Mass protests rock Indonesia
Over the last week, protests have been organised across Indonesia in response to politicians giving themselves a hefty pay rise. Days of demonstrations, mostly in the capital, Jakarta, faced severe police repression. But they continued to grow.
On 28 August, after four days of mobilisations, 21-year-old ride-share driver Affan Kurniawan was hit by an armoured police car. He died in hospital soon after. The rage at this is evident among demonstrators and their sympathisers. The protests have grown and radicalised as a result, and many activists are calling for the prosecution of the police responsible, as well as the prosecution of all officers involved in human rights abuses. These new demands add to the existing demand for parliament to be dissolved in response to the politicians’ self-approved pay rise.
The proposed pay rise would add an extra 50 million Indonesian rupiah (roughly A$4,600) to the monthly allowance of members of parliament, supposedly to help them with housing costs. The increase alone is around ten times the minimum wage in Jakarta, and it would be added on top of the base salary and other perks that politicians already receive.
Such self-serving greed hit a nerve when it was announced, and it has become the focal point for broader working-class grievances that have been aired for months. Indonesia’s unemployment rate is currently the highest in South-East Asia. Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry reports a 32 percent increase in company lay-offs in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year.
This has only added to the trend of underemployment and low-quality jobs dominating the labour market. According to a recent article by economists Kelvin Ramadhan and Wisnu Setiadi Nugroho, real wages have not increased since 2018. All of this has created a sense of stagnation and instability for Indonesian workers, especially young workers, while Indonesia’s billionaires and politicians grow richer.
Police repression has increased the anger driving these protests. Police have used water cannons, tear gas, batons and mass arrests. According to reports from socialist activists on the ground, at least 200 people were arrested in Jakarta and Bogor, 50km south of the capital, on the night of 28 August. Police are trying to disorganise and demoralise protesters, particularly students, whom the Indonesian ruling class often call “professional anarchists” to justify police beating and arresting them.
Politically motivated police brutality has been a feature of Indonesian politics for decades, even more so as protests against corruption, militarism and neoliberalism have grown over the past six years. But there has been a particularly sinister normalisation of human rights abuses by the Indonesian state with the election of Prabowo Subianto last year. President Prabowo is a conservative military figure best known for leading the counter-insurgency campaigns against the independence movement in East Timor and for his role in kidnapping and torturing student democracy activists in the late 1990s.
Since his ascension to the presidency, he has been promoting allies from the military into high-ranking government positions, despite their sordid past of human rights abuses and murders of democracy activists. For now, the police remain the main target of protesters’ rage. But the military has its own history of human rights abuses and is often relied on to quell protests when they reach destabilising proportions.
Despite the attacks on this most recent round of protests, students held their ground on 25-27 August. After that, unions involved in the Labour Party (Partai Buruh) organised their own demonstration alongside the students on the 28th, demanding an increase to the minimum wage. This increased the numbers in the face of police violence, drawing workers and students into action in their thousands on the streets of Jakarta.
Since Affan Kurniawan’s murder, the anger reached explosive proportions. His funeral was held on the morning of 29 August. Thousands of ride-share drivers attended on their bikes and in uniform to pay respects to their colleague. Many more have joined the protests since hearing the news. On that afternoon, a mass protest of students and workers formed around the police headquarters in South Jakarta. The Jakarta Post reported that by 4pm, they had entered the front gate and occupied the space in front of the building. Reports from socialists involved in the protests say that by 7pm, the police had deployed tear gas again. Many other cities had their own protests that day as well. Reports in the Guardian and CNN indicate that provincial government buildings and official guesthouses have been set ablaze in Makassar, South Sulawesi and Bandung, central Java.
President Prabowo and the Jakarta police chief have issued condolences and apologies for Kurniawan’s murder and called for calm. An investigation into the officers responsible is under way, and there is enough public pressure that it may even result in consequences for the killers. But the whole system of repression continues to rain down tear gas and beatings on those demanding justice. Meanwhile, the inequality that sparked this movement only worsens day by day. For those reasons, it won’t be easy to appease the movement. But nor will it be so simple to repress it. As the ruling class grasps for a way to stabilise the system and return to the grinding normality of capitalism in Indonesia, the struggle continues.
