"There hasn’t been major anti-Chinese violence now for a
decade. The last one was in 1998 and actually the main victors
were Chinese. The problem is that the state policy was to reeducate
the Chinese in many ways. Chinese were completely
excluded from political power. In the whole time there was only
one Chinese minister—who was a crony—and he was appointed
in the last weeks of the regime. At no time were they in any
bureaucratic positions; Chinese were excluded completely from
the military and the police. So what were they going to do if they
didn’t fill professional positions and become doctors or lawyers?
They created businesses, so they became more visible as a group
that couldn’t do anything except business and who got rich and
became arrogant, which is indeed very often what did happen.
The problem with the Chinese community in Indonesia and in
fact with the overseas Chinese population generally is that this
was a community which had no regrets and which had no
memory. Prestige and influence depended heavily on money,
something Kwee criticized all the time. Chinese were in the habit
of a visible and ostentatious display of money, which they saw as
perfectly reasonable. It looked terrible from the outside. And it’s
interesting, in many of the earlier riots, the actions aren’t directed
against the person who was Chinese. The most famous one was
the one in 1963. In fact nobody was hurt, but hundreds of
automobiles were burned. Houses were burned, not taken over.
Basically it was a protest against Chinese arrogance.
At the same time, one has to say that, as pretty often happens,
minorities produce courageous people precisely because they can’t
have political power. Far and away the most famous human rights
lawyer Yap Thiam Hien, who died 8 or 9 years ago [Yap Thiam
Hien died in 1989. —ed.] was a national hero to everybody, and
wasn’t in the regime. He was incredibly brave and went to prison
a couple of times. By having things barred to them by a regime,
perhaps part of the energy flows into this kind of heroism which
native Indonesians with much different opportunities are less
likely to do."
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