F

ormer student activists are still looking for their friends who went missing when rioting first broke out on a campus in Medan on May 4, 1998, spreading to many parts of the country in the following days.

Dozens of people were reported missing and dozens others were shot during the rioting in Medan, which paralyzed the economy in the region.

 The riots began when the police and military lay siege to the campus of the Medan Teacher Training Institute (IKIP), now Medan State University (Unimed), according to the former student protest coordinator Iwan Keling, 38.

 '€œI remember the siege very well as it has been recorded as the trigger of the May 1998 riots in the country, which led to the stepping down of then president Soeharto,'€ Iwan told The Jakarta Post at Unimed on Saturday.

 Iwan said the siege was carried out because the students were demanding that Soeharto step
down from the presidency. The protests were jointly conducted by students from the neighboring IKIP Medan, Medan Area University and Medan State Islamic Science University (IAIN Sumatera Utara).

The siege took place at 12 p.m. on May 4, 1998, leading to a clash between the protesters and security personnel. Students throwing stones were met by police with tear gas and rubber bullets.

At dusk, Iwan said, dozens of police and military personnel infiltrated the campus and attacked the protesters. A large number of students and lecturers were injured in the attack before the protesters were able to expel them from the campus.

Rifai, another former student protester, still remembers the brutal attack by the police and military.

'€œI pretended to be dead at one point so that they wouldn'€™t beat me again,'€ Rifai said.

After the attack, dozens of students were reported missing.

'€œI did not know where they were,'€ Rifai said.

But that was not all, according to Iwan. The security forces continued to lay siege to the campus and allegedly sexually assaulted dozens of female students who were planning to go home.

This, said Iwan, enraged the protesters. After the police and military personnel left the campus at about 8 p.m., they marched to nearby shop-houses on Jl. Pancing and Jl. Aksara and spontaneously damaged and looted the properties belonging to Chinese-Indonesians.

The rioting was later continued by other people. They blended in with the students, looting shops belonging to Indonesians of Chinese descent. Outside Medan, riots occurred in Deli Serdang regency and in the municipalities of Tebing Tinggi and Pematang Siantar.

The rioting lasted four days in North Sumatra.

Kennon Rambe, 34, one of the looters during the 1998 riots in Medan, said the riots happened spontaneously and on a massive scale. He said many people looted shops because the police and soldiers were not stopping them.

'€œThey did not do anything to me although they saw me carrying rice that I had looted,'€ said Rambe, who looted a store on Jl. Mandala Bypass, adding that he regretted what he had done.

Spokesperson for the Regional Military Command (Kodam) I in Bukit Barisan, Col. Samuel, refused to comment on the riots, explaining that he was out of the city. '€œI am sorry, I am in a meeting in Balige,'€Samuel told the Post over the phone.