Why did the Jakarta student riots of 1998 succeed in ousting President Soeharto while this week’s public displays of outrage seem doomed to fail?

Soeharto has been in his grave since 2008, but his former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto (74 this October), is still firmly in charge as the eighth president, digging deeper by boosting military involvement in domestic affairs.

The army remains his source of strength, despite being cashiered in 1998 for disobeying orders. That year he was also divorced and hasn’t remarried.

He has also been allegedly implicated in human rights abuses during tours of duty in East Timor and West Papua, though never charged.

On Monday, tens of thousands of mainly young men were flinging rocks and burning tyres in blocked streets outside Jakarta’s parliamentary buildings. Some waved pirate-themed flags lifted from the Japanese manga cartoon One Piece, supposedly symbolising rebellion. But spectacles are not results.

The show has been big in the Indonesian media, but light internationally, where other events are making headlines.

For street riots to make a difference in the world’s fourth-most populous nation, as in most autocracies where the elite few rules and the downtrodden majority mumble, several factors need to be present.

The first is regime fatigue, with ministers idle or corrupt or both, and showing contempt for the electorate.

Prabowo’s seven-party coalition, informally backed by five others under the banner of the Great Indonesia Awakening, has yet to reach that point, though it’s heading downhill with the alleged corruption of the Deputy Manpower Minister Immanuel Ebenezer.

He’s a member of Prabowo’s party Gerindra, which leads the renamed Advance Indonesia Coalition aka Red and White, that’s been in power for less than a year – not long enough for resentment to be embedded. When Soeharto was uprooted, he’d been running the republic for 32 years.

The unkempt kids on the streets this week looked furious, but their mood fell short of the righteous rage of 27 years ago; they were dashing about with no outstanding leader to articulate their anger and focus the protest.

That position is essential – and dangerous. It’s not just the mobs that need a front man or woman – so does the government.

Then they can seize that individual and twist them into a threat to national unity misleading the people, nurturing a secret agenda. They’d be smeared as a paid foreign agent planning to steal the motherland’s resources.

This patriotic twaddle has been flapping around for some months now, spotted regularly by Prabowo, though by few others. Naturally there’s no name or origin.

That one bogeybird can spook many in a nation of 285 million is fanciful, but strong enough where superstition and black magic still grip millions, particularly in rural areas.

Indonesia is regularly tagged as having the world’s largest number of Muslims — 88% — but Islam and Christianity were latecomers to the archipelago and haven’t smothered the traditional beliefs that have survived for millennia.

The hero of the 1998 protests was a university heavyweight, Dr Amien Rais, an US-educated intellectual strong on religion. He brought discipline, direction and determination to the hate.

He’s now 81 and still involved in public affairs, mainly through Muhammadiyah, an organisation that represents the more modern and conservative branch of Islam.

Although no longer potent, he had the status and authority last century to confront Soeharto and his gangsters trying to hang onto power, while leading their opponents. Many were tertiary students who’d brought reasoning to their dissent..

At that time (May 1998), the police were controlled by the army. Lines of authority and separation of powers were blurred, the military often handling domestic strife.

They’re the ones who used live rounds, killing four and injuring many youngsters from the nation’s largest private tertiary educator, the prestigious Trisakti University.

This was more than a human tragedy, but a tactical mistake because the students were children of the business oligarchs who run the Indonesian economy.

This time the 1300 “security personnel” used tear gas. So far there have been no reports of killings and few of injuries.

The crowds had been inflamed by a series of missteps — including big tax hikes — by Prabowo, who is proving to be a poor politician but good at shouting to the choir. As reported earlier in Pearls and Irritations, he’s militarising the civilian elected MPs by organising parades and boot camps.

Dressing up in fatigues and wearing boots was first seen as selfie fun, to be tolerated because there were tangible benefits for accepting Prabowo’s fantasies. The most pleasing to the 580 politicians has been a monthly housing allowance of A$5500 atop a salary double that sum in a country where most incomes are in the hundreds.

Before this month’s riots, the House Speaker, Puan Maharani, 51, tried to explain the bonuses. She’s the daughter of Megawati Soekarnoputri, 78, the nation’s sixth president and leader of the Democratic Party of Struggle.

The centre-left secular-nationalist party claims to be the de facto opposition, but Puan’s comments make that contestable.

She told journalists that the politicians’ remuneration had been “thoroughly considered and adjusted to current prices in Jakarta". Her statement didn’t endorse her credentials as a leader of the poor who must now think they’re even more unloved, so what to lose by stoning cops?

Everything, because punch-ups add to Prabowo’s scares of violence and therefore the need for tough guys to be in charge. Excluded from that cohort (there are only five women in the 48-strong ministry) is the civilian Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 38 this year.

In Indonesia, nepotism is as entrenched as corruption.

As the eldest son of the former president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, Gibran’s place as the youth-bait on last year’s election ticket is widely considered the reason for Prabowo’s clear win, 58% in the three-way contest.

But the young man is now seldom seen in public; when he does appear, his smile is forced.

Similar features could be seen in the mobs rioting outside the former businessman’s new office in the Parliament. If he’s going to be dislodged, it’s more likely to be by retired generals who have been petitioning Parliament — so far unsuccessfully — than teen gangs.

Indonesian politics are forever volatile; that keeps them dangerous. The 1998 riots that followed Soeharto’s resignation led to firebombings, an estimated 1000 killings and 400 rapes of ethnic Chinese women.

A repeat of that unresolved tragedy is the fear of all who watch the present protests.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.