Present & Future

It has been a month of hatred in Indonesia. More than 500 shops in Bandung were wrecked in a single day. At Suka-bumi, youthful rioters hurled six automobiles over a precipice. Fistfights were common in dozens of other towns and villages.

The ugly violence has one common denominator: all the victims were Chinese, that minority of 3,000,000 among Indonesia's 97 million which by hard work and nimble brain has extracted wealth from the overheated, forested archipelago of President Sukarno. The racial bitterness beats even Birmingham, for despite repeated government efforts to crack their economic power, the Chinese--sometimes operating through middlemen to circumvent official sanctions--still control trade, agriculture, small industry, the black market and other forms of commerce. "Go into even the smallest village in Indonesia," an Indonesian army officer once complained, "and you will find one man whose house has electric lights and a refrigerator. That man will be Chinese."

"We Are Hungry." There is nothing new in Indonesia's prejudice, since the overseas Chinese have been running things there for years. But feeling against the Chinese has risen higher as Indonesia has slid toward the brink of economic ruin. Inflation is out of control; banknotes in circulation have doubled in the past year, and the U.S. dollar, officially pegged at 45 rupiahs, now gets 1,500 rupiahs on the black market. A good sarong costs a worker three months' pay, and one Indonesian airline pilot has complained that he can make ends meet only by smuggling in cameras from Hong Kong. Government-subsidized schoolbooks are too expensive for some students. There are periodic rice shortages, and production of rubber, copra, and tin on expropriated Dutch estates has declined sharply under the management of fumbling government bureaucrats. Students have staged demonstrations with banners screaming: "We are hungry."

Resentment against the rich, well-fed Chinese minority finally exploded after a fistfight between an Indonesian student and a Chinese student at Bandung's Institute of Technology. When a youthful rioter was shot by police in one town, mobs with bamboo clubs herded Chinese from their houses and made them bow their heads as his funeral procession passed by. Firing over the heads of a screaming throng in Bandung, police brought down a power line which electrocuted two Indonesians.

Prone to Enjoy. Predictably, Indonesia's President Sukarno blamed neither himself nor his chaotic economic policies for the riots, said that they were caused by "counterrevolutionaries trying to capitalize on the food and clothing situation and on the Chinese minority problem." He went right ahead with plans to squeeze out Western oil companies, though in the process he risked losing the source of one-third of his nation's total export earnings.

Not one to be disturbed long by mere economic questions, Sukarno was more interested in tenure. So as to be able to cope with any future disorders, he had his rubber stamp Congress "appoint" him to the presidency for life. "This decision might not entirely live up to certain constitutional requirements," harrumphed an Indonesian Cabinet Minister, "but it should be remembered that it is a political revolutionary product and not a legalistic product." With his continued career thus assured, Sukarno flew off for what was described as a long rest in Japan, Belgrade, Vienna, Rome, and France, which he is always prone to enjoy. At Sukarno's stop in Tokyo last week, the buss was waiting at the airport--in the form of three delectable things overdressed for the occasion.

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