by MICHAEL G. VANN
Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo, has a gruesome track record of human rights violations and hostility to democracy. But a slick campaign successfully presented him as a cuddly grandpa figure, with crucial assistance from outgoing president Jokowi.
After a decade-spanning quest for power, Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo, generally known simply as Prabowo, has finally taken Indonesia’s presidency. The world should be deeply concerned.
While his social media team presents him as a cuddly, cat-loving grandpa — gemoy in Indonesian slang — the resume of this self-described fascist includes coup attempts, ties to the criminal underworld, and numerous accusations of human rights violations ranging from kidnapping to genocide. During his twenty-eight-year career in the Indonesian Army (TNI), Prabowo earned a reputation for extrajudicial violence, eventually leading to a dishonorable discharge.
As Robert S. Gelbard, a former US ambassador to Indonesia, once remarked: “Prabowo certainly is somebody who is perhaps the greatest violator of human rights in contemporary times among the Indonesian military. His deeds in the late ’90s before democracy took hold were shocking, even by TNI standards.”
Profiling Prabowo
Prabowo was born into a well-connected family in 1951. When his father came into conflict with Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, over the government’s economic policies, the family went into political exile, and he was raised and educated in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The family returned in the early years of the New Order dictatorship (1966–98), shortly after the infamous anti-communist bloodbath that cemented Suharto’s grip on power.
Prabowo’s father worked as an economic minister for Suharto’s regime, and he enrolled in the Indonesian Military Academy in 1970. While he could have used his connections to secure a desk job, for decades Prabowo sought out dangerous battlefield missions. As a young officer, he led a Special Forces (Kopassus) commando unit in the brutal occupation of East Timor.
In one high-profile operation, Lieutenant Prabowo hunted down Nicolau dos Reis Lobato, the first Timorese prime minister, who was killed in an ambush in 1978. Lobato’s remains are still missing. Some reports suggest that he was beheaded and his skull taken to Java. The wider fate of the Lobato family encapsulates the horrors inflicted on the Timorese people: Indonesian forces raped and murdered his wife and seized their infant son, raising him in Jakarta.
Kopassus is accused of countless war crimes, contributing to the death of up to a third of the Timorese population between 1975 and 1999. Prabowo’s team of “Ninjas,” irregular troops who dressed in black and operated at night, terrorized the population. Prabowo also directed Kopassus actions against Papuan independence fighters, including a ruse in which he disguised an attack helicopter as being from the Red Cross.
In the 1980s, Prabowo received training in irregular warfare and counterinsurgency at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, becoming a US intelligence asset. In 1983, he married Suharto’s daughter, which brought him fully into the inner circles of power.
However, his career was derailed in 1998. As the Suharto regime crumbled in the face of mass protests, Prabowo was accused of organizing the kidnapping, torture, and murder of democracy activists.
When Suharto resigned in May 1998, Prabowo quarreled with his commanding officers and the new president. In August, he was dishonorably discharged and went into a brief exile in Jordan. He claimed that he had been scapegoated for the regime’s crimes. In 1998, he also divorced Suharto’s daughter and never remarried.
After this disgrace, Prabowo developed the Nusantara Group, a collection of twenty-seven companies with interests in oil, coal, and natural gas, palm oil plantations, the fishing industry, and other sectors. Having failed to win the support of Suharto’s Golkar party, he founded Gerindra, the Great Indonesia Party. Gerindra espouses right-wing, populist nationalism and has ties to Donald Trump.
In 2009, Prabowo was the vice-presidential candidate on the failed ticket of Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the country’s first president. In the next two elections, he ran for the presidency himself and lost in the second round to Joko Widodo (Jokowi). In the 2014 election, Prabowo rode into rallies on horseback and ran an advertisement with Nazi imagery set to a heavy metal soundtrack.
After his defeat, he supported a populist Islamist protest movement against one of Jokowi’s allies and may have been involved in coup plots. Jokowi’s administration considered bringing human rights charges against the troublesome Prabowo. In the 2019 election, Prabowo allied with Islamist groups amid absurd rumors that Jokowi was a secret communist agent. Refusing to accept his electoral defeat, he orchestrated deadly riots in central Jakarta.
As the smoke and tear gas cleared from the riots, Jokowi started his second term with a series of concessions to his right-wing rivals. Once seen as a great reformer, Jokowi defanged the anti-corruption agency and backtracked on labor and civil rights while centralizing power around the presidency. In a Machiavellian move, he even appointed Prabowo as minister of defense.
A year ago, as the lineup of candidates for the 2024 election took shape, few analysts would have put money on Prabowo. His failed presidential runs in 2014 and 2019 seemingly indicated that the septuagenarian’s time was up.
Jacobin for more