Standing outside Parliament's gates yesterday, the students who forced Indonesian President Suharto's resignation last week must be all too visible to the newly installed leader, B.J. Habibie.
Resuming the two-month vigil that culminated in Suharto's departure after 32 entrenched years, they began yesterday banging on drums, calling for Habibie to be hanged "next to Suharto," and waving banners demanding "Immediate Elections" to replace the new president.
But a week after the massive popular uprising toppled Suharto from power, the force that's driving the dissident movement remains invisible. As characterized by The New York Times' Seth Mydans, "[t]he student movement is a curious political force, headless and leaderless, without a central organizing force."
This headlessness, however, may be the movement's greatest strength. Suharto, and now Habibie, has no specific target to attack. The Internet has given students and other dissidents unprecedented freedom of speech. Bound by a covert thread of communication, they have been able to foment a massive ground swell of pro-democratic activity.
Ironically, access to the Internet was fueled by Suharto's money-hungry kin. The president's children -- especially his daughter Siti Hardiyanti "Tutut" Rukmana and son Bambang Trihatmodjo -- recognized the money to be made from TV and satellite communications. Eager to tap into global business markets, Indonesian authorities built satellite networks across the archipelago.
Unlike Singapore, where satellite TV is not permitted, or Vietnam, Burma, and China, where access to the Internet is limited or banned, Indonesia had CNN, and its citizens found a way into cyberspace. Even the remotest of Indonesia's islands were wired.
Because the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, uses the Roman script, Indonesian users needed no special software to send and receive messages from other islands, or from Europe, Australia, and North America. Indonesians became full cyber citizens. The country has 25,000 registered Internet users, and the total number of people who have access to the Net is believed to be at least 100,000.
For Indonesia's repressive government, under Suharto and now Habibie, the results have been disasterous. "[T]he most powerful role of this technology has not been to introduce outside ideas," Margot Cohen wrote in the latest issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, "but to provide a tool to an Indonesian middle class increasingly fed up with corruption and other abuses of power."
Indeed, throughout the May uprising, middle-class students used the Internet to network their impatience into a cohesive political force, planning demonstrations and meetings. During the weeklong occupation of Parliament which led to Suharto's resignation, representatives of more than 40 universities met separately -- a feat which would have been virtually impossible without online communications.
And Internet postings have reached thousands of other Indonesians as well. Since Suharto's resignation, students have formed committees to take their pro-democracy message to outlying villages and poor urban neighborhoods. They have downloaded overseas commentary on the movement, printed the most compelling posts, and plastered them on bus stops all over Jakarta.
Even individuals such as Oey Hai Djun, a 68-year-old former journalist and translator, have access to radical online postings. Branded a leftist when Suharto seized power in 1965, Oey Hai Djun was arrested. He served 14 years with 13,000 other political prisoners in a labor camp on the island of Buru.
Upon release, he effectively became a nonperson, deprived of even the limited rights which Suharto granted other Indonesian citizens. He lost the right to vote, hold a government job, or a passport. Every month, he has to report to the local police in the Jakarta suburb where he lives.
But even these restrictions couldn't keep subversive information off of Oey Hai Djun's radar screen. Indeed, thanks to a computer given to him by a younger relative some years ago, Oey Hai Djun has tapped directly into the lifeblood of the dissident movement, free speech. Online, he read daily posts to bulletin boards from Indonesian exiles in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States.
"The most important thing is that the fear of the republic has fallen," Muridan S. Widjojo, an anthropologist studying the protests told The New York Times. "People are free to think what they want and say what they want."
