Forces of Change

 Students hold a special place in the history of this country. Small numbers of educated youths have continually commanded roles in almost every significant event in the country’s history, including the 1998 end to the New Order regime. M. Taufiqurrahman looks at where some of the youth leaders of yesterday are today.

 

The Youth Pledge, made in 1928, is considered the first political statement in the country’s modern history to recognize Indonesia as a united entity. Tellingly, it was organized by students of the STOVIA School for Physicians.

 

It was the first of many examples of students acting as forces of change. Founding fathers Sukarno and Hatta agreed to declare the country’s independence in August 1945 only after persistent cajoling by radical students of the day. University students later played an important role in toppling Sukarno and helping bring to power the New Order regime.

 

One of the 1966 activists, Arief Budiman, says that without the role of the students, the story of the rise of the New Order would appear to be that of a military coup against Sukarno.

 

And as soon as Soeharto’s administration turned corrupt, the students rose up against the leader in 1974, rioting in parts of Jakarta. Although Soeharto quashed student activities following the riots, that didn’t stop them.

 

Scholar Ariel Heryanto wrote in the journal Inside Indonesia in 1996 that during the New Order, students carried greater political weight than in earlier times, if only because the New Order had managed to subjugate the other social forces of political parties, labor unions, the press, the judicial system, legislature and mass organizations.

 

That was no overstatement. Future historians who write about the decline of the New Order will certainly highlight the role of the students. The thousands of students who besieged the People’s Consultative Assembly building on May 20, 1998, and the hundreds of thousands more who took to the streets that same day were an indication that change was coming to Indonesia.

 

Skeptics may say – paraphrasing Ariel – that the appearance of the students in the front row was the legitimizing factor in a crisis of succession, but no one could deny the fact that in 1998 these students gave their blood, sweat, tears and lives.

 

Adian Napitupulu

In late May 1998, Adian Yunus Yusak Napitupulu, now 37, leader of the radical student group Urban Forum, stared death in the face when a team of marksmen stationed on the roof of the Assembly building had him and hundreds of other forum members in their sights.

 

The sharpshooters were concerned that the presence of Adian and students from the Urban Forum – comprising mostly students of Jakarta’s private universities notorious for their brawling – would cause more of a ruckus than the ailing regime needed. The concern was justified, as the forum was one of the first student organizations in Jakarta that had adopted violence, if not revolution, as its creed to topple the New Order.

 

While activists from moderate student organizations were willing to lobby their way into the Assembly building, hundreds of Urban Forum students forced their way inside, setting off a chain reaction that would end in Soeharto’s resignation on May 21, 1998.

 

When the more moderate Jakarta Student Senate Communication Forum decided to bring political elites into play by staging the Ciganjur summit, Adian tried in vain to abort the meeting. Nadhlatul Ulama leader Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, opposition leader Amien Rais, PDI-P chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri and Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkubuwono X met and agreed they would carry the mandate for reform from the people.

 

“I personally confronted them and told them that by handing over the mandate to these people, they had hijacked the mandate for revolution,” Adian says.

 

Now, a little over a decade after the events, Adian is back where he started out – on the streets.

 

In late January, he was instrumental in organizing a mass rally to mark the first 100 days of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration. His demand was the same one he had leveled at Soeharto: that Yudhoyono step down because of gross incompetence.

 

Soeharto’s departure and the ushering in of political freedom did little to temper Adian’s youthful rage.

 

In May 2007, when the Yudhoyono administration decided to hike fuel prices as part of austerity measures, Adian organized a violent protest that ended in some of his colleagues being arrested.

 

Following this, his beef against the President turned personal.

 

“If you’d gone through what I’ve experienced so far, I don’t think you’d have any other option than to fight [Yudhoyono],” he says. “In just his first term in office, dozens of our activist friends were arrested and 16 of them are still behind bars.”

 

Constantly chafing at the bit has taken its toll on him.

 

Soon after the May 2007 protest, police ransacked his office in Tebet, South Jakarta, from where he ran his law firm, seizing much of his assets and effectively shutting the office down for two years.

 

In May last year, he ran for a seat at the House of Representatives – under the PDI-P – necessitated mostly in an attempt to evade prosecution. But a fresh police probe made it impossible for him to run any kind of campaign, and he never made it to the House.

 

Adian says his bid for public office was also driven by a desire to rise above being a mere street-bound activist.

 

“A new generation of activists has emerged and I can’t stay on the streets forever,” he says at an expensive café in Kemang, South Jakarta, owned by an old friend from his college years. “I need a new stage, I need to take part in a heavyweight fight.”

 

Having been a grassroots activist for so long, even after the enemy was gone, also affected his education.

 

He graduated from the Indonesian Christian University’s School of Law in 2007 – 17 years after enrolling in 1990.

 

Although married with one son, Adian remains restless. While some activists from his generation have switched sides by becoming part of the political establishment, Adian remains a staunch government critic, recently joining the Jakarta-based NGO Bendera, which leveled allegations of corruption against Yudhoyono and his associates.

 

Responding to the WEEKENDER’s request for a photo shoot near the Assembly building, Adian traveled all the way from Bandung, West Java, where two of his colleagues from Bendera, Mustar Bonaventura and Ferdy Semaun, had been arrested the day before on charges of libel against the President and members of his inner circle.

 

Adian’s short-term aspirations are modest. “I hope to reopen my law office in the coming months,” he says.

 

One of the student leaders Adian confronted for making the Ciganjur summit possible, Bayquni Bayu, now 35, says the Urban Forum leader may have exaggerated the role that students played in the event.

 

Bayu, now a lecturer at the ITKP School of Advertising in Radio Dalam, South Jakarta, says it was Gus Dur, who died at the end of 2009, who had made the meeting possible. Megawati, Amien and Hamengkubuwono only signed on after much persuasion from the purblind cleric, he says.

 

“We went to ask them to come to Ciganjur,” Bayu says. “But they all declined and only agreed after a personal request from Gus Dur.”

 

For his part, Gus Dur was not impressed by the students’ machinations, particularly after learning that the initial plan was to kidnap the leaders and spirit them away to Rengasdengklok, a small town in West Java where Sukarno and Hatta had been taken by radical youths on the eve of the country’s declaration of independence.

 

In a juvenile tit-for-tat, Bayu was himself kidnapped by Urban Forum activists after the Ciganjur summit.

 

These days, Bayu can hark back to those fateful days with a fond nostalgia, but he still lives by the code and spirit forged during the times and for which he had to pay a heavy price.

 

It was only two years ago that he could achieve any degree of security after doing a string of odd jobs.

 

In the early 2000s, while some of his activist friends joined political parties or got cushy jobs at government agencies, Bayu worked as a writer for an automotive magazine – an unlikely job for someone who didn’t drive.

 

When the magazine folded in 2007, Bayu, a communications graduate from Moestopo University, began teaching at a private university on a part-time basis, before signing a contract with the ITKP.

 

Teaching, as meagerly as it pays, is the only means by which he can still fight the good fight, he says.

 

“I want to emulate what Soe Hok Gie did,” he says of the late, much-celebrated 1966 student activist, who decided that teaching at the University of Indonesia was the only way to avoid being corrupted by the establishment.

 

“While some of his activist friends drove luxury cars to the parliament building, he still held on to his idealism. I still hold on to the ‘98 idealism.”

 

Difficult as it may be to keep the flame of reform alive, Bayu still finds ways to pass the torch to his students.

 

“They can criticize the government by using the techniques they learn in my class,” he says.

 

Beyond just advertising skills, Bayu says he hopes his life story will inspire his students.

 

“I can hold my head up high and tell them I never sold out by joining a political party,” he says of his career choice.

 

The former chairman of the University of Indonesia’s student senate, Rama Pratama, 35, however, believes that in the fight for reform, if you can’t beat them, join them.

 

Rama joined the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and ran for a seat at the House in 2004, representing a North Jakarta constituency, after brief stints at accounting and business management firms.

 

Having made it into the House, he was assigned to Commission XI – overseeing state finance, development planning and banking – long considered a corruption-prone commission. He also served as a member of the House budgetary committee.

 

Before long, he landed in hot water. A fellow House member implicated him in a bribery case related to multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects.

 

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) questioned him on April 2009, but he continues to protest his innocence.

 

“I’m no longer a student activist; I have to move forward,” Rama says at his spacious office in one of Jakarta’s gleaming skyscrapers along Jl. Sudirman. “I haven’t abandoned the ideals of reform – I only compromised on other unrelated issues.”

 

The KPK launched its probe when Rama was campaigning for a second term in office, and his re-election bid suffered accordingly. He failed to garner enough votes for another stab at the House.

 

But it didn’t take him long to get back into politics. In mid-February, House Commission XI appointed him one of five members of the newly formed Bank Indonesia Supervisory Body.

 

Despite all the trouble he has had with it, politics seems to suit Rama best. After all, years of student activism on the UI campus prepared him for just that.

 

Rama was among the student leaders who lobbied their way into the parliament building during those tumultuous days in May 1998, drawing the ire of radical activists who accused them of jumping on the bandwagon when Soeharto was already a spent force.

 

“They can call us whatever they like, but one undeniable fact is that we were a formal institution with institutional legitimacy that lent credence to the whole movement,” Rama says. “When students from UI speak, the people listen.”

 

As for the inertia that prevented formal student organizations from responding swiftly to the fast-changing events of May 1998, Rama says this had more to do with the common problem plaguing any formal organization – bureaucratic red tape.

 

“It took us months to realize we could have used pagers to convene a meeting, rather than sending out letters,” he says.

 

That same inertia apparently prevented Jakarta students, in spite of their position in the nerve center of national politics, from becoming the trailblazers for political change, particularly in 1998.

 

Quoting an inside joke among activists from the late 1990s, Rama says the impetus for change always comes from elsewhere and Jakarta students customarily pick it up and carry the banner forward.

 

“In those days, we used to joke that the student movement began in Yogyakarta, got big in Jakarta and ended in Bandung,” he says.

 

The punch line was that it was dead accurate. It was in Yogyakarta where students embraced violent protests and, as if to pre-empt their peers in Bandung, it was students in the Central Java sultanate who delivered the final blow to the Soeharto regime.

 

It was a group of radical Yogyakarta students, under the People’s Struggle Committee for Change (KPRP), who upped the ante and led the way for moderate students from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) and other schools in Yogyakarta to finish the job.

 

The KPRP was a Marxist-influenced outfit set up as an umbrella organization for the urban poor, radical students, artists and rural laborers, and which sought to overthrow the Soeharto regime through a violent uprising. Simply put, it was a radical outfit that rejected the piecemeal reform promised by Soeharto.

 

The chairman of the group, Haris Rusli Moti, now 35, could be considered among the unlikeliest of people to lead such an organization. Born into a Muslim family in Ternate, North Maluku, Haris led a number of Islamic faith-focused organizations during his early student days at UGM. He was chairman of the campus branch of the Muslim Students Association (HMI). In the early 1990s, he joined a radical Islamist group led by firebrand cleric Ja’far Umar Thalib and took to wearing Arab robes in his junior years as a student at the school’s Department of Archeology.

 

He turned to Marxism in the late 1990s only after persuasion from activists of the then-outlawed People’s Democratic Party (PRD). His adoption of the radical ideology was also motivated by the incapacity of mainstream organizations, Muslim or otherwise, to take a stand against Soeharto’s authoritarian rule.

 

And once he embraced radicalism, there was no turning back. Together with an assortment of left-leaning activists, Haris found ways to radicalize students and elements of Yogyakarta’s urban poor.

 

Today, he takes pride in the fact that the KPRP was the first organization to use violence in its street protests.

 

“In May 1998, the first ever violent clash was between students and police in Surakarta, but it had no national repercussions,” Haris recalls.

 

“It was the confrontation between KPRP activists and the police that kicked off the violent protests throughout the country, which in turn precipitated Soeharto’s downfall.”

 

Haris may have overstated the KPRP’s role in escalating the tensions in May 1998, but the pictures of police chasing students into the UGM campus and occupying their lecture halls as broadcast on national television certainly helped create an uproar that only galvanized the antagonism toward Soeharto.

 

When Soeharto finally stepped down on May 21, Haris, like his peers who had embraced a creed of revolution, couldn’t help but feel cheated.

 

“We expected that with all the pressure, Soeharto would only resign in September 1998, giving us ample time to consolidate civil society,” he says. “But it turned out he was smarter than all of us. He could divide civil society by resigning early and leaving us scrambling for a new strategy.”

 

In spite of the initial letdown, the strongman’s departure proved to be a boon even for a radical outfit like Haris’.

 

Soon after the relaxation of draconian political laws, the PRD emerged from the political underground and consolidated its base to contest the 1999 elections.

 

Haris’ close contacts with top PRD activists paid off when he was named chairman of the party’s Yogyakarta branch in 1999. He took over the national leadership from Budiman Sudjatmiko in 2001, in the wake of the party’s dismal performance in the polls.

 

Today, he harbors no regret over his stint with the PRD.

 

“Most people thought of PRD activists as god-hating communists,” he says. “We weren’t. Most of were just regular, middle-class, well-adjusted students who couldn’t stomach oppression, and we fought the system for no reward.”

 

Capitalizing on his Muhammadiyah background, Haris joined the National Mandate Party (PAN) in 2004, from where he expected to make waves in national politics.

 

But the harsh reality of the game forced him to leave the party.

 

“I’m not the kind of person who can wait 24 hours just to hear what the party chairman has to say,” he says. “I suck at sucking up.”

 

He adds he also declined the party’s offer to help fund his parliamentary bid.

 

After breaking with the PAN, Haris set up the Aviyasa consultancy, advising clients on security and political issues. The agency relies heavily on the vast network he built up throughout his political years.

 

Haris also supplied some of data that George Aditjondro used for his Membongkar Gurita Cikeas (Uncovering the Cikeas Octopus) book, and his office in Pancoran doubles as a café where political activists rendezvous to hash out the issues of the day.

 

“I can make a living from the consultancy, so I can always say no to people who try to buy my idealism,” he says.

 

If Haris’ KPRP credited itself for leading the way for violent confrontation against the Soeharto regime, Ridaya La Ode Ngkowe, now 35, chairman of the UGM student senate in 1998, takes pride in having gone down the opposite path.

 

Throughout May 1998, student protests were violent affairs, but the final blow to the strongman was delivered by hundreds of thousands of students who rallied peacefully on the streets of Yogyakarta on May 20.

 

Soeharto brought his 32-year rule to an end the next day.

 

Ridaya was present when history was made. He was among the students who fronted the rally, and as chairman of the UGM student council his role was unmistakable.

 

“The idea to hold a million-person march was ours,” Ridaya says at a café in Sabang, Central Jakarta.

 

“We thought the rally should be the final salvo, because the situation was just so chaotic that there weren’t many options but for Soeharto to resign.”

 

The idea for a peaceful rally, a symbol for public disobedience, proved to be a tough sell among radical activists.

 

“We got into serious fights in the run-up to the rally, and as you may have seen yourself on May 20, 1998, the protesters were split into two camps,” Ridaya says.

 

Just as with the split between the Urban Forum and the Jakarta Student Senate Communication Forum over the Ciganjur summit, students in Yogyakarta were divided over whether protesters should seek an audience with Hamengkubuwono at his palace.

 

Although Soeharto announced his resignation less than 24 hours after the Yogyakarta rally, Ridaya is under no illusion that it was the students who had toppled him.

 

“We just took advantage of the situation,” he says. “The regime was no longer solid and there were diverging interests among the elites. The fact that we exploited the situation, though, was cause for celebration, because we didn’t fall into the same trap as in 1966 or 1974, where students were used to further others’ agendas.”

 

The events of those years were the rise of the New Order and the Malari riot, respectively, in which student protesters acted as mere pawns in an elite rivalry.

 

Ever self-effacing, Ridaya admits his role in May 1998 may also have been fortuitous.

 

“It was purely a historical coincidence that I was the senate leader when all of it happened, when there was a big issue to act upon,” he says.

 

Until late 1997, he goes on, the student senate was a dormant organization whose presence was barely felt on the campus.

 

And had Ridaya stuck to his initial plan to graduate early and join the civil service, he would certainly have missed what would become the most important gig of his life.

 

Born in a working-class family in Banggai, Central Sulawesi, Ridaya’s involvement in student activism was always grounded in pragmatism.

 

“The career path for a geography student like me was to work in the spatial planning division of the national or regional development planning agency,” he says. “And since I wasn’t from a privileged family, I needed to pad my resume with stints in student organizations.”

 

But by taking the plunge into student activism, not only did Ridaya contribute toward effecting change in the country – he also altered the course of his own life.

 

Throughout his two years as chairman of the UGM student senate, Ridaya made a lot of friends, some of whom helped him make the transition from an apprentice activist into a full-fledged one.

 

In the two-year period following Soeharto’s departure, Ridaya was involved in various projects to strengthen democracy at the grassroots, joining the Yogyakarta-based Institute for Development and Economic Analysis (IDEA).

 

In 2000, he was awarded a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to pursue a master’s degree in international studies at the University of Birmingham.

 

The timing couldn’t have been better, as by the end of 2000 Ridaya was already mulling closing the chapter on his life as a low-paid student activist in Yogyakarta.

 

Upon returning to the country in 2003, Ridaya took up an offer from antigraft activist Teten Masduki to join Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW).

 

He first worked as a program manager for an Aceh monitoring team before being named deputy coordinator of the antigraft watchdog.

 

Ridaya left ICW in September 2008 to join Publish What You Pay, a global civil society coalition that aims to empower citizens in resource-rich developing countries to seek accountability for the management of revenues from the oil, gas and mining industries.

 

After more than a decade of bouncing between different NGOs, Ridaya feels he has finally found a home.

 

“At the very least, I don’t have to make a living from being a politician going from one hotel lobby to another trying to get government contracts,” he says.

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