1 New Enemy of the State: Youth in Post-New Order Indonesia Manneke Budiman, Yuka D.N. Mangoenkoesoemo, P. Ayu Indah Wardhani, Nila Ayu Utami Introduction Youth’s political activism and participation are not unusual in modern Indonesian history. During the revolutionary war against the Dutch colonial army, elements of Pemuda (youth) played an instrumental role in the armed struggle for independence and sovereignty between 1945 and 1949. They put themselves again at the frontline of change during the final years of Sukarno’s era as they took to the streets to demand political and economic reforms in order to remedy the nation-wide crisis in the mid-1960s. They brought up three demands known as the Tritura, which urged the state to dissolve the cabinet, lower staple foods’ prices, and disband the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The youth group, which named itself the “1966 Generation” (Angkatan ’66), later broke up into fragments as some were co-opted by the New Order regime, while some others experienced disillusionment and set out to resist the authoritarian regime in the early 1970s. During the New Order era, youth political participation was heavily depoliticized and de- revolutionized, a process which has intensified, particularly since the early 1980s. Street demonstrations were met with harsh responses by security forces on the ground of maintaining national security and stability. This was part of the effort to sterilize the public space from any revolutionary potential amongst the masses. 1 Strict political curfews on students’ activism were heavy-handedly imposed through state-sanctioned mechanisms such as the NKK and BKK 2 , in addition to compulsory attendance in ideological indoctrination programs that were made prerequisite to the completion of studies. 3 In the early 1990s, as the New Order’s legitimacy was quickly being subverted by rampant corruption, human right violations, and increasing demands for democratization, a group of college students set up a political party called the PRD (Partai Rakyat Demokratik, People’s Democratic Party), which was immediately declared as an illegal 1 Abidin Kusno, in his celebrated work on Indonesian urban space in relation to political cultures, Behind the Postcolonial (2000), argues that while Sukarno used the public space as a site for “populist politics” by mobilizing the masses on streets and other public places for his revolutionary agenda, Suharto took the opposite path. He instilled a new image of the street as a “dangerous place” infested by criminals and thugs, thus discouraging people from associating themselves with it. See Kusno, pp. 97-119. 2 NKK stands for Normalisasi Kehidupan Campus (Normalization of Campus Life), a notorious state program which discouraged students from any involvement in so-called ‘politik praktis’ (practical politics), whereas BKK is short for Badan Koordinasi Kemahasiswaan (Student’s Coordinating Body), a state-supervised student body whose task was to ensure that the depolitization program was implemented under the watchful eye of the state through its apparatuses in the Ministry of Education. 3 The most intensive and large-scale indoctrination program implemented nation-wide to almost all sectors of society was the P4 Training (Penataran Pedoman Penghayatan dan Pengamalan Pancasila, Training on the Guidelines for the Understanding and Implementation of Pancasila, the state ideology) for secondary school and college students, civil servants, state officials, members of the military, as well as members of mass organizations affiliated with the state.