John McBeth, Jakarta – Down a narrow side street in a crowded East Jakarta suburb is a small nondescript office marked by a white banner with a red cross. Inside, Father Sandyawan Sumardi is playing host to yet another group of people he simply calls "the victims." They've been streaming into his office since May 14, when organized mobs in the capital went on a rampage of looting, arson and rape that targeted Indonesia's tiny ethnic-Chinese community.

Shocked Indonesians are still struggling to understand the mayhem that raged virtually unchecked for most of that day and continued over the next two. Some think it was a spontaneous explosion caused by long-smouldering resentment over economic disparity. But others like Sandyawan believe the orgy of organized violence stemmed from a conflict among key Indonesian power-holders that drew on racial hatred. "This was not about ethnicity," says the reed-thin Catholic priest softly, his eyes red-rimmed behind his spectacles. "It was an intra-elite conflict that needed victims."

Sandyawan, whose Jakarta Social Institute works in some of the city's poorest neighbourhoods, is better placed than most to make that judgment. Soon after the riots broke out, he dispatched small volunteer teams across Jakarta to help people in trouble and, just as importantly, to record what they saw. Those eyewitness accounts, some from inside borrowed ambulances, have been catalogued in a comprehensive report sent to the state-appointed National Commission on Human Rights. One key observation: The violence was premeditated and organized, not spontaneous.

The findings by Sandyawan's teams have put renewed pressure on both the government and the military to not only explain the circumstances behind the mid-May looting and rapes, but also to account for earlier incidents of violence – the fatal shootings of four student demonstrators at Jakarta's elite Trisakti University on May 12, and the abduction and torture over the past year of more than 20 pro-democracy activists, 12 of whom are still missing.

Connecting up the dots has become everyone's preoccupation. "The disappearances and the shootings are connected to the same group in the armed forces, and the shooting and the riots are connected in terms of cause and affect," notes Marzuki Darusman, deputy chairman of the National Commission on Human Rights. He believes, though, that others were also involved in the rioting.

A link has already been drawn between the abductions and the military – remarkably by the armed forces itself. An internal fact-finding mission has concluded that Kopassus, Indonesia's special forces, was involved in at least nine of the kidnappings (including those of five activists still missing). Announcing the arrest of seven Kopassus officers, the military indicated in a July 14 statement that what began as an effort to root out radicals among pro-democracy activists had gone badly astray. Although the military didn't immediately release their names, sources close to the armed forces say one of those arrested was Col. Charuwan, commander of Kopassus Group 4, the covert arm that works closely with military intelligence. Charuwan is a loyalist of Lt.-Gen. Prabowo Subianto, son-in-law of former President Suharto.

Certainly old practices take time to die. Those looking for improvements in the quality of justice have criticized the way riot police appear to have been used as convenient scapegoats for the Trisakti shootings. And although Jakarta has finally conceded there were organized groups behind the riots and the rapes, witnesses and victims alike have been subjected to the same sort of harassment that marked the Suharto years.

Marzuki says the instigators are sending women photographs of their rapes as a warning to keep silent. Numbed by the testimony he has heard and cross-checked himself, the former legislator from the ruling Golkar party told the Review: "This is the first time we are describing a violation in Indonesia as a crime against humanity – the codeword the United Nations used for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia," where the majority Serbs sought to systematically eliminate the Muslim minority.

Investigations into the incidents have been progressing slowly. But with Kopassus being fingered for the disappearances, the blame for almost everything that occurred during Suharto's final days as president is likely to fall even harder on the head of Prabowo. The latter headed Kopassus for two years before taking over as commander of Kostrad, the Army Strategic Reserve, a post from which he was sacked just days after Suharto's May 20 resignation. He is now commandant of Bandung's Staff and Command School, a low-profile position.

Gen. Wiranto, the armed-forces commander, has since been weeding out Prabowo associates from the military's ranks, leaving insiders wondering whether the other shoe has yet to drop. Among those axed has been Maj.-Gen. Sjafrie Syamsuddin, Jakarta's regional commander and a former Suharto bodyguard, who was transferred to a position in charge of territorial affairs.

Whatever the truth of Prabowo's involvement, a consensus is emerging both inside and outside the military that the Trisakti University killings and the subsequent violence were deliberately staged to show that Wiranto was incapable of maintaining law-and-order while Suharto was on a state visit to Egypt. The Trisakti incident may also have been designed to sabotage a reform dialogue Wiranto had initiated with student activists.

Given the mystery surrounding the other events, the activist abductions are perhaps the easiest to explain. Because of the circumstantial evidence available to investigators, analysts believe the abductions were aimed at cowing opposition to Suharto, timed as they were between the general elections in May 1997 and the March 1998 session of the People's Consultative Assembly that re-elected the former president.

A source close to the military says that when investigators visited Kopassus headquarters in Cijantung outside Jakarta, they found a Group 4 detention centre – which may have been used to hold some of the activists – had been levelled about a month earlier. According to the source, now that the pressure is on, the military appears resigned to cleaning up its own house. Now, it is trying to restore a measure of confidence not only in itself, but in the way Indonesia is viewed from abroad.

Prior to the military's announcement, the civilian Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, known as Kontras, had implicated four separate military commands in the abduction conspiracy, an indication that the kidnappers were acting under a central authority. Because it had been implicated in similar acts in the past, suspicion has centred on Cijantung-based Kopassus Group 4.

For Wiranto, the dilemma seems to be just how far up the chain of command he should allocate blame. As the victims' relatives clamour for accountability, the decision has become harder because some of the missing might well be dead. Sources close to the military say Wiranto might even decide to call a military honour board if suspicion falls on an officer of general rank. One of the last times such a board was convened was after the 1991 massacre in Dili in East Timor. Maj.-Gen. Sintong Panjaitan, the regional commander, was sacked over the incident even though he wasn't present when troops opened fire on unarmed demonstrators.

Apportioning of blame for the fatal shootings at Trisakti has been fuzzier. Although human-rights groups are convinced trained snipers killed the four students, the blame so far has fallen on 18 policemen, two of whom are already on trial for breaches of procedure by losing control of their men and allowing them to fire on unarmed students. No one, however, has been charged with the deaths.

Human-rights lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution, who represents the two lieutenants, says the investigation was directed only at the police right from the start. "There was never any intention to get to the bottom of the case," says Buyung, who was allowed to meet his clients only eight hours before the trial opened. He adds that the military knows "it might endanger the unity of the armed forces and could become very complicated politically." Wiranto has denied these allegations and says investigators are still looking for "additional facts" to determine the involvement of other parties in the shootings.

So far, there's no physical evidence linking anyone to the crime. All four dead were buried without an autopsy, a surprising omission in itself. Two weeks later, one of the bodies was exhumed and a bullet extracted. It came from a Steyr, an Austrian-made assault rifle that police carried on May 12. But a high-ranking police officer, who spoke to the REVIEW on condition of anonymity, says the retrieved bullet still hasn't been matched to any of the weapons collected at the scene. Nor has a second bullet found inside a campus building. He says a third slug dug out of a wounded student has disappeared.

The officer insists that the 18 police suspects, including 12 members of an elite anti-bomb squad, each carried three blank rounds and 12 rubber bullets in their rifle magazines – but did not have live ammunition. "This is a political decision, not a judicial decision," he says. "They don't want the army to be involved."

The students themselves were unaware live rounds were being fired. The fatal shots appeared to have been aimed at the tail end of the demonstration when almost everyone was back inside the campus. All the victims were hit in the head or upper body, indicating the presence of snipers firing from a nearby flyover or other high vantage points. The students can't confirm police sightings of 10 mystery men, carrying Steyrs and dressed in police uniforms, jogging along the opposite end of the flyover soon after the shootings.

Local activists also suspect the military was behind the organized rioting that occurred a few days later, simply because it's the only group with the organizational muscle to pull it all off. "It's difficult to believe that a government intelligence network which has long been monitoring the movement of its citizens is so impotent and unreliable that it couldn't protect all those lives," says Sandyawan, the Catholic priest.

Some analysts suggest the deliberate targeting of ethnic-Chinese properties and women was an exercise in ethnic cleansing that spun out of control, leaving 1,200 people dead in burned-out malls and supermarkets. President B.J. Habibie, human-rights and religious leaders, almost everyone except the military itself, are now satisfied that organized groups were responsible for much of the May 14 destruction, which began in Chinatown's Glodok district and spread as far as the Chinese-owned Lippo Karawaci Mall, 25 kilometres away. There, remote-camera tapes showed six truckloads of men breaking into banks, cash dispensers and silversmiths – then inviting in thousands of looters. Only hours beforehand, soldiers and police guarding the mall had been ordered to withdraw. Who gave the order to leave remains a mystery.

The story was the same in other places. Sandyawan's report lists 10 incidents where groups of 8-16 young men, some dressed in high-school or college uniforms and others sporting short hair and military boots, screamed anti-Chinese slogans as they led mobs in the looting and arson. "They were professional groups who were well prepared and had obviously planned everything beforehand," says Sandyawan, noting that witnesses saw some of the men carrying radios and pistols.

At two department stores, men who emerged from cars carrying cans of petrol started fires and ran upstairs with the looters. Hundreds died. One of the worst death-tolls was in East Jakarta's Jatinegara Plaza, where Sandyawan claims tear gas was fired into the ground floor, as flames consumed the upper floors.

Equally horrific was the systematic violence perpetrated on ethnic Chinese in the street and in their homes. Sandyawan's team has recorded at least 180 rapes, some committed in front of terror-stricken families. Many Indonesians have refused to believe the stories. "What we're up against is a wall of scepticism, which shocks us as much as the crimes themselves," says human-rights commissioner Marzuki. "This should be a soul-searching time for Indonesians."

But so much is puzzling. Why didn't the army move more swiftly to crush the riots, waiting instead until almost nightfall before putting armoured vehicles and soldiers on the street? The authorities have proffered no adequate explanation. A general recalls coming across a well-dressed young Indonesian directing men armed with crowbars to break into a shop in Central Jakarta's Sabang shopping centre. "In hindsight," he says now, "I suppose we should have arrested him."

There's also been no satisfactory explanation for why Wiranto and the military leadership flew to East Java for a divisional parade on the morning of the riots, even though trouble had already erupted in the central business district the previous night. They should have known there was a security vacuum in the capital: Most police had been confined to barracks because of tensions over the Trisakti killings, and some key Kostrad and police units were in Medan, where they had been deployed to quell riots some weeks earlier.

Lt.-Gen. Prabowo Subianto's responsibility for May's tragic events, as well as his motives, are open to conjecture. One thing is certain, though: He might well be facing his toughest test for survival, even as Wiranto emerges stronger after weeks of careful consolidation. Military sources say Prabowo's relationship with the armed-forces chief is cold and may become frostier if investigations are allowed to take their course. Says one experienced observer: "If you listen very carefully, you can hear the sabres being sharpened in the back room."

Prabowo's relations with his father-in-law and the Suharto family are no better, even though he continues to live a stone's throw from the Suharto residence. The day after Suharto resigned, he told Prabowo during a face-to-face meeting that he considered him a "troublemaker." The family, for its part, criticized the young general for not ending the student occupation of parliament, which became a powerful symbol of the reformist struggle around the world.

Prabowo privately protests his innocence. His defence: The responsibility for troop deployment in Jakarta rested with the regional commander, in this case Sjafrie, a close friend. A Western military expert agrees that for "operational purposes" this is indeed so, but he says it still leaves company and battalion commanders in a serious quandary. As he puts it: "If a three-star general writes your proficiency report and he orders you to put troops into a certain area, are you going to do it?"