Award-winning Toronto Star foreign correspondent Paul Watson, who was arrested by Indonesian police after taking pictures of a riot in Medan, was deported to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, yesterday. Watson, The Star's Asian bureau chief, filed this story before being flown out of the country.

Paul Watson, Medan – The police did not care that dozens of looters were stripping bare a shop owned by an ethnic Chinese, even tearing the wires from the burned shell of his car.

On a day when at least six people died as rampaging mobs stoned and torched shops, two police detectives stood just a few metres away from one, watching thieves haul off every last scrap.

The Indonesian officers' only concern was the foreign journalist taking pictures.

They were intelligence officers in plainclothes: Captain Jhony Serayang and his partner, Top Sergeant James Sidabutar, who later bragged to me that he had a black belt in judo and used to like roughing up prisoners.

They didn't identify themselves at first, but were easily marked as cops. One had a home video camera. He asked me who I was and where I was staying.

While four looters dragged a generator out of the gutted auto parts shop, I gave the officer my business card, told him the name of my hotel and excused myself to go back to work.

About 10 minutes later, as I walked away from the mob that was still finding things to steal, the police stopped me at a taxi and put me under arrest.

What happened over the next nine hours is barely a hint of what this country's corrupt, and often brutal, police and military do to Indonesians each day.

My time in detention left me in no doubt that democracy activists who complain of arbitrary arrest, torture and disappearances are not the liars in Indonesia.

In one of the most recent cases, opposition activist Pius Lustrilanang risked his life to tell reporters in Jakarta how he was abducted and tortured for more than two months.

Lustrilanang, 30, said armed men kidnapped him on Feb. 4 and then held him with about six other activists in different jail cells, where the abductors applied electric shocks to his hand and feet.

They wore hoods, or blindfolded their prisoner, and kept asking him about his political activities. Before letting him go they warned him to keep his mouth shut or they would kill him.

Lustrilanang boarded a plane to exile in Amsterdam minutes after his news conference on April 27. He said his torturers worked like professionals and a national human rights group blamed Suharto's government.

Complaints ignored

Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority has complained for years that Indonesia's police and military do little to protect them and a lot to make their lives difficult.

Many are convinced the police and army let looters single out Chinese shops, both to keep the wealthier Chinese minority in its place and to let angry people blow off steam.

The Indonesian government's failure to protect the ethnic Chinese, whether by accident or design, has left them terrified of what might happen, any day.

They have good reason to be scared. Long before Bosnia or Rwanda, there was Indonesia.

Suharto rose to power in 1965 when as many as 500,000 people were massacred in an anti-communist purge, many of them ethnic Chinese merchants deeply resented for their money.

Throughout each night last week in Medan, groups of ethnic Chinese men stood guarding their shops with axes and clubs.

When the plainclothes police officers sat me down in an interrogation room and played back the video of me photographing wildly happy thieves, I asked them why they hadn't tried to protect the Chinese shop.

International bailout

"That's none of your business," one snapped. "You are not from here."

I told him it was every bit my business, especially with millions of Canadian tax dollars aiding Indonesia's government each year with still more pouring into a $43 billion (US) international bailout.

By now, there were half a dozen police in the room and I asked the question again. Why were they not trying to stop the theft of private property?

"They are poor people," replied the officer who had told me it was not my concern.

The walls of the interrogation room were streaked with dirt, a ceiling fan whirled overhead while Commander Arkian Lubis and Sergeant Zulfan Azmi searched through the phone book trying to find the immigration office's number.

Lubis was in uniform and Azmi wore a designer T-shirt. He offered me a soft drink, which he paid for, and then informed me that I was under arrest for working as a journalist illegally.

An immigration officer at Jakarta's airport stamped a two-month visa in my passport after I declared my profession as writer, and put a tick beside business as my purpose.

It was the third time I had entered Indonesia to report on its worst economic crisis in 30 years, and each time the immigration officers read my declaration cards and promptly stamped my passport.

Many foreign journalists enter Indonesia the same way, especially during emergencies like last week's riots in Medan, where authorities are doing all they can to stop foreign media coverage.

Student protests

As an immigration officer told me Friday, before confirming my deportation: "You came at the wrong time. We are all tired of this." And he motioned to the street outside.

After months of unprecedented student protests demanding Suharto step down, Indonesian authorities are losing their patience.

The police commander insisted I had sneaked in as a tourist, without a proper letter of introduction from the ministry of information, or a travel pass from the police in Jakarta.

Following a call to external affairs' emergency line in Ottawa, Kym Poole, a diplomat at Canada's embassy in Jakarta, was on the phone trying to persuade the commander to release me.

While she spoke, the police brought in another Canadian photographer with a Reuters wire service identity card, whom they also accused of working illegally as a journalist.

He was at least the fourth journalist hauled in by Medan police in two days. Another was with a foreign TV crew.

In another incident on Wednesday, a Reuters TV cameraman was attacked by a military intelligence officer after filming a mob looting a Chinese-owned motorcycle store while soldiers simply watched.

As the cameraman fled, the officer grabbed him, levelled a pistol at his temple and then fired three shots just above his head before slamming him against a wall.

He fell into a ditch full of sewage, breaking the camera and ruining the videotape. Reuters, a global news service, filed a formal protest with the Indonesian government.

The Cable News Network reported Thursday from Medan that the military had tried to prevent its accredited camera crew from filming the riots.

Some of the looters attacking a Chinese-owned food warehouse said they knew military intelligence officers were watching them, but thought they had permission to steal, CNN also reported.

The rioting in Medan was largely quelled by army reinforcements. Yesterday, soldiers sold rice to long lines of people running short of staples after many of the Chinese - traditional scapegoats in times of hardship – closed their shops.

Indonesia calls itself a democracy, and clearing up confusion over a bona fide journalist's visa would seem simple enough. Sometimes it is. But, as Sergeant Azmi said, Medan "is a different situation."

I would have to be deported, his commander insisted. The order was carried out yesterday after another six hours in police detention Friday.

An immigration officer escorted me to a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which was full of ethnic-Chinese Indonesians fleeing the country in fear for their lives.

After Tuesday's interrogation, my passport was seized and the commander said I could return to my hotel – if I surrendered the film in my two cameras.

Film has nothing to do with visa problems, I told him. Sergeant Azmi warned the Canadian diplomat the police would use force if I didn't give it up.

They backed off after The Star's foreign editor Bob Hepburn complained about the threat to Indonesian diplomats in Canada, and I handed over two rolls of film just before midnight.

While I waited to be released, I chatted with my guard, who was eager to work on his broken English.

He asked about my family, whether I had a wife or kids, or a personal computer. As often happens in Indonesia, the conversation turned to Suharto and dictatorship.

"In Canada, revolution?" he asked and we both laughed. "In Indonesia, government terrible."

'Suharto no good'

I told him Canadians don't go for uprisings much, but I had to agree with his assessment of Indonesia's rulers.

"In Indonesia, president for 32 years," he said after adding up the years Suharto has been in control of Indonesia. "In America, only two years."

Actually, the law gives American presidents at least four years, and Bill Clinton is going for eight, I told my guard. I said I got his point anyway.

"Suharto no good," he scowled back, and then he gave me the thumbs up, and smiled. "Democracy good," he said.

[The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, has written to Suharto protesting Watson's detention and subsequent deportation. Watson has said that at least three other journalists had been detained briefly in Medan in the course of covering the riot - James Balowski.]