How a Swat From a Rolled-Up Newspaper Was the Beginning of the New Order's End

The incident I'm talking about here occurred in Dresden, Germany, on 5 April, 1995. That's when two East Timor independence leaders, Luciano Valentim da Conceixao came face-to-face with a man who ordered the bloody invasion and annexation of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony on the southeastern tip of Indonesia that shared Timor island with the Indonesian province of West Timor.

Luciano Valentim da Conceixao were protesting Suharto's visit to an art museum showcasing the work of Indonesian romantic painter Raden Saleh when, in the middle of the protest, Luciano found himself right in front of Suharto. In his right hand, he held a megaphone. In his left, a rolled up newspaper.

"I had the sudden urge to smack his head with the newspaper," Luciano told me over the phone from a coffee shop in East Timor's capital Dili.

So he did. This is the story of how an East Timor independence activist humbled one of Southeast Asia's most-powerful dictators with a rolled-up newspaper. And it's the story of how that single blow set into motion a sequence of events that changed the face of Indonesia.

The entrance to the Zwinger Museum was down a narrow footbridge that required the Indonesian delegation to leave their bus and walk into the museum. Suharto was escorted by dozens of German police officers and members of PASPAMPRES—Indonesia's secret service.

There were about 200 people waiting for the delegation near the museum's gates. Most of them were young German activists involved in the East Timor independence movement. They had shown up that morning with a simple plan: embarrass the Indonesian delegation.

In a matter of seconds the scene turned to chaos. The protests unfurled banners critical of the Indonesian government. Others cursed and threw eggs at Suharto and the rest of the delegation. Suharto's security tried to protect the president from the fusillade of raw eggs with umbrellas.

The Indonesian delegation froze. They couldn't move forward and enter the museum—the protestors were blocking the entrance. But they couldn't retreat to the bus either. The scene lasted for 30 minutes as members of PASPAMPRES closed ranks around the Indonesian delegation.

“We had briefed the German demonstrators before we arrived at the museum,” Luciano told me. “They (the Suharto entourage) were very humiliated.”

One of the men on the scene, retired Lt. Gen. Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, the head of PASPAMPRES Team A, said that Suharto's security had heard that there would be a demonstration outside the museum. But, perhaps unprepared for the size and fury of the protest, they had arrived at the museum with only three bodyguards.

"The German security forces were shocked, but they did nothing," Sjafrie recalled, according to the book Pak Harto: The Untold Stories.

Luciano seized on the chaos to move closer to Suharto. Sjafrie reportedly saw him approach and tried to push him back only to be rebuffed by German police. Seeing an opportunity to do something bold, Luciano gripped the rolled-up newspaper in his left hand and swung it at Suharto's head.

It wasn't a hard blow. The peci Suharto wore on his head didn't even move. But it still served its purpose—embarrassing a man who was seen as untouchable back home. Luciano told me that the moment the newspaper struck Suharto's head he knew that he was in danger.

"I knew the risk," he told me.

Luciano braced for the repercussions. He stood there and then… nothing happened. Suharto walked into the museum and a member of PASPAMPRES who could speak Tetum—the local language of East Timor—walked over and told Luciano to "just stop what you're doing."

Suharto and his entourage spent only 45 minutes inside the museum. The protests continued outside as Sjafrie snuck the president and his wife out a side door into a waiting car. But the rest of the delegation were left behind to walk back through the protest and board their bus again. The protestors quickly surrounded the bus, cutting off the only viable route out of there. As the ministers sat inside, the protestors closed in tight around the vehicle. They began to rock the bus back-and-forth.

"We tried to push it into the river," Luciano told me.

Suharto left Germany earlier than planned only a few days later. The entire trip had been a disaster. There were demonstrations in every large city the Indonesian delegation visited. Inside the presidential plane, Suharto told the assembled media that the protestors were "irrational and crazy people." He accused his rivals back in Indonesia of organizing the demonstrations. These "provocateurs," had "shamed the country," Suharto said. He threatened to strike his political opponents when he returned to Indonesia, convinced that someone back home had a hand in the demonstrations.

The fallout came swift for those Suharto blamed for the Dresden incident. The head of PASPAMPRES, a military general named Jasril Jakub, was fired for failing to protect the president. Sri Bintang Pamungkas, a politician with the United Development Party (PPP) who happened to be in Germany at the same time as Suharto's visit, was arrested moments after he arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. Four months later, he was on trial for treason.

"Suharto was mad when he came back home," he told CNN Indonesia in a special interview. "Suharto thought I was trying to stage a coup."

Sri Bintang was found guilty of treason and sentenced to two years and ten months in prison. The damning evidence was a copy of a speech Sri Bintang delivered at a university in Hannover, Germany, where he said that Indonesia wasn't a democracy under Suharto's New Order regime. It would take another ten years before the Supreme Court reversed the ruling on appeal and found Sri Bintang innocent.

Luciano told me that Sri Bintang wasn't involved in the protests at all. The East Timor activists contacted their counterparts in Germany themselves and convinced them to stage the demonstration.

But the real motivations behind the invasion of East Timor had nothing to do with colonialism. East Timor was already an independent country, after all. Portugal was being led by a new left-wing government that had overthrown the former authoritarian ruler in a military coup. The new left-wing government had little interest in maintaining control of Portugal's overseas territories and, suddenly, East Timor found itself a free nation without fighting a war.

A left-wing party, the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor or FRETILIN, quickly rose to power in East Timor. The sudden presence of a leftist-run country on the border of Indonesia spooked leaders in both Jakarta and Washington DC.

Suharto, himself an authoritarian leader who rose to power amid a violent anti-communist purge that left an estimated half-million dead, worried that a leftist East Timor would become a staging ground for renewal of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

And the US, a country with a long history of toppling communist and socialist governments, was equally concerned that FRETILIN's more radical wing would shift the country toward communism. The US had just withdrawn from a disastrous war with communist forces in Vietnam, and leaders in DC were willing to turn a blind eye to any action that would hobble East Timor's young leftist government.

It didn't help that East Timor's independence was off to a rocky start. While FRETILIN was in control of the country, rival parties like the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT) weren't convinced of FRETILIN's pro-liberation stance. The UDT soon attempted a failed coup on 11 Aug. 1975 that triggered a short three-week civil war with the UDT on one side and FRETILIN and the East Timor army on the other.

FRETILIN was able to maintain control of the government and the UDT fled over the border to Indonesian-controlled West Timor where UDT leaders, as well as those of a small, unpopular pro-Indonesia Timorese Popular Democratic Association (APODETI), soon signed a document backing integration with Indonesia. It was the culmination of nearly a year of backroom deals and pressure on UDT politicians from the Indonesian government, who warned that Indonesia and the West wouldn't view a FRETILIN-led East Timor as a friend.

By October, Indonesian forces had begun sporadic attacks on border towns, including one on the town of Balibo that left five Australian journalists dead. Then, on 7 Dec. 1975, Indonesian forces invaded East Timor. In less than a year, there were more than 30,000 troops stationed across the tiny island nation. The invasion was beyond brutal. Indonesian forces massacred East Timorese civilians in what the former Australian ambassador to Portuguese Timor called, "one of the most brutal operations of its kind in modern warfare."

In the following 24 years of occupation, an estimated one-third of the population of East Timor was killed, either at the hands of Indonesian soldiers or from starvation and disease resulting from the war. This was the East Timor that Luciano grew up in. His parents were FRETILIN supporters who fled to the mountains during the Indonesian invasion. Four years later, both of Luciano's parents were gunned down in an ambush.

“My parents were killed along with many other families from our village,” Luciano told me.

Luciano was raised by his distant relatives in Dili, East Timor's main city and its current capital. His school was run by the Indonesian government and Luciano later moved to Jakarta to attend university, settling in Kampung Melayu. But he held on to his anger over what the Indonesian Military (TNI) did in East Timor. Luciano soon began to campaign for East Timor's independence, going as far as meeting with officials at the US Embassy in 1994 during a visit by then-president Bill Clinton.

He soon had to flee the country with three others, resettling in Portugal in late 1994. When they heard of Suharto's planned visit to Germany, Luciano and the other activists bought tickets to the cities on Suharto's scheduled tour and began petitioning them to reject the Indonesian delegation's visit. Luciano told me that his efforts were successful. His protest had the support of the mayor of Dresden.

"The mayor and police of Dresden said they were protecting us," he told me. "That allowed us to get close to the Indonesian delegation."

"Thousands of my countrymen were killed by the Indonesian military,” he told me. “But that’s the price we had to pay. In this world, there’s no such thing as 'free' freedom. We have to fight.”

Luciano later ran into Ali Alatas in Sri Lanka where the two men greeted each other with kindness. It was 2004, almost ten years since Luciano tried to push Ali Alatas' bus into a river in Dresden and the tensions between the two were gone, he said.

“His first reaction after getting hit in Dresden was not to go after East Timor," Made told me. "He could’ve, in the heat of his anger and humiliation, bombed the country, but he didn’t. Instead, for the first time, Suharto threatened someone he didn’t like, and expressed it openly in the media. That raised some questions from people.”

Part of the reason Luciano's protest garnered such a reaction in Indonesia was its symbolism. Suharto presented himself as a modern iteration of the great Javanese kings, utilizing all sorts of mystical practices to place himself, symbolically, in the same rarified air as the rulers of the great kingdoms that predated the Dutch.

For a Javanese king, their head, or "prabu," is considered a priceless asset and Luciano's act of striking Suharto on the head with a newspaper was the highest form of insult.

"A Javanese king will beat anyone who violates his dignity," Made explained.

As word of the incident spread throughout Indonesia, activists and opposition leaders started to get braver, directly challenging Suharto's regime. The political party of Megawati Soekarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia's founding father Sukarno, began to criticize Suharto's administration more directly, a move that later resulted in a harsh crackdown that left five dead.

The protest in Dresden had released a pressure valve that had been building for months. Suharto was forced to step down a few year later, in 1998, amid an economic crisis, massive student-backed protests, and a wave of rioting in the streets of the country's largest cities.

“The impact of Dresden incident was initially only felt in the activists circles, but later spread to other layers of society," Made said, "including intellectuals, academics, journalists, and former members of political parties."

Made wonders whether he or any of his friends would've had the courage to follow through with their protests if they hadn't first heard about Luciano's actions in Dresden.

"I remember, in 1995, having a discussion with other college students," he said. "We thought, ‘if an East Timor activist can do it, that means there’s a chance.'"