In 1976, then-Lt. Prabowo Subianto arrived for his first tour of duty in East Timor, the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia had invaded and occupied the previous year. The youngest person to lead a unit of the Indonesian military’s special forces arm, Kopassus, the 26-year-old Prabowo was sent to Timor in search of Nicolau Lobato, a prominent leader of the region’s independence movement.
Two years later, Prabowo’s unit located, arrested and killed Lobato. His severed head was mailed to then-Indonesian President Suharto as proof of his death.
With that mission, Prabowo began his long military and political career. It would be a career littered with abuses, including alleged war crimes. It would also culminate in his inauguration as Indonesia’s eighth president on Oct. 20.
Since that first mission almost 50 years ago, Prabowo’s journey has been inseparable from Indonesia’s fractious, often violent history. As a general during the country’s occupation of East Timor in the 1980s and 1990s, Prabowo organized gangs of hooded killers to terrorize and subdue civilians associated with the independence movement. And he allegedly participated in one of the bloodiest events of the Timor war: the Krakas massacre, in which 300 Timorese—mostly civilians—were hunted down and killed by Kopassus units.
In 1996, Prabowo was sent to the province of West Papua, where the secessionist Free Papua Movement, or OPM, was embroiled in violent clashes with the Indonesian army. There, he and his unit carried out reprisal attacks, targeting villages they believed were sympathetic to the armed independence movement.
Two years later, after the Asian financial crisis spurred mass student-led protests against Suharto’s repressive regime in Jakarta, Prabowo spearheaded campaigns to kidnap, arrest and torture student activists, 22 of whom were disappeared by state authorities. After Suharto’s fall, Prabowo was dishonorably discharged from the army for his role in the enforced disappearances, and for years, the United States government, which had previously provided him with military training, barred him from entering the country.
Today, the whereabouts of 13 of the 22 disappeared student activists remain unknown, and a weekly candlelight vigil in their honor still takes place every Thursday at the steps of the Presidential Palace—the palace that Prabowo now occupies.
While Prabowo is often described as erratic, he has in fact been quite consistent in his contempt for agitators against the Indonesian government—whether in East Timor and West Papua, or on the streets and in the universities of Java.
Prabowo’s human rights record did not deter Indonesian voters from handing him a decisive first-round victory in February’s presidential election, with 58 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field. His presidential ambitions began a decade ago, when he first ran for the office. Five years ago, Prabowo joined forces with the man who had beaten him in the 2014 and 2019 contests, serving as defense minister for outgoing President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi.
But Prabowo’s political rise has also been championed by an Indonesian populace that is predominantly forward-looking and often unconcerned with his central role in some of the darkest chapters of the country’s recent history.
That history will undoubtedly shape his presidential term. Prabowo has now appointed his Cabinet, comprising more than 100 ministers. Among them is Prabowo’s longtime friend and one-time fellow military academy cadet, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, who will serve as defense minister. Like Prabowo, Sjamsoeddin also served in Kopassus, completing tours of duty in East Timor, Aceh and Papua, and cementing his career by curbing political dissent, crushing opposition movements and brutalizing separatists. Also like Prabowo, he was once denied a visa to the United States due to his involvement in atrocities and human rights violations during his Kopassus tenure. A report commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights found that, in the lead up to the Timorese independence referendum in 1999, Sjamsoediin discussed with other senior officers “plans to destroy vital infrastructure, and to kill key pro-independence leaders, in the event that the ballot result favored independence.”
The rise of both Prabowo and Sjamsoeddin highlights the military’s return to centrality in Indonesian politics, which has been building under Jokowi following a fall from grace in the initial post-Suharto democratic transition. Prabowo and his cohort will now have a new legislative arsenal of repressive laws at their disposal, as they navigate escalating tensions with the Papua independence movement and oversee the winding down of the post-civil war financing mechanism in Aceh province.
If Prabowo’s pre-inauguration outreach is any indication, his administration will also pivot away from Jokowi’s primary focus on domestic policy to put a greater emphasis on projecting Indonesia’s influence in the global arena. Even before taking office, Prabowo met with the leaders of China, Russia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia, among others. He has indicated that he believes “a web of strong friendships” will be Indonesia’s “strongest pillar of foreign policy and … defence policy.”
The enthusiasm Prabowo has generated for a more globally engaged Indonesia is one of the factors that helped catapult him to victory at the polls in January. But his rise could jeopardize the safety of many communities in Indonesia, including the independence movement in Papua, as well as Indigenous groups, human rights defenders, the LGBTQ+ community and others whose activism and organizing is now in the crosshairs of the repressive powers of the Indonesian state.
Abuses in Papua
In a wide-ranging interview with Al-Jazeera in May, just a few months after his election victory, Prabowo was asked about a video that had gone viral earlier this year showing Indonesian soldiers torturing a detained West Papuan rebel who subsequently died in custody.
Initially, Prabowo acknowledged that those responsible for the incident were facing disciplinary measures. But when pressed about the apparent frequency with which such acts occur in the two Papuan provinces, Papua and West Papua, he bristled and accused the interviewer of “one-sided” questioning. “Have you been there?” he demanded. “Why don’t you go there?”
His attempt to deflect the questioning was ironic, given that the Indonesian government enforces strict prohibitions on access to Papua, which has been home to a long-simmering independence movement since Indonesia took over the administration of the former Dutch colony in 1962. Jakarta traces its territorial claim over Papua to a 1969 United Nations-supervised plebiscite, in which a group of electors, who were largely hand-picked by Jakarta, voted unanimously to join Indonesia.
In the decades that followed, Papua’s independence movement, like those in East Timor and Aceh, posed a constant threat to Jakarta’s control over each territory. But only the Papua movement will present Prabowo with an active conflict—Timor-Leste has been an independent nation since its 1999 referendum, and the independence movement in Aceh all but vanished following a 2005 peace agreement in the aftermath of the tsunami the previous year.
Indonesian forces have been regularly accused of human rights abuses in their decadeslong battle against the Papuan independence movement. In March 2022, U.N. experts expressed concern over reports of child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement. And earlier this year, in its periodic review of Indonesia’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Human Rights Commission expressly noted the treatment of Papuans—including accusations of torture, unlawful detention and extrajudicial executions—as problem areas. The report also pointed to the lack of available information due to the prohibitions on access, as well as the frequency of internet shutdowns in Papua, especially during military operations, as exacerbating the risks of human rights abuses.
Meanwhile, Papuans Behind Bars, a civil society monitoring organization, recorded over 500 politically motivated arrests in the territory in 2023. And in July, a Papuan lawyer and human rights defender was shot by unknown assailants in what Amnesty International described as “a reprehensible attempt to silence a courageous voice and to instill fear in those who fight for justice.”
These reports are already troubling, but the situation could very well worsen under Prabowo. While he is often described as erratic, he has in fact been quite consistent in his contempt for agitators against the Indonesian government—whether in East Timor and West Papua, or on the streets and in the universities of Java.
In the previously mentioned interview with Al-Jazeera, Prabowo went on to dismiss those fighting for independence as “terrorists” who “burn and kill children.” He rejected the concerns of human rights organizations and other NGOs, insisting that his decisions on Papua “will be guided by our national interests.”
The Crackdown on Dissent
That is further cause for concern, because in Indonesia, talk of “national interests” has long been a euphemism for exploiting the vast reserves of natural resources, including oil, gas, timber, nickel and gold, that have buoyed the country’s economy. In recent years, activists have sought to highlight how neatly these “national interests” overlap with the personal financial stakes of decision-makers in the government.
As a result, activists have also been increasingly targeted by Indonesia’s political elite. In 2021, for instance, human rights activists Haris Azhar and Fatia Maulidiyanti were charged with defamation for a YouTube video in which they discussed their report on human rights violations perpetrated by the Indonesian military in Papua. During the conversation, they mentioned that Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan—at the time Indonesia’s minister for maritime affairs and investments and now named by Prabowo to head the National Economic Council —holds personal investments in gold mines where some of these violations took place.
In response, Luhut launched a campaign of judicial harassment against the two, filing criminal and civil charges under Article 27 of the Electronic Information and Transactions, or EIT, Law, which prohibits making available any material “with contents of affronts and/or defamation.” Article 28 of the law also prohibits “disseminating false and misleading information.” These two articles alone were used against at least 332 individuals between January 2019 and May 2022, according to Amnesty International.
With the repressive legal landscape quickly becoming entrenched in Indonesia, Prabowo will have even more extensive powers to repress dissent.
While the charges against Haris and Fatia were ultimately dropped—the last was finally dismissed in January—the activists were subjected to three years of legal harassment and multiple interrogations. Luhut’s campaign has also established a model for abusing the EIT Law to protect an elite political class that has largely captured Indonesia’s “national interests.”
In August of this year, criminal defamation charges similar to those leveled against Haris and Fatia were brought against two student activists protesting outside the headquarters of the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, or IWIP, a nickel-mining and industrial venture. The protesters were calling for IWIP to address the environmental impacts of its nickel-mining operations in North Maluku, where Indigenous communities’ land and way of life remain at high risk of devastation as a result of state-sanctioned development projects.
The defamation charges brought against the two activists mirror those at the heart of Luhut’s case. They have been accused of personally insulting Suaidi Marasabessy, a retired military general with personal financial ties to the mining industry who shares an office with IWIP. The students alleged said that Marasabessy has failed to use his position to protect and assist the communities affected by IWIP. The two activists have also been targeted with vague threats by Ali Marasabessy, the chairman of Bravo 5, an organization of former military generals of which Luhut is a member. In a video shared on TikTok, Ali Marasabessy insisted the students apologize or face a “risk.” The case further illustrates the trend of political and military elites abusing Indonesian laws to protect their personal interests and reputations.
Beyond the targeting of individual activists, the EIT Law perpetuates a climate of fear among activists who represent any threat to the state power that Prabowo has so fiercely defended throughout his career. This climate has only been exacerbated by the launch in 2021 of the “virtual police,” a division of the Indonesian National Police responsible for supervising content on social media platforms. While the purported purpose of the virtual police is to reduce prosecutions by “educating and informing” the authors of offending posts, the reality is closer to the establishment of a state-sponsored online surveillance system.
Much of this worsening climate for civil society began under Jokowi, who initially presented himself as a democratic reformer but ultimately did more to undermine democracy and entrench elite power—including that of the military—in Indonesia. However, unlike Jokowi, who came from a humble background and rose to power as a political outsider, Prabowo comes from a family of political elites and has personal interests of his own to protect, including more than $127 million in assets. And with the repressive legal landscape quickly becoming entrenched in Indonesia, Prabowo will have even more extensive powers to repress dissent.
As Prabowo focuses attention on strengthening the country’s “network of friends” in the global arena, he will likely try to leverage Indonesia’s role as a leading state in Southeast Asia—a strategic region often seen by the international community only through the narrow lens of the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China—to deflect scrutiny and criticism of the deteriorating environment for political freedoms at home. That bodes poorly for independence activists facing abuses at the hands of the Indonesian military in Papua, as well as for Indonesia’s civil society, whose rights to free expression have been increasingly subsumed by a legal warfare that aims to silence dissent and pursue facetious claims of “national interest.”