- Joined
- Jul 17, 2016
- Messages
- 2,001
Growing up in Indonesia, I knew better than to threaten a mob with a gun. If you have a gun, you use it as a last resort self defense tool, which is true anywhere in the world. You don’t show it until you can’t avoid shooting somebody, like when they’re about to chop you to pieces or in the process of lighting your house on fire.I too was in Jakarta in May 98 and had zero desire to possess a real gun. Caucasian-looking foreigners were not major targets at that time. I bajaj-ed, walked and took a taxi through riots and looting from South Jakarta to Central Jakarta to West Jakarta and back. On May 13-14 itself, rioters around Roxy (Jl Hasyim Ashari) and Jl Gajah Mada were quite gleeful. It was an atmosphere of excited, frenzied mayhem. Looters were taking things to extremes, stripping shops bare, then even taking empty shelves. Suddenly, every other low-income family or warung seemed to have a new TV, while kids were selling looted laptops at traffic lights. Most of the approx 1,200 fatalities were looters, trapped inside malls that were set alight to create maximum chaos. There were also the military provocateurs, inciting the rape and murder of ethnic Chinese females in parts of West and North Jakarta. I felt more afraid of the soldiers at that time, than I did of the unarmed idiot looters. Many smiled at me, shouting hello mister and proudly displayed their freshly looted goods. Obviously, it wasn't a good time to look Chinese (in addition to local ethnic Chinese, some Koreans and Japanese were attacked). What if I had owned a gun at that time and pointed it at the shrieking mobs? Incitement for them to attack me. The atmosphere was extremely tense around Kedoya and Grogol, especially when just the soldiers and the short-haired men in military boots and civvies were on the street on May 13, before most of the mass looting and fires started. It was safe for a white-looking Westerner to walk through the unfolding devastation. Some days later, I was in a taxi at a traffic light in Kebayoran Baru one night, when a couple of youths smashed one of the back windows and demanded my money. The driver and I both told them off, as we were shocked and the boys weren't armed. Different story if they had had guns. Later that year, and the following year, I was again more scared of the military and police, which had taken to randomly murdering students and other innocent civilians in response to demands that the military/police lose their free seats in the national parliament. It was around this time that Wiranto, Habibie, Hamzah Haz and some senior police (Nugroho Djajoesman) funded the creation of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) to use religious extremism to combat civilian protesters. In return, the FPI got to run protection rackets, but rarely attacked foreigners. Previously, Tommy Suharto had funded Islamic militants to counter pro-democracy protesters in July 1996. This situation also saw the rise of Betawi protection racket groups -- which exist to this day and will still take money from crooked politicians and security officials to do their dirty work (see the anti-Ahok protests). Next was the Ambon/Maluku violence, triggered partly by long-simmering religious tensions that came to the boil after Suharto fell and exacerbated by generals (deploying the Laskar Jihad forces) aiming to destabilize then-president Gus Dur. Anyway, the idea of owning a gun for self-defense in Jakarta is stupid. If everyone were able to get a gun "just for self defense" then the incidence of gun crimes would soar. If/when coronavirus-19 leads to mass unemployment, food shortages, triggering social jealousy and desperate hunger, easily incited into riots for nefarious political purposes, would I feel safer with a gun? No. I don't expect a murderous mob to arrive at my doorstep. Rich communities pay for military/police protection of their neighborhoods. It's possible that satpams could be overwhelmed or flee if a massive mob arrives, but it's more likely that angry mobs could be led to lower-income enclaves of ethnic Chinese. Alas.
Shoot or shoot not, there is no threaten.