Riot Survivor Ready to Become First Chinese Jakarta Governor
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Molotov cocktails and machetes were what Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s family once needed to fend off rioters bent on driving ethnic Chinese from Jakarta. Sixteen years later he’s set to become the Indonesia capital’s first governor from the minority group.
“We just needed to survive,” Basuki’s younger brother Basuri Tjahaja Purnama recalled of the May 1998 attacks. “Why should we leave? We were born here, grew up here. It’s our land and our soil. So we just needed to defend ourselves.”