Global Crime
Vol. 6, No. 3&4, August–November 2004, pp. 325–344
“Behave Like Enraged Lions”:
Civil Militias, the Army and the
Criminalisation of Politics in Indonesia
Romain Bertrand [1]
Since the end of the authoritarian New Order regime in May 1998, Indonesia has
embarked upon a difficult journey towards democracy. One of the key questions raised by
the rise of social and political violence in both Java and the Outer Islands since President
Suharto’s resignation from power is that of the wearing away of the state’s monopoly of the
means of violence and of its legitimate uses. But the process of the criminalisation of both
state agencies and political parties is much older than one would have it. It begun during
the late colonial period and gained momentum during the war of independence, in the
late 1940s, when army units had to engage in extortion and smuggling to cater for soldiers’
needs. Under the New Order, this beam of relationships between the police, the army and
criminal gangs was given an official recognition of some sort, hence quasi-legal protection,
through the creation of the “System for the Protection of the Environment” (Siskamling).
This “system” enabled many petty criminals from the red light districts to join civil and
para-military militias and even, at times, to enter public administration. Post-Suharto
Indonesia inherited these criminalised “grey areas” between state agencies and the
underworld, where one would find numerous masters of violence – people for whom
violence is both a way of life and a way of making a living.
Keywords: Indonesia; New Order; Criminalisation of politics; Militia; Criminal gangs
Introduction: A Historical Ethnography of Political Violence
Post-Suharto Indonesia has come to be portrayed, both in the international press and
in the reports of multilateral and conflict-prevention agencies [2], as the archetypal
Romain Bertrand is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National
Foundation for Political Science, Paris.
ISSN 1744-0572 (print)/ISSN 1744-0580 (online) q 2004 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17440570500274174
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‘failed state’, in which loss of political legitimacy and governmental effectiveness has
opened the door to all kinds of social and political violence. The evidence is indeed
damning. Since late 1998, there have been hundreds of lynchings in Java and tens of
so-called ‘inter-community’ riots, particularly in the Molucca Islands and Southern
Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo) [3].
Two kinds of theories have been systematically advanced to explain this outburst of
violence. The simplistic culturalist explanation relates societal violence to a psychopathological element of the “collective conscience”: a mad violent compulsion lurking
in the heart of a perennial cultural unrest, which nineteenth century Dutch novelists
called amok. Press correspondents used this amok notion to try to make sense of the
anti-Communist massacres of 1965– 6, in which hundreds of thousands were killed in
Java and Bali in the space of a few months. For some time now, historians have been
demonstrating the scientific futility and political danger of this method of
interpretation, which entirely ignores the socioeconomic aspect of the massacres
[4]. However, this does not stop its being brought up with alarming regularity by
commentators who do not hesitate to liken modern day Indonesia to the Europe of the
Dark Ages [5].
By contrast, the functionalist explanation focuses on the inherent link between the
weakening of the state and the intensification of conflictual patterns in social
relationships: a weak state would automatically call forth a violent society. Although the
functionalist theory does have a certain heuristic value in explaining the resumption in
activity of the separatist movements at the crisis point in the changeover of the regime, it
does not take into account the inevitable circumstantial nature of the path to violence –
as the uneven spacing, both geographically and temporally, of the sequences of conflict
since the end of the New Order regime shows [6].
In order to find out the aetiology of a violent situation, it is necessary to build a new
interpretational scheme every time. Even then, the result is more often descriptive than
explanatory. From a perspective which could best be seen as building upon an
historical ethnography of political violence [7], I intend to focus on one only of the
sociological determinants of violent situations in Indonesia: the existence, on the
fringes of the state, of an important group of professionals, or masters, of violence.
These are people for whom the use of physical violence constitutes a ‘career’—an
activity for which one is guaranteed remuneration and which implies the acquisition
of specific know-hows and bodily skills.
To do so, it is first necessary to bear in mind that since Independence (1945), the
process of state-formation in Indonesia has led to the emergence of a system of
“indirect government”, which in turn has facilitated transactions between the politicoadministrative bodies and the world of crime, both serious and petty.
The Criminalisation of Dissidence Under the New Order
The issue of troubled relations between the politico-administrative bodies and the
criminal world has frequently been explored in works on the social and political
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history of modern-day Indonesia. However, this historiography was for a long time a
delinquent one, in the sense that its interpretation of how state power functioned was
not tolerated by universities or the national media. President Suharto’s New Order
(1966– 98) was an authoritarian regime, which provided the basis for a “totalitarian
ambition” of complete control over social and intellectual life [8]. Its principal
argument for legitimacy was based on a fundamental lie: the regime presented itself as
the outcome and embodiment of “the true revolution” and asserted that it snatched
the country from the jaws of the threat of a violent power take-over by the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) in 1965. Endorsed and orchestrated by the conservative
faction of the army run by Suharto, the massacre between 1965– 6 of nearly a million
militants and sympathisers believed to be linked to the PKI, did not only radically
change the political balance of Indonesian society, but also led to an enormous
propaganda effort which denied the country any possibility of critical reflection on its
own history for more than three decades. Early relations between the army and the
underworld of the Javanese republican resistance movement (1945– 9) were of course
kept out of the picture, as was the criminal nature of certain military units during the
1950s [9].
The regime claimed the monopoly on the production of memory and history for
itself through successive hegemonic advances signalled by the reorganisation of
museums and memorable sites, the rewriting of school textbooks and the diffusion
of cheap literature depicting Sukarno’s “Old Order” (1949– 67) as a murky period of
history and the PKI as a bunch of criminals. In this way, the Gerwani, the women
of one of the satellite movements of the PKI, were portrayed as harpies who took part
in horrible sexual orgies during which they would sever and then consume the genital
organs of their live victims as part of a reactivation of the kalique imaginary which
inspired the practice of black magic [10]. A regime of incredibly severe censure was put
into place, and those intellectuals linked to the PKI were its first victims. Thus, the
writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was imprisoned from October 1965 to December 1979
on the implicit grounds of his close links with ‘Marxist-Leninist theories’ [11]. Not
only could one not contest the official historiography with impunity, but any attempt
to describe or document the early relations between the army and the criminal world
was equivalent to a one-way ticket to Cipinang Prison or the camps of Buru Island.
The regime was the one and only voice of social legality and normality.
The Imaginary Social and Political World of Criminal Activity
The Paradoxical Figures of the Jago and the Kriminal
In A New Criminal Type in Jakarta, James Siegel maintains that the New Order did
more than set itself up as a state against a crime defined as political deviance: it
believed that it was itself of a criminal nature, that it was indeed a preman-state
belonging to the same order of mystical powers as the great criminals to whom
popular legend often ascribed knowledge of the occult [12]. The term preman, which
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these days refers to petty criminals who “work” markets and bus stations, has a
complex genealogy. Up until the 1930s, it would have referred to “free men” (from the
Dutch vrij man), and then from the 1950s to the 1970s to the external indicators of
police authority (in particular the uniform) [13]. In recent years, the term has also
come to express the idea of “resourcefulness”, of the cunning evasion of the law: a
meaning peculiar to the colourful language of the poorer suburbs and slums of big
towns [14].
James Siegel’s statement that the state modelled its authority on the lethal power of
the preman would be no more than rhetoric, were it not supported by strong linguistic
evidence. Actually, during the 1980s and 1990s a new category of criminal activity
known as kriminalitas was emerging in the national press. In various articles and
special reports, the notion of kriminalitas appeared to be distinct from the notion of
kejahatan (criminality as transgression of the law) in that it implied the crossing of a
point of no return in the violence inflicted upon the victim (rape, torture, murder).
Kriminalitas is the absolute negation of morality, taking everyone by surprise in an
outpouring of brusque hatred which cannot be explained. Unpredictable and
uncontrollable, kriminalitas becomes inexplicable. The kriminal, unlike the jago, the
‘local fighting cock’, is not motivated solely by the lure of gain. He does not stop at the
acquisition of other people’s riches: he is not a simple robber such as one finds in all
kampung (traditional districts and villages). Therefore, one can have no hold over him:
he is a last resort power (of death).
In this sense, the kriminal is the complete antithesis of the jago. Indeed, Henk
Schulte-Nordholt and Margreet van Till make clear that the jago, the ‘fighting cock’ of
the village (that is, the small rural crook always “swaggering around”) was an essential
part of the local systems of power during the colonial era. Each village or desa had its
own jago, sometimes several, whom everyone knew by name or surname. Village
leaders often used them as civil militia, entrusting them with keeping a night watch
over the paddy fields and orchards. The Dutch police even paid them in their capacity
as “informers” (weri): “The jago was an integral part of the colonial power structure”
[15]. By tacit agreement, the jago would never operate within the community to which
he belonged, but protected it (as far as he was able) from his own kind. A Javanese
proverb puts it like this: “don’t defecate in your own bedroom” (aja ngising ing
khamaré dhewé) [16]. The jago, unlike the kriminal of the New Order, who is often
thought of as an ethnic stranger or an unknown vagrant, remains a full member of the
village or local area: he is “known by everyone” and never seeks to hide his misdoings
in order to flatter his own vanity. By popular sayings, the jago is even a “naughty little
boy” who can provide valuable services to the community by offering ordinary citizens
his mastery of the techniques of violence (and particularly of the martial arts of the
pencak silat) [17].
In contrast, the kriminal is a figure peculiar to urban imaginations tormented by the
issue of anonymity. As such, he escapes all systems of social recognition. He has no
“origins”, cannot give anyone a clear definition of his asal-usul (his genealogy and
geographical provenance). As James Siegel convincingly shows, most contemporary
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popular stories about famous kriminal insist upon their “uncertain origins”: they are
depicted either as “bastards” who seek to redeem their low birth by becoming the
middle-classes’ worse nightmare, or as bearers of mystical powers acquired during
long trips to distant and frightening places. The sorcerer to whom the kriminal is
compared indeed always learn his dreadful art far away from his birthplace: modernday dukun santet always put the emphasis on initiation journeys that led them to
Nigeria or Haı̈ti or even Europe [18].
The difference between the figure of the jago, the rascal of old who respected a “code
of honour”, and the kriminal, the “morality-free criminal” of today, can be seen
particularly clearly in the sayings of a Javanese lawyer, brought together in 1996 by
John Pemberton:
“Of course, I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the olden days, but one often hears
that back then there used to be thieves, robbers, pickpockets in the markets . . . that
kind of thing. And for the most part, they were simply trying to earn their living, to
satisfy their basic needs. Sure, some of them liked luxuries, but for the most part
they concerned themselves with what was genuinely necessary. That’s what I’ve been
told. But today’s criminals certainly are not concerned with earning their living. Not
at all: what they want is to throw money out the window, make a big impression, get
drunk, and gamble. [The criminals of the old days] were what I would call “pure
criminals” (kriminal murni) like the maling [a Javanese word which means ‘robber’]
But the others, well there the lines get blurred. Perhaps we should find them a better
name. Like debt collectors, maybe. [. . .] There is a proverb which robbers used to use
in the old days. “Don’t defecate in your own bedroom”. But now, there is a tendency
to operate near to where one lives, in one’s own territory. And they’re not at all
embarrassed about doing it” [19].
Mythologies of Criminal Activity
The modern day fictional view of kriminalitas, by way of contrast, creates the myth of
the good bandit, the “honourable bandit” who puts himself at the service of the village
when it is attacked and who only robs the haughty rich. Traces of this mythology of
criminal activity can even be found during the first decades of the 19th century. In the
1830s, following the terrible Java War (1825–30) which had signalled the end of
autonomous rule for the island nobilities, a group of highwaymen in the Banten
region made themselves a reputation as champions of the fight against colonialism.
Their misdeeds (robbery, money extortion) were portrayed in anonymous lampoons
as acts of resistance against the Dutch authorities and their plans to transform the
island into a plantation colony. They were ascribed supernatural powers, such as the
power to make themselves magically invulnerable or to vanish at will [20].
The architects of a culturalist reading of political violence in Indonesia remember in
the same way that the main subject of palace-based gossip in the pre-colonial era was
the cruelty common to the exercise of royal authority. If the Javanese sovereign had to
prove the legitimacy of his claims to power by the enduring practice of asceticism and
meditation, he also had to be pitiless when the time came to punish traitors and get rid
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of enemies. It is known that Javanese military techniques, particularly during the
reigns of the first kings of Mataram, were not hampered by humanitarianism: the
conquest of the city-state of Surabaya by Sultan Agung in 1625 was achieved by
poisoning the river of the besieged with the decomposing corpses of animals, and
numerous executions took place after the surrender [21]. High court officials found
guilty of accepting bribes or of having indulged in illicit sexual intercourse with young
pageboys were summarily put to death by palace executioners or had to prove their
innocence by fighting tigers almost barehanded. However, in historical works on
modern day Indonesia, it is most often the Dutch colonial period, and particularly the
sequence of the “conquest state” (1816–1912) which is presented as the matrix for the
practice of contemporary violence [22].
To expand on this and also justify the close links between the state and the criminal
world, culturalist literature also makes reference to the figure of the bandit-king. The
legend of Ken Angrok (Ken Arok), which inspired numerous Indonesian poets and
novelists [23], is the archetypal story of the robber-turned-king which insists on the
inherent use of violence in gaining access to and exercising power. In the Pararaton, a
dynastic chronicle written at the end of the 15th century, Ken Angrok is portrayed as
an ordinary peasant boy who, when he reaches adolescence, becomes a highwayman
and leads a life of depravity. He enters the service of the governor of the Tumapel
province, Tungul Ametung, whom he assassinates, and whose widow, Ken Dedes, the
“woman with fire in her belly” [24] he subsequently marries. Under his reign at the
head of the Singasari kingdom (1222– 27) [25], the island of Java, which had been
divided since the death of King Airlangga into two rival dynasties (Kediri in the East
and Janggala in the West), was at last reunified. Ken Angrok was assassinated by the
legitimate son of Tungul Ametung and Ken Dedes in 1227 [26]. The mobilisation of
this idea of coming into power through crime was at the heart of the strategies for the
justification of the violent exercise of authority. Suharto himself liked to be compared
to ancient Javanese kings and hired a number of powerful dukun (mystical advisers)
to protect him against black magics and assert his privileged links with the spirit
world.
Security in the Kampung: The Role of Civil Militia in Systems of Surveillance
and the Maintenance of Law and Order
The Security Paranoia of the New Order
The culturalist argument, which attempts to relate the present-day practice of violence
either to a distant past or to an ahistorical canvas of expectations and ideas, seriously
underestimates the periods of deep rupture in the organisation of systems of power.
During the last third of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, Insulinde’s
“colonial modernisation” crossed a qualitative border into police repression [27]. In
the same way, the New Order regime, by allowing the entry into power of a military
elite which planned to run the country somehow in the same way as they would a
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barracks, brought into being a new kind of state violence: a “bureaucratised” violence,
exercised at all levels of the administrative body and therefore on a scale and in a way
previously unknown to Java.
Under the New Order, the executive power defined the criminal domain in political
terms. Ex-Communists (eks-PKI, eks-TAPOL: tahanan politik, “political prisoners”)
took their place on the never-ending list of figures of “social instability”, alongside the
village crooks and the local gangsters. From 1967, the state organised campaigns to
“clean up the environment” that became, in the villages, hunts to rout out those with
neither hearth nor home [28]. Tens of thousands of vagabonds, criminals and
communist militants were thrown into prisons and asylums. As well as the anticommunist decrees of 1966 [29], the Anti-Subversion Law of 1968 authorised the
preventive imprisonment of all individuals suspected of wanting to “undermine the
integrity of the state”. The new criminal procedure code (KUHAP) of 1981 certainly
nominally preserved the right to defend oneself. However, thanks to the invocation of
the idea of “subversive actions”, the administration of justice was kept outside the
control of civil authorities.
The Command for the Restoration of Law, Order and Security (KOPKAMTIB)
instituted by Suharto in 1968 to co-ordinate the interventions of the army’ special
units, was abolished in 1988. However, it was immediately replaced by an equivalent
instrument: the BAKORSTANAS [30] or Agency for the Co-ordination of [the
Maintenance of] National Stability. As Daniel Lev underlines:
“The KOPKAMTIB was granted immense discretionary authority, which was not
even governed by the rules of public procedure, to deal with all matters affecting
security. In terms of the public policies of the New Order, this meant both political
security (rigidly defined) and economic policy security (control of the workforce)
to a considerable extent. This conception, peculiar to crime, included all kinds
of opposition and demonstrations, all fierce criticism (by people or private
companies, by the press), any attempt to create syndicates and any clear expression
of open discontent which was judged potentially threatening by the leaders of the
regime” [31].
Thus the New Order lived in a permanent state of jurisdictional exemption, motivated
by the necessity to protect itself from a resurgence of the communist threat. This
resilience of the insurrectional communist threat was attributed to the “desire for
vengeance” of those individuals who had escaped the repressive operations of 1965–
66. Filled with a real paranoia about security, the regime entrusted its ideologists, such
as Ali Murtopo, with the task of creating a doctrine of “national stability” whose
corollary was the criminalisation of all political and trade-union dissidence. Since
crime was a part of society, it was necessary to create a network of a myriad of control
points in society. The army and the police were joined together in one instrument of
security, known as ABRI [32]. The army had a double function (dwifungsi) to carry
out: to defend the territory against “external threats” and to protect the nation against
“internal threats”. The latter of these two functions, which was termed the “sociopolitical” function, included a mission of political intelligence.
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At every level of the military structure, from Area Command (KORAMIL) to
Regional Command (KODAM) [33], liaison officers from the Army Intelligence
Service (BAIS) known as “intelligence assistants” would update “operation maps”.
On these maps, thousands of encrypted symbols conveyed the “situation in terms of
public order and security”. The smallest element of social life had its graphical
symbol. Events and facts such as public uprisings, factory strikes, numbers of eks-PKI
and recidivist criminals, numbers of churches and mosques, cases of theft, of pillage
or of arson: all were gathered at district level and all found their way onto the maps
of the intelligence assistants. No social activity was allowed to be beyond the state’s
reach. To apply for a job, one had to request a ‘Certificate of Good Behaviour’ from
the police station. From the village chief to the regional military HQ, from the
residential militia patrolling at nightfall to the anti-riot police squadrons, from the
“civil security auxiliaries” to the special units of the army, it seemed everyone was on
alert for the spectral menace of the resurgence of the extreme Left. The demand for
ubiquity responded to the supposed changes of the communist threat, which was
thought to survive to the present day through “formless organisations”, the OTB
(Organisasi Tanpa Bentuk: an expression used to describe all clandestine
organisations, whether student clubs or militant trade-unions). It was important
not to concede any part of the social territory, no matter how infinitesimal, to these
formless enemies.
The Satpam and the Hansip
The scheduled militarisation of social life was possible due to the putting in place of a
number of surveillance systems involving both public and private actors: that is, on the
one hand, members of the state security bodies, and on the other, civil militia. Some of
these systems had been implemented during Java’s period of Japanese occupation
between 1942 and 1945 [34]. Examples include the Neighborhood Units (Rukun
Tetangga or RT) and the Residential Units (Rukun Warga or RW), which are copies of
the tonari gumi characteristic of the Japanese municipal system. Others, such as the
“nightwatch rounds” (ronda malam) were already in existence during the Dutch
colonial period [35]. The New Order reactivated them by inserting them into a vast
system known as “the System for the Security of the Environment” (Sistem Keamanan
Lingkungan or Siskamling). This “system” was structured on a territorial level by the
army. The leader of a Neighbourhood Unit (the smallest administrative unit, generally
consisting of a street of households) had to organise the “night rounds”, which were
carried out by teams made up of the heads of the families.
Even today, these nocturnal patrols pace the streets of their area to make sure that
no suspect individuals are loitering near the houses. In a village, one of the most easily
recognisably nightly noises is the high-pitched sound produced at regular intervals by
these night guardians as they knock the electricity pylon or the iron grills of the houses
with a metal object as they pass to indicate that “all is well”. Any “strangers” (orang tak
dikenal: people who do not belong to the village community) are instantly ordered to
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show their identity card. If they do not do so immediately, and if they do not explain in
the proper forms the reasons of their venue, it may be assumed that they are robbers
and they may well be beaten up before being taken to the police station. We can assess
the scale of the violence that these residential patrols are capable of in times of great
political stress from a short press article relating to a tragic incident which took place
in October 1998 in an average sized town in eastern Java:
“On the morning of Monday 19 October, a group of residents of the Kebalen
quarter, situated either side of the Widow Street in Malang, butchered [36] a 27year-old young man named Supriono, who lived on Kresna Street, and who had
been accused of being a Ninja [an aggressor, a masked robber-killer]. The victim was
well known for having been simple minded since childhood. The residents killed
Supriono after they came across him sleeping in a prayer house in Kebalen and
found that he was unable to give exact responses to their interrogative questions. As
two policemen arrived from Kedungkandang to extricate Supriono from the
murderous madness of the crowd, Bambang, one of the members of his family, tried
to explain to the residents that his brother was just a little simple. But the crowd
followed the unlucky young man and pulled him away from his escort. The two
policemen were unable to avoid the shower of blows and suffered numerous injuries
themselves. After they had separated Supriono from his guards, the crowd beat him
up terribly, and then stabbed him to death. Soon after, they dragged the victim’s
body to the Kedungkandang Sectional Police station. A crowd instantly amassed in
front of the building, and did not disperse until the ambulance arrived to take the
corpse for autopsy at Malang Central Hospital” [37].
In every village or suburb district, on each of the access roads to the area, one would
find pos kamling [38] or “security posts” (acronyms of pos keamanan lingkunkan or
“environmental security posts”). From these small bamboo booths, just a few square
metres in size and often painted the colour of military fatigues, teams of “civil security
auxiliaries”, the hansip (an acronym of Pertahanan sipil or Civil Security) watch the
comings and goings, attentive to any “suspect movements”. In each security post, there
is a kentungan: a hollow tree trunk, split from top to bottom. This hangs from the
ceiling, and resounds like a gong when hit with a wooden mallet. In the event of a
“threat” (whether a natural catastrophe or the presence of robbers), the watchmen
make the kentungan ring out. Village life immediately comes to a halt, and the
residents head for the central square to find out the exact nature of the danger and
work out how to deal with it.
As Joshua Barker points out in his remarkable study of the “System for the Security
of the Environment” in the western Javanese city of Bandung, the night rounds and the
kentungan are security systems which, although susceptible to being used for the
purpose of repressive state action, also demonstrate a truly autonomous capacity to
mobilise on behalf of the residents of an area [39]. The hansip are even paid directly by
the area’s inhabitants: every month they have to go from door to door asking for their
salary, and this anchors them in the local community (for better or worse). However,
even if they are financially dependent upon the residents, the hansip maintain close
links with the police, who inspect them on a regular basis.
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Public places (administrative buildings, train and bus stations) and businesses are
also watched over by “security guards” called satpam (an acronym of Satuan
pengamanan or Security Unit). According to the “System for the Security of the
Environment” as it was first set up in the middle of the 1980s by the Head of Police,
Awaloedin Djamin, the satpam are obliged to follow training courses run by a section
of the national police known as BIMMAS (Bimbingan Masyarakat, literally “Society
Guidance”). If they do not attend these summary courses, which last from one to three
months, then they receive neither their official registration number nor their
“uniform”, which consists of blue trousers and a white shirt with SATPAM stamped on
the shoulders and the left pocket. In theory, the satpam should also attend a training
session every week at the police station, but they seldom do so. Their monthly salary is
paid to them directly by the business that they are protecting. In addition to this they
can pick up a number of “tips” (between 1,000 to 5,000 rupees) by running small
errands for the customers: helping them to find a parking space, keeping an eye on
their vehicle (which can mean not vandalizing it), carrying a parcel for them or hailing
them a taxi. These compulsory “tips”, as they were commented upon by Jakartanese
friends of mine, are first and foremost meant to buy the satpam protection against his
own retaliatory violence. The satpam of Southern Jakarta indeed often look like very
much to preman: they have the same intimidating glance and attitudes and use the
same coarse street language that scares to death middle-class teenage girls. Of course,
not all of them act the harsh way, but in big cities most undoubtedly come from (and
still belong to) an “underworld culture” of machismo and aggressiveness.
In other words, the satpam are private guards who are trained by the police (who
continue to use them as informers) but paid by their employers. The paradoxical
nature of their professional position is summarised well by the head of the BIMMAS
division of the Jakarta police:
“A member of the Satpam has two “masters”: the business, home or office which
employs him, and the police who ensure that he is well trained. Being in the Satpam
is a profession. Its members are not night patrol volunteers (tukang ronda malam)
nor even night watchers (centeng). They do more than open the doors for people
entering a building. Put simply, the Satpam do a policeman’s job. That is why we
train them, and that is why they are accountable to us for their actions” [40].
Combating Urban Guerrilla Warfare: Operations to “Clean Up the Environment”
When the arrival of an important official is expected, and the police carry out so-called
“National Discipline” operations aimed at clearing the streets of the motley crowd of
street vendors and beggars so as not to offend the sight of a General or a Minister, they
call on teams of satpam. In Bandung, these “knuckleduster” interventions are
organised by a police unit known as TIBUM (Penertiban Umum: Public Order). The
TIBUM is under the direct authority of the city council. In Jakarta, it would appear
that the clearing-up operations are run by military units, and in particular by the
Arhanud KOSTRAD, an air defence artillery division of the army’s Strategic Reserve
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Forces which has a reputation for brutality towards street people [41]. On a regular
basis, clusters of hovels snatched from under the bridges along the toll road leading to
Soekarno-Hatta International Airport are razed to the ground by bulldozers under the
impassive gaze of passers-by and soldiers [42]. The sides of this road constitute the
first glimpse of the urban landscape for foreign tourists, and it is therefore important
that they should be “cleaned” regularly. The Governor of Jakarta, retired MajorGeneral Sutiyoso, is moreover well used to a “urban guerrilla warfare”-style of city
management, since he spent most of his career in the army’s Special Forces, the
Kopassus, of which he became the chief commanding officer. His “security-oriented”
approach to urban space meets the expectations of the capital’s middle classes, who are
frightened by the supposed rise in violent crime (a “rise” mostly built out of politically
distorted statistical evidence).
Moreover, population movements are severely limited and recorded in minute
detail. If the ordinary citizen wants to leave his place of residence, he must first obtain a
travel authorisation or “journey letter” from the police. This “journey letter” notes all
the places which he intends to go to or through which he must pass in order to reach
his final destination. Whenever a visitor spends more than 24 hours in a village other
than his own, he must announce his presence to the Head of the Resident Unit, the
kepala RW, who will make a note of his identity card number and the reasons for his
visit. The kepala RW then gives the visitor’s name to the watchmen and night watch
team. Indeed, this bureaucratic formality is often superfluous: everyone in the village
knows the identity of the newly arrived stranger within a few hours. The grapevine
works at an astonishing speed. The morning after my late impromptu night arrival in
the Umbulhardjo district, south of Jogjakarta, in September 2000, all the people that I
knew came to drink tea with me at breakfast, which was as much a way of extending
friendship to me as of letting me know that they had been informed of the details of
my arrival.
In fact, the kampung is never left unguarded. Day and night, every “suspect”
movement is noted, judged and commented on ad infinitum by a crowd of watchmen,
servants and kaki lima (wandering salesmen). In the street, tens of people seated at
trestle tables alongside the road, sipping tea or eating rice soup, are equally attentive
witnesses of social life, ready to “report” (melapor) anything abnormal to the nearest
security post. At night, in front of each of the luxurious homes of civil servants and
rich businessmen living in Menteng district (Central Jakarta), guards (who are often
soldiers looking to earn a little extra money [43]) and servants are constantly watching
the actions and gestures of passers-by as they play dominos and chat disinterestedly
about the game. In front of the malls (shopping centres) where the middle classes’
teens meet up for a karaoke evening, the satpam and the hansip are stationed every 50
metres.
Both in urban areas and in rural villages, surveillance systems are the product of the
combination of punitive action taken by state bodies and preventive and repressive
actions taken by local communities. The satpam and the night watch teams look after
the daily tasks of identity checks and the protection of goods and people. But when a
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threat to the regime appears, or a priority decision of the local authorities needs to be
carried out, military units and special police squads summarily take over the area to
the great terror of the inhabitants. The arrival of numerous Arhanud KOSTRAD or
anti-riot police in a district generally causes panicked fear while the metallic click of
the night rounds has a rather reassuring effect.
It is important to bear in mind the particularities of these semi-public, semi-private
surveillance systems if we are to truly understand the extent of the danger that the
frequent presence at their heart of members of organisations of a criminal nature can
constitute.
The Criminalisation of State Militia [44]
“Behave Like Enraged Lions!” The Revolt of the Kamra
In the late 1990s, as well as on the satpam, the police and the army could also count on
the help of the kamra, members of the Popular Defence militia. The acronym kamra
comes from Keamanan Rakyat, the name of a militia set up during the 1950s by the
Sukarno regime in order to regain control of rural areas of Java which had fallen in the
hands of Islamic rebels from the Darul Islam movement that then seeked to establish
an islamic state. Nowadays, the kamra often go under the name of hansip out of pure
linguistic habit, but their status is in reality very different. Although they are recruited
and employed by the Defence Minister, and theoretically entrusted with aiding the
population in time of difficulty (floods, fires), the kamra are often used as a support
team to “make safe” (mengamankan) public places [45].
Because of this, during the run-up to the elections of June 1999, General Wiranto,
the then Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and currently one of the candidates
to Presidency, authorised the use of Decree no 56/1999 to recruit 40,000 kamra to
patrol the streets of the big cities in order to “prevent trouble on public highways”. To
this end, public authorities delegated to the kamra the power to carry out identity
checks, to make arrests, and even to lead on-the-spot “interrogations”. According to
numerous witnesses, their role, at least in Jakarta, was clearly defined as “quashing
demonstrations” and in particular preventing militants from the PPP and the PDI-P
(two main opposition parties) from reaching the main streets of the city centre.
Aged between 18 and 45 and trained by the army in the KOSTRAD barracks, these
kamra were paid around 250,000 rupees per month (35 euros) plus a daily allowance
of 3,500 rupees (0.4 euros) for food and transport costs. This was about half as much
as an ordinary soldier, who would earn between 450,000 and 650,000 rupees a month
(not including food and accommodation costs). According to an (ironic) journalist,
the kamra working day would go something like this: “For three or four hours, they
would be busy with traffic. And the rest of the time, they would chat calmly amongst
themselves in the police stations” [46]. During the summer of 1999, the kamra were
visible all over Jakarta, and particularly around the National Monument and the
Parliament building. Wearing military fatigues and armed with supple rattan canes,
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they often intervened alongside the Brimob (the mobile police brigades) to disperse
groups of student demonstrators hanging around outside public buildings.
In October 2000, two months before their employment contract was due to expire,
several thousands of these kamra openly threatened the government. Towns would be
“subjected to fire and the sword” if they were not very quickly offered jobs in civil
administration or the police force. Their representative for Java, P.D. Prihanto (a guy
who had already gained a reputation for street violence in the 1980s when he and his
thugs were employed by the New Order regime in election time) put it like this: “If the
government does not make its decision known by 20 December, behave like enraged
lions!” [47]. After a few skirmishes at Pontianak (south-west of Kalimantan) where
they eventually kept the governor locked up in his office for a few hours, the majority
of these kamra were taken on by administrations and local businesses [48]. Thus, in
Jakarta, 2,500 of them were transferred to the Department of Public Security [49], and
5,500 charged with the protection of large businesses such as PT Astra Motors [50].
The governor of Jakarta, Sutiyoso, justified this forced employment by saying that
“the town’s administration needs more personnel to keep a check on wandering
salesman, prostitutes and street musicians” [51] And yet many of the kamra in
question had come from large criminal bands in Medan and Surabaya. They’d learnt
how to be robbers in red districts run by crime barons (as the tattoos on their forearms
showed) [52].
The affair of the 40,000 kamra shows how the criminal workforce employed by the
army and police in certain kinds of civil militia quickly acquired an autonomous
power base in the heart of state administration. The hansip, the satpam and the kamra
ran numerous operations of violence on the fringes of the State—these “grey areas”
where most of the transactions between the political and criminal world took place.
The existence of around 200,000 satpam in Indonesia (of which 90,000 are in Jakarta)
and around 5 million hansip gives some idea of the scale of these “grey areas”, run by
masters of coercion [53]. They therefore hold considerable weight when compared
with the 350,000 army staff and 250,000 policemen (a ratio of about 1 policeman to
1200 people). To be sure, these militiamen and their preman friends were once kept
under control by the state, if necessary by means of pure counter-violence. In 1984,
during the so-called “mysterious killings” (Petrus), hundreds of petty criminals were
murdered and their corpses put on display at the entrance of villages. It was later
known that this was a “warning” sent by President Suharto to the underworld
professionals, in order to have criminal gangs understand that they should not go too
far in enjoying the freedom that their unofficial partnership with the army gave
them [54].
But the end of the New Order regime and the 1997– 99 economic crisis led to a deep
disorganization of the state security apparatus. Soldiers’ wages slumped and the army’s
reputation was tarnished by the disclosure of its past wrongdoings, while the need to
fight resurgent guerrilla-warfare separatism in Aceh and to check outbursts of
communal riots in the Outer Islands downsized its ability to scrutinise criminalised
civil militias as carefully as in the 1980s. The army spokesman publicly stated in early
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2000 that up to 70% of the soldiers’ income came from “non-official sources”,
therefore acknowledging that many soldiers have to resort to extortion and smuggling
to make a living.
It therefore seems that things can now get out of control much easier than in the
past. Awaloedin Djamin was the first to realise that the delegation of responsibility
for the maintenance of law and order to hansip and satpam was a dangerous shortcut
to take. However he believed that by then (mid-1990s) it was too late to get rid of
them, since they would never find another job and would therefore simply swell the
ranks of the unemployed [55]. And so the “System for the Security of the
Environment” fulfils at present two potentially contradictory objectives, since it aims
not only to protect national security but also to provide professional opportunities
for young men from working-class backgrounds who are tempted by the prospect of
a career in crime.
The “System for the Security of the Environment” as Matrix for the Criminalisation of the
State and Political Arena
The “system” was effectively put into place precisely in order to bring criminal groups
who held sway on the outskirts of the “formal” economy within the boundaries of the
state. Put simply, its main objective was to rationalise competition between security
officials and crime barons in illegal markets (prostitution, drug dealing, extortion and
smuggling). It envisaged creating a system of shared power in the lower towns by
splitting the territory up between the army, the police and the criminal world. Thus it
brought about the delegation of some of the political surveillance mission to criminal
urban gangs.
As evidenced by Joshua Barker, the first contingent of satpam and hansip trained by
the police and army actually came from Gang X in Kebayoran Baru, from Prems and
from Massa 33, that is to say from violent streetgangs who specialised in “protection”
businesses [56]. Partly because of the extent of their activities and partly because of
their progressive penetration into legal security markets for goods and people, these
urban gangs were known as “private security organisations” (OPS) [57]. By legalising
the partnership between these gangs and the police and army, the Siskamling had the
paradoxical effect of not only failing to reduce the competition between them, but
also of even exacerbating it by showing up the similarities between their activities.
This model of militia organisation of state security services had two dramatic
consequences.
Firstly, it accelerated the criminalisation of security services—a process already well
under way—by supporting the entry of criminal modes of behaviour into the heart of
public institutions. One only has to look at the increasing frequency of lethal brawls
amongst the police and military to realise the extent of this phenomenon. Regular
army and police units are increasingly behaving exactly like gangs. They are fiercely
predatory about their areas of jurisdiction, which they see as their hunting ground.
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They seek direct or indirect control over markets in illegal goods. They even brave
knives and rifle fire.
Thus, on the 29 and 30 September 2002, at Binjai (near Medan, in Sumatra),
soldiers from an airborne unit dependent on Kodam I (Linud 100), armed with rifles
and hand grenades, carried out an attack on a police station. They killed 7 policemen
and 3 civilians. According to on-the-spot interviews by journalists, they had decided
to attack after the police had refused to free a recently imprisoned drug dealer that the
military were “protecting” by taking a percentage of his profits [58]. On 4 March
2003, members of an army and air garrison stationed east of Jakarta set fire to a police
station and killed the policeman on duty to “avenge” the humiliation that one of their
men had suffered when the motorbike taxi belonging to someone in his family was
confiscated (or rather stolen) by the police [59]. The fact that state security services
adopt the kind of violent behaviour usually seen in criminal gangs certainly is the
direct consequence of their receiving very low wages. But it is also one of the perverse
effects of the policy, begun by the Siskamling, of making deals with the criminal
world.
Secondly, the advent and institutionalisation of criminal behaviour deep within
state bodies led to the continuing criminalisation of the political arena. No political
party today is without its own “security service” which behaves as a paramilitary
corps. These “security agents”, known simply as satgas, dress as if they were in the
military (fatigue jackets, berets, ranger shoes, badges, rank stripes) and train in
martial arts.
Despite or perhaps because of their bad reputation, hundreds of Banser, members of
the youth movement of the Nahdlatul Ulama (the main Indonesian traditionalist
Muslim organisation), have been poured into the ranks of Abdurrahman Wahid’s
National Awakening Party security service [60]. The Banser [61] claim to have 425,000
members, but in reality they probably have nearer 100,000. The movement’s official
literature portrays the Banser as working to help the public by protecting it in times of
natural disasters and rebuilding public buildings in poor areas. They are thus praised
as “fighters for humanity”, entirely devoted to the service of the nation and poor [62].
When questioned individually, the Banser nevertheless are happy to talk about their
passion for violent martial arts [63], which they learn under the instruction of wellknown religious leaders such as Gus Munif and Kiai Maksum Jauhari. Although they
have never yet been implicated in any criminal activity, the Banser have been behind
many violent action campaigns, most notably when President Wahid was given a hard
time by the media for his adulterous affairs and corruption (they sacked the offices of
the Jawa Pos newspaper at Surabaya, at a time when I was living and doing research in
the city).
As for the 30,000 “security agents” of the Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle
of Megawati Sukarnoputri (the acting President), their reputation for brutality has
been well established ever since their forceful participation in the electoral campaign
of May-June 1999, during which, truncheons in hand, they “made safe” meeting
areas [64].
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Conclusion: State Reform and the Militia Question
Although the preman-state seems to have its origins in the implementation of the
Siskamling during the mid 1980s, it has a much longer history than that. This history is
marked by the criminal origins of certain Republican resistance guerrilla units during
the late 1940s and then by the construction of an authoritarian regime which made
crime its law. The prosperity of the criminalised political administration system during
the supposedly democratic transition process makes one question the efficiency of the
laws reforming the armed forces that were voted in between 2000 and 2002 [65]. The
problem of the very low wages of soldiers and policemen still has not been
satisfactorily addressed. And the silence on the subject of the status of civil security
militia weighed heavily on the attempts of the civil experts charged with rewriting
these texts to make military personnel and staff more professional [66].
And indeed, for as long as the hansip, the satpam and the kamra are in control of law
and order maintenance, in however small a way, and for as long as political militia
behave like paramilitary corps, the market in professionals of violence will be thriving in
Indonesia. In big cities, civil security militia still often act as nods and hubs of
interactions between the criminal world and state bodies. They are the vehicles of a
militia-style organisation of public institutions and the partisan field which makes the
use of brute force an integral part of political competition, particularly during periods of
electoral mobilisation. That Indonesian public authorities still tolerate and even
promote private displays of violence was made clear by Governor Sutiyoso who, fearing
street battles ahead of the Independence Day ceremony in August 1998, said to Jakarta
dwellers: “Use all possible kinds of weapons to protect yourselves: bludgeons, spears,
klewang (sabres), scissors, anything you want, for those who will come to loot in your
neighbourhood won’t come barehanded” [67]. One first step towards state-reform
would surely be to stop inciting ordinary people to equip themselves with “all possible
kinds of weapons”.
Translated by Kate Simpson
Notes
[1] A preliminary draft of this text was presented to a research group seminar on “Criminal
Businesses” led by Jean-Louis Briquet and Gilles Favarel at the Centre for International Research
and Studies in Paris, and then to a workshop on “Organized Crime” presided over by Felia Allum
at the ECPR Convention in Marburg (2003). A shorter version was published in the review TiersMonde (n8174, April-July 2003, pp. 323– 344) under the title “Les virtuoses de la violence.
Remarques sur la privatisation du maintien de l’ordre en Indonésie contemporaine”. I thank the
two anonymous reviewers of Global Crime for their insightful and enriching comments.
[2] For an insight into these gloomy texts, which use an ultra-nominalist typological approach, see
Mohammed Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Anatomy of Social Violence in the Context of Transition: the
Case of Indonesia (1990 – 2001), Jakarta, United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian
Recovery (UNSFIR), Working Paper 02– 01E, April 2002.
[3] For a chronological presentation of the main sequences of political violence in Indonesia since
1998, one can read Olle Tornquist (ed.), Political Violence. Indonesia and India in Comparative
Global Crime
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
341
Perspective, Oslo, University of Oslo: Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM),
SUM Reports 9– 00, 2002.
For a historical analysis of the anti-Communist Bali massacres, see Geoffrey Robinson, The
Dark Side of Paradise. Political Violence in Bali, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995, especially
pp. 235– 272. For an analysis of the East Java massacres, re-examined in the light of the
structural opposition between the wealthy Muslim peasantry and the agricultural day labourers
supervised by the Indonesian Communist Party, see Hermawan Sulistyo, Palu Arit di Ladang
Tebu. Sejarah pembantaian massal yang terlupakan (1965 – 1966) (“The Hammer and Sickle in
the Sugar Cane Field. Story of a forgotten massacre (1965– 1966)”, Jakarta, Kepustakaan
Populer Gramedia, 2000, especially pp. 231– 243 for a critique of the culturalist explanation.
As an example of this, a journalist from the daily newspaper El Pais explained at the end of 1998
that Javanese “burned cats” to conjure up witchcraft: pure fantasy!
There is an excellent critique of the culturalist, functionalist and economic approaches to
violence in Indonesia in John Sidel, “Riots, Church Burnings, Conspiracies. The Moral Economy
of the Indonesian Crowd in the Late Twentieth Century” in Ingrid Wessel and Georgia
Winmhöfer (eds), Violence in Indonesia, Hamburg, Abera Verlag Markus Voss, 2001, pp. 47– 63.
For a political critique of the idea of a “culture of violence”, see Elizabeth Fuller Collins:
“Indonesia, A Violent Culture?”, Asian Survey, vol. 42, n8 4, July-August 2002, pp. 582– 604.
This article expands on the questioning of the lynching of petty criminals and vagrants in Java
begun in Romain Bertrand, Indonésie, la démocratie invisible. Violence, magie et politique à Java.
(“Indonesia’s Invisible Democracy. Violence, Magic and Politics in Java”), Paris, Karthala, 2002,
especially pp. 85 –101.
Richard Tanter, “The Totalitarian Ambition. Intelligence Organisations and the Indonesian
State” in Arief Budiman (ed.) State and Civil Society in Indonesia, Melbourne, Monash Papers
on Southeast Asia no 22, 1990.
For the criminal economy of certain Republican guerillas units in Java, read Benedict
Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, Occupation and Resistance, 1944 – 1946, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1972. For enlightenment on the illicit economic activities of the army during
the 1950s, and in particular those of the Diponegoro Division formerly under the command of
Suharto, see Robert Elson, Suharto, A Political Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2001, especially pp. 60 –65.
For the story of the Gerwani and their diabolisation by the New Order, see Saskia Eleonora
Wieringa, Penghancuran Gerakan Perempuan di Indonesia, (“The destruction of the feminist
movement in Indonesia”), Jakarta, Garba Budaya, 1999, chapters 9 and 10.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer speaks about his ten years of incarceration in the prison camps of Buru
Island in a collection of writings published under the title Nyanyi sunyi seorang bisu. Catatancatatan dari Pulau Buru (“The silent song of a mute man. Notes from Buru Island”), Jakarta,
Lentera, 1995. For an introduction to Pramoedya’s works, one could try Henk Maier, “Flying a
Kite: The Crimes of Praemoedya Ananta Toer” in Vicente L. Rafael (ed.), Figures of Criminality
in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999,
p. 231– 58.
James Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta. Counter-Revolution Today, Durham, Duke
University Press, 1998.
For more on this subject, read Loren Ryter, “Pemuda Pancasila. The Last Loyalist Free Men of
Suharto’s New Order”, Indonesia, no 66, October 1998, pp. 231 –58.
Ruddy Agusyanto, “Preman adalah Profesi” (“Preman is a job”), Gatra, no 25, March 1995, p. 20.
Henk Schulte-Nordolt and Margreet van Till, “Colonial Criminals in Java, 1870 – 1910” in
Vicente L. Rafael (ed.), Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, as before, pp. 47– 69. Also see Henk
Schulte-Nordolt, “The Jago in the Shadow. Crime and Order in the Colonial State in Java”,
Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, vol. 25, Winter 1991, pp. 74 – 91.
342
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[16] As quoted by a lawyer in John Pemberton, “Open Secrets. Excerpts from Conversations with a
Javanese Lawyer and a Comment” in Vicente L. Rafael (ed.), Figures of Criminality in Indonesia,
as before, p. 195
[17] To read about the apprenticeship of Javanese martial arts, which are as much physical
techniques as mystical knowledge, see Jean-Marc de Grave, Initiation rituelle et arts martiaux.
Trois écoles de kanuragan javanais, (“Ritual initiation and martial arts. Three schools of
Javanese kanuragan.”), Paris, L’Harmattan, Cahiers d’Archipel, no 33, 2001.
[18] See for instance the career of the “king of sorcerers”, Ki Gendeng Pamungkas, as recorded in
Romain Bertrand, “Ki Gendeng Pamungkas, un sorcier en politique. Notes sur les dimensions
occultes de l’espace public en Indonésie”, Politix, vol. 14, n8 54, July 2003, pp. 43 – 73.
[19] John Pemberton, “Open Secrets. . .”, as before, pp. 194– 5
[20] Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in 1888. Its Conditions, Courses and Sequels. A
Case Study of Social Movements in Indonesia, s’Gravenhage, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, pp. 116– 9.
[21] For more on Javanese military techniques from the 16th to 18th centuries, see B.J.O. Schrieke,
Indonesian Sociological Studies, La Haye, Van Hoeve, 1957, vol. II, pp. 121 –52.
[22] Henk Schulte-Nordolt, “A Genealogy of Violence” in Freek Colombijn and Thomas Lindblad
(eds.), Roots of Violence in Indonesia, Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002,
pp. 33 –61.
[23] I am thinking in particular here of Ken Angrok dan Ken Dedes by Muhammad Yamin (1902–
1963), a novel published in 1934.
[24] There are numerous classic Dutch translations of the Pararaton. One of the most frequently
used is that of J.L.A. Brandes, Pararaton (Ken Arok) of het Boek der Koningen van Tumapel en
van Majapahit (“The Pararaton or The Book of Kings of Tumapel and Majapahit”),
Verhandelingen van het Koninglijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen,
XLIX, 1897. The legend of Ken Angrok can be found in pp. 61– 65 of Brandes’ translation.
[25] Ken Angrok took Sri Ranggah Rajasa as his royal name.
[26] For an insight into the Ken Angrok legend as told in the Pararaton, see B. Schrieke, Indonesian
Sociological Studies, as before, vol. II, pp. 8 – 10, 20 – 22, 70 – 74. For a summary of the history of
the Singasari kingdom (1222– 1292), see G. Coedès, Les Etats Hindouisés d’Indochine et
d’Indonésie (The Hinduised States of Indochina and Indonesia), Paris, De Boccard, 1989
(1948), pp. 338– 41.
[27] Rudolf Mrazek highlights these improvements in police surveillance techniques in colonial
Insulinde and their implications for potential Javanese modernists in Engineers of Happy Land.
Technology and Nationalism in a Colony, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002.
[28] For further information on these bersih lingkungan campaigns, see Rob Goodfellow, Api dalam
sekam. The New Order and the Ideology of Anti-Communism, Clayton, Monash University, 1995.
[29] The PKI was banned, and “Marxist-Leninist teaching” prohibited by Presidential Decree no
1/3/1966 of 12 March 1966.
[30] The BAKORSTANAS was itself dissolved in 1999 following the army’s announcement that it
was abandoning its socio-political role ( fungsi sospol) of internal repression. It nevertheless
seems that the asintel still operate at the district level of the army’s command structure.
[31] Daniel Lev, “The Criminal Regime: Criminal Process in Indonesia” in Vicente L. Rafael (ed.),
Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, as before, p. 187.
[32] ABRI is an acronym of Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia: Armed Forces of the
Indonesian Republic.
[33] Bear in mind the different levels of the graduated territorial structure of the Indonesian army:
the KODAM or Komando Daerah Militer, the KODIM or Komando Distrik Militer, the KOREM
or Komando Resort Militer and the KORAMIL or Komando Rayon Militer. A rayon militer could
have a range of one or many districts.
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[34] It is indeed important to remember that the Japanese occupation was an intense period of
political mobilisation for the Javanese population. The Japanese occupiers presented
themselves as a liberation force providing freedom from the yoke of colonialism in the name of
the ideology of Great Asia, and supported the diffusion of nationalist texts. A large number of
youth and paramilitary organisations were set up, such as the Youth Movement (Seinendam),
the Civil Militia (Keibodan) and the Defenders of the Country corps (PETA from Pembela
Tanah Air). More than a million adolescents were involved in the Keibodan’s activities. From 15
August 1945 (when Japan capitulated), these militia and paramilitary corps became the matrix
for armed republican resistance forces which fought against the return of the Dutch troops. It
could therefore be said that the Japanese occupation was a crucial period for the process of
“militia-isation” of political life.
[35] The ronda malam system is often mentioned in Dutch literature and administrative reports
from the end of the 19th century.
[36] Literally: “butchered like a farmyard animal” (dibantai)
[37] “Tersangka Ninja ditebas kepalanya di Malang”, Suara Pembaruan, 20 October 1998. For
further examples of groups of villagers killing “strangers” and an attempt to explain them, see
Romain Bertrand, Indonésie, la démocratie invisible (“Indonesia’s Invisible Democracy”), as
before, pp. 87– 96.
[38] From 1996 the regime also set up “command posts” or posko which fulfilled the same
surveillance role as the poskam.
[39] Joshua Barker, “Surveillance and Territoriality in Bandung” in Vicente Rafael (ed.), Figures of
Criminality in Indonesia, as before, pp. 95 –127.
[40] Interview published in The Jakarta Post on 13 October 1996, and quoted in Joshua Barker:
“State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order” in Benedict R.O.G
Anderson (ed.), Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
2001, p. 26. Information on how the Siskamling functioned has been borrowed from this article
by Joshua Barker. The creator of the Siskamling, the Chief of the National Police Force,
Awaloedin Djamin (1978– 1982) describes how it theoretically functioned in Pengalaman
seorang perwira Polri (“Experiences of a police officer”), Jakarta, Sinar Harapan, 1995.
[41] Interviews with representatives of the Trade Union for Rickshaw Drivers of Jakarta, May 1999.
[42] Interviews with members of the non-governmental organisation Konsortium Kemiskinan Kota
of Jakarta, May 1999.
[43] For example, the “night watchman” of a house in Menteng where I stayed in 2002 was a fortysomething officer from the Kopassus (the army’s Special Forces) who had served in Aceh during
the anti-separatist operations of 1989 – 92. He earned as much in one week of night watching as
he did in his monthly salary (around 400,000 rupees, or 45 euros).
[44] For more on “criminalisation of the state”, see Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice
Hibou, La criminalisation de l’Etat en Afrique (“The criminalisation of the State in Africa”),
Paris, Complexe, 1998.
[45] Note however that since Decree MPR no 7 of 18 August 2000—which dealt with the separation
( permisahan) of the police and army (which has since been known as the TNI, an acronym of
Tentara Nasional Indonesia)—the kamra has been the exclusive domain of the police. However,
since the police can “request the assistance” of the army in helping to restore public order, the
TNI maintains some control over the kamra.
[46] “Kamra members face dissolution”, The Jakarta Post, 22 October 2000. Throughout the chain of
command, the National Police Force is divided into 5 “operational sectors”: Security and
Intelligence (Intel-Pam), Criminal Investigation (Reserse), Public Highway Patrols (Samapta),
Traffic Control (Lantas from lalu lintas) and Guidance / Supervision of Society (Bimmas). For
an insight into the organisation of the POLRI, see Kepolisian Negara Republik Indonesia (“The
Republic of Indonesia’s Police”), Jakarta, PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 1995.
344
R. Bertrand
[47] “Over 1000 Kamra members threaten to run amok”, The Jakarta Post, 19 December 2000.
[48] At Pontianak, 900 kamra attacked the office of the provincial governor, Aspar Aswin, to force
him to employ them within the police. See “Kamra protest turns ugly in Pontianak”, The
Jakarta Post, 8 December 2000.
[49] Tramtib is an acronym of ketentreman dan ketertiban, “Order and Tranquillity”, which took on
the old slogan of the Dutch East Indies, Rust en Orde.
[50] “Governments finds jobs for 8,000 Kamra members”, The Jakarta Post, 30 November 2000. This
information was confirmed to me by one of the governor of Jakarta’s assistants in February
2002.
[51] “City to hire 300 Kamra members”, The Jakarta Post, 23 October 2000.
[52] Interviews with M.Kh., an officer in Surabaya’s anti-drug brigade, September 2000. This officer
confirms that he belonged to a famous band of preman in Malang before joining the police,
from which he gained his remarkable knowledge of the world of urban gangs.
[53] International Crisis Group, Indonesia: National Police Reform, 20 February 2001, p. 8.
[54] Justus Van Der Kroef, “Petrus: Patterns of Prophylactic Murder in Java”, Asian Survey, 25, n8 7,
July 1985, pp. 745– 759.
[55] Awaloedin Djamin, Menuju POLRI Mandiri yang Profesional (“Towards an Independent and
Professional National Police Force”), Jakarta, Yayasan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia, 1999, p. 235,
quoted in Joshua Barker, “State of Fear”, as before.
[56] Joshua Barker, “State of Fear”, as before, pp. 25– 6. Massa 33 was a famous Surabayan gang,
which was especially active in the large red light district of Dolly where many thousands of
prostitutes work.
[57] OPS: organisasi pengamanan swasta.
[58] For more on this matter, read John Roosa, “Brawling, Bombing and Backing”, Inside Indonesia
no 73, January-March 2003, pp. 10– 11.
[59] “Air Force to discharge members involved in an attack”, The Jakarta Post, 6 March 2003.
[60] Interview with M.H. Rofiq, chief of ANSOR for East Java, February 2003. There is a general
discussion of the Banser in the pamphlet Gerakan Pemuda Ansor. Persaudaraan untuk Indonesia
(“The ANSOR Youth Movement, a Brotherhood for Indonesia”), Jakarta, ANSOR, April 2001.
[61] Acronym of Badan ANSOR serba guna, the “catch-all service” of ANSOR.
[62] See, for example, the opuscule Riyanto, Pahlawan Kemanusiaan. Profil pengabdian Banser
(“Riyanto, a hero of humanity. Portrait of a servant of the banser.”) PW GP Ansor Jawa Timur,
2002. This is a pamphlet dedicated to the memory of a Banser member who died in a bomb
explosion in a church in Mojokerto (East Java) while he was “doing his job of protection on
New Year’s Eve”. Riyanto was set up as a martyr and a model of “fighters for humanity”.
[63] Interviews with members of the Surabayan Banser, September 2000.
[64] Phil King, “Putting the (para)military back into politics”, Inside Indonesia, no 73, JanuaryMarch 2003, pp. 19– 20.
[65] These were MPR Decrees nos 6 and 7 of the 18 August 2000 which dealt with the separation of
the police force and army, and with Law no 3 of 2002 revising the 1959 law on states of urgency.
[66] Interviews with Riefqi Muna, Research Institute on Democracy and Peace (RiDEP), Jakarta,
March 2002.
[67] “Sutiyoso tells Jakartans to protect themselves”, The Jakarta Post, 15 August 1998, p. 3.