Is Indonesian democracy doomed to repeat a cycle of violence?

Writer Andreas Harsono spent 15 years and carried out 2,000 interviews for his book ‘Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia’

In it, he traces a common thread from pro-Prabowo protests after the 2019 election to the mass murders of communists in the 1960s

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Prabowo Subianto supporters clash with riot police in Jakarta. Photo: AP

Published: 10:00am, 19 Jun 2019Updated: 12:47pm, 19 Jun 2019

In Indonesia, violence and democracy go hand in hand. Anyone doubting that should reflect on the viral images on social media last month that allegedly showed police officers mercilessly beating Andri Bibir.

The 30-year-old had been caught up in the violent clashes that resulted from what were initially peaceful protests by thousands of supporters of losing presidential challenger Prabowo Subianto.

To long-term observers of Indonesia, a country of 256 million people of many ethnicities, the scenes were all too familiar.

After all, Indonesia’s democracy was borne from the political instability that caused the downfall of dictator Suharto in 1998, when riots in several cities left an estimated 1,000 people dead. The violence targeted ethnic Chinese and many women from the community were raped.

Since then, images of violence have often defined the evolution of Indonesia’s democracy, as it grows to take in competing voices and ideas, among them intolerance for ethnic and sexual minorities.

So what is the Indonesian idea of violence? Is it the image of a homosexual man being caned in Aceh, a special province on Sumatra? Burned temples in North Sumatra?

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