Chapter 1 provides a first look through previously unseen archival material to establish a paper trail for the student movement’s “missing years” (1980s– 1990s), locating material evidence of fragmented but vibrant student activ- ism amid the inertia of the New Order’s depoliticized campuses. The under- ground resistance movement depended on what I call the techne of paper to generate reams of counter- regime propaganda, internal communications, and legal documents in response to state charges of subversion. I unveil the epis- temic tensions that animate the hopeful and moral gestures of student activism captured and circulated in paper form a full decade before Suharto fell from power. I theorize the relation between archives, documentation, and histo- ricity to draw attention to the contradictory attributes of marginal student
Pemuda fever | 21
archives—from their fetish quality as invaluable souvenirs of the democracy movement to their tendency to reproduce, disappear, and reappear in new and unregulated contexts far from their point of origin.
Chapter 2 describes how student activists came to be at home on the street, asserting their transformational claim to the city through spectacular displays of political participation. The student- led mass demonstrations that overthrew Suharto in 1998 were emblematic of the intense spatial politics that formed the backbone of popular democracy in post- Suharto Indonesia. The street was a zone of strategic experimentation, student expertise, and efficacious nationalism that brought together middle- class university activists with rural and urban poor in an unevenly sutured political body, the rakyat (People). Throughout the chapter, I showcase the work of disappeared activist poet Wiji Thukul, whose poems about the dispossessed rakyat in the city operate as spo- ken anthems of resistance at demonstrations, reminding activists of the inter- play between the spatial embeddedness of social injustice and the immanent revolution found in everyday urban life.
Chapter 3 argues that political movements are profoundly aesthetic frame- works that introduce new ways of looking, seeing, and being—turning style into the conduit and currency for political identity. I examine the singular im- portance of style to student movement politics as the terrain through which youth identities and affiliations were secured, and by which forbidden left- ist references entered the mainstream. Student activist visual culture invested the activist body with a signature pemuda style that was iconic, historical- nationalist, and global in its orientation, and it did so through widely available objects of public culture such as film, photography, and clothing. I demon- strate how the production and consumption of political fashions in the ac- tivist movement became a popular access point to experiencing and desiring political youth identity. I conclude with a study of Reform’s cinephilic infatua- tion with the 1960s activist Soe Hok Gie as an example of how pemuda style’s saturated images of youth merged the political goals of the present with the pure nationalist intentions of the past.
Can heroes be moral and violent? Chapter 4 examines the ways that en- during perceptions of students as socially privileged and moral subjects have muted public and scholarly debates on student violence. I analyze activist narratives of state violence, trauma, and counterviolence over ten years of Reform politics to trace the intimacy of violence in activist narratives and political trajectories. As student movements evolved toward greater militancy and spectacular violence after the fall of Suharto, violent methods and experi-
22 | IntroduCtIon
ences entered their agenda with increased frequency. I offer up controversial activist memories of retaliation against suspected state agents and symbols of the state as evidence of defensive and provocative student practices that have sparked state interventions. By asserting student experiences of state violence and counterviolence as linked discourses, I explicitly counter the silence ob- scuring student violence by drawing attention to the connections and tensions between civil society’s framing of collective solidarity and the state’s call for discipline and order.
Can revolutionaries ever settle down? Chapter 5 leads us “home” through the rarely seen domestic arrangements that provided spaces of rest, return, and belonging for student activists. It unlocks the spatial poetics and terri- torial logics of the basekemp (organizational headquarters), posko (command posts), and kost (rented rooms) as activist structures that housed extensive experimentation against New Order ideologies of family, home, and authority. I analyze how these shared spaces of work and play provided youth with the freedom to interact, mobilize, and socialize outside gendered social norms and hierarchies. However, the egalitarian dream of youthful community was also vulnerable to the movement’s practical and logistical challenges. This chapter undoes the distinction between public and private spaces to show the reach of activism’s territorializing potential—a project that makes political life as fully present in the makeshift homes of activists as in the demonstrations on the streets.
Chapter 6 shows Generation 98 in the grip of election fever during the 2004 elections, as activists sought to renew their representation of the People on the streets and from within the system. However, New Order rituals of “de- mocracy festivals” (pesta demokrasi) and the monied politics of military and elite domination destabilized Generation 98’s progressive vision of civic and public life. I argue that the transition to institutionalized democracy, the cod- ification of Reformasi narratives, and the temporal distance from 1998 made activist futures more insecure than ever. By focusing on discourses of corrup- tion, individuation, and social difference that emerged during the elections, I convey pemuda identity’s uneven integration into post- Suharto Indonesia.
The book ends on a grace note of hope. At present, Indonesians are placing their hopes in Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, who won a very tight race in the July 2014 presidential elections. Generation 98 volunteered eagerly for his campaign against the former general Prabowo Subianto, a powerful elite figure thought to have been responsible for the kidnapping and disap- pearance of activists but never convicted. As one activist from Generation 98
Pemuda fever | 23
described him, Jokowi is a previously unthinkable and entirely new breed of politician in post- Suharto Indonesia—one without tradition, ties, or capital, without ormas (mass organizations), religious networks, international affil- iations or degrees, even without activism! The comment places activism as yet another Indonesian institution that Jokowi has surpassed, signaling the welcome end to Generation 98’s long era of struggle in the pemuda spotlight.
INTRODUCTION
1. On May 12, 1998, demonstrators were shot at with live ammunition by the secu- rity forces. The death of six students sparked popular outrage, which was further compounded by the spontaneous and organized looting and raping that claimed hundreds more lives in the May 13– 14 riots in Jakarta.
2. Arbi Sanit is a well- known senior political scientist and professor at the University of Indonesia. Rudi has spelled his name “Arby Sanit” in his diary.
3. D. Rudi Haryanto, unpublished diary, 1997– 1998, personal collection of Do- reen Lee.
4. Thus I use these terms with some interchangeability in this book, while issuing a reminder here that “youth” or pemuda presents a sociological and historically situated category of analysis, whereas “activist” ushers us into a political lexicon of seemingly global significance.
5. See Ian Wilson’s essay (2014) on the vigilante actions of organizations that foment violence, such as the extremist Islamic Defenders Front.
6. Dedicated collections at North American and Dutch institutions that have tra- ditionally hosted centers for Southeast Asian or Indonesian studies provide a wealth of Indonesian- language resources outside Indonesia. In the politically repressive New Order years, librarians and researchers paid special attention to media sources and political ephemera that would otherwise have been lost. I have consulted Cornell University’s collections at the Kroch Library, the iisg’s unique collections on 1980s– 1990s Indonesian activism in the Netherlands, and my own acquired collections in the writing of this book.
220 | notes to IntroduCtIon
7. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s epistemological analysis of her own securitate (secret police) file builds on Ann Stoler’s work on the Dutch colonial archives to situate the archive as the site of categorical alignments that capture the anxieties and articulations of power.
8. See Strassler (2010), chap. 5, “Witnessing History.”
9. Numbers from the 2010 census give us approximately 82 million between the ages of fifteen and thirty- four, out of a total of 237 million. See the United Nations Sta- tistic Division’s Demographic Statistics for Indonesia, at data .un .org, accessed Sep- tember 1, 2015.
10. The 1978 Campus Normalization Act dissolved student councils, broke student autonomy, and enabled a military presence on campus.
11. See Ryter (1998), Siegel (1998b), and Wilson (2011) for a detailed discussion on how the state cultivated the criminality of underclass youth to turn them into the “left hand of the state,” such that the term pemuda came to mean preman, “under- class gangster,” during the New Order.
12. See Barker and van Klinken (2009) and Aspinall and Fealy (2010) for examples of recent scholarship in Indonesian studies that interrogates the primacy of state- centric analysis and reassesses the role of New Order political institutions. 13. See Miftahuddin’s biography of Faisol Reza (2004), 101– 107.
14. Growing interest in political Islam in Indonesia as an object of study in US, Aus- tralian, and European academies has created in Indonesian studies a huge subfield of Islamic and political Islam studies. These changes follow the opening up of religious politics in the post- Suharto years and touch on global preoccupations with the War on Terror and the presumably vexed relationship between Islam and democracy. In my experience, it is most often international scholars rather than Indonesians who ask me questions about the role of Islam in my work and who remain dissatisfied with my answer that for the most part, entrenched secular- nationalist ideas and class- based discourses linking labor, agrarian, and urban sectors supersede the claims made by the religious right in an admittedly complex and religiously inflected post- Reformasi world.
15. The national organization Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam is an exception. It split into two factions with the birth of the splinter group Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam- Majelis Penyelamat Organisasi (hmi- mpo) in the 1980s over the issue of accepting Pancasila as the sole ideological doctrine, a decision that resulted from state intru- sion in the organization.
16. The People’s Democratic Party, its predecessor, Democratic Indonesian Students Solidarity, and Pijar predate 1998, while the City Forum, City Front, Students Action Front for Reform and Democracy (Forum Aksi Mahasiswa Untuk Refor- masi), Indonesian Youth Struggle Front (Front Perjuangan Pemuda Indonesia), National Democratic Students League, and National Students Front later emerged as actors in the post- 1998 Jakarta- based student movement.
17. See the opinion column in the student publication politika, titled “Ekspresi: Pemuda dan Kegairahan Politik” (1987).
notes to ChaPter 1 | 221
18. Abbreviations and slang were important markers of “cool” but also were strategic choices for activists, who were always chronically short of pulsa, prepaid phone credit on their cell phones. See Hefner- Smith (2007).
19. Rumors about me took on a local cast. For example, in one rumor I was a rela- tive of Kwik Kian Gie, a rare ethnic Chinese politician in the Indonesian Demo- cratic Party of Struggle and economist who had been an outspoken member of Megawati’s cabinet. In another rumor, someone had heard somewhere that I had ties to Baperki, the defunct political association founded by ethnic Chinese in the 1950s.
CHAPTER 1: ARCHIVE
1. “Bandel” means “naughty” or “rebellious.” One can also translate the name as “King of Mischief” or “Bandit King.” The name appears in a four- page demon- stration planning meeting report, undated (c. July 1989), Indonesian Student Protest Movement Collection, iisg. Better known by his nickname, Beathor, Bam- bang Suryadi continued to be an activist in increasingly formal political organi- zations, participating in progressive networks such as the election- monitoring body komite independen pemantau pemilu in the 1997 election and, after Reformasi, in Relawan Perjuangan Demokrasi (Volunteers for the Democratic Struggle), the political organization started by former student activists that be- came enfolded into the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. He has since climbed high in the ranks of that party’s leadership. In March 2014 the party offi- cially elected him speaker of the house in Indonesia’s parliament; his predecessor in this office, Taufik Kiemas, Megawati Soekarnoputri’s husband, had died of a heart attack in June 2013.
2. Bergema literally means “resound” or “reverberate” but is also a play on the com- monly known term Gema, short for gerakan mahasiswa (student movement). Thus the leaflet title implies that the university campus is defiantly breaking out in waves of student movements.
3. The reference to Pancasila, or the Five Principles, is a coded way to refer to Suhar- to’s crackdown on Islamic groups in the 1980s. Suharto forced all religious groups to declare allegiance to the “one true principle” of Pancasila, thereby asserting the power of the secular state over Muslim communities with strong religious affiliations whose religious identities provided forms of autonomous, potentially political expression. Affected groups included the student group Himpunan Ma- hasiswa Islam, which experienced an internal split as a result of the decree, and other Islamic mass organizations. “Tanjung Priok Tragedy” refers to the mass vio- lence that took place at the port of Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, in September 1984 between soldiers and a Muslim congregation. The civilian death toll remains unclear, ranging from dozens to hundreds reported dead.
4. From documents related to Bambang Beathor Suryadi’s subversion trial, Stanley’s archive, Indonesian Student Protest Movement Collection, iisg, 4 pp., 1– 2. My translation.