By Max Lane
The Indonesian press has described riots at Medaeng prison in Surabaya on June 11 and 12 as the biggest in Indonesian history. According to Pos Kota daily, 575 prisoners rioted, destroying 12 buildings, including six prison blocks. Only the shell of the prison remains.
One prisoner was shot in the hand and scores of others injured, together with some prison guards. The prisoners broke out of their cells in six cell blocks by using the metal frames of their beds to smash through the cell walls.
Medaeng prison is where three People's Democratic Party (PRD) leaders are held. These are Dita Sari, president of the Centre for Indonesian Labour Struggles (PPBI), Mohammed Sholeh from Students in Solidarity with Democracy in Indonesia (SMID) and Coen Husein Pontoh from the National Peasants Union (STN).
Molotov cocktails made of oil and kerosene from the prison kitchen were used to set alight the main two-storey registration and administration building, as well as the kitchen and canteen, followed by the cell blocks.
After a brief party using food and drink taken from the prayer house canteen, the prisoners then used the metal bed frames and a flagpole to smash through the inner main prison gate.
They had already smashed a metre-wide hole in the outer gate when three units of Mobile Brigade Commandos, one unit of military and two platoons of police arrived and brought the attempt to a stop by firing live bullets over the prisoners and firing tear gas. The prisoners responded by setting more buildings alight and by throwing bottles at prison guards and soldiers.
According to Media Indonesia daily, the police and soldiers formed several lines of defence between the gate and the prisoners and were backed up riot police and units of detectives and intelligence agents.
The unrest was subdued only after sunrise because the military were limited in what they could do at night after the prisoners turned all remaining electricity off. Forty-one prisoners were taken to police headquarters, suspected as ringleaders. Others, both men and women, were evacuated to other nearby prisons.
Rich-poor gap
Pos Kota quoted one prisoner, Azas, who was interrogated at police headquarters, as saying that prisoners were angry because rich prisoners were given special treatment.
"Those of us who can't pay for visits are treated like garbage", Azas, in jail for bank robbery, told his interrogators. According to Pos Kota's investigations, prisoners with money are allowed to receive their visitors in two special rooms. Each time they pay Rp10,000 ($5) to Rp15,000 per visitor. There are no time limits on the visits, and no restrictions on physical contact with visitors.
Poorer prisoners must queue up in crowded areas to receive their family visits and are restricted to 15 minutes per week. If they want to extend the visit over that, they have to pay Rp3000 .
The head of the Department of Justice for East Java, Drs Sugiantoro, also admitted that the prison was overcrowded, with 575 prisoners in a jail designed to take 450.
'Intellectual leaders'
Police Major-General Sumarsono told Pos Kota that the police were still investigating who the "intellectual leaders" of the actions were.
"I don't know if the three People's Democratic Party (PRD) activists were involved or not", he told the press. He said that the events were a planned action to attempt to escape.
Prison officials repeated this assessment, stating that if the military had arrived only a little later, the prisoners would all have escaped out of the main gate.
Other prison officials told Pos Kota that the PRD activists had been involved in earlier incidents over the unequal distribution of food between rich and poor prisoners. Activist sources in Indonesia also report that during a major disturbance in the prison on May 25, the prisoners began chants of "Long live DIta Sari" and "Long live the PRD".
"The discontent over the gap between rich and poor prisoners has been around for a long time", the official told Pos Kota, "but it is only since the three PRD prisoners have been here that the prisoners have dared act upon their anger".
Dita Sari has been shifted to a prison in the town of Malang in East Java. Coen and Sholeh have been placed in isolation cells in another Surabaya jail.