Eight people have died in violent protests that have rocked Indonesia since last week, as unrest builds over deep-seated dissatisfaction with President Prabowo Subianto’s governance of the fourth most populous country in the world.
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Across the Southeast Asian archipelago, demonstrators have torched government buildings, riot police have hurled tear gas and fired water cannons at protesters in city streets, and some people have looted politicians’ houses and burned vehicles.
Even the overcrowded tourist haunt of Bali was not spared: students and online motorcycle taxi drivers surrounded the region’s police headquarters on Saturday, sparking a rare riot that saw police cars vandalized and looted, as well as several people arrested.
The outbreak of violence has prompted Prabowo to cancel a planned trip to China this week and foreign embassies, including the U.S., to issue warnings to its citizens abroad about the protests. TikTok, which has more than 100 million accounts in Indonesia, suspended its livestreaming feature in the country to keep the platform “a safe and civil space.”
The protests appear to be the biggest test of Prabowo’s leadership, less than a year since he took office. The President, for the most part, has urged calm, but law enforcement officials have responded with heavy-handed crackdowns on protesters, fueling even more backlash.
Here’s what to know.
When and why did the protests start?
Protests have been ongoing in Indonesia for some time since Prabowo took office in October, primarily over his domestic policy decisions, which have been perceived to favor the political elite. In February this year, students and activists took to the streets to decry austerity measures. Protests have continued throughout the year, including ahead of the country’s 80th independence anniversary in August, when many discontented citizens raised pirate flags in lieu of or alongside the national flag to voice their discontent.
But the latest wave began on Aug. 25, after reports emerged that all 580 lawmakers of the Indonesian parliament were receiving 50 million rupiah (around $3,000) monthly housing allowances on top of their salaries. The allowance, introduced last year, is almost 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta and 20 times the minimum wage in poorer regions, as Indonesia struggles with a cost-of-living crisis. Gejayan Memanggil, a group that organized the Aug. 25 protest in front of the House of Representatives building, demanded that the allowance be scrapped and any plans to increase parliamentarians’ salaries be prevented.
The protests escalated after a 21-year-old motorcycle delivery driver died after being run over Thursday by a police tactical vehicle responding to the demonstrations. Affan Kurniawan, the driver, had dropped his phone after being entangled with a crowd of protesters when a police vehicle ran over his body. He was sent to a hospital in Jakarta and died shortly after.
The President and police have since apologized for Affan’s death, but his passing only deepened anti-government and anti-elite sentiment among the protesters.
Prabowo announced that political parties agreed to unspecified cuts to lawmakers’ benefits and imposed a moratorium on lawmakers’ overseas trips.
“We are determined to always uphold the interests of the people, including the marginalized and the underprivileged,” Prabowo said.
Where are protests taking place?
Demonstrations began in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, but spread to other major cities as thousands of people joined the call for police reform.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the police headquarters in Denpasar, Bali’s capital, on Saturday as some burned rubbish on the street and police fired tear gas into the crowd.
In Mataram, the provincial capital of Lombok, a crowd set fire to a council building, while in Cirebon in West Java, protesters dismantled a monument made from confiscated exhaust pipes, according to local media. In Solo, a city in Central Java, protests turned into a riot that destroyed the main gate of the Mobile Brigade headquarters and set fire to a government building, although the Solo online motorcycle taxi solidarity alliance alleged that the protest had been infiltrated, while other groups warned on social media of online provocateurs.
More protests sparked across the island of Java, including in the cities of Bandung, Surabaya, and Semarang, Borneo, and Sumatra. In some cities, protesters looted government buildings and the homes of political party members. Photos and videos of the protests and police response have spread on social media.
Protests turned deadly in some cities. In Yogyakarta, Rheza Sendy Pratama, a 21-year-old university student, was found dead and covered in wounds, which some activist groups have said were a result of being beaten by authorities. Amikom University, which Rheza attended, said the circumstances of his death remain unclear while an investigation is ongoing.
At least three people were killed in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi, after a regional parliament building was set on fire on Friday, local officials said. A fourth person was killed on Friday. A local disaster agency official Muhammad Fadli Tahar told AFP that the man had been beaten by a mob that suspected he was an intelligence officer.
How have authorities responded?
Prabowo, a former military general discharged in the 1990s for alleged human rights violations, ordered Indonesian law enforcement to use force to respond to protesters. “We cannot deny that signs of extrajudicial, even unlawful, actions are beginning to emerge, some even leading to treason and terrorism,” Prabowo said Sunday, ordering the Indonesian police and military to take the “firmest actions possible in accordance with the law.”
Police have since set up checkpoints across the capital in Jakarta on Monday. They have also said that they identified those involved in vandalism and looting incidents and are pursuing the swift arrests of those persons.
Authorities, however, have been criticized for the brutality of their actions since the past week, which resulted in Affan’s death as well as the arrest of more than 1,000 individuals suspected of taking part in the protests. Rights group Amnesty International said that journalists covering the protests also suffered from violence from law enforcement.
Human rights NGO KontraS criticized the police response to the Aug. 25 protests for its “excessive” use of force, including the “arbitrary” detention of minors, and called out how protesters were being framed as “anarchists” to justify such a response.
Indonesia’s Commission on Human Rights, a government-established independent body, on Sunday urged law enforcement “to work professionally, accountably, transparently, and uphold human rights principles, including refraining from repressive actions, using excessive force, and adhering to human rights standards when securing demonstrations.”
The apparent insensitivity of some politicians has further frustrated the public, with some describing the protests as an “empathy test.” Ahmad Sahroni, a member of political party NasDem, said people demanding the dissolution of parliament were the “dumbest people in the world.” Sahroni’s Jakarta home was looted by protesters, with videos posted online showing them smashing his sports cars and giving out his designer bags. Sahroni was suspended from parliament over his comments, alongside another NasDem member, Nafa Urbach, who had defended the housing allowance increase as she said it was necessary for her to avoid an “extreme” commute to work.
What comes next?
Some student activist groups and civil society groups called off protests on Monday, fearing a harsher crackdown from authorities. The Indonesia Women’s Alliance, a coalition of civil society groups, postponed a planned protest “to avoid an escalation of violence by the authorities and prevent the demonstration from being exploited by irresponsible parties,” the group said in a statement translated from Bahasa Indonesia on Instagram. It’s not clear whether other protesters also plan to halt.
But even if the past week of protests die down, analysts say the pattern of Indonesian politics means it may well flare up again.
“This escalation was predictable,” Ambang Priyonggo, a political analyst at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, told Channel News Asia. “It is the accumulation of public frustration with political elites whose policies do not serve the people.”
Christina Clarissa Intania, a law researcher at the Indonesian Institute thinktank, noted that the public’s frustration goes beyond the disparity between politicians’ salaries and average pay in the country and is more broadly to do with what they perceive to be a lack of transparency and accountability from the government.
“These complaints are not new. They reflect a long-existing divide between political elites and everyone else within Indonesian society,” Elisabeth Kramer, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Sydney, wrote for the University of Melbourne’s Indonesia at Melbourne blog. “The call for accountability and increasingly vocal demands that politicians answer to the public are reflective of [a] rising sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, which, if not resolved, might lead to an ever-rising number of protests in the future.”