May 1998 is often remembered as the month that Indonesia broke free from Suharto’s authoritarian grip. For many, it marked the dawn of Reform, a democratic awakening. However, beneath this national narrative lies a more painful, hidden story. One not of triumph, but of betrayal. A story of homes set alight, of women raped with impunity, and of an ethnic group abandoned by the very nation they called home.
This was not just political change. It was a national trauma, violently etched into the lives of Chinese-Indonesians and women whose pain has yet to be truly acknowledged.
State Collapse or State Design? The Orchestration of Chaos
In the weeks leading up to Soeharto’s resignation, Indonesia was a nation on the brink. The Asian Financial Crisis had plunged the economy into turmoil. Food prices soared. Discontent festered. And then came the trigger, the Trisakti shootings. On 12 May 1998, four university students were gunned down by security forces during peaceful protests in Jakarta. That same night, cities erupted.
What appeared to be spontaneous riots soon revealed a darker orchestration. Entire Chinese-Indonesian neighbourhoods were targeted, shops looted, women assaulted, and family-run malls deliberately set on fire, resulting in horrific casualties (Purdey, 2006).
These were not random acts of chaos, but systematic violence linked to military-backed provocateurs, drones of anti-Chinese rhetoric, and well-coordinated planning, as documented in survivor testimonies and historical analysis (Purdey, 2006).
Witnesses later testified to seeing uniformed soldiers standing by, or even participating. The state’s silence was deafening. The violence was not random. It was systematic, ethnicised, and gendered.
Rape as a War Tactic, Women’s Bodies in the Crossfire
Amongst the most haunting violations were the mass sexual assaults against Chinese-Indonesian women. Survivors described being dragged from their homes, gang-raped, beaten, and humiliated often in front of their families. Others were abducted and never returned.
Many victims were underage and several accounts describe vulnerable girls being assaulted. Perpetrators reportedly shouted racial slurs like “Cina babi” during attacks, making clear that the violence was not only sexual, but deeply rooted in both racism and misogyny (Purdey, 2006).
Yet few dared to speak out. Cultural stigma, trauma, and threats of retaliation forced survivors into silence. Some families refused to report the assaults, fearing further shame. The government, rather than investigating, cast doubt on the very existence of the attacks.
The Institutional Machinery of Forgetting
In the aftermath, independent civil society groups and Komnas Perempuan documented numerous cases of sexual violence during the riots. Dewi Anggraeni’s Tragedi Mei 1998, Lahirnya Komnas Perempuan provides detailed testimonies and field investigations, reporting around 85 confirmed cases of rape, assault, and harassment, emphasising the structural impunity and systemic silencing that survivors faced (Anggraeni, 2014). Human Rights Watch provided international pressure. But not one perpetrator was prosecuted. No truth commission was formed. No formal apology was issued.
What followed instead was national amnesia. School textbooks rarely mention May 1998 in detail. The rape cases are almost never discussed. Public discourse prefers to frame the period as a political achievement, the fall of dictatorship, rather than a humanitarian catastrophe. Indonesia’s democratic transition came at the cost of burying the truth.
Echoes of Trauma, What the Nation Refuses to Heal
Two decades later, the survivors still live in shadows. Many suffer from untreated psychological trauma, health issues, and chronic fear. Children born from those rapes were often abandoned. Chinese-Indonesian families remain wary, reminded that citizenship does not always equal protection.
The unresolved wounds of May 1998 continue to cast a long shadow. The Reformasi generation, raised in the wake of the trauma, grows up learning a selective version of history, one that sanitises brutality and romanticises resistance. But how can a nation heal when it refuses to even say the names of the wounded?
Memory as Resistance, History as Justice
The violence of May 1998 was not just physical, it was epistemic. It was the erasure of voices, the denial of identity, and the silencing of grief. And this silence, sanctioned by the state, continues to harm.
To write history solely from the viewpoint of political milestones is to deny the human cost of those transitions. Victims of 1998, particularly women and ethnic Chinese, deserve more than footnotes. They deserve to be remembered as central to the nation’s story, not collateral to it.
Rewriting Indonesian history from the victims’ perspective is not an act of defiance, it is an act of restorative justice. It affirms that memory can be a form of resistance, that testimony is political, and that confronting uncomfortable truths is a necessary part of democratic maturity.
Justice delayed may well be justice denied, but memory, when preserved, can still be a powerful act of defiance. And until Indonesia dares to remember fully, it will never be truly free.
References
Anggraeni, D. (2014). Tragedi Mei 1998: Lahirnya Komnas Perempuan [May 1998 Tragedy: The Birth of the National Commission on Violence Against Women]. Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas.
Purdey, J. (2006). Anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia, 1996–1999. University of Hawaii Press.
Powerful and necessary. Thank you for giving voice to the survivors and reminding us that silence is never justice.
This needs to be read by more people 🥹