Retas Sejarah

David Bourchier // Crime, Law and State Authority in Indonesia

One of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the New Order was the wave of state-sponsored executions of suspected criminals which took place between 1983 and 1985. In this two year period, over five thousand people, none of whom had been tried, lost their lives at the hands of highly-trained hit squads known popularly as Petrus, an acronym of penembak misterius or ‘mysterious gunmen’.

Much has been written about the repression of political dissidents in Indonesia and the military operations against armed opponents of the Indonesian state in such places as Irian Jaya and East Timor. What was unusual about the Petrus campaign is that violence was used not to silence criticism or to defend the Indonesian state from perceived threats to its integrity, but as an instrument of social policy. It was a carefully planned and orchestrated military- intelligence operation intended, in the words of President Suharto, as “shock therapy” to curb radically the incidence of violent crime.

and attempted to handle the problem of crime. Drawing mainly on contemporary press reports and other documentary material I go on to examine the killings and try to explain both why they occurred and what they reveal about the character of the Indonesian state. The thrust of my argument is that while the killings were certainly unprecedented, and were attributable to some extent to the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the early 1980s, they can be understood in the context of political and ideological trends which have evolved since the rise of the New Order in 1966. Most significant in this respect are the concentration of power in the security and intelligence wings of the government and the development of a state doctrine which is at once paternalistic and preoccupied with the notion of the preservation of social order and state authority. I conclude by drawing attention to a division within the state between those whose conception of authority is based on armed force and those who favour legal solutions, and suggest that increasing structural pressures for regularisation may force a shift away from the use of violence as a means of social control.

Crime and its Setting

It is no coincidence that the highest levels of crime in Indonesia are found in its major cities. Uncontrolled rural to urban migration over the past forty years has seriously strained the resources of the principal cities of Java and Sumatra, resulting in severe shortages of living space, clean water and jobs. Crowded squatter settlements have mushroomed in most cities, sometimes housing tens of thousands of poor who seek a living in the informal sector, in prostitution or in petty crime. Because of the rapid rate of population growth in Indonesia, a large proportion of these people are young.

I begin this paper with a brief look at the social, historical and political context of criminality in Indonesia and at some of the ways in which the managers of the New Order state have perceived and attempted to handle the problem of crime. Drawing mainly on contemporary press reports and other documentary material I go on to examine the killings and try to explain both why they occurred and what they reveal about the character of the Indonesian state. The thrust of my argument is that while the killings were certainly unprecedented, and were attributable to some extent to the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the early 1980s, they can be understood in the context of political and ideological trends which have evolved since the rise of the New Order in 1966. Most significant in this respect are the concentration of power in the security and intelligence wings of the government and the development of a state doctrine which is at once paternalistic and preoccupied with the notion of the preservation of social order and state authority. I conclude by drawing attention to a division within the state between those whose conception of authority is based on armed force and those who favour legal solutions, and suggest that increasing structural pressures for regularisation may force a shift away from the use of violence as a means of social control.

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