By Cindy Shiner
JAKARTA, Indonesia, May 15-Burning tires and bonfires set by looters from the streets of Jakarta's Chinatown district today, replaced by more blockades thrown up by the Chinese who were burned out of their and businesses.

In an effort to keep out a potential second wave of marauding looters, young Chinese men sealed off alleys leading to their homes off the main street. They used scorched chairs and other damaged furniture, small uprooted trees and pieces salvaged from their burned businesses.

"We will fight with them because we defend our rights," said Ricky, an angry 28-year-old, as he stood behind a barricade with a dozen others. He leaned on a blue aluminum baseball bat while the men beside him rolled metal pipes in their hands and surveyed the street.

Chinatown resembled a war zone a day after thousands of people rampaged through Jakarta. The street was littered with burned-out vehicles, broken glass and ash. Frightened people peered out through smashed windows in apartments above their shops. A huge plume of black smoke rose from a torched mall. Straggling looters were still running out of smoldering buildings as soldiers fired warning shots in the air.

As in past periods of economic and political turmoil, the Chinese, who comprise about 3 percent of Indonesia's population, were particularly hard-hit in the rioting.

Indonesians resent the ethnic Chinese because they control a majority of the country's wealth and trade, and accuse them of hoarding and indiscriminately raising prices in the midst of rampant inflation.

"They hate us," Ricky said.

But many of the Chinese who lost their homes and businesses in the rioting are as poor as the looters who smashed through their windows and set fire to their neighborhoods. They also have suffered from the economic crisis and its resulting high prices and unemployment.

Ricky, for example, lost his marketing job two months ago -- one of the 8-plus Indonesians and ethnic Chinese who have become unemployed since the crisis erupted last summer after the fall of the Indonesian currency, the rupiah.

The exchange rate was further destabilized after Chinese conglomerates and other businesses moved their money into overseas bank accounts shortly after the crisis hit.

But the idea that all Chinese are wealthy is an illusion. Most of the hundreds of shops destroyed in Chinatown were mom-and-pop businesses, and many of the owners couldn't afford plane tickets to Singapore, Australia and other, like the thousands who flocked to Jakarta's international airport today.

Still fresh in the minds of many Chinese are the massacres of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Communists and suspected sympathizers during the late 1960s, when President Suharto rose to power. The looters refrained from personal violence in Thursday's mayhem, but their seething anger is palpable.

Despite the fear in Chinatown, many people, like Frankie Hakim, 48, have chosen to stay. He estimated the damage to his small restaurant at about $10,000.

"We cannot move to other countries because we know that we are born here, and we have grown up here," said Hakim as his workers swept up the rubble around him. "We are Indonesian, too."

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company