D

espite Thursday being Waisak (Buddha’s Day of Enlightenment). a public holiday when shopping malls are usually crowded, Klender Mall in East Jakarta was deserted, with only few people visiting the mall.

Tety, a 49-year-old beverage vendor in the area, said on Thursday was like any other day at the mall, which had failed to lure back shoppers after 1998, when Jakarta was rocked by bloody riots and the mall was looted and set on fire.

“There was a time when this mall was packed with people, before and after the [1998] riots,” said Tety, who has been selling cold drinks in front of the mall for more than 19 years.

Before the riots, Klender Mall was called Yogya Plaza, which had not only shops but also a fitness center and a nightclub.

The mall was busy from afternoon to early morning, Tety said.

However, the shopping center was set on fire during the May 1998 riots and hundreds of people perished inside.

“Before the fire broke out at 1 p.m., I saw thousands of people swarm the mall like bees and loot everything inside,” said Tety.

She said she did not take part in the looting because she knew most of the employees at the shopping center.

“At 5 p.m., dark smoke started to billow from the basement. At the same time, all the doors in the mall appeared to be locked as people could not get out. And then the electricity went off,” said Tety.

Because of that, local residents could not help anyone inside, she added.

Like Tety, 51-year-old siomay (dumpling) seller Koko said it had been impossible to help those inside the mall that evening because of a lack of equipment and manpower.

“Apart from the power outage, there were no officials, like police officers or firemen, when the incident took place. Police officers came the following morning,” Koko said, adding that when the rioting broke out, he was busy saving people of Chinese descent from the looters.

Koko said the next morning he entered the mall to help emergency services personnel. However, he only managed to help in the removal of five bodies as he became overwhelmed by the sight of so many dead bodies and the smell of burned flesh.

He said he was still haunted by scene at the mall.

After the fire, the mall management renovated the shopping center, eliminated the small garden at the front and added fences.

Reopened in 2000, the mall was popular for about five years, Koko said.

Many production houses used the mall as a setting for horror movies after people started spreading stories of ghosts of the victims haunting the mall.

“There were many horror stories following the fire, such as about the voices of dead people. But we were here every day and there were no such things,” said Tety with a laugh.

The mall’s heyday, however, ended in 2005 when the mall had to compete with more sophisticated shopping centers in the capital, both Tety and Koko said.

Now, Klender Mall is a ghost of its former self, with mostly empty kiosks.

In the past, families of the victims would gather at Klender Mall to commemorate the incident by putting flowers in the yard every May.

However, commemorations are now held at Pondok Ranggon Cemetery in East Jakarta, where the unidentified victims of the May tragedy in Yogya Plaza were buried, said Neng Dara Afiffah, a former commissioner of the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), who has been assisting the May tragedy survivors.

“In 2015, the Jakarta administration built a monument at the cemetery to mark the tragedy,” said Neng. “It means a lot to the survivors because at least it [the monument] acknowledges the unresolved incident.”