Foreign Policy: Ghosts of Pogroms Past Haunt Indonesia
Nearly two decades after anti-Chinese riots tore through this part of Indonesia’s capital, one busy road still bears the scars. Amid the clamor of heat and traffic of Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, a row of shop-houses lies abandoned, an octagonal feng shui tile still attached to a bricked-up window. Across the street, through locked steel shutters, one can still make out the charred beams and blackened walls of rooms gutted by fire in 1998. A nearby three-story building stands in ruins: a former furniture store destroyed during the rioting. “It’s been empty since 1998,” said Iskandar, 60, a street-side portrait painter who stores uses the space to store his wares. While the building has a Chinese owner, he said that they appear to have abandoned it. “Maybe it’s because they have bad memories,” he said. “Some of them have very bitter memories here.” But anti-Chinese feeling in Indonesia is more than just a matter of memory. A rising tide of Islamic conservatism is now opening up the coun