The day that Jakarta went out of control started quietly enough. As on Wednesday, students held a big campus demonstration, this time at the University of Indonesia medical campus at Salemba, a complex of elegant Dutch colonial buildings about five miles from the business centre. Traffic to the university was light but everything appeared normal.
As at Trisakti University the day before, where the shooting dead of six young people by soldiers and riot police had sparked the crisis, the students held a noisy demonstration under the palm trees, calling for President Suharto to step down. They unfurled a giant banner from the orange-tiled roof with seven demands: lower prices, more jobs, end of repression, return of sovereignty to the people, recall of parliament, a change of national leadership and unity between students and the army.
Meanwhile, crowds of people, many of them from the poor areas nearby wearing cheap sandals and T-shirts, gathered outside the railings. At midday they started pulling down road fences. A group of young men attacked the traffic lights at the nearby junction, punching out the green and orange and leaving the red permanently on. A line of 75 helmeted riot police at the campus gates, there to prevent the students leaving, watched idly as the destructive forces of the Indonesian proletariat were let loose. They clearly had instructions not to intervene. It was the first sign that the situation was slipping beyond the control of the security forces. The previous day police and troops had fired tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds doing the same thing outside Trisakti campus.
Student stewards linked arms to keep their comrades from leaving and joining the mob but by 1 p.m. students were becoming irrelevant. Traffic stopped. Crowds gathered in the roadway, filling it in both directions as far as the eye could see. They milled about, drawing a few tear gas shells from a distant line of soldiers who then retreated.
An anarchic situation developed quickly. An empty military truck parked unaccountably by the roadside was overturned and burned, then further down the tree-lined road three cars were pulled from a dealership connected with the son of President Suharto and set alight. Crowds gathered on pedestrian overpasses and on roof-tops to watch. More people poured into the road until there were dense crowds in every direction. It was as if people sensed that the hour of revolution had come.
They would have received confirmation in an extraordinary event shortly afterwards. Along the road came two lines of soldiers in camouflage uniforms and purple berets with automatic rifles slung behind their backs and swagger sticks in their hands. There were about 50 in all, strung out on each side of the southerly carriageway. They strolled along, waving their fists in the air in solidarity with the rioters. The crowd went wild with delight.
"They are marines, they are on our side," said an onlooker. "They are not soldiers or police, who shoot us." The marines passed by smiling, giving "high fives" to street urchins who a few minutes before had been tearing up paving stones and breaking the windows of the five-storey glass-walled Mayapada Bank.
They walked past the burning cars to the cheers of the massed onlookers. They deployed along the street in small groups, a couple of them standing outside a little hotel beside the burning car showroom where I managed to get an excellent coffee and cheese sandwich while watching the mob through the windows of the restaurant tearing up road signs outside. The son of the manager joined me, shaking his head sadly. "They will destroy everything," he said. "Indonesia is finished." By early afternoon it was clear that city traffic had been paralysed in every direction. I began walking towards my hotel, several miles away. All along the city roads crowds milled around, some doing nothing, others strutting around in face masks and waving Indonesian flags. Motorcycles came into their own, roaring up and down the roads on the lookout for riot police. A train passed over a low overpass, with dozens of passengers leaning out the carriage windows yelling encouragement to the mob below. A little further on a mass of people were looting a small row of shops.
On the next street a police post was ablaze and two burnt-out "Silver Streak" taxis blocked a side road. The Jakarta police were nowhere to be seen. Everywhere people grinned and said "Hallo mister, what you think?" "It's a revolution," I said to one young man. "Yes, yes, a revolution," he cried, as his companions cheered. At times the atmosphere was more menacing, with street thugs on the lookout for every opportunity. A lone jeep came by and the driver called to me to get in, saying, "It's too dangerous that way, sir, people are going crazy." He was an engineer from Digital who said that nothing would stop the mob now unless President Suharto stepped down. We drove along a deserted main highway (usually jammed with traffic) to the business district but he had to do a U-turn a mile from the hotel as the same scenes of mayhem were being repeated up ahead.
The heart of the city had shut down. Crowds roamed the elegant boulevards. Soldiers in riot gear stood around four troop carriers which had the windows smashed, and fraternised with the throng. A convoy of British-made Scorpion armoured cars with long guns drove slowly by, with the troops giving the thumbs up to the mob. They, too, were greeted with cheers. But across the carriageway, dozens of young people were setting fire to a shop and the air filled with the sour taste of burning materials. Then shots rang out and the crowd fled a short distance down the road, but moved back when it was clear the riot police had been firing in the air.
The police then drove off. Inside the hotel foyer, there was pandemonium. Dozens of expatriates and middle-class Chinese families had come to seek refuge until the storm outside exhausted itself. Unlike the poorer Chinese who were being killed by the mob and their shops burned, they had credit cards. From the upper floors they had a panoramic view of a city in the midst of a self-destructive spasm. As far as the eye could see and in every direction, large plumes of black smoke rose into the air as factories, shops, cars and shopping malls burned. On the horizon the smoke merged into a huge dirty grey wall shutting out the sunlight on what must be Jakarta's darkest day.