Keith B. Richburg, Jakarta – Indonesia Elang Mulya Lesmana's parents first noticed changes in their son at the beginning of April. He started reading newspapers, asking questions about the country's economic decline, becoming more politically aware. Then he brought out his dark blue university blazer and asked his mother to sew on all the school patches, declaring, "Starting tomorrow, I'm going to wear this every day!"
The one day Elang forgot his jacket was May 12, the day of the big demonstration here at Trisakti University, called to demand the end of President Suharto's 32-year-old authoritarian regime. When the shooting started, he must have stood out at the top of the school steps, a sole T-shirt amid a sea of dark blue blazers, waving his arms and directing the other students to safety. That's when a sniper's bullet ripped through his chest.
Elang, 19, was one of four Trisakti students killed that day by unseen gunmen. Hery Hartanto, 21, was killed by a bullet in the back after he paused during a lull in the chaos to wash the tear gas from his face and hands with water from a plastic bottle. Henriawan, 20, was shot twice while running, once in the back and once in the neck; he managed to make it to the base of a flagpole in the center of the campus to sit down and die. Hafidhin Royan, 21, a quiet young man who had never gotten involved, died instantly when a bullet pierced his head, just above the ear.
More than any other single incident during months of political and economic turmoil, the shootings at Trisakti University led to the toppling of Suharto and the emergence of a new political order in Indonesia. The slayings triggered massive rioting here in the capital that left more than 1,000 people dead, and they led the armed forces to decide that Suharto had to go before the security situation in the capital became untenable. And they added new urgency to demands across Indonesian society for a more democratic political system.
A reconstruction of the Trisakti shootings offers a revealing look at how and why Suharto's government collapsed so suddenly and raises questions about the role of powerful military commanders that still haunt Suharto's successor, President B.J. Habibie. The stories of the slain Trisakti students show that these four average young men from middle-class families, like many young people across this archipelago of 204 million people, were swept up in a rapid political awakening this spring that transformed their lives and ultimately made them unintentional martyrs.
An investigation of the shootings suggests strongly they were a deliberate act supported by hard-line military elements opposed to reform. Interviews with students at the scene that day, including two of those still hospitalized – as well as friends, family members, human rights investigators and diplomats – indicate the shootings were not random acts by security forces firing blindly into a crowd. Almost all the victims, killed and wounded, were shot in the head, neck, chest or back.
"It was not a sudden burst of fire," said a Western diplomat who also has studied the incident. "It was slow, deliberate fire, for over an hour, and that can be proven... You're talking about targeting – that counts for the high number of kills for the number of wounded."
On Saturday, the military announced it was charging two police officers, 1st Lt. Agus Tri Heryanto, 29, and 2nd Lt. Pariyo, 30, of the police anti-riot brigade, with disobeying orders and not controlling their troops. An internal military investigation has blamed the police for using live rounds, instead of rubber bullets, when dispersing the students.
But police officials have denied issuing any live rounds to officers on May 12, and defense lawyers and other Indonesian sources said they suspect the police are being made the scapegoats for a military unit that was really behind the Trisakti slayings.
Several sources said they suspect elite units of the army special forces, called Kopassus, of masterminding the incident because of the skill needed to carry out the shootings. Those units were once under the command of Lt. Gen. Prabowo Subianto, a tough and ambitious officer who is also Suharto's son-in-law.
In March, Prabowo was promoted to head the much larger Army Strategic Reserve Command in Jakarta, but he maintained his influence over the Kopassus forces he helped train and equip, with assistance from the US military.
"This was not an unfortunate action," said Marzuki Darusman of the government-sponsored National Commission on Human Rights. "There was a great deal of planning. The high degree of skill that went into Trisakti and the sophisticated weaponry indicates only certain units which have that," he said. He added that witnesses have come forward suggesting that Kopassus was behind the attack.
Prabowo was relieved of his strategic reserve command after Suharto's May 21 resignation, but he remains in the army, teaching at a staff college in Bandung, 75 miles southeast of Jakarta. Five days after the Trisakti shootings, and before his reassignment, Prabowo visited the home of one of the slain students, Hery Hartanto. As Hartanto's startled parents looked on, Prabowo took a copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, held it above his head and swore before God that he did not order the Trisakti slayings.
"It was the first time in my life I've ever seen anything like it," said Hartanto's father, Sjahir Mulyo Utomo, 70, a retired army 2nd lieutenant. After that display, he said, he now believes Prabowo was not involved.
Unlikely heroes Whoever did order the killings may not have realized that the day's violence would give a new set of martyrs to Indonesia's popular uprising. And to those who knew them, the four who died were the unlikeliest of heroes.
Elang Mulya Lesmana was worried about forgetting his blue Trisakti jacket that day. Since only students were allowed in the demonstrations, he knew that anyone without the distinctive dark blue university blazer might be suspected of being one of the police informants who infiltrated all such anti-government protests. He had left at 6 a.m. for the 90-minute bus ride from his parents' spacious home in the far southern corner of Jakarta to the Trisakti campus in the northwest. He told his parents he was going to take a final exam that day, the last of Trisakti's academic term.
Since the beginning of the year, Indonesian students had been mounting steadily larger protests, demanding that Suharto resign. The unrest was touched off by the collapse late last year of Indonesia's currency, the rupiah, which forced a massive bailout by the International Monetary Fund and induced a severe economic crisis marked by massive layoffs, soaring prices and the collapse of the banking system.
But the students were not just protesting prices; they were demanding that Indonesia embrace democracy after decades of Suharto's authoritarianism. Trisakti University, a private institution that attracts students from many leading Indonesian families, had recently become a focal point of the demonstrations; students there were pressing to move their marches off campus and into the streets of Jakarta.
Elang, his parents said, was an average teenager, fond of playing basketball in the evening with neighborhood friends and playing the guitar in a band. But his parents said they knew Elang was changing when he began wearing his Trisakti jacket and had his mother sew on all the patches.
"From the beginning, when he brought down that jacket and started wearing it, he started getting up earlier, he was reading the newspapers, he started asking questions about the fall of the rupiah," said his father, Bagos Yoga Nandita, 49, a graphic designer. "At the time, I was really proud that my son was getting more involved."
Only later, when they were called to the hospital morgue to collect Elang's body, did his parents discover that their son had become a key student activist, organizing on behalf of the architectural school where he studied. "Maybe he didn't want to worry his parents, so he never told us he was going to demonstrations," said his father.
Hery Hartanto underwent a similar transformation. The son of a well-to-do family, he had a wide circle of friends and was always lending money to those in need. It was in February, his parents said, that he discovered political activism. "I told him not to join in with the other students," said his mother, Lasmiati. "But he was becoming very concerned about the economic situation, so it was impossible for me to stop him from going."
At dinner conversations, Hartanto grew vocal, once saying adamantly that Suharto had to resign. "I told him not to talk about such things," Lasmiati recalled. He was young, his parents thought, and strong-headed.
Serious misgivings
The demonstration was to begin in the late morning of May 12. The protesters were becoming bold – encouraged, many believe, by the armed forces' relative leniency even as they pushed their rallies farther beyond the campus gates. This time, the students planned to take their protest a few miles down the highway to the national parliament building. Suharto was out of the country, attending a conference in Cairo.
Just before 11 a.m., the red-and-white Indonesian flag in the center of campus was lowered to half-staff, and the students, joined by faculty members, began singing the national anthem. There was a moment of silence, a sign of respect for the country's poor and suffering, followed by a series of fiery speeches. The crowd was getting revved up for the march.
Hafidhin Royan didn't care much for demonstrations. A reserved engineering student who never got involved in the campus protests, Hafidhin had come to school that day only to finish his assignments before returning to his home town, Bandung, for the summer break. He had told his mother he was going home on May 13.
When he arrived at Trisakti, Hafidhin found that all classes and exams had been canceled because of the demonstration. He could have left then. But friends say Hafidhin was a follower, not a leader. He stuck around, "out of solidarity with the students," said his engineering school classmate, Agung.
Just after noon, students noticed that security forces were gathering on an elevated toll road that swings past the campus as it winds toward Jakarta's international airport. Some became angry. Elang was growing nervous.
Elang told a friend he wanted to go home because he was feeling "uncomfortable" about the demonstration. Another friend said he was going off to pray, but Elang stopped him. "If you go pray, we may never see you again," Elang said.
Then the friends threw their arms around one another and posed for a photograph – Elang without his blue jacket.
Just before 1 p.m., students began moving out of Trisakti's main gates en route to parliament. Hafidhin turned to Agung, his classmate, and said, " 'Gung, we shouldn't move out, we shouldn't go. We'll get shot!" The friends became separated. On the street outside there was a lengthy standoff, with two rows of riot police, later backed by truckloads of reinforcements, refusing to let the students pass.
For hours, the students alternately negotiated with police to be allowed to move and sat on the pavement in protest. They made speeches, sang patriotic songs unable to move forward, refusing to retreat. They held their ground through a brief but heavy downpour.
Henriawan had already gone home at 2 that afternoon; his uncle, Subanning, saw him talking with other neighborhood youths. Then, without saying a word to his uncle, Henriawan went back to rejoin the students.
Subanning was not particularly worried about his nephew. He never knew Henriawan to be involved in politics, although lately they had started discussing Indonesia's economic crisis at the dinner table. Subanning, a Jakarta city government employee, took night classes at Trisakti. He arrived near the campus at 4:30 and found the scene to be "chaotic."
But as Subanning looked on, the students began to file back to campus. Two faculty administrators apparently had brokered a deal with police to end the standoff peacefully. The students would retreat to campus, and the police would move back their line.
But just then, a Trisakti dropout, identified by students as "Mashud," appeared and began shouting obscenities at some of the female students. A small group of Trisakti students suspected "Mashud" was a police informant or was being paid to stir up trouble and chased the intruder back toward police lines.
Just then, at about 5, the police charge began. They fired tear gas, swung their batons at the retreating students and opened fire with rubber bullets. The slow move back to campus became a wild stampede.
"What was that?" Subanning asked, hearing the cracking sound. Someone yelled back, "They're firing at the students!"
Henriawan made it as far as the campus gates. The first bullet hit him in the right side of the neck, twisting his body around. The second bullet caught him in the middle of the back. Once on campus, Henriawan was able to walk as far as the flagpole; a friend saw him sit down on the concrete base and keel over.
Hery Hartanto thought he was already safe because he was back on the university grounds. He had run far and fast, and he and a friend stopped at the foot of the stairs in front of the M Building to catch their breath and wash the tear gas from their faces with a bottle of water when Hartanto fell forward suddenly. "Oh, my God!" he cried. "I've been shot in the leg!" The friend looked at him and said, "It's not your leg." The bullet had gone straight into Hartanto's upper back lodging near his heart. Hafidhin's friends could not say clearly where he was, because he had stayed on campus for fear of being shot. But some witnesses said they remember him making a call from a row of telephones near the Student Union.
He had just replaced the receiver when a bullet tore into the right side of his head, just above his ear, and came out his back. The path of the bullet suggests that whoever shot him fired from above, from the direction of the elevated toll road.
The students realized quickly that some of the bullets flying into their campus were not rubber, but lethal ammunition. Elang took responsibility for making sure others got to safety. He climbed to the tile expanse at the top of the M Building steps and shouted to the others to run inside.
"Get in! Get in! As fast as you can!" he was shouting, waving both hands. Then the bullet entered his chest.
'Clearly targeted'
Two wounded students remain hospitalized. Tammu Abraham Alexander Bulo, 20, who was shot in the neck, said he believes the Trisakti students were targeted.
The bullet "definitely came from up top and came down," he said from his hospital bed. "The people that died were clearly targeted in the head, the neck area or the chest."
Elang's father visited the spot where his son was slain while the white tiles were still fresh with blood.
"If you look at exactly where he was shot [in the chest], it could not have been a random, accidental occurrence," he said. "It must have been someone with weapons training. It was so precise."