ABSTRACT
In the middle of the night, between Wednesday 28 and Thursday 29 March 2001, a group of 400 Indonesian strikers was attacked by an even larger group of unidentified persons armed with swords and home-made bombs. The workers were camping inside a Japanese-owned factory in the Pulogadung Industrial Estate in the outskirts of Jakarta. The confrontation on the factory premises left one dead and eleven injured, of whom one later died. The police arrived only after a considerable time when the thugs were already getting back in their buses. The suspicion was voiced that the criminals had been paid by the factory management to bring the strike to a halt. The strike had been going on for ten days, with the employer consistently refusing to acquiesce to the workers’ demands, including a wage hike of 100 per cent and the dismissal of two unpopular supervisors. It transpired that the strike had been preceded by clashes between the several trade unions representing the workers at the factory. Later investigations also revealed that a former student activist, believed to act on behalf of the management, had urged one of the newly established militant trade unions in the Jakarta region to call off the strike as all requests had been granted, which was obviously not true (Jakarta Post, 30 March 2001, Media Indonesia, 5 May 2001).
