anxieties over the worsening street crimes in Jakarta’.

Coterminous with the development of gated communities, the malling of Jakarta provides a safe haven for the retreat of the middle class, away from the perceived dangers of the street…

…In Kusumawijaya’s words, the mall attracts the middle class by drawing them away from the street, so that the street becomes something to be experienced only from the window of a car”.

The mall may seem a digression in this discussion, but it has emerged discursively as part of measures taken by urban planners and the middle class (consumers) in reaction to the dangers of the streets. The Mall as anti-street presents new challenges to the memorializing of radical politics associated with Semanggi”.

Here again is Abeyasekere’s words. They echo down the long history of Jakarta.

“…from colonial times onwards, governments have sought to impose an inappropriate façade on Jakarta, a façade which was unable to conceal the sprawl of the city.

Is Jakarta the awful culmination of the nation’s past or does it in fact mirror Indonesia’s future? Throughout its history its rulers have certainly intended the latter, but the real city has always taken its own perversely different path, making it to some extent a microcosm of the country at large- a forum for government policies at odds with people struggling to make a life of their own.

The central fallacy which has persisted from 1619 to the present is that it is possible to create a city for the privledged few, cut off from the countryside of the majority poor”.

The evidence, of which I have very direct experience, is that this fallacy is still alive and well and thriving in Jakarta at this very moment.