Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World

7. Youth Gangs and Otherwise in Indonesia

147 7 Youth Gangs and Otherwise in Indonesia Loren Ryter In December 2008, Japto Soerjosoemarno, until today the unchallenged leader of Pemuda Pancasila, or Pancasila Youth,1 by all accounts the most powerful youth gang in Indonesia during the last decades of Suharto ’s rule, denied that his youth gang had ever existed (pers. comm., December 23, 2008).2 The reason for his denial, and the outright mendacity of it, says much about the nature of youth gangs in Indonesia. It illustrates the degree to which youth gangs learned to thrive as long as they sought formality and recognition and transformed themselves—­or, more precisely, insisted on perpetual efforts to transform themselves—­ from amalgamations of toughs into innocuous associations of noble purpose, usually but not always nationalist. The Siliwangi Boys Club (SBC), the 1960s “gang” whose existence Japto denied, was not Pancasila Youth but rather one of its precursors. I’ll return to the SBC shortly, but first I must introduce Pancasila Youth, the “gang” for which he was most famous. Though popularly understood as a gang, Pancasila Youth was officially not a gang at all but rather a state-­ recognized youth group, one among dozens of members of the Indonesian National Youth Council. Japto, born in 1949, assumed the national leadership of Pancasila Youth in 1981 at the age of thirty-­ one. To allow Japto to retain the top post well into his fifties, sometime after the resignation of Suharto in 1998, the youth group altered its legal status to become a social organization, thereby bypassing Pancasila Youth’s leadership age cap of fifty-­ five. I raise this to underscore that 148    loren ryter any definition of youth gangs that caps membership at twenty-­ five is not applicable in Indonesia, and with that restriction, there would be no “youth gangs” at all. The category of “youth” (pemuda) in fact is understood in Indonesia in terms other than demographic, which I also discuss further later. From the 1980s through the 1990s, Pancasila Youth became the most prominent of several state-­sanctioned youth groups who enjoyed virtual impunity from prosecution for running gambling, prostitution, drug distribution, and protection rackets; for extortion (primarily of wealthy ethnic Chinese); and for general thuggery in exchange for service as militant supporters of the Suharto regime and as personal bodyguards of Suharto’s family and political and business cronies. Crudely put, they served as the regime’s “brown shirts.” During election campaigns and on patriotic holidays, they were mobilized by the tens of thousands for rallies and parades. At such rallies, they wore orange and black camouflage uniforms, which were meant both to announce an affinity with the army and visibly index the bravado of wild game hunting (Figure 7.1).3 Nominally acting spontaneously out of a perfected sense of national allegiance, they intimidated regime critics, such as nongovernmental organization activists and students; accused them of treason; broke up protests; and occasionally abducted and tortured them. Like mafias elsewhere, they were frequently employed by industrialists as strike-­ breakers against labor agitation, with the added value that as loyalists of the anti-­ Communist regime, they could also accuse labor organizers of Communism and thus treason. Therefore, the threat that they brought to bear was not only of physical violence but of the full force of law of an authoritarian state. Employed also by politically connected property developers, its local leaders made out like bandits by evicting residents who resisted the displacement required for the transformation of urban centers such as Jakarta into modern metropolises . Like those against labor organizers, threats against recalcitrant residents and squatters also carried the ring of treason, insofar as to obstruct so-­ called development, the regime’s raison d’être, was trumpeted as tantamount to betraying the nation. They thus developed a concrete interest in the “concrete,” with large numbers of local leaders founding local contracting companies and turning to their members for labor supply.4 National membership estimates from the late 1990s ranged from four to ten million members, which would have put its youth gangs and otherwise in indonesia    149 membership at nearly 4 percent of the total Indonesian population.5 While most of the rank and file were youngsters under twenty-­five and mostly without means, leaders at all levels were considerably older, and given the lucrative potential of the rackets, they generally desired to hold on to top positions as long as possible. For the most...