JAKARTA: Sulianto Sunarto remembers the days he had to bribe Indonesian officials to sell Chinese red lanterns and lion dance gear in Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown.

“I felt like a smuggler when I sold those,” said Sulianto, who has sold the ornaments for 31 years and only stopped making payoffs to corrupt bureaucrats in 1998 when President Suharto stepped down after 32 years of iron-fisted rule.

“I felt I was treated unfairly during the Suharto period,” said Sulianto, a 59-year-old Indonesian born of overseas Chinese parents.

And while that particular problem has ended, Sulianto feels ethnic Chinese are still being mistreated by officials in other ways, a view common among his nine million compatriots in the world’s fourth-most populous nation of some 210 million people.

Among other difficulties, they still face many discriminatory laws, some dating back to the Dutch colonial period and some passed during the Suharto period with the primary aim of crushing communist supporters linked to Beijing.

Many Indonesians see the Chinese, who by some estimates control around 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth, as overly privileged.

Chinese were often targeted in the suppression of communists in 1965 that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

Political and economic crisis in 1998 saw looting and burning of Chinese-owned shops, raping of Chinese women and more than 1,000 deaths.

Several of the discriminatory laws were repealed after that crisis and Suharto’s fall, but a number remain, as do double standards allowing bureaucrats and others to give ethnic Chinese a harder time than citizens from indigenous groups.—Reuters