I was somewhere outside Yogyakarta on this day eight years ago, within sight of Mount Merapi volcano.

One of the greatest democratic revolutions in history was about to erupt but I didn’t know it then.

I was at a mysterious Javanese graveyard of tombs outside Yogyakarta, where old and young many of them in traditional Javanese dress of batiks in ancient cinnamon and indigo dyes, alongside boulevards of tombs and walls, a lot of dark palms shading it all, mysteriously gloomy, even as amid the equatorial sun its shade made it all refreshingly cool. The old women, like the men, wore no shirts, in the ancient Javanese style of royalty. I was walking down a thousand tiny and ancient mildewed steps of some ancient palace, talking to an abangan military man who spoke English and who was there to pay his respects his ancestors. News had just broken of students shot dead by troops in Jakarta at Trisakti University. I asked him about it. Should I worry about returning to Jakarta tomorrow? He told me he did not have much information and I pressed him as to why. Then he said, “Have mercy on me, I am afraid to talk about it.”

That evening, I understood why. I went to the threadbare house of my warm, friendly Acehnese student friend who went to Gajah Madah University. He had a big picture of the Ayatollah Khoemeini on his wall of the rented house amid the leafy residences, where bikes and motorcycles were parked out front by the tropical greens and stone fixtures, and we talked about Indonesia’s currency crisis which interested me.

But what really interested him more was ‘demokrasi’ and the great political struggle for that that was rumbling and erupting in Indonesia. We watched dictator Soeharto on the television from a summit in Egypt and mocked the bastard on the television, sitting on the floor by the kitchen because there was no furniture, just him, the TV, two Achenese friends smoking kretek clove cigarettes with an ashtray, me, and the ayatollah.

I can’t tell you how pregnant that moment seemed as those were the days of thousands of young student moving to defy the thuggish Soeharto regime all by themselves. I had been going to the first demonstrations in March, taking photographs, to see for myself. Something big was going to happen, but I did not know what or when. Would we get shot? Would we get caught? Would the students throw the tinpot out? My friend wanted to forge forward.

Indonesia had been ruled by a dictator for 32 years. The young people had no memory of anything but dictatorship. It was a stable country but it was corrupt as hell and kids felt they had no outlet for their considerable energies. They were bright college students who had the pride of being Asians in the world’s only region that had pulled itself out of poverty after just one generation, and yet they were getting cheated at the critical moment and their future was being robbed in front of their very eyes. The great currency meltdown was the root of it, and they felt their dreams had been crushed – everything had been crushed – beggars had appeared on the streets and jobs were gone and the money was worthless and no one knew what to do.

The only thing being done was a huge multibillion-dollar IMF loan to keep these cronies who had caused the problem in the first place afloat — a bill these young people knew they would have to pay in the end.

If they wanted to make something of themselves, they’d have to go to Singapore which was suddenly too expensive for them. Or they could resist. One of those two.

At the same time, the university kids, babes in black turtlenecks and blue jeans and clogs (hardly tropical wear, just pure stylin’!) at furtive teach-ins on demokrasi, at Jakarta’s University of Indonesia campus rec rooms, decorated by wildly colored batiks repeatedly told me that it was their own parents who had pushed them to fight for demokrasi. They told their kids they were too old and so it was the students who would have to lead the fight and struggle. The kids were ready for it.

At Universitas Indonesia, I had earlier been to the student barricades not far from the leafy, wide, UCSD-like entry and the guard gate of the southern campus. The bus stop across the street was where the Soeharto agents in their little black jackets used to listen to us talking. The student leader told me that when they got too close, we’d start talking about Clinton and Lewinsky, it was the signal of danger nearby. There were several student tents and each one had different kinds of demokrasi activists – they all wanted me to sign their guest books – something I wondered about, given the Soeharto goons’ inquisitiveness, but I signed. I was surprised that these tents were allowed to exist at all. As dusk came, someone made a pot of peanut and tofu soup, and I listened to the religious students – probably Islamofascists but this was 1998 – tell me of the need for reformasi and demokrasi, and an end to korupsi, kolusi, dan nepotisme (corruption, collusion, and nepotism) that was blighting their future.

I thought about that and after that day near Yogyakarta, I arrived again in Jakarta on May 13, and asked a cab at the airport to take me to the Menteng house of my journo friend who was a Chinese Malay Christian. The cab didn’t want to take me to the Menteng area of central Jakarta, which I could not understand. He said there was another student demonstration, a big one, that had cut Jakarta in half. I told him to drive around it then. He said it was practically impossible. Other cab drivers had also told me no. Finally he agreed to — for $20, three times the normal cost of a cab from the airport to Menteng. It was high but I paid. I soon learned why. In the night gloom, driving two hours for what should have been 15 minutes – it was either smoke or fog, swirling in the dark – and lining the highways, even on rising overpasses, I saw all these idle people wearing civilian clothes in army trucks and hanging around on the highway. They were doing nothing but waiting. I had no idea who or what they were (they were government’s planned rioters) and guessed it was due to the demonstration but it had a strange feeling. After all, demonstrators demonstrate and then go home. Not these people. I got to the house but only the maid was there. My friend called and said she had been warned by her editor to stay in Yogyakarta. (I didn’t even realize she was there!) So there I was, alone, without my hostess, in a rich area of Jakarta on a night before the most violent riots Indonesia had seen since the Year Of Living Dangerously in 1966.

I decided to go to sleep early, it was hot and there was no fan and I had finished reading all of my Jakarta Posts so there was nothing else to do. The maid and the night watchman told me not to go outside, because it was dangerous – there were some gatherings at the end of the block I had wanted to see. Before I went to bed, the maid came to me and said the Blue Bird cab company had a phone call for me. The man on the line asked the maid if they could pick me up at 5:30 am instead of 6:30 am for my next day’s 7:30 a.m. flight to Singapore. They didn’t say why and I didn’t suspect anything at the time. I said sure.

The morning of May 14 they got me there on time, driving through the early morning haze, and I tipped them generously, something like an extra $20, I am not sure why. At the airport customs, I had all kinds of dissident literature with me from my travels, so I stuck a hibiscus in my hair and put on a Hawaiian shirt and some coconut smelling sunblock so there’d be no question in their minds that I was a tourist and they’d be less curious about the stuff in my bag. There was no trouble, the airport was calm and efficient, and barely anyone was there. In the waiting room for the flight, everyone was glued to the television set, and Soeharto was to arrive from Egypt that day. But more was going on than that and the mood was just heavy with anxiety. The stewardess had to shoo people away from that TV just to get them to board the plane, they weren’t doing it on their own. By the time I landed in Singapore, around an hour later, Jakarta was in flames.

All hell broke loose around 8 or 9 o’clock with govenment rioters raking people out of cars and torching and killing. The troops fired machine guns all over the place, blasting starfish into each window of every mirrored glittering Jakarta downtown high rise they could find, and helicopter gunships fired on people below huddling under an overpass near Glodok, the Chinatown. Meanwhile, Soeharto’s goons rampaged through Chinatown, burning everything in sight, shops, satellite dishes, houses, cars, highways, parking garages, palm trees, billboards, everything. 200 looters attacked a shopping mall that was on fire – and its walls crashed in, burning them all dead to nothing, the stench of death permeating that area as the cement steps remained covered with ash, and the dead blackened walls stayed hot to touch for weeks.

I got to work in Singapore at about 9:00, saw the flames on TV and I sent an email home to tell my family in the states that I was safe. I recall that they emailed back that they didn’t even know there was a problem. That afternoon I called one of the students at University of Indonesia and he told me it was chaos and they were all scared of what was going on, hiding under their beds, laying low. It was then pretty clear to me that the students doing the demonstrating and whoever it was who was out rioting were not the same thing.

I flew back to Jakarta from Singapore by the weekend and looked at the smoking ruin that was there in Jakarta and the first impression off the airplane at Sukarno Hatta airport, as I breathed the hot air and scent of clove cigarettes was the overwhelming stench of burning wood all through the city – it smelled like one huge campfire.

Amid this death and destruction, turmoil like none I have ever seen, these same students, were told they’d be shot if they dared demonstrate in the streets in the next days, yet took to them anyway – on the day of a real big demonstration planned near the center of the city, to be led by Amien Rais, (who was told by the army he’d be shot if he went) all of a sudden, on television … Soeharto came on, and as students watched, tearfully resigned. The students, Soeharto’s worst enemies, the ones who had forced him out … were in tears too.

Soeharto wasn’t completely evil, he had brought roads and electricity and education, he had brought manufacturing and bank accounts and home ownership and high tech jobs, but he tolerated intolerable corruption, rigged elections, retarded the formation of Indonesia’s democratic institutions, and put Indonesia behind its ultra-competitive Tiger neighbors. We hated him enough, and in the name of demokrasi, he had to go.

After that, the students were left to build a democracy from the tattered sticks and stumps of Soeharto’s regime, eventually winning the right to elections by November, something they – and everyone else in Indonesia – enthusiastically embraced.

They eventually formed parties, like the Forkat Justice party and eventually blended into the political scene as Indonesia was able to hold one democratic election after another, haltingly compromising, taking second-best in the spirit of unity, taking it all seriously, improving their leadership gradually … to the point where they are now.

Here is a memoir of a student leader in today’s Jakarta Post describing what happens to great democracy movements once they achieve what they dream of.

Jakartass has some great commentary and photos of the event along with links to other Indonesian bloggers recalling the event that’s a must read here.
Hat tip: Global Voices

Eight years later, echoing the political volcano unleashed in Indonesia in 1998, Mount Merapi rumbles in harmony, nature’s echo of the momentous events of that May in Jakarta.

Mount Merapi

Like a metaphor for demokrasi, it’s just the most awesome and wondrous natural phenomenon on earth and its effect it has on people has no explanation known to science. It’s mysterious how it’s chosen this momentous anniversary in Indonesian history to make its presence known. Wretchard at Belmont Club has a curiously harmonious piece about the strange intuitions of nature and human perception from the nearby Philippines here.

Volcanos are symbols of fertility in Indonesia – they explode in mighty eruptions and hurl lava down the mountains, destroying everything in their path. But when the lava dries and disintegrates after a few decades, what you have left is some of the richest soil on earth. Java is the world’s most densely populated island and there’s a reason for it – it can sustain itself with food with constantly enriched soil from the volcano.

So the coincidence of the volcano blowing the replenish the earth on the anniversary of democracy’s birth in Indonesia seems … divine. There are a lot of reasons people feel awe at volcanos as if there is something divine about them – don’t think this will go unnoticed on Indonesians – the volcano echoed the great democracy movement of 1998. It doesn’t get more awesome than this.

Here are some more myths and traditions about Gunung Merapi, which means ‘Fire Mountain’ in The Jakarta Post
.

Mount Merapi Volcano on Java
Source, all volcano photos: Getty Images, via MSNBC