JP/NURHAYATI

More than a decade after accomplishing one of the most monumental tasks in the country’s modern history, the student movement has entered its twilight.

The student movement has also ironically been rendered obsolete by the strengthening of the country’s young democracy.

Close to 14 years after helping unseat the authoritarian regime of former president Soeharto, the student movement is beginning to show signs of irrelevance, as indicated by its visible absence from national politics and recently, by a new penchant for violence.

Late last week, dozens of students of the once influential Islamic Student Association (HMI) in Makassar were involved in brawls, first against residents who were irked by their constant protesting and later with police officers looking to pacify them.

The next day, a similar clash took place in Cikini, Central Jakarta, when dozens of HMI members fought with police officers during a solidarity rally for the Makassar incident.

The Cikini brawl unwittingly served as the final nail in the coffin of the student movement, which in the past decade has degenerated from a force feared by the political establishment to a marginal player in national politics, all within the short span of a decade.

Australian National University associate professor of Indonesian studies Ariel Heryanto, who has written extensively on the country’s student movement, says the current student movement is in a state of confusion as to what it is protesting aganist.

“The only thing that unifies student movement of today is the general disorientation. They have lost their roles as heroes. They only fight against the shadows of their enemies, but they are not sure who the enemies are. The enemies are no longer the same,” Ariel wrote in an email to The Jakarta Post.

On a more structural level, Ariel said the student movement was becoming obsolete because its role was usurped by political parties, the media, NGOs and mass organizations that thrive in the country’s new democracy.

He added that the only reason the student movement mattered toward the end of the New Order was because of the disarray of other social forces like political parties, labor unions, the press, the judiciary and the legislature.

But the role of the student movement during this period has been somewhat exaggerated, Ariel said.

“During this period student movements gave a little bit of everything to the masses. With the parliament powerless, students taught the people about political debate, a role traditionally reserved for the parliament. When the press was silenced, students supplanted the press by disseminating information through pamphlets, stickers, bulletins and poetry. This is the equivalent of bringing a flashlight to a town suffering from a blackout.”

A small role, yet highly romanticized and lionized in the canon of the Indonesian history, thanks in part to a myth created both by the official history of the New Order and dissenting voices.

In an article for Inside Indonesia journal published in 1996, Ariel wrote that the contribution made by students and intellectuals to the birth of the Indonesian nation and its subsequent struggle for recognition was revered across the political spectrum, by groups who would otherwise be in opposition.

“It is a central feature of both New Order propaganda and the Buru novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer banned by the regime. In Toer’s Buru tetralogy, official history is overturned, but the central figure remains the native product of a modern schooling system,” he writes in the piece titled “Student Movement”.

Student movements today insist on being the flashlight when in fact a new day has dawned and the sun has shone its blinding light, Ariel says, highlighting the student movement predicament.

“My criticism may be harsh but that’s the reality. Even student activists who were kidnapped [for their political activism] are now hobnobbing with their former abductors and tormentors. They are now part of the campaign teams of their former abductors. What can we expect of them?” he says.
Ariel was referring to a number of former student activists who joined political parties and government agencies, doing works unimaginable during their days of activism.

A former student activist shares Ariel’s opinion, saying that students of today were at an ideological dead end, a condition that condemns student to engage only in superficial street protests.

“They shy away from discussions and what they want to do is just burn stuff at rallies. This is why most of them become hired guns at political rallies,” former 1998 student activist Bayu Baiquni says. Bayu was one of student activists who came up with the idea of staging a summit of the country’s reform leaders, Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, Megawati Soekarnoputri, Amien Rais and Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, in November 1998.

Bayu is one of a small number of 1998 activists who refused to join government agencies or political parties and opted to take a teaching job at a private college in South Jakarta. This position enables him to have close contact with activists in the college, close enough to know the student zeitgeist.

After more than a decade of knowing that the only way to stick it to the establishment is through street protests, it is difficult to convince students to do otherwise.

“It is difficult to change their mentality. They know nothing but street protests,” Bayu said.

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