What happened next was a shock. Instead of leading the attack, this once unknown group stood stock still in silent solidarity with students protesting military control over Indonesian life. With the Army in ignominious retreat from East Timor, Parliament last week passed a bill that students read as an attempt to widen the military’s authority to declare martial law and, as one student pamphlet put it, “take over the country any time they want.” More than 15,000 people hit the streets in the largest demonstrations since the fall of President Suharto last year. Six people died and more than 110 people were injured in the violence, before the white-clad warriors appeared. Visibly anxious, Army commander General Wiranto went on national television to withdraw the so-called Prevention of Danger Act. “Students and the public are now being joined by private forces,” said Wiranto. “This could lead to anarchy.”
The protests were inflamed by public disgust at how the military and the current president, B. J. Habibie, have handled the bloodshed in East Timor. Echoing demands in the United Nations for a genocide inquiry, demonstrators carried a coffin draped with a banner reading WIRANTO, HABIBIE: CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. “The Army’s looking for a way to avoid being held accountable for all this abuse,” says a Western diplomat. “They know that change is coming, and they need a new political role.”
But what role? Before the fall of Suharto as president, the military was guaranteed posts throughout government and broad powers to suppress dissent. Wiranto insisted that the Prevention of Danger law was intended to “democratize” the harsh 1959 internal-security act and had been widely misread, but the students didn’t believe it. “We don’t care if we get killed,” said Faihaus, 27, a student at Atma Jaya University, which was at the center of the protests last week. “We’re going to keep going till we get democracy and the Army gets out of politics.”
Change is coming fast. A newly elected Assembly opens Oct. 1 to pick a president. It had appeared that Wiranto could emerge as vice president behind Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose party won a 34 percent plurality in elections last June. After the violence last week, that deal looks dead, and now it has the mysterious Islamic Defense Force watching over its shoulder as well. No one is sure just what this force is. But this much is clear: it is far more disciplined than the paramilitary gangs who helped sustain Suharto, and it doesn’t appear to be on the side of the Habibie regime.
