Jakarta – Crowds of ethnic Chinese, with mixed feelings of fear and a new sense of pride, flocked openly to temples in Jakarta Wednesday to celebrate 'Imlek', as the Lunar New year is known here.
But though a harsh 1967 decree banning public Chinese celebrations was gone for a second year, and the government for the first time declared the Lunar New Year an optional state holiday, no one was taking chances.
More than 200 armed policemen, among some 8,000 security troops deployed citywide, were standing guard late Tuesday evening along the unusually quiet Gajah Mada street in Jakarta's densely-populated Chinatown area.
Ethnic Chinese were wary, with the still-blackened ruins of whole city blocks in Jakarta's Chinatown, devastated in riots in 1998, stood as a stark reminder of smouldering anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia.
But this year's celebration – the Year of the Snake – gave a new sense of pride for many Chinese Indonesians, despite swirling rumors of riots and bomb threats across the city.
The decree on the optional holiday gave Chinese Indonesians "a sense of recognition," said Lie Oen Liong, one of the caretakers of Jakarta's Kim Tek I, or the "Golden Virtue" Chinese temple.
"Although it's only an optional one, we are very happy since it represents a message that discrimination is slowly eradicating here," Lie told AFP as hundreds of people offered their prayers at the temple Tuesday night.
"During the (Muslim) Eid-El-Fitr holiday, we go to the homes of our Muslim friends to pay our respects ... now that Imlek is an optional holiday, they [ethnic-Indonesians] can do the same thing."
Rumors that a series of bombs would go off in Chinatown during the nine-day festivities had caused many temple-goers to be "somewhat edgy," Lie said.
"Nowadays, you can never predict what's going to happen ... but this is a house of worship and you just have to have faith. We survived the May riots and we can definitely survive other tragedies," he said. Joko Wijaya, a 35-year-old salesman who came with his wife and two children from the nearby Cengkareng area, told AFP that the new law – issued Monday by the Religious Affairs Ministry – was "a beginning of a new era."
At the next door Tee Tjong Ong Pou Sat temple, hundreds of beggars gathered, waiting for the Chinese revellers to toss them "ang pau," red envelopes with money in them.
In one five-star hotel, where army troops were stationed at the entrances, extra tables had been set up in the red lantern-festooned second floor lobby area, where the guests looked down on a dragon dance accompanied by beating drums and clashing symbols.
Waiters were dressed in traditional Chinese silk jackets, and parents guided small children to put Ang Pao in the mouth of the dragon.
Ethnic-Chinese, though estimated at some 3.5 percent of the country's 210 million people, hold a disproportionate amount of Indonesia's wealth.
But they have long been burdened by written and unwritten restrictions, most of them legacies of the Suharto era, including marked ID cards.
Under Suharto, who ironically counted a few wealthy ethnic Chinese businessmen among his inner circle, the Chinese were shut out of top government posts and forced to adopt Indonesian-sounding names.
The government also imposed a 10 percent limit on Chinese entering medical, engineering, law and science faculties at universities.
Many went abroad to study and later moved with their families to countries like Singapore and Australia seeking the greater opportunities open to them and their children there.
Lingering resentment against percieved favoritism during the Dutch colonial era, which bred distrust against ethnic Chinese, was further exacerbated by Jakarta's accusation that Beijing supported a failed coup attempt in 1965 blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
Many ethnic Chinese were among the more than 500,000 killed by official count in the harsh crackdown that followed the abortive coup, although the communist party was legal at the time.