Four Dead Students and the May 13 Reform Bluff

By Constance Bell · September 21, 2026

Four students were killed by Indonesian soldiers on May 12; a confidential cable sent a day later shows a government attempting to stall a revolution with empty talk of reform.

Four students—Elang Mulia Lesmana, Heri Hertanto, Hafidin Royan, and Hendriawan Sie—died on a campus sidewalk in Jakarta on May 12, 1998. Their deaths, caused by gunfire from Indonesian Army soldiers, acted as the detonator for a nationwide explosion that would end a decades-long dictatorship.

I am working here from the archive's curated description of the record rather than the original pages. The document is a confidential telegram sent on May 13, 1998, from the US Embassy Jakarta, the diplomatic outpost that authored the report, to the State Department, the executive arm of US foreign policy in Washington. The cable, titled "Political Reform - Lots of Government Talk, Will There Be Action?", arrives twenty-four hours after the massacre at Trisakti University, a private Jakarta institution that became the site of the May 12 shootings.

Four Dead Students

As the public record establishes, the deaths of the four students triggered a riot and a revolutionary wave across Indonesia, a Southeast Asian nation then gripped by economic collapse and social unrest. The protestors were not asking for a change in policy, but for the immediate resignation of President Suharto, the head of state whose authoritarian grip had defined the country for thirty years.

According to the record, the violence at the university changed the calculus of the street. The record notes that "student protesters and opposition figures," the political challengers focusing on the necessity of a rapid regime change, had become "bolder" in their demands. The students were no longer interested in the slow pivot of legislative adjustments; they were demanding an immediate transition.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Moderate Political Reforms

Despite the blood on the pavement, the regime attempted to pivot toward the language of concession. The record establishes that the government began discussing a "more limited, yet critical, agenda of political reform." This was not a sudden epiphany of democratic virtue, but a response to a crisis that had moved beyond the control of the police.

In a window of only two weeks, three distinct pillars of the state—the President, the Speaker of the House, the presiding officer of the legislative body, and the Defense Minister, the official overseeing the military forces—all "raised the possibility of political reform."

This coincidence of timing is where the record earns its irony. The record explicitly states that after the May 12 shootings, government officials believed that "student protesters would not accept moderate political reforms." The regime knew its offers were insufficient before it even made them. Public statements from these leaders indicated that any changes "will not come quickly and will not satisfy student demonstrators."

The Two-Week Window

When the President, the Speaker, and the Defense Minister all begin speaking the same language of "reform" within fourteen days of each other, it is rarely a sign of a unified policy shift. The pattern suggests a regime in fragmentation. If these three men were acting in concert, the communication would have been a singular, coordinated announcement designed to pacify the masses. Instead, the record presents these as separate instances of "raising the possibility."

This suggests that the pillars of the state were no longer taking orders from a single center. The Speaker of the House and the Defense Minister were not merely echoing the President; they were signaling their own willingness to survive the coming collapse. The desk's reading is that these individual gestures of "reform" were auditions for a post-Suharto world.

Furthermore, the distinction the record draws between "moderate political reforms" and "immediate transition" reveals the government's tactical objective. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the "moderate reform" agenda was a stalling mechanism. By offering a limited set of concessions, the regime hoped to peel away the moderate elements of the opposition and isolate the more radical student protesters. It was an attempt to trade a few legislative crumbs for the survival of the crown.

The Calculation of Exit

The most critical line in the record is the Defense Minister's sudden interest in reform. The public record shows that the soldiers under his purview were the ones who opened fire on unarmed students at Trisakti University. For the man responsible for the military's deployment to start floating the idea of "political reform" immediately after a massacre is not a sign of remorse, but of calculation.

The military leadership was calculating an exit strategy. As the cost of repression rose—measured in students' lives and the resulting urban chaos—the military realized that the President had become a liability. The Defense Minister's alignment with "reform" rhetoric was a signal to the US Embassy and the domestic opposition that the army was prepared to stop shielding the President if the price of doing so became too high for the institution to bear.

The US Embassy Jakarta saw through the performance. The title of the cable—"Lots of Government Talk, Will There Be Action?"—betrays a profound skepticism. The diplomats in Jakarta had concluded that the regime was no longer capable of implementing a top-down solution, regardless of the rhetoric emanating from the palace. The "reforms" being discussed were devoid of substantive policy; they were linguistic placeholders designed to signal flexibility without actually conceding power.

The desk's reading is that by May 13, the regime was already dead; it simply had not yet stopped breathing. The simultaneous calls for reform from the President, the Speaker, and the Defense Minister were not a plan for a transition, but the sounds of a structure cracking. The redacted or missing details of these "discussions" likely contain the specific prices the Defense Minister and the Speaker were weighing to ensure their own immunity once the President was gone.

What a full release of the embassy's traffic from that week would show is the precise moment the US decided that Suharto was no longer a viable partner. The pattern of this record suggests that the US Embassy was not waiting for the regime to reform, but was instead documenting the speed of its collapse to determine who the next strongest man in the room would be. The students at Trisakti University paid for that documentation with their lives, and the "moderate reforms" offered in the aftermath were nothing more than the regime's final attempt to negotiate the terms of its own surrender.

Four Dead Students and the May 13 Reform Bluff

Four Dead Students

Moderate Political Reforms

The Two-Week Window

The Calculation of Exit

Sources