Indonesian cops out in force at anti-communist rally
JAKARTA: Indonesian police will deploy 30 000 personnel to guard an anti-communist rally tomorrow, as the country’s military chief and Islamist groups stoke fears of a hard-left revival in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
Protesters will gather outside Indonesia’s parliament on the eve of the 52nd anniversary of the murder of six army generals and a young lieutenant by rebel armed forces personnel, an incident that led to a retaliatory pogrom that killed at least 500 000 alleged communists.
The massacres ushered in more than 30 years of authoritarian rule under Suharto, the former general who led the communist purge.
Earlier this month, Armed Forces Commander-General Gatot Nurmantyo instructed military officers to screen a Suharto-era propaganda film depicting the deaths of the generals and the crushing of an alleged Communist coup to “prevent what happened in 1965 from recurring”.
The three-and-a-half-hour film, criticised by historians for inaccuracies and failing to depict the massacre of leftists, has been widely shown in villages and mosques in the past week.
During Suharto’s rule, it was broadcast annually on the night of September 30, the date of the alleged abortive coup.
Indonesia’s Communist Party, once one of the world’s largest, remains outlawed, and there appears to be little evidence of a Marxist ideology taking hold in Indonesia. Instead, analysts and government advisers said the fomenting of a “red scare” was aimed at Indonesia’s reformist president Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, and long falsely accused of being the descendant of communists.
Indonesia’s growing economic ties with China are also frequently cited by those concerned about the rising communist influence in Indonesia.
“I see Jokowi being the factor behind the rise of communism in Indonesia, because of the co-operative relationship with China,” said Yudi Syamhudi Suyuti, one of the protest organisers and a failed political candidate for the opposition Gerindra Party, in comments posted online.
Tomorrow’s rally has been organised by hardline Islamist groups led by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). “We reject and fight against the awakening of the Indonesian Communist Party,” Slamet Maarif, the head of the rally’s organising committee and spokesman for the FPI, said.