Indonesia Today: Challenges of History

23 THE CRIMINAL STATE: PREMANISME AND THE NEW INDONESIA

Vigilante Justice/Mob Rules … Vigilante justice in Indonesia has reached new extremes with the storming of a courtroom by an angry crowd who lynched a defendant on trial for murder. A distressed district court judge in the remote provincial town of Putussibau on the island of Borneo today recounted details of the attack in his courtroom by up to 400 angry villagers intent on revenging the murder of a local. Judge Aini Basrah said about 50 police had been guarding the courthouse yesterday for the trial of 31year -old Usnata, accused of killing money changer James Sandak. The police had earlier increased their guard when they heard rumours that a mob was on its way to revenge the killing of Sandak. But they were outnumbered when truckloads of men armed with traditional machetes and home-made rifles arrived in search of the defendant. ‘They broke in through the court windows’, Judge Basrah told AAP by telephone from his office today. ‘I was terrified and hid in my office with a guard.’ He said Usnata was mobbed and killed inside the very courtroom, and was being buried today. ‘This is the first time and I hope this is also the last time such a thing has happened in my court’, said the judge, who has been posted to the remote town in the province of West Kalimantan near the border with Malaysia for five years. (Jakarta Post, 14 December 2000) This recent news item is typical of a rising tide of reporting in Indonesia not only of widespread vigilantism, but also of the proliferation of violent standover rackets; a linking of religion and ethnicity to gang warfare and the systematic killing of minority groups; terrorist bombings; and the failure, or even complicity, of law enforcement officials in such events. They are in part a consequence of the power vacuum created by the resignation of President Soeharto. As McLeod (2000b) has demonstrated, his departure left the corrupt political and business ‘franchise’ that he had built without its lynchpin, its ‘godfather’. This led to a fragmentation of systems of political control and the rise of intense rivalry for power between the political groups Soeharto once dominated. Inevitably, this has resulted in a gradual pushing out or reconfiguring of the elites through which he ruled. It has also led to a loss of certainty 23 THE CRIMINAL STATE: PREMANISME AND THE NEW INDONESIA Tim Lindsey 283 AA/Part4&5 23/3/01 6:28 PM Page 283 and confidence in the security forces – his ‘enforcers’ – who have always sought a monopoly on the use of public violence. In this environment of uncertainty, political flux, confusion about lines of authority and a reduced capacity for prompt, coordinated and consistent state responses, longstanding community tensions exacerbated by economic crisis have easily mutated into violence, creating cycles of revenge. Stepping back, these events can be seen more broadly than as simply a response to the tumultuous political and economic events that have wreaked havoc in Indonesia since 1997. They are the latest in a long sequence of violent acts by Indonesians against Indonesians. Since Soeharto’s fall these include the destruction of East Timor by military-backed militias; the communal wars in Ambon, Maluku and elsewhere in eastern Indonesia; the war with the Independent Aceh Movement (GAM); and the emerging battle with separatists in Irian. These events can be seen as part of a continuing pattern, one that Siegel (1999, p. 214) has described as ‘an intermittent civil war in which, by definition, members of the same nation kill each other’.1 This ‘war’ is, however, one that has historically involved the state to some extent. In recent incidents, and those historical events discussed below, the state either has been a protagonist or, at the very least, has been implicated by providing the political circumstances that have led to the acts of violence and criminality . In fact, under Soeharto, the state came to be a fundamentally violent and criminal player in public life. THE PREMAN AS PARADIGM This chapter will argue that the real structures and systems by which the New Order operated were illegal. This argument builds on, but goes beyond, the readings of the state authority in Indonesia suggested by critiques based on authoritarian state capitalism (Jayasuriya 1999) or patrimonialism. I argue that the New Order state’s methods of operation – violence, extortion and secrecy – were, in fact, most closely analogous to those of criminal gangs. The key to my analysis is the idea of the preman. Derived...