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If you have watched TV, read newspapers, or turned on the radio
<TT>this past several days, you may heard of the riots in Indonesia. News media are telling us the Indonesian Pribumis (Malay) people are rising up against the Suharto dictatorship. We are told that the Indonesia poor Malay suffered a lot under Suharto’s corrupted regime</TT> It mentions the Suharto dictatorship in the first paragraph of the letter. It seems this letter was probably writen around the time of 1998 riot in Indonesia.
Yes, there have been many anti-Chinese riots in Indonesian history.
A distant relative lost practically all his belongings when he left Indonesia in 1960s.
Chinese have periodically been targets of mob violence. Some 100,000 Chinese were expelled from the country in 1959, while thousands of Chinese were attacked and many killed during the 1965–1966 bloodbath that followed the fall of President Sukarno. Many Chinese were accused of being Communists and with maintaining secret ties to the mainland. Anti-Chinese rioting also occurred in 1973 and 1980.
Under Suharto, Chinese were also forbidden from careers in state-sponsored academia, serving in the military, and the civil service. They were forced to carry identity cards and the use of Chinese characters and celebrations, such as the Chinese New Year, were banned.
Most Indonesian Chinese were and are not Muslim, further fomenting negative sentiments from the mostly Muslim native Indonesians. This is ironic in light of the fact that many of the earliest Muslim evangelists in Java (who were called the Wali Songo or the nine ambassadors) were of Chinese ancestry. Government policy mandated all Chinese language teaching be banned from school; Chinese names were outlawed and most Indonesian Chinese were made to adopt Indonesian names. The established Chinese schools were nationalized and their facilities were converted to public schools. Moreover, many Chinese Indonesians are assigned different identity cards which show their ethnicity, and have to show proof of having rejected Chinese citizenship, despite being a native-born Indonesian. Many believed these laws were targeted to drive Chinese out of the country because family names and genealogy are an important part of Chinese life.
Most Indonesian Chinese are not politically active and hence fail to set legislation to protect their own interests despite their economically affluence. The situation is different in Singapore where the overseas Chinese are both politically and economically active. Some compare the situation of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia to the Jews in Europe before WWII.
Some well known Chinese Indonesian Badminton players. |
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