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Police Open Fire on Thousands of Demonstrators at Jakarta University

HeadlineMay 13, 1998

Police opened fire on thousands of anti-government demonstrators at a Jakarta university campus, killing six and wounding more than a dozen others in the bloodiest outbreak of violence yet in Indonesia’s growing political crisis. Witnesses said police fired down from an overpass for several minutes on protesters at the prestigious Trisakti University, inflicting the first student deaths in nearly three months of demonstrations at campuses across the country calling for an end to the authoritarian government of the dictator Suharto. Weeping students gathered outside the morgue at Jakarta’s Sumber Waras Hospital, where officials said four corpses with gunshot wounds had been taken, this according to the Reuters news service. Police and military officials later confirmed that six people had died in the melee and that at least 16 had been wounded. In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a statement, the United States “deplores the killings” and for the first time called publicly for political reform in Indonesia, this after last week when the U.S. Clinton administration pushed through $1 billion in loan guarantees for Indonesia without any human rights conditions.

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