Prabowo Subianto will take office as President of Indonesia in October. He is a military strongman with a sordid history of killings and human rights abuses. How did he win the election? An Indonesian socialist explains the background to his rise
On 14 February, more than 204 million Indonesians turned out to vote in the general elections. In the months leading up to that day, one could walk out onto the streets and find, peering down from billboards and posters, the visage of the 72-year-old Defence Minister.
These images were repackaged with AI programs into an ostensibly more marketable, cartoonish version of the man who was once representative of all that Indonesians had come to fear of Suharto’s brutal dictatorship.
He won, of course, a resounding victory with 58.59 per cent of the vote. Prabowo Subianto, 72, is poised to become Indonesia’s next President when he assumes his office in October, along with his running mate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of the current President, Jokowi.
To understand the consternation surrounding Prabowo’s election victory, we must first understand his past.
Flashes on the horizon
It is a story that has played out time and time again. A country begins to breathe in a way that the US finds troublesome. The CIA begins to turn its attention to the offending country, ready to reveal its claws as soon as it is evident the interests of the global capitalist class are in any sort of danger.
In 1945, Indonesia was a young, newly independent nation just like many others which had just shaken off their colonial masters in the wake of the Second World War. The birthplace of the Non-Aligned Movement, many Indonesians believed it was possible to forge their own path, unbeholden to the demands of Washington or Moscow.
In 1955, the CIA spent a million dollars in an attempt to influence the Indonesian elections. Still, the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) consistently polled better year after year.
By 1965 the PKI was the third-biggest communist party in the world, the biggest non-ruling communist party in the world, behind the Soviet Union and China. They backed Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, following a Stalinist stages theory that meant downplaying the importance of independent workers’ struggle. This saw them become the key force allowing him to hold onto power.
The PKI, like the rest of the country, were enjoying a growing confidence that they could forge their own path. Much of their focus was on cultivating a broad support base and, for a time, this seemed to work for them well enough.
In a 1956 National Security Council meeting, US Vice President Richard Nixon asserted that democracy was probably not the best system for Indonesia. In 1957, suspiciously well-armed rebellions broke out. A year later, planes began dropping bombs on the island of Ambon. One plane was shot down and the pilot had papers identifying himself as a CIA agent. This particular operation failed spectacularly, but the CIA only intensified its operations in Indonesia.
Afterwards, Sukarno, Indonesia’s first President, began to more brazenly call out Washington as an imperialist aggressor, calling out their activities in Vietnam, Brazil and Guatemala, for example, as examples of “neocolonialism”.
Over time, funding from the US dried up in virtually all sectors, save for the virulently anti-communist military. The PKI and various other left-wing groups in Indonesia, as well as Sukarno, had long suspected that the CIA or some other foreign power had been conspiring with the right-wing military. Indonesia’s right wing elements increasingly made their dissatisfaction with the country’s leftward turn known.
Some military officials formed a group called Gerakan 30 September—the 30th September Movement. Late that night in 1965, seven high-ranking military officials were kidnapped as they slept. There are a lot of conflicting theories of where, who, what and why happened that night. But by 1966, General Suharto, leader of the military, a man most Indonesians did not know, was in direct control of the country, using the failed coup as a pretext.
What followed in the following months was the most brutal mass-murder of leftists and suspected communists ever carried out in the Cold War. Estimated figures of the deaths range from 500,000 to 1,000,000.
The CIA provided kill-lists to the Indonesian military and made it known in no uncertain terms that Indonesia was to adopt IMF economic plans, and that agreements had to be made with American oil companies. The population was inundated with anti-communist propaganda and the country became a quiet US ally.
American publications ran with the Orientalist story that such a massacre was an unfortunate consequence of the people’s backward natures. The American bourgeoisie was largely quite happy with these developments. They opened up the country for business, after all. For the rest of the Global South, “Jakarta” became synonymous with brutal violence against leftists.
Where does Prabowo Subianto fit into all of this? He was born to a well-connected family of bourgeois entrepreneurs, among the small elite which essentially ran the newly formed American client state. At the time of the massacres, he was 15. He entered the military in 1976. He succeeded. At 26 he was a commander of a special forces unit. In 1983, he even married Suharto’s daughter.
Timor-Leste
We have briefly laid out the violence on which Suharto’s regime was founded. It is likely impossible for one to advance far in a military career, to be so embedded within the upper echelons of such a government without, on some level, being as guilty of the brutal violence through which it asserted its rule.
Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste in 1975 very shortly after the Fretilin party declared independence from Portugal. Before the invasion, Timor-Leste’s population was about 650,000 and estimated figures for the death toll from the invasion and occupation range from 100,000 to 200,000. The capitalist nations of the Global North which had just propped up Suharto, of course, did not care, and just continued to send support to the Indonesian military.
Much of Prabowo’s career as a commander of the special forces group Kopassus had him stamping out resistance movements for Suharto. He has been accused of human rights abuses in Timor-Leste and Papua, both of which he’s denied.
1998 and Suharto falls
In 1998, Suharto’s power was waning. There was an economic crisis. Tens of thousands of students occupied the parliamentary grounds and demanded Suharto’s resignation. At Trisakti University, the army responded by opening fire and killing four unarmed protestors. In May, Suharto was forced to resign after months of sustained pressure.
To “disappear” a victim in the night was a tactic executed with brutal effectiveness in the mass killings over the months following October 1965. It was a tactic repeated in the Indonesian military’s campaigns in Timor-Leste and West Papua. And here, too, in the capital, it was employed.
Between the early months of 1997 and the fall of Suharto in 1998, Prabowo’s Kopassus troops abducted 23 activists. At first, the victims were members and supporters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). The PDI had recently split into two factions, one of which supported Suharto’s daughter as its chairperson.
After the students began protesting, the list of victims grew to encompass students as well. Like in 1965, some disappeared from their homes at night. Some were arrested in broad daylight.
Nine were released. 13 have yet to be found. One is dead. Prabowo has even admitted to carrying out these particular abductions. He used the Nuremberg defence in an interview with Al Jazeera—he was just following orders.
It was for these particular kidnappings, the military would later assert, that Prabowo was dishonourably discharged.
Even in 1998, there had been those who believed that Prabowo was just a scapegoat. It is certainly true that the Indonesian military did not stop committing vile acts after his dismissal.
A year later, in 1999, 70 per cent of the buildings in Timor-Leste were destroyed and half the population was displaced following an independence referendum organised by the UN. Even just last year, in 2023, they launched yet another military operation in West Papua.
How a war criminal became a cuddly grandpa
A general is dismissed from the army after allegations of kidnapping, torture and murder. Twenty-six years later, he is elected president. One could say that Prabowo is a real overachiever—most presidents commit war crimes only after they are elected.
Prabowo has already run for president twice against Jokowi and lost. In both campaigns, he presented himself as a tough military strongman, the type of man who reads Hitler and Napoleon. In 2024, it seemed that he was able to completely reinvent his image into that of a harmless old codger who loves dancing, cats and TikTok.
Barack Obama briefly lived in Indonesia. In his memoirs, Dreams from My Father, he recalled his life as a child living in Jakarta in the late 1960s in a place where it seemed that: “History could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened …”
Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Prabowo’s 2024 running mate, is Jokowi’s son. Suddenly it appeared that Jokowi, a man who initially ran on a platform asserting his grassroots origins as a furniture salesman, was now backing Prabowo.
Several human rights organisations supported Jokowi’s campaign for the presidency back in 2014 in the hope that he would at least acknowledge the brutal and horrific violence perpetrated by the Suharto regime.
In January 2023, just a year before he was due to step down, he did acknowledge that “gross human rights abuses did happen in many occurrences” to the media.
Unfortunately, his tacit support of a man so deeply embedded in the brutal state-sanctioned violence he’s ostensibly condemning, alongside the state’s failure to apologise for anything for nine years of his 10-year-long presidency, seems to indicate that this was a thread which went absolutely nowhere.
Some of the people who Prabowo had kidnapped even joined his right-wing nationalist political party, Gerindra, and helped his political campaigns. In an interview with SBS, one such victim-turned-Gerindra member, Desmond Junaidi Mahesa, said he thought Prabowo was just one of the many people responsible for the kidnappings. Another, Pius Lustrilanang, explained in an interview with Tempo that he believed Suharto was more to blame than Prabowo.
We can speculate on how truthful these claims are and what their true motivations might have been, but the point is that Prabowo has been rather successful in rehabilitating his image. Still, most of the victims, of course, did not join the political party of the man who admitted to their kidnapping and torture.
Reaction from civil society
If a man who once represented the worst excesses of the Suharto dictatorship occupies the highest seat in government, what chance is there of any justice for the victims? The message is loud and clear. Jokowi himself barely ever acknowledged any of the sordid affairs laid out in this article until the very last year.
Human rights activists and NGOs have come out rather strongly against Prabowo, as they have each time he has run for election since 2014.
KontraS, a human rights organisation focused on investigating the forced disappearances, published a few articles about how Jokowi’s government has thus far betrayed the principles of human rights and democracy and how some of its practices invoke the memory of the “Orde Baru” (New Order, Suharto’s catchphrase).
Thus far, their activities have included submitting a letter to the government, holding an art gallery exhibition and hosting a discussion forum at that art gallery on the state of Jokowi’s government.
Hundreds of students took to the streets on 12 February this year, just two days before the election, protesting Jokowi’s interference in this election. The police responded with tear gas and water cannons.
The vast majority of news articles on this event reported the exact same 15 or so sentences which say that the students’ main concern was about Jokowi and the state interfering with the election to support Prabowo, though none saw fit to mention Prabowo’s sordid past.
Following the election, various academics continued to voice concerns but it does not appear that their actions have got very far.
Labour movements and trade unions
Twenty-six years after the fall of Suharto, the labour movement is still a shadow of what it used to be. After decades of red scare propaganda, communism is still regarded with suspicion—spreading communist ideas is still a prosecutable offence.
Tourists with leftist symbols on their clothes get arrested on occasion. In the 2024 election someone had apparently stapled a hammer and sickle on a ballot instead of casting a vote—and the counters were so horrified they notified the police and alerted the media.
This is not to say that the labour movement is non-existent. Since 2020, the wider Indonesian labour movement has largely focused their efforts on protesting the Omnibus bill.
This bill was rushed through parliament in October that year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, stripping away the rights of workers and the environment. Tens of thousands took to the streets for fear that it would lower wages, reduce severance and paid leave and threaten job security.
It has led to mass layoffs. The Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions (KSPI) announced that nearly 127,000 textile workers have already been laid off since the start of 2024 even as the government continues to parade Indonesia’s economic growth.
On May Day, 2024, repealing the Omnibus law was one of the demands presented by Said Iqbal, president of both the Partai Buruh (Labour Party) and the KSPI, to a crowd of thousands of workers in Jakarta.
But despite the fighting words, the KSPI, as the PKI had done, seems to be trying to work closely with the government.
In 2014 Iqbal backed Prabowo after he was promised a prestigious position in his cabinet as Manpower Minister. He backed Prabowo again in 2019. In 2022, he formed Partai Buruh to participate in the 2024 elections hoping that, eventually, pro-labour politicians could repeal the law from their seat in parliament.
Many activists got involved in building the Partai Buruh and were bitterly disappointed when Iqbal once again threw his support behind Prabowo. There was strong criticism from activists, both from his own party and from other trade unions.
It must also be mentioned that Jokowi has never been a friend to the working class. In 2013, Jokowi, governor of Jakarta at the time, refused to meet the demands of workers striking for wage increases and urged them to simply discuss their concerns with their bosses.
Meanwhile, Prabowo spoke at a May Day rally and blamed “the elites” for causing poverty. Perhaps he speaks from experience—after all, he has had a long career stamping out resistance movements for this elite and facilitating the further exploitation of the Indonesian people on behalf of the American elites which had installed his father-in-law.
Despite this hostile environment, the labour movement is not completely passive either. On a 3 July rally, the KSPI threatened to order a strike of its textile and logistics workers, a move which they said would paralyse the country, if the government doesn’t repeal a law removing tariffs on textile imports.
It seems that they cannot really make up their minds on whether they wish to be effective opposition to the government or not. But the labour movement needs to stop putting its trust in establishment politicians, who will never consistently support workers’ interests.
We have already discussed at length the results of collaborating with the state—the PKI discovered first-hand where that strategy will get you.
The Australian bourgeoisie and its state apparatus, like every other imperialist country which demand 10 other countries be poor so that it could be rich, celebrated Suharto’s takeover of the country. They simply did not care about the blood which was spilled to reap this victory.
Even now, Indonesia remains a steadfast ally of the current US-aligned part of the world. Indonesia has participated in an annual joint military exercise with the US, Australia and Singapore called Super Garuda Shield since 2022.
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles met with Prabowo in February and announced the intent to sign a new defence pact. When asked about Indonesia’s treatment of Papuans, he simply said: “There is no support for any independence movements. We support the territorial sovereignty of Indonesia and that includes those provinces being part of Indonesia, no ifs, no buts, and I want to be clear about that.”
The lives of workers have only ever improved as concessions to violent protests and strike action. Every right we are afforded, no matter how minuscule, can and will be taken away if our leaders believe they can get away with it.
In the United States, a common criticism of the Democratic and Republican parties is that they are not all that different to each other—that they are both just as “faithful in their service to corporate America”, as Parenti put it. Here in Indonesia, it seems that the state believes it can do away with even having to pretend that there is an opposition.
If they wish to do away with such an illusion, that is their prerogative. Despite constant and often violent state repression, previous national strikes have won significant victories in the form of wage increases and further concessions from the state. As always, workers have to keep up the struggle outside of parliament.
Perhaps 26 years have dulled the population’s memories of unimaginable violence, mass murders and constant repression. Perhaps the ruling class is content with sitting in their Jakartan luxury apartments and mansions overlooking oceans of slums as they continue to strip away what little rights we have.
And yet, despite proving time and time again that there is no depravity towards which the capitalist lapdogs are unwilling to stoop, despite three decades of the most brutal repression against leftists, workers continue to organise in the millions. No matter how much our rulers try, resistance and rebellion is a candle that can never be extinguished.
