Rebecca Meckelburg: Suharto’s lingering shadow — Prospects for human rights and democracy in Indonesia and West Papua after Prabowo’s election

In Indonesia’s February presidential elections, Prabowo Subianto was elected as the country’s eighth president on his third attempt, having previously run in the 2014 and 2019 elections. This article will assess the political and human rights situation in Indonesia and West Papua after Prabowo’s election. It begins with a short history of the Indonesian and West Papuan people’s long struggle for democracy and human rights, as context for understanding current developments.

The article is organised in three parts:

1. The rise of the New Order dictatorship and the state of human rights under General Suharto;
2. Politics and human rights in post-New Order Indonesia; and
3. What we can expect under a Prabowo presidency.

The New Order dictatorship and human rights under Suharto

Suharto was Indonesia’s second president. His rise to power in 1965-66 was facilitated by massacres of more than 1 million people and the incarceration of about 1 million more. Through such violence, Suharto consolidated his military dictatorship, which remained in power for 32 years. The campaign of mass violence by the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI, Indonesian National Armed Forces) in the mid-60s brought an end to a period of political uncertainty under Indonesia’s first president Sukarno. Namely, would Indonesia move in a more popular socialist direction or to consolidate capitalist development. Indonesia’s situation was not unlike that facing many anti-colonial independence struggles across Asia at the time, such as in Vietnam.

Many of those murdered in the mass violence were members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia, PKI) and its affiliated organisations. But hundreds of thousands were people who had participated (or were the children of those who had participated) in the huge civilian mobilisations and military campaigns that defeated the Dutch colonial oppressors two decades earlier. Alongside the physical destruction of the PKI and affiliated organisations, and the left wing of Sukarno’s Partai Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Party, PNI), the state also branded hundreds of thousands of poor people as PKI sympathisers. It banned all grassroots organisations, including arts, cultural and women’s sewing groups, and forms of organised mutual cooperation that secured people’s survival. The PKI’s destruction removed the army’s only rival for political power. The army then deposed Sukarno and purged the civil service and military of PNI, leftist and Sukarnoist elements.

This was done with the aim of realising several strategic goals:

• Eliminating the PKI and the broader left-wing nationalist movement as the military’s only significant political rival for power;
• Punishing Communists, left nationalists and local organisations for mass actions they had waged from the 1950s onwards, which directly threatened feudal and capitalist property relations; and
• Realising their political and economic ambitions of creating a modern capitalist nation-state.

The Suharto dictatorship developed a national ideology and military structure that gave the TNI a physical presence at every level of administration, from the national to village level, openly legitimising a repressive role for the military in politics.

Before 1965, right-wing nationalists in the military and national government believed that the dominant political ideologies in Indonesia were Communist, socialist and left-wing nationalist. The dictatorship’s concern with political ideas and organised opposition from grassroots organisations was so great that Lieutenant-General Ali Moertopo was assigned by Suharto to design indoctrination courses. Moertopo lectured his propagandists in the Information Department: “Indonesians have been influenced by Communism as a system of thought for so long that it came to be identified as the Indonesian way of thinking.”

Suharto sought to decisively destroy any social basis for new mass-based popular political power. His dictatorship represented an ideological rejection of the popular mass participation unleashed during the Indonesian revolution (1945-49), which defeated Dutch colonialism and thrived until 1965. The military state’s actions also provided the needed preconditions to develop and consolidate a strong domestic capitalist class, which had not been possible under colonial rule. This required creating highly organised and repressive systems of exploitation of both Indonesia’s people and natural resources. It also included the annexation of West Papua in 1963/1969 and Timor Leste in 1975.

But as with all capitalist states, the contradictions of this system of extreme exploitation created the pre-conditions for the (re)emergence of its opponents: the mass of ordinary people in the cities and villages. The Suharto regime was unable to create passive non-resisting lower classes despite repressive systems created to control urban and rural people, and the huge expansion of land brought under the control of the Indonesian state and private capitalist enterprises by the New Order dictatorship. Throughout 32 years of dictatorship, there were periodic waves of repression against workers, students and rural poor people who organised against crushing exploitation in Indonesia’s developing manufacturing sector and the theft of land and natural resources for capitalist development. Students demanded political rights. From the 1980s, many NGOs began waging political campaigns, through lobbying and legal forums, while leveraging support from progressive political parties and social movements internationally.

The huge rural movement that emerged to oppose the Kedung Ombo dam in Central Java in the late 1980s marked a historic turning point, with new organised left forces starting to meet and organise more systematic opposition to the Suharto dictatorship. The Partai Rakyat Demokratik (People’s Democratic Party, PRD) — which had a “sister” relationship with the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP, a predecessor of the Socialist Alliance) in the 1990s-2000s — had its origins in this and other struggles that emerged throughout the 1990s across Indonesia. Mobilisations of organised workers, small farmers and urban poor people, alongside those of students and NGO activists organising in defence of the rights of women, workers, farmers and the environment, became a significant feature of social life in the 1990s. These organised social movements faced systematic repression: worker, farmer and student activists were arrested, kidnapped, jailed, disappeared and murdered by the regime. But this did not stop the mobilisations.

These struggles received support from international solidarity campaigns, particularly in Australia, Europe and the United States. The DSP and Green Left Weekly (now Green Left), along with AKSI-ASIET (Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor), built solidarity campaigns in Australia and promoted solidarity among international collaborators. The Indonesian people’s political struggles, supported by these international solidarity campaigns, and the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, contributed to a growing crisis of political legitimacy for the New Order dictatorship in the late 1990s and ultimately forced Suharto to resign on May 21, 1998. These heroic struggles by the Indonesian people for democracy, and by the East Timorese people for independence, successfully defeated the structures of political rule built up over 32 years of New Order dictatorship, forcing the military out of political institutions and the military’s role in direct repression largely stopped, except in the provinces of Aceh and Papua.

Politics and human rights in post-New Order Indonesia

The dismantling of the political structures of dictatorship required something new to replace it. The primary structure that became the scaffolding of the present political system were the electoral and representative systems. These structures allowed multi-party elections for representative parliaments, as well as direct elections for national and local executive positions, with essentially only Communist and “separatist” (pro-independence) parties banned. Such elections determine which groups control the national and local government apparatus. The armed forces are responsible to the elected government and, so far, have only challenged this situation once since 1998, during the early transition stage.

The period 1998–2002 was primarily one of transition. It was overseen by three presidents: Bacharuddin Jusuf (BJ) Habibie, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and Abdurrahman Wahid. Their presidencies were marked by ongoing contestation over the political direction of the post-Suharto Reformasi movement. Made up of diverse social interests and groups, this movement involved mass political mobilisations around political demands, such as replacing the dictatorship with political structures that more genuinely represented the interests of people. These included a new parliament, formed as the product of free elections in 1999; ending single state trade unionism and other controls on civil society; recognising freedom of the press; and decentralising budgetary policy to local governments. During this time, most restrictions on the media and civil society were lifted. The Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK, Corruption Eradication Commission), with significant investigative and arrest powers, was established in 2002. Such genuine reforms reflected the need to accommodate the demands of still powerful mobilised social groups.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) was president between 2004-14. This period was defined by the consolidation of these new political structures as the basis for the political and economic stability desired by the politico-business elites. These new structures included refining election laws, introducing direct elections for national and local executive positions, further decentralisation, and three national and several provincial and local elections.

This restructuring from a centralised, authoritarian politics to decentralised, multi-party electoralism influenced the fragmentation of political parties and social movements. This fragmentation also reflected the more general fragmentation of social movements that occurred across the Global South and North under neoliberalism, where many post-colonial states were pushed to adopt decentralised political systems. It influenced the development of local political struggles, many of which oriented towards making demands on regional political structures for power and resources. Though sometimes successful, these struggles diverted attention away from more nationally based campaigns that placed demands on a centralised political power: the national government. This fragmentation was also reflected in the factionalisation of the most well-resourced social classes — the political and economic elites — into many different political parties.

The Indonesian economy was able to recover from the turmoil of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and get through the global economic crisis of 2008. But the 2014 elections marked a new turning point in the Indonesian state’s development. Two rival presidential candidates stood: Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi) and Prabowo. Jokowi’s slim victory was in large part due to mass public mobilisations and campaigning by pro-democracy civil society actors, as well as lower middle classes and poor people who saw Jokowi as “fresh” political blood in a system still largely dominated by military and political figures from the Suharto era. Every president since Suharto — Habibie, Wahid, Sukarnoputri, and SBY — had been prominent figures during the New Order: whether supporters or opponents of the New Order, they were products of that period and the social world defined by its elite. Jokowi’s popularity was built on implementing specific popular welfare policies, in particular a universal healthcare system. His campaign style involved frequent well-publicised dialogues with groups perceived in political culture to be representative of the “common people,” such as street and marketplace vendors.

The perception of Jokowi’s candidacy as manifesting a new political process was strengthened by the contrast with his rival, Prabowo. Hailing from an elite, very wealthy New Order family, Prabowo was married to Suharto’s daughter. Prabowo is a conservative right-wing nationalist whose entire professional career — in the military, as a businessperson and as a politician — was shaped by his elite family background and the experience of spending his youth in Europe. Prabowo had a strong military career, rising very quickly through the ranks of the army to head the elite special forces organisation, Kopassus. Along with designing strategy for military security in East Timor, Prabowo was accused of leading a unit responsible for the kidnapping and disappearance of pro-democracy movement leaders in 1998.

In policy terms, the key difference between Prabowo and Jokowi was in their attitudes to the system of decentralisation and direct election of government heads at the national, provincial and district levels established in the Reformasi period. Jokowi defended the systems consolidated during the SBY presidency, while Prabowo campaigned for a return to the New Order system, in which government heads were appointed by parliaments or representatives of the president.

Jokowi was elected with expectations of something new. However, he proved committed to the system developed during SBY’s presidency — one defined by transactional politics and agreements between different elite political parties. This intra-elite transactionalism, and absence of substantial programmatic differentiation, was only possible because the different factions of the country’s elite share the same basic socio-economic interests and outlook. All parties support the general priority of accelerating infrastructure construction to intensify the rate of exploitation of humans and natural resources through mining, palm-oil expansion and prime tourism for wealthy (mostly foreign) tourists. No differences in overall economic strategies were offered up in the 2014, 2019 or 2024 presidential elections. Rather, a general consensus exists among the political elite on promoting private sector-led economic growth, seeking foreign investment and aid, increasing state subsidies for infrastructure development, and reducing regulations perceived as negatively impacting the freedom to do business. There is also general agreement on providing a minimal safety net for those defined as extremely poor, while steadily cutting subsidies for consumer goods and production inputs.

Jokowi’s main difference with previous presidents was his political skill in transactional politics, proving able to bring most political parties into his government during his first presidential term. This remained the case in his second term, with all but two parties given strategic positions within his cabinet. After his 2019 election victory, Jokowi appointed Prabowo as defence minister. In the 2024 election, Jokowi was Prabowo’s most staunch high-profile backer.

What can we expect under a Prabowo presidency

Given this, what can we expect from a Prabowo-led government in terms of human rights? As Prabowo is yet to be installed as president, there are four factors that might help us evaluate what the human rights situation under a Prabowo presidency might look like:

1. The human rights record during Jokowi’s presidency, given the level of inter-elite agreement and Prabowo’s position in his cabinet;
2. The level of inter-elite stability;
3. Prabowo’s long-term military, business and political experience, and strategies he employed when holding positions of power; and
4. Domestic and international solidarity campaigns in defence of human rights and the environment.

Human rights

Since 2020, Indonesia has recorded the highest number of human rights violations in Asia, with the state being the most frequent perpetrator. The Papuan province (West Papua) has a disproportionately high number of reported human rights violations. This has affected both Papuan people in West Papua and Papuan students across Indonesia demonstrating against the Indonesian state stealing and destroying their lands and forests for agribusiness and extractive development. Extrajudicial killings by the state or other state-mobilised actors in Papua — including the police and military — drew significant international attention in the second period of Jokowi’s presidency.

National Strategic Projects

Since 2014, Jokowi’s economic program has centred on developing numerous National Strategic Projects (NSPs). These projects have involved cases of human rights violations, such as the state violently expropriating land from poor people. During Jokowi’s reign, the most effective broker of land-grabbing for development was the central government, carried out in the name of “public interest”. A report by a legal and human rights advocacy group released in April found nearly half of the 300 NSPs launched by the Jokowi government involved documented cases of violations against local communities. Perhimpunan Bantuan Hukum Indonesia (PBHI, Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights Association) identified cases of intimidation, torture, criminalisation and forced evictions carried out by security forces in 144 projects. It also found significant cases of environmental damage in 62% of all NSPs, while 89% of residents in affected areas experienced psychological trauma as a result of soldiers’ or police actions. About 84% of residents lost their land and homes due to forced evictions. For every investment worth IDR 1 trillion (about $62 million), the average workforce absorption reaches a maximum of 1250 people. Yet, in 115 conflicts in NSP areas alone, social conflicts over land have caused 85,555 farmers to lose access to their livelihoods and means of production.

Historical cases of state human rights violation

In his 2014 election campaign, Jokowi promised to resolve historical cases of state human rights violations, particularly those committed during the New Order dictatorship. However, his appointment of former military generals from the New Order regime to cabinet ministries in both terms as president allowed the culture of impunity to continue. These included former generals who benefited financially during the New Order and are now very wealthy businessmen, but who have serious records of human rights violations against pro-democracy activists and the East Timorese people. Among them are:

• Wiranto: held the positions of chair of the Presidential Advisory Council and Coordinating Minister for Politics, Law and Security. His personal wealth is estimated at $50 million.
• Luhut Binsar Panjaitan: held the positions of head of Presidential Staff, as well as Coordinating Minister for Politics, Law and Security and Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million.
• Prabowo: held the position of Defence Minister. His personal wealth is estimated at $200 million.

In the 2024 presidential campaign, national human rights organisation Komisi untuk Orang Hilang dan Korban Tindak Kekerasan (KontraS, Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence) reported all three presidential campaign teams included figures accused of historical cases of state violence and serious human rights violations.

The most recent period of Jokowi’s government was marked by rising human rights violations. Between 2020-23 KontraS recorded patterns of human rights violations that included:

• Information restrictions to stifle public discourse and political campaigning, along with digital attacks (doxing, profiling, hacking) to intimidate and silence political criticism;
• Physical violence (intimidation, arbitrary arrest, vandalism, shooting rubber bullets, use of tear gas and water cannon, environmental pollution and destruction, forced evictions, land seizures) to repress mass mobilisations and other expressions of political organising; and
• Psychological and symbolic violence (criminalisation, delegitimisation of land ownership) to facilitate mass expropriations, with many cases linked to government NSPs.

KontraS identified four human rights violations most often used to silence the community between November 2019 and October 2023: criminalisation, intimidation, land evictions and arbitrary arrests. Criminalisation of activists included arbitrary arrests and other forms of intimidation towards communities mobilising to oppose state land grabs. Recent well-publicised cases include in Wadas village in Central Java, West Papua, and the Rempang ecocity in the Riau islands. Activists have also been accused of crimes against state security over calls for West Papuan independence. Those who speak out against state violence, corruption (including of figures from president Jokowi’s inner circle) or unjust state policies have faced charges under defamation and information and electronic transactions laws. Freedom of association has been repressed via police harassment and intimidation, particularly of those protesting NSPs that violate human rights and destroy the environment.

A recent example occurred in May, with the forced dispersal of the People’s Water Forum (PWF) in Bali and intimidation of organisers. The PWF is an international meeting to oppose water privatisation and advocate for water management to benefit public welfare. The forum was violently disbanded by a militia organisation called Patriot Garuda Nusantara (PGN), in a move widely seen as a repeat of the kind of actions taken by the New Order regime. Before the event, members of the PWF 2024 organising committee received threats from state officials pressuring them not to hold the forum. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation Pedro Arrojo Agudo was prevented from entering PWF 2024 by security forces.

Inter-elite stability

Prabowo’s speeches before and after his election have stressed the need for unity. This unity refers to at least two things: the continued unity of politico-business elites; and the “unity” of the Indonesian state against pro-independence movements.

We can anticipate at least two possible challenges to inter-elite unity. The first challenge will be inter-elite conflict management. Conflicts might be triggered, for example, by a domestic economic downturn or deepening global economic crisis, with competing interests between elites/conglomerates becoming sharper, threatening to break previous alliances. The second challenge is the potential flow-on effects of the huge rise in cost of living over the past five years, which is intensifying social conflicts over access to resources that Indonesia’s poor social classes need to survive. Future rises in costs or domestic economic shocks could further intensify social conflicts, triggering inter-elite conflicts over the best strategy to contain them. While Jokowi has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to manage inter-elite unity, Prabowo’s capacity is yet to be tested.

We can also expect that defence of the unity of the Indonesian state will continue to be used by a Prabowo-led government to legitimise state violence against independence struggles in West Papua, as it was under Jokowi. Prabowo was trained in special forces ideology by the US military, at a time when counterinsurgency against conventional warfare was being resurrected as a strategic approach to dealing with popular movements in Central and Latin America. He and other elite Indonesian military figures trained by the US built on Indonesia’s history, in which the army forged its own counter-insurgency warfare immediately after independence to combat separatist movements across the Indonesian archipelago in the 1950s. He was a central military figure in the occupation of East Timor and understood that suppressing the independence struggle was not limited to military operations, but required diplomatic approaches. At military officer training school in the mid-1980s, Prabowo developed the thesis that successfully incorporating East Timor into the Unitary Indonesian Republic meant offering strategic groups in the annexed territory clear material benefits.

Given this, we can anticipate that Prabowo’s approach to securing stability in Indonesia will be significantly influenced by his military training and experience and that it will involve mobilising security forces while fostering splits and fractions within opposition movements by coopting certain sections and terrorising others. This can be understood as part of a broader strategy of securing stability through direct repression and intimidation, while providing welfare for social elements most vulnerable to political radicalisation. This approach is similar to Jokowi’s. If we consider the role of key figures such as Prabowo, Wiranto and Panjaitan during Jokowi’s presidency, Prabowo’s presidency is likely to be a continuation of Jokowi’s second term.

Domestic and international solidarity campaigns in defence of human rights and the environment

The Indonesian state’s human rights record worsened under Jokowi and is likely to further worsen under Prabowo, particularly in a scenario of rising social and economic instability. In light of Indonesia’s national development strategy, Prabowo is likely to remain focused on accelerating natural resource extraction while retaining a modest manufacturing sector. The consequences will be continued destruction of Indonesia’s remaining forests (largely found in Papua), the ongoing conversion of agricultural land to industry, and expanding spaces for middle class urban economic activity and tourism. All these projects involve evicting the most vulnerable — the urban and rural poor — from their homes and land, with nowhere else to go. If we look at Prabowo’s role as defence minister and the mobilisation of the TNI in West Papua during Jokowi’s second term, we can expect a significant escalation in human rights violations in that region.

And much like during Jokowi’s presidency, we can also anticipate domestic campaigns in solidarity with local people’s struggles displaced by NSPs, albeit in fragmented and localised forms. It remains to be seen whether there will be moves by localised groups to discuss more systematic coordination.

More recently, the All Eyes on Papua movement gained momentum on social media, calling on Indonesian people to pay attention to what is happening in Papua. This campaign focuses on the struggles of the Awyu and Moi tribes, who are fighting for their right to live in the customary forests they have inhabited since long before Indonesia became independent, and which are now concession lands for palm oil plantations. The Awyu indigenous community in Boven Digoel, South Papua, and the Moi indigenous community in Sorong, Southwest Papua, are currently involved in a lawsuit against the government and palm oil companies to defend their ancestral forests. As of June 4, the All Eyes on Papua call had been shared more than 2.8 million times on Instagram Story. Many netizens are busy reposting the poster as a form of showing concern for protecting Papua’s traditional forests. The huge expression of empathy from netizens for Palestinian people in the face of Israel’s genocidal war seems to have begun to influence people’s concern about environmental destruction and human rights violations in Papua.

Now is the time for us to build people-to-people solidarity. Indonesia is beginning to return to the kind of repression seen during the New Order regime. But the challenges of organising in the face of this new wave of repression are different from those of 25-35 years ago, both domestically — due to the serious fragmentation of social movements and radical anti-capitalist organisations — and internationally — as the people-to-people solidarity we saw in the past, in all its different expressions, is no longer a significant feature of Australian solidarity movements (with the exception of West Papua solidarity). Like in the 1990s, when there was success in making connections between the East Timorese people’s struggle for independence and the pro-democracy/anti-dictatorship movements across Indonesia, today we must find ways to build connections between West Papuan people’s struggles and pro-democracy elements in Indonesia, as winning ordinary Indonesian people to support West Papuans and vice versa will only strengthen both movements.

[This article is based on Rebecca Meckelburg’s presentation to Ecosocialism 2024. Meckelburg is an independent research scholar based in Central Java Indonesia with affiliations to Indonesia Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University and the Institute of International Studies at Universitas Gadjah Mada.]