As a rookie reporter with The Jakarta Post in early 2003, I was assigned to cover the National Police Headquarters, the Jakarta Police Headquarters, and the Attorney General’s Office. For the next four years, I circled these three beats almost daily, swallowing my brain and conscience in the process.
I witnessed first-hand what the police are capable of when power, reputation, and survival are at stake. I saw them elevate their institutional standing through their counter-terrorism operations in the early to mid-2000s. I saw them mobilize civil society organizations and local communities against Newmont Minahasa Raya, a powerful US mining firm, in a false accusation that positioned the police as defenders of national interest. They can do almost anything when they are desperate enough.
That is why it did not shock me to see Laras Faizati, an ordinary Indonesian youth who happened to work at the ASEAN Secretariat, chained in a courtroom last Monday, accused not merely of wrongdoing, but of being a threat to the state.
Laras is 26 years old. She had never joined a street protest against the government before. She is not a political organiser, not an activist leader, not a public intellectual. Her crime was an Instagram post written in anger after the killing of Affan Kurniawan by the police, expressing that the police headquarters near her office deserved to be burned down. It was an emotional, reckless, and ill-considered statement, as many social media posts are. But in a functioning democracy, it would have warranted a warning, perhaps an investigation, at most a proportionate legal process.
The post was in English and only obtained around 20 likes, and could not incite any riot. Instead, Laras was transformed into an unlikely symbol of resistance, paraded through the justice system as a national lesson. Her prosecution was not about law; it was about theatre.
Laras is not alone. Last week also saw the trial of other young Indonesians, including Ahmad Faiz Yusuf, Shelfin Bima, and Sam Oemar, each of whom dragged before the courts under similar accusations, while Delpedro Marhaen was detained, along with many others whose names have barely made headlines. None of them are political elites, or power brokers. They are students, young workers, ordinary citizens whose expressions of anger or dissent, mostly online, have been elevated by the state into existential threats. Taken together, these cases reveal a pattern that can no longer be dismissed as coincidence or overzealous law enforcement. They form a deliberate warning system: Laras is not an exception; she is a template.
This theatre has a clear audience. It is aimed at young Indonesians, their parents, universities, and the broader public. It is meant to send a message: do not dare repeat what happened in late August, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Indonesia to protest President Prabowo Subianto’s government. Those demonstrations, spontaneous, youth-driven, decentralised, terrified the palace. Several sources close to the presidential circle have described how visibly angry and unsettled Prabowo was, not merely because of the protests themselves, but because they triggered a deeply personal political memory. The crowds, the slogans, the moral confidence of young protesters reminded him of 1998, the demonstrations that toppled Soeharto and forced Prabowo, then a powerful general and Soeharto’s son-in-law, to flee the country in humiliation.
That trauma matters. It shapes power. Leaders who have once watched a regime collapse from the streets rarely forget the feeling. They do not see protests as democratic expression; they see them as existential threats. Under Prabowo, that fear has returned to the centre of Indonesian politics, now amplified by a government increasingly dominated by military figures. Former generals occupy key ministries, advisory roles, and strategic positions. The language of security has crept back into civilian governance. Stability, order, discipline, and loyalty are again presented as higher virtues than dissent, debate, or accountability.
In this political environment, the police find themselves cornered. Having enjoyed unprecedented power and wealth in the aftermath of Reformasi, pushing the military aside and asserting themselves as the dominant internal security force, they are now facing a pushback as the military steadily re-enters the political center. The police understand this shift all too well. They also know, perfectly well, that these young people were not the actors who turned the late August rallies into chaos and destruction. Within the institution, there is no confusion about that. They recognise the fingerprints of the 1998-style violent demonstration planners all over the place.
Police reports, according to multiple sources, documented the presence of suspicious men, who were too old to become student during the August unrest, figures who appeared not to stop violence but to hover around it, enabling escalation rather than containment. This escalation opened the door for Defence Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, himself a key figure during the 1998 incidents, to push for the declaration of martial law, a proposal that came perilously close to succeeding. It was only blocked after civilian Gerindra politicians rallied behind Sufmi Dasco Ahmad to reject Sjafrie’s plan and prevent the formal militarisation of the crisis. The police were fully aware of these dynamics. But pursuing that trail would have involved risks too great to take. The military’s return was not something they could openly challenge.
Yet they still had to show President Prabowo that they could deliver. The police chief was under pressure. The institution’s relevance was being tested. And so, the calculation was made. If the real actors were untouchable, substitutes would suffice. It was these young Indonesians – harmless, politically inexperienced, without institutional protection, who would be sacrificed.
What we are witnessing is not law enforcement; it is scapegoating. The police and the Attorney General’s Office are performing loyalty to power. They are staging prosecutions as warnings, turning young Indonesians into symbols of what happens when you cross invisible lines. This is how authoritarianism is rebuilt, not through mass arrests at first, but through selective punishment designed to instil fear.
The case against Laras and the others also reveals a deeper moral failure. The state is demanding emotional restraint from young citizens while exercising none itself. It tolerates violence by security forces, excuses deadly force, and closes ranks when accountability is demanded. Yet it criminalises anger expressed by civilians, particularly when that anger is directed upward. This is about controlling narrative and emotion.
The danger of this moment lies not only in the injustice inflicted on individuals like Laras, Ahmad, Shelfin, Sam, and Delpedro, but in the precedent being set. When protest is treated as subversion, when speech is criminalised as threat, when law is bent to serve political reassurance, democracy hollows out from within. Institutions remain standing, elections continue, courts operate, but fear replaces freedom as the organising principle of public life.
President Prabowo’s government insists it is protecting stability. But stability built on intimidation is brittle. Indonesia’s history should have taught its leaders that repression does not erase dissent; it drives it underground, where it grows more radical, more dangerous, and harder to control. The August demonstrations did not emerge from nowhere. They were the product of accumulated frustration, over economic inequality, shrinking civic space, environmental destruction, and the return of military influence in civilian affairs. Prosecuting young protesters will not address these grievances. It will only confirm them.
For those of us who lived through the last years of the New Order and reported on the birth of Reformasi, this moment feels painfully familiar. The language has softened, the uniforms have changed, the courts wear democratic robes, but the logic is the same. Power fears the street. Institutions compete for favour. And ordinary citizens pay the price.
Laras did not set out to become a symbol. Nor did Ahmad Faiz Yusuf, Shelfin Bima, Sam Oemar, or Delpedro Marhaen. They were made symbols, by a state desperate to show strength, by a police force anxious about its standing, and by a political leadership haunted by the memory of its own downfall. In that sense, their trials are not about them at all. They are about a country at a crossroads, deciding whether it will move forward as a democracy that tolerates dissent, or slide back into a familiar cycle where young lives are broken to preserve the comfort of those in power.
If Indonesia chooses the latter, it should not pretend surprise when the next generation refuses to stay silent.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
