Indonesia Marked the Anniversary of Its Dead With 18,500 Riot Cops

On August 28, 2025, a Brimob police tactical vehicle ran over Affan Kurniawan, a motorcycle taxi driver watching a protest in Jakarta. He died that night. Within days the anger over his death, layered onto weeks of fury about a parliamentary housing allowance ten times the city's minimum wage, had spread to dozens of cities. An independent commission later counted thirteen dead and 6,719 arrests before it was over. The demand at the center of it all — a law letting the state seize assets tied to corruption, first introduced to parliament in 2008 — still has not passed.

A year later, on August 27, 2026, thousands marched on the same parliament to ask for the same bill. This time the organizers went out of their way to say they weren't looking for a repeat: no riots, just aspirations, delivered peacefully. The state's answer was to send 18,500 police officers, backed by military units, and to detain 65 people before the march even started, on the grounds that they might be "provocateurs." Officers eventually met thrown objects with tear gas and a water cannon after dark; a police post and a motorcycle were burned. Lawmakers, again, promised to pass the bill — this time by December 15, 2026.

Notice the shape of that response. A government that spent a year absorbing the political cost of killing its own citizens over an unpopular housing perk did not respond to the anniversary of that killing by loosening its grip. It responded by expanding it — more officers than were deployed for the original unrest, mass preemptive detention of people not yet accused of anything but suspicion, and a military rolled out for a domestic protest march. This is the standard authoritarian move after a crisis of legitimacy: absorb the outrage, promise the reform, and quietly upgrade the machinery meant to make sure it never has to make that promise again in public.

The bill itself is instructive too. A law that lets the state confiscate assets linked to corruption without a conviction sounds like exactly what people are marching for — until you remember which state would be wielding it, and against whom civil-forfeiture powers are actually used once they exist. Indonesia's police and prosecutors are the same institutions responsible for last year's dead. Handing that apparatus a broader seizure power while it has spent a year escaping accountability for killing protesters is not obviously a win for anyone but the state itself. The organizers know this and are pushing anyway, because the alternative — an entrenched kleptocracy immune from any legal remedy — is worse. That's the trap corrupt states set: your options narrow to a bad tool or no tool.

What the anniversary march actually proved is that a year of promises, a parliamentary reshuffle, a discharged police commissioner, and a proposed reform commission bought the Indonesian state nothing in the way of trust. People came back to the same gates a year later because nothing structural had changed — the housing allowance fight became the asset-forfeiture fight became a referendum on whether the police who killed Affan Kurniawan get to police the next march too. Solidarity with people who keep showing up at a parliament that answers them with riot lines is not sentimental; it's the only sane response to a state that treats grief as a security threat.

Sources

August 2025 Indonesian protests — Wikipedia

Civil inquiry: worst youth crackdown since 1998 Reformasi — Heidoh

Indonesians march on parliament to demand crackdown on corruption — Al Jazeera

CGFoE Protest Monitor, September 3 2026: Indonesia — Columbia Global Freedom of Expression