Tomorrow's Revolutionaries Quietly Prepare For Their Day
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday July 26, 1996
The next generation of Indonesian leaders are sitting cross-legged around an ashtray, talking conspiratorially about their opposition to President Soeharto's Government, a curtain drawn across the glass door concealing them from view.
This student group is illegal and the participants in the spirited discussion have already had to prove their loyalty to the cause: the criticism of what they see as the corruption and authoritarianism of the Government.
To this end, each has endured the physical violence of the final stage of the initiation process, a three-step intellectual, emotional and physical test designed, they say, to build the solidarity and loyalty essential within an underground movement.
"This is a famous place with a history of intellectual excellence and leadership," they say of their university, the renowned Institute of Technology, Bandung (ITB).
It was here, south-west of Jakarta, that Indonesia's founding President Sukarno studied engineering and consolidated his political ideals. And it is here now that Indonesia's biggest, and potentially most powerful, underground student organisation has taken root, despite tough laws which ban political activity on campus.
As students of the ITB they believe they have a responsibility to revive the tradition of student agitation, and as members of one of the most elite tertiary institutes in Indonesia they expect to assume positions of power in later life.
The group claims about 10,000 members, all of whom have to prove they want in. Once they are in, they are obliged to follow the program, whether or not that means risking arrest or expulsion. The Bandung group says it has allies at universities in Jakarta and many other towns.
It is not yet a national movement, the men concede, but a significant part of the "potential" of the stillfragmented political opposition in Indonesia. As such it is known to worry the Government and the powerful armed forces.
In recent months a wave of student protests, like spot fires across the country, have taken on everything from public transport fare increases, the minimum wage, white-collar crime and the Government-backed overthrow of Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri from the leadership of the Democratic Party of Indonesia (PDI).
The protests are not tame, despite the 1978 Campus Normalisation Law, which effectively banned political activity at universities. Several students died in the regional capital of Ujung Pandang in battles with police during protests over public transport fare increases in May and in Indonesia's second largest city of Surabaya, students led days of confrontation last month in support of industrial workers seeking higher wages.
Then last week a number of illegal student groups from around Indonesia signed a two-kilometre-long banner endorsing Ms Sukarnoputri, the de facto head of the country's infant pro-democracy movement.
"What we expect is intellectual criticism, strength of character, leadership and militancy," says one of the Bandung students, flicking back his long, black hair.
It was at the ITB in the late 1970s that the so-called White Book was prepared, detailing Government corruption and social injustices under Mr Soeharto's New Order Government from students' first hand research in villages and towns all over Indonesia. The book was banned and the student board sacked, leading to the nationwide restrictions on student politics.
"This is a moral movement. What the students wrote about in the White Book was examples such as funding being allocated for two hospitals but only one hospital being built," says another student, barefooted on the grubby blue carpet.
Students in Indonesia, they acknowledge, have not had real power since 1978.
Bandung students have been arrested during protests but more than jail, they say, they fear expulsion from their courses which will deny them the qualifications they need to assume powerful positions in Indonesian society.
From the point of view of the Soeharto Government, the potential of youth-led opposition is particularly worrying. For much of his time in power, Mr Soeharto has harked back to the turmoil and bloodshed which accompanied the fall of Mr Sukarno in 1965.
This generation, with no first-hand experience of political chaos, is increasingly unconvinced.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald
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