Every Thursday evening, a group of activists assembles in front of the presidential palace in Jakarta, Indonesia’s congested capital city. They wear matching black t-shirts and carry signs demanding accountability for a legacy of military-led human rights abuses. Some appeal for information about the fate and whereabouts of 17 students who were forcibly disappeared by the military while protesting Indonesia’s repressive New Order government in 1998. For 18 years, the group, which includes parents of the missing students, has taken a small but committed stance against a military that once threatened the safety and well-being of civilians across the country.
Last week, however, the protests against Indonesia’s military escalated. On March 20, Indonesia’s Parliament passed an amendment to the country’s 2004 Indonesian National Armed Forces Law allowing greater military control over aspects of civilian government. The decision strips away the protections that were put in place after 1998 to guard against the repression of the Suharto era. In response to the passage of the amendment, activists and students, some of whom were not yet born when the New Order fell, took to the streets. In Jakarta, police eventually dispersed protestors with water cannons after some protestors lobbed petrol bombs and attempted to breach the Parliament gate.
Demonstrations against the amendments, which erupted in other cities as well, suggest that the repression that gripped Indonesia 30 years ago can still galvanize a country where protest has become increasingly uncommon. The law’s reform, though, indicates that military leaders remember the power they once commanded – and want it back.
In 1998, widespread protests in Indonesia drove President Suharto, who had led his New Order government for three decades, from office. The New Order was founded on the violent repression of 1965 and 1966, during which Indonesian troops killed more than a million people under the cover of rooting out communist sympathizers. The Indonesian army later committed grave atrocities in East Timor, where estimates of civilians killed in the conflict range from 90,000 to over 200,000. Indonesian activists and dissidents were arrested, tortured, and disappeared to maintain the state’s monopoly on power. Meanwhile, military leaders and officers enjoyed immunity from prosecution.
The student uprisings that eventually drove Suharto from power were first met with extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. When Suharto finally relinquished his office, reformists ushered in an era of political change, passing laws to dismantle a key aspect of the regime known as dwifungsi, or dual-function, a political doctrine imposed by the Suharto administration to insert military leadership into the economic and administrative functions of the state.
In recent years, praise for Indonesia’s democratic reforms has been shadowed by increasing concerns about a return to repressive government practices. The current Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was elected in February 2024, besting two opponents with enough support to secure a first-round victory outright. He had served under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo as Indonesia’s defense minister. During the New Order, Prabowo oversaw the Indonesian Special Forces, Kopassus, the directorate responsible for widespread human rights violations. Despite Prabowo’s involvement in some of the most repressive aspects of Indonesia’s political history – he was banned from entering the United States for 20 years for his alleged role in the enforced disappearance of student protestors who ultimately drove Suharto from power – he entered office in October 2024 with broad popular support.
But the threat of a return to military dominance of the social, political, and economic functions of the government, a process that arguably began during Jokowi’s two terms in office, has spurred a return of student and activist protests. Thirty years after the post-Suharto reforms, many Indonesians recognize that a cascade of rushed legislative moves could return them to a violently oppressive past.
Military intrusion into civilian affairs poses immediate threats: the emboldening of an unaccountable military, the jeopardizing of security for groups or individuals likely to be targeted, and the marginalization of civilian institutions and civilian governance. But the intrusion threatens longer term impacts as well. The establishment of military power over civilian affairs creates a model that leaders aiming to implement authoritarian practices with autocratic tendencies will find easy to reengage. Military intrusion poses a threat to the civilian institutions on which rights-respecting states depend, which, if unchecked, could persist beyond the term of any single leader.