Indonesia Burning

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With rocks crashing through his windows, an iron spike punching holes through his kitchen door and a mob outside baying "Burn! Burn!," Philip Lo discovered the meaning of terror last Thursday as he cowered for two hours with his family inside a locked bedroom.

"This is like being in a war," said the ethnic-Chinese pastor whose church and adjoining house were attacked during riots in Jakarta that left around 400 dead and hundreds of stores looted and gutted by fire. "All we could hear was things being smashed up outside," said Lo. He and his family escaped injury, but their food stocks were carried off, their car was burned and the inside of the church was ransacked. Lo knows he was targeted because the Chinese minority is perceived as more affluent than most Indonesians. "This is a problem of the stomach. People don't have food," he said. "If there are no reforms, the riots will get even worse. This is amok."

"Amok"--literally, "to go berserk" in the Malay tongue that is spoken across Indonesia--is precisely what the outside world has feared for Jakarta ever since it was hit by a currency crisis late last year that the aging President Suharto, 76, seemed unable to understand or to control. Suharto, in power for 32 years, refused to implement key economic reforms that could damage the private business interests of his family members and close friends, even as food prices spiraled. The fatal shooting of six students by police in the capital last Tuesday sparked riots and looting. "Indonesia needs to break the cycle of violence that appears to be emerging," said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, calling for "dialogue between the Indonesian government and its citizens." Suharto cut short a visit to Egypt, but by the time he returned to Jakarta early Friday, clouds of smoke hung over the city as the country he had patiently built up for three decades burned before his eyes. Early Saturday morning the U.S. embassy began an emergency evacuation of Americans on charter planes. Other embassies advised their citizens to leave Indonesia as soon as possible.

Indonesia's economy has taken a hard fall, and no level of society has escaped the pain. The population of more than 200 million people has seen per capita income drop from $1,200 to $300 almost overnight. Tinted-glass towers in the business district of what was last year one of Asia's hottest cities for investors now stand virtually empty. Corporations have no way of repaying the $70 billion they borrowed from foreign banks, and much business has simply ceased. At the other end of the economic scale, poor households have no way of paying the escalating prices for rice and cooking oil that keep them from going hungry.