Shots in the Dark
Troops open fire on students in Jakarta as violent protest spreads and Indonesia's halting journey to democracy takes another bloody turn
By NISID HAJARI

Young Indonesia teethed on chaos. After bloodily evicting the Dutch in 1949, Indonesians of differing ideological stripes quickly launched into a frenzy of partisan debate at factories, universities, plantations--in, as one historian put it, "a kind of permanent, round-the-clock politics." In the next decade secessionist rebels waged war on Jakarta, itself teeming with radical Muslims, Communists and soldiers. Sukarno's successor Suharto, having imposed a New Order, liked to wield the memory of those fraught years as justification for his punishing rule.

Suharto has relinquished power now, and chaos has returned to the broad streets of his capital. Throughout last week, student-led marchers in Jakarta clashed with riot troops assigned to protect a special session of the nation's highest constitutional body, the People's Consultative Assembly (known by its Indonesian acronym, MPR). On Friday night the run-ins exploded into a full-fledged battle, with soldiers chasing and shooting protesters with rubber bullets at close range. By dawn at least a dozen civilians had been killed; more than 200 were reported wounded. At the eerily calm Parliament building, where loops of razor wire and thousands of soldiers and police sealed off the MPR, legislators passed 12 toothless decrees that only glancingly acknowledged the students' demands. Mere blocks away, where blood and tear-gas canisters littered Jakarta's main thoroughfare, the divisions of the past had fast been reduced to one--between a government and its people.

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