Jakarta, the sprawling capital of Indonesia, looked at times like a battlefield last week. Fires burned all night as angry mobs attacked stores, businesses, hotels and nightclubs, smashing and gutting hundreds of automobiles as they surged through the stricken city. It was the worst rioting that Jakarta had seen since the anti-Communist disturbances of 1967. The occasion for the violence this time, ironically enough, was neither the threat of externally supported subversion nor the advent of civil war; rather, it was the good-will visit of a friendly foreign leader, Japanese Premier Kakuei Tanaka.
By the time he reached Jakarta on the last stop of his five-nation, eleven-day good-will mission to Southeast Asia, Tanaka had already encountered an embarrassing amount of hostility. His effigy had been burned in Bangkok (TIME, Jan. 21), and on the day of his departure from placid Kuala Lumpur, a handful of activists at the University of Malaysia had staged an auto-da-fe of a puppet labeled Tanaka. But the stop last week at Indonesia was the worst of all.
Ugly Scene. One reason that Tanaka's arrival was delayed until darkness was the announced intention of student groups to give him a fiery welcome. Ten students broke through the tight cordon and were caught on the airfield just before Tanaka's arrival. A powerful array of riot police and troops in battle dress saw to it that Indonesian President Suharto and his guest arrived on time at the white Dutch-colonial guesthouse in the spacious compound of the President's official residence. At that point hardly anyone could foresee that for the duration of his stay, Tanaka would be a virtual prisoner within this compound, guarded by hundreds of tough commando troops and armored cars.
The violence started with the burning of every Japanese automobile within reach of the roaming crowd—100,000 strong at times—and quickly mushroomed into the sacking and setting afire of stores and businesses that sold Japanese products, especially those owned by overseas Chinese. As night fell on the first full day of rioting, the city shook with the crashing of rocks through shop windows, the crackling of flames, the jeering of looting mobs, and the occasional bursts of gunfire as police and troops shot over the heads of the crowds.
Sometimes the violence began almost playfully, as when the mob swarmed over Japanese-made automobiles and deflated their tires. But then the cars were set aflame. A special target was the Astra Toyota agency, where the entire stock of new cars went up in flames, their fuel tanks exploding with an occasional thud.
Perhaps the ugliest scene occurred at the Pasar Senen shopping center, where thousands of rioters looted the Chinese-owned stores and stalls and started fires. Seven of the ten known victims of the two-day riots were killed here. The number of dead would have been far greater if the Indonesian police and troops had not held their fire. "It would have been impolite," explained Foreign Minister Adam Malik, "to start shooting while our guests were here."