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JAKARTA: Viral footage of a tactical van crashing into a young delivery driver in Indonesia’s capital before rolling over his body has sparked renewed anger against a police force long known for its heavy-handed tactics.
Seven officers inside the van were detained for violating the police ethics code at the protest against low wages and financial perks for lawmakers, while the president pledged an investigation.
But protests have since erupted across the country over the incident, the latest in a string of cases where Indonesia’s militarised police force — the Mobile Brigade Corps, or Brimob — has been accused of overreaction leading to civilian death.
“Brimob is actually a militaristic police force with their own heavy weapons. It is historically used to deal with armed movements but over the last decade more often assigned to work against street protests,” said Human Rights Watch’s Andreas Harsono.
The unit has therefore “often employed excessive force when dealing with street protests, initially in places like West Papua, but lately also in Jakarta and other urban areas,” he added.
Brimob has its origins in the Japanese colonial era when it was formed as a special police force, before being turned into a post-independence paramilitary unit used to quell internal rebellions.
It has since crushed radical Islamist groups and anchored the government’s bloody fight against separatists in Papua, Aceh and East Timor.
The unit now effectively acts as the special operations force of the Indonesian police and has grown in influence after the fall of military dictator Suharto in the late 1990s.
Since the election of president Joko Widodo in 2014 and the rise of his defense minister Prabowo Subianto to replace him last year, the national police force has been handsomely funded to militarise itself.
And its Brimob unit has since been used to crush government opponents and even defend financial interests such as plantations and mining operations, activists and experts say.
“They are pretty much involved in several large mass protests to do a crowd control function,” said Dimas Bagus Arya, coordinator of the human rights organization KontraS.
“They have the same credo as the military, which is kill or be killed.”
He said Brimob have been deployed in restive Papua, where a low-lying insurgency is still rumbling, on joint operations with the military, in which Prabowo once served as a special forces commander.
Indonesia’s national police did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
While the protests began over economic conditions, deep-rooted anger against the police has manifested itself on Indonesia’s streets in recent days and amplified the unrest.
On Saturday night, a police headquarters was set on fire in the East Java city of Surabaya with expletives aimed at the force spray-painted on the road.
Such anger comes from previous incidents that people believe were unjust.
In 2022 a stadium stampede in East Java left more than 130 people dead after police fired tear gas into the stands after some fans invaded the pitch.
The crush was one of the deadliest disasters in football history.
Only several officers were held and all received light sentences.
In 2019 at least 10 protesters were unlawfully killed in post-election riots, most of them by gunshot, in cases that were not brought to justice, according to rights groups.
“This is not only because one driver was hit, but this is the accumulation of all of the police problems,” Ardi Manto Adiputra, director of human rights group Imparsial, told AFP.
Many Indonesians fear a culture of impunity for the police will continue, with close ties between the force and government giving the impression they are intertwined.
“Human rights violations committed by Brimob have almost never been taken into a civilian court of law,” said Amnesty International Indonesia’s Usman Hamid.
“One of the root causes is lack of accountability.”
The country’s intelligence chief Budi Gunawan was deputy of the national police force, while interior minister Tito Karnavian is a former head of police, and former police officer Eddy Hartono is the head of the counterterrorism agency.
Some say that without government action to reform the very force many of them worked in, little will change.
“The first thing that needs to be addressed by the president, the government, is to make a roadmap of reform of the police,” said Ardi.
“If not, this means nothing. The masses will always feel disappointed and keep their feeling of revenge toward the police in the future.”

TIANJIN, China: President Xi Jinping gathered the leaders of Russia and India among dignitaries from around 20 Eurasian countries on Sunday for a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and center of regional relations.
Security was tight in the northern port city of Tianjin, where the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit is being held until Monday, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in Tianjin on Sunday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.
Meanwhile Xi held a flurry of bilateral meetings with leaders from the Maldives, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and one of Putin’s staunch allies, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
He also met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xinhua news agency reported.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance. This year’s summit is the first since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
In an interview published by Xinhua on Saturday, Putin said the summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space.”
“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as the SCO to curry favor.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are attending the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
“The large-scale participation indicates China’s growing influence and the SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.
Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game,” said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference, and multipolarity, which the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee said.
Xi met leaders including Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.
Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Turkiye’s Erdogan and Iran’s Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear program respectively.
The Russian president needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also the support of the second largest economy in the world,” said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
“Russia is also keen to win over India, and India’s trade frictions with the United States presents this opportunity,” Lim said.
The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp bump up in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
India’s premier Modi arrived on Saturday, in his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began last October, when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Modi was not on a list of attendees for the Beijing parade published by Chinese state media that included Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.