Indonesian authorities have fired a police officer involved in the death of a bystander during unrest in Jakarta last week, in a bid to bring a rolling campaign of political demonstrations and disruptions to an end.
Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old ojol motorcycle driver, was run over and killed by a Mobile Brigade Corps (Brimob) vehicle during a heated protest in Jakarta on the evening of August 28. The killing, which was captured on video and widely disseminated online, ignited angry protests and riots in major cities across the archipelago, which have since claimed at least another 10 lives.
In a statement yesterday, the National Police Ethics Commission announced that Kosmas Kaju Gae, one of seven detained officers from the vehicle that hit Affan, “committed a serious violation and must be dishonorably discharged,” the Jakarta Globe reported.
After the ruling, Kosmas said he had only been carrying out his duties. “I was merely fulfilling my responsibilities in totality, following institutional orders and my commander’s instructions,” he said, as per the Globe. He also expressed condolences to Affan’s family, calling the incident “completely unforeseen.” The fate of the other six officers is yet to be determined.
Affan’s death occurred during a demonstration outside the parliamentary complex in South Jakarta, protesting a proposed new housing allowance for Indonesian lawmakers totaling 50 million rupiah per month ($3,057), an amount equivalent to nearly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta. Demonstrators were also demanding an end to outsourcing and low wages, a halt to mass layoffs, labor tax reforms, and the payment of holiday bonuses and retirement savings.
With Affan Kurniawan’s death, the protests then flared into a more generalized spasm of anger against economic privation and an apparently uncaring and out of touch political elite. Over the following days, angry crowds looted and ransacked the homes of politicians, including several who had appeared to mock the protesters’ concerns, and set ablaze police stations and regional parliament buildings in multiple cities.
On August 31, shortly after canceling a planned trip to China due to the unrest, President Prabowo Subianto announced that Indonesia’s lawmakers had agreed to forego the housing allowance and other perquisites of office. He also warned protesters that he had ordered police to respond with force to any looting or destruction of public or private property.
Protests have continued this week, albeit at a less disruptive level. On Tuesday, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters near two universities in the city of Bandung. Then, around 300 members of the Indonesian Women’s Alliance protested outside parliament yesterday, demanding an end to state violence and the withdrawal of the military from civilian security duties. A further student protest is planned for today, and according to Indonesian media reports, a large number of troops have been deployed in several parts of the country as a “preventive” measure.
The situation has calmed to an extent great enough for Prabowo to travel to China as planned, where he was among the national leaders who watched yesterday’s grand military procession in Beijing. His office stated that “signs of normalcy returning in Indonesia were a factor in his decision to travel,” as Reuters reported.
The action against the police officer is a clear attempt to mollify the public’s anger about Affan’s killing and bring the cycle of protests to an end. Whether it succeeds in cooling the public’s anger, in either the short or long term, is another question. As Sana Jaffrey wrote this week for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the scope and intensity of the past week’s protests reflects the deterioration of Indonesia’s democracy into a “a collusive power-sharing system” over the past decade, as well as the contraction of economic horizons for many ordinary Indonesians, including the huge number who work in the informal sector.
“Caught between economic precarity and a hollowed-out democracy, Indonesia’s most vulnerable have risen to set limits on those in power, making clear that stability and accountability can no longer be traded off,” she wrote. “These economic grievances are being voiced in the streets rather than settled in parliament because channels of democratic representation and accountability are effectively shut.”