Page 79 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

64 Chapter 3

As the students swept through the legislature’s hallways, the economy collapsed
further and Jakarta faced a serious food shortage. Lawyers and business leaders joined
the demonstrations. The same parliament that had voted unanimously in March to
give Suharto a seventh term now announced they would reverse this decision. For-
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eign leaders also began pressuring the president to concede power. While American
officials argued that they did not have as much influence over Suharto as they had
had over the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, they made quiet plans
to offer the general safe passage into exile. The International Monetary Fund then
suspended payments from the $43 billion bailout package recently established to help
Indonesia through the crisis.
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On this second day of their occupation, the students, rather than leave the grounds
at sundown, camped out for the night while various factions attempted to broker
a resolution to the standoff. The situation was precarious. Several Western officials
believed it likely that the military would take over, repeating the scenario that had
brought Suharto to power thirty-two years earlier.
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In the official version of the events that followed, Wiranto spent the night per-
suading Suharto that resigning would be preferable to facing impeachment proceed-
ings, and pledged to defend him and his family. Suharto finally gave up. On May 21, in
a short televised ceremony, he handed over power to his vice president and protégé,
B. J. Habibie. While conceding his effective expulsion from office, he insisted throughout
his resignation speech on a corporatist conception of society with himself as Bapak,
or “father”—head of a still-embodied nation. Dropping the convention within Malay
languages that uses the passive voice to efface ego, Suharto invoked the first person
singular no fewer than eight times in just twelve sentences. That same day, eleven
members of his cabinet resigned.
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Students and the Media
For the mainstream media, the events culminating in Suharto’s resignation were
a wake-up call, rousing them from their complacency, rupturing their privileged rela-
tionship with the regime, and forcing them into an unaccustomed activism. When the
Asian economic crisis hit, the country’s news media had largely avoided negative cov-
erage. Even when students’ growing boldness began to create opportunities for criti-
cal commentary, most outlets remained cautious. Yet, as editor Endy Bayuni noted, in
the end, the demonstrations simply grew too large to ignore. Once a few outlets began
covering them, there was no turning back.
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It was not the media, therefore, but students and workers, through their own pro-
tests, who first exploited the political opening created by the economic crisis, using it
to break the long taboo against criticizing the president. More significantly, through
determined defiance of the government’s ban on demonstrations, the students began
normalizing public dissent and gave members of the media their own opening. In
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the reinforcing dynamic of the political firestorm that emerged among protesters, the
media, and dissident elites, news coverage became an accelerant by providing demon-
strators a wider audience for their criticisms. In short, as Bayuni put it, “The [student]
movement broke the barrier against freedom of expression, and with it came freedom
of the press.”
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With the onset of the economic crisis in 1997, the legitimacy of Suharto’s New
Order began to crumble, creating an opening for the emerging reformasi movement