Jakarta – Around 1,000 high school students on Wednesday defied a ban on protests to call on President Abdurrahman Wahid to step down and denounce attacks on schools by his supporters in East Java.
The protestors gathered peacefully outside the offices of the vice president in Jakarta, wearing their school uniforms. They were from schools attached to the country's second largest Islamic organization, the Muhammadiyah.
The students urged the government to investigate the vandalism of Muhammadiyah schools in East Java during a wave of often violent protests by Wahid's supporters last week. "Stop anarchy," one of their posters said. "Gus Dur go!," chanted the protestors, using Wahid's nickname.
Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of the country's founding president Sukarno, was away from her office at the time. "We are here to express our concern over vandalism of our schools in East Java," one of half a dozen teachers present, Hani Priyatna, told AFP.
But he said the vandalism was not necessarily committed by Wahid's supporters from the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) – the country's largest Islamic group which the president once led, and considered a rival of the Muhammadiyah.
NU members have been at the forefront of daily protests, many targetting the local offices of the opposition Golkar party in East Java, Wahid's political heartland, to protest calls by MPs that he step down in favour of Megawati.
Later in the day, some 100 student protestors from the City Forum (Forkot) rallied near the home of former president and Golkar patron Suharto, demanding "an immediate public trial" for corruption during his 32 years in power. They set fire to a poster of Suharto and a Golkar banner under the watchful eyes of police before disbanding peacefully.
In the North Maluku provincial capital of Ternate, hundreds of anti-Wahid students also called for the embattled 60-year-old president to step down, the state Antara news agency said.
The protests came a day after Education Minister Yahya Muhaimin ordered head masters to ban pupils from taking part in the current protests, warning that they could be killed.
"School students are still young and we will be very sorry if they must die young," the Indonesian Observer quoted Muhaimin as saying. The minister also urged principals to punish those caught joining protests with extra homework.
Parliament censured Wahid on February 1 after a parliamentary panel concluded that he could "be suspected" of involvement in an illegal disbursement of 3.9 million dollars from the state food agency Bulog.
The commission also said he failed to account for a two million dollar gift from the Sultan of Brunei.
Wahid's camp this week has hit back at the censure on two other fronts, with his National Awakening Party (PKB) accusing Golkar cadres of burning down their own offices, and Defence Minister Muhammad Mahfud accusing Golkar of embezzling funds from Bulog when it was still in power in 1999.
"According to information from our East Java officials, the people who burned the Golkar offices there were those coming out of the office. So, it was Golkar people themselves," PKB deputy secretary Chotibul Umam Wiranu was quoted as saying by the Detik.com news service.