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To: Alex who wrote (7473)	2/11/1998 3:38:00 PM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 116972

Alex--Along the IMF theme>> Baton-wielding riot police and soldiers on Wednesday broke up the largest anti-government protest in Jakarta since an economic crisis hit Indonesia seven months ago. Security forces arrested 140 protesters and dispersed hundreds more after the demonstrators, shouting "Lower the prices!'' and singing Indonesia's national anthem, tried to march toward the Labor Ministry. Many of those detained were supporters of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has urged democratic reform of Indonesia's tightly controlled political system. Authorities defended the arrests, saying the demonstrators were disrupting traffic. The government had warned that it would crack down on any demonstrations before next month's presidential elections. Wednesday's protest was one of the many demonstrations, some violent, that have erupted in a dozen Indonesian towns since the value of the country's currency, the rupiah, began plummeting in July. Since then, the rupiah has dropped 80 percent in relation to the dollar. The currency has recovered slightly since President Suharto last month enacted economic reforms under a $40 billion bailout package sponsored by the International Monetary Fund. It has also been buoyed by a government announcement that it was drafting legislation pegging the value of the rupiah to the dollar. Still, unemployment and inflation have soared, and hundreds of companies face bankruptcy because of huge debts. While the demonstrators Wednesday blamed government corruption for the country's ills, Suharto accused unidentified groups of sabotaging the economy by undermining the value of the rupiah. In an unscheduled speech at a factory opening in West Java on Wednesday, Suharto said the rupiah's devaluation had been "unnatural.'' Unidentified groups had "deliberately engineered the destruction of our economic fundamentals,'' he said. Suharto, 76, is Asia's longest-serving leader. He has governed for 32 years and is almost certain to win a seventh five-year term when the 1,000-member People's Consultative Assembly votes in presidential elections next month. The armed forces held anti-riot exercises last week, warning they will deal forcefully with any unrest in advance of the balloting. In a related development, jailed labor leader Muchtar Pakpahan urged the visiting Dutch foreign minister, Hans van Mierlo, to push for a delay in international loans to Indonesia because of government corruption. Van Mierlo did not comment publicly on the request by Pakpahan, who is serving a four-year prison sentence for subversion. Pakpahan, who is under guard at a hospital while he receives treatment for a lung infection, said the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank should halt aid to Indonesia. The IMF and the Suharto government recently agreed to a $40 billion bailout package for Indonesia.