The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood, a restorationist edition of Behind the News, back to two guests and two segments.

John Rosa will explain the riots in Indonesia, and David Dualdi will explore the history of DSA and its ancestor of the Socialist Party, whose most famous member was Eugene Debs.

On August 25th, riots broke out in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities in protest against a proposal

for a new housing allowance for members of Parliament. There had been rising discontent generally,

directed at the country's political class and President Prabol, since an austerity budget was

passed in January, but this was the spark that set things aflame. The protests were met with harsh repression,

and on the 28th, the cops drove an armored vehicle into a crowd, killing a motorcycle courier,

which only intensified the crowd's rage. As I'm preparing this show, the protests are still going on.

Indonesia has a dark political history. The country's first president, Sukarno,

who served from 1945 to 67, was a left nationalist. He was overthrown with the help of the US,

which thought communists were doing too well in the country's politics, and replaced by Suharto,

a general who presided over a massacre of hundreds of thousands of leftists, again with the help of the CIA.

Suharto was deposed in 1998, and since then the country has been a parliamentary democracy, led by a president,

though under substantial influence, of oligarchical money. He worth more as John Rosa,

professor of history at the University of British Columbia, who's been studying and writing about

Indonesia for a long time. John Rosa. We've seen considerable unrest in Indonesia over the

last week or so, directed against the regime of President Prabhuo. It's a vocation with the unrest

that brought down the dictator Suharto in 1998. Is that a fair comparison? Yes, it is. In fact, I started studying Indonesia and going there in the 1990s, and I was there

for the riot in 1996, and then I was there after the riots in 1998. And this does feel like

it's the start of a new cycle of struggle. That is,

that those struggles, the riots, the demonstrations that were attacked by the police,

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