Student protests against Prabowo Subianto’s militarised style of government have exposed anger over prices, corruption and civil liberties, but without broader public support or elite pressure they are unlikely to threaten his hold on power.

In Indonesia, it was flagged as the Big One – maybe a prelude to the fall of the arrogant and feared eighth president, Prabowo Subianto busy turning his nation into a barracks. Even parts of the Australian media got excited, though the story wasn’t about a Sydney druggie in Bali.

But last Friday’s rumpus was never going to be a repeat of the 1998 demos that brought down Indonesia’s second president.

Soeharto had been running the world’s fourth most populous nation for 32 years until the currency crashed. Then the discreet oligarchs who run Indonesia slipped him a note. It read: “Go”.

In last century’s Asian economic crisis, Krismon – krisis moneter – the rupiah crumpled from a steady 2,500 to almost 17,000 against the greenback.

There are still cities in the Republic where the see-through rusting skeletons of half-finished office towers scar the streetscape, monuments to a giant failure, a financial system so badly run that clefts in jungle ironbarks would have been safer repositories.

The losses were staggering; 45 private banks collapsed or were liquidated. More than 70 per cent of the Jakarta Stock Exchange-listed companies became insolvent or went bankrupt.

Armageddon didn’t have to be imagined – it was here.

I wrote later in The Jakarta Post: “Indonesia didn’t break down like Egypt or crash like Syria. The gears grated, the engine coughed, but democracy kept edging forward and stayed on the road, a modern miracle of social change insufficiently acknowledged.”

That’s not happening now.

The demos in Jakarta and other big cities this month were never going to have the intensity of Tragedi 1998.........

© Pearls and Irritations