“America’s Fair-Haired Boy,” Notorious Mass Murderer, on Brink of Indonesian Presidency

Gen. Prabowo Subianto, who has expressed a desire to rule the country as a fascist, declared victory Wednesday in Indonesia’s presidential election. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Allan Nairn, a longtime investigative journalist focusing on U.S. intervention around the world. Nairn, reporting from Indonesia, describes the current election process in the country and the crimes Prabowo has been implicated in. He details the government’s intimidation tactics to attempt to install Prabowo, his right-wing political leanings, and the history of Indonesia, including how the U.S. government trained Prabowo and his father-in-law, the late dictator Suharto.

Ryan Grim: This is Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

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Today, meanwhile, we really have a good show. I’m going to be joined by journalist Alan Nairn, who has been covering the abuses of the Indonesian military and its American sponsors for decades now, including with a number of investigative pieces at The Intercept, one most recently this week.

I don’t want to spoil the conversation, so all I’ll note up front is that Indonesia had what it tried to call “presidential elections” this week, and the result was equal parts to be expected, and shocking to the conscience. 

Here’s my conversation with Alan Nairn.

Alan, welcome to Deconstructed.

Allan Nairn: Thanks. Good to be with you.

RG: I’m really excited to have you on to talk about this election and, also, the history leading up to it. First of all, tell everybody where you’re joining us from, what time it is, and what the current situation is.

AN: I’m in Jakarta, Indonesia, it’s 9 p.m. And General Prabowo — the worst of the massacre generals, and the closest U.S. protege in the Indonesian military — has just been elected, or selected as president, with the full support of state power of the current government. It’s the beginning of a whole new era.

After General Suharto, the U.S.-backed dictator, fell in 1998, there was hope that Indonesia could move to a kind of democracy. And, indeed, there was a series of elected presidents. But the last elected president — President Jokowi, who will be in office until October — he’s decided to turn the country back toward the Suharto era. And this general, Prabowo, who he just helped install, in fact, is Suharto’s son in law. So, people are now deciding how to deal with that.

Just today, I was at a demonstration called the Aksi Kamisan. Every Thursday, survivors of the massacres and their friends and relatives gather in front of the palace to protest, and military intelligence was all over, and they were harassing people afterwards. And those there all agreed that this is going to get worse once General Prabowo comes in. 

RG: Did they harass you at all? I’m sure you’re on their radar.

AN: At the demonstration? Yeah, apparently two of them did try to detain me, but the activists got between us and put me in the car. And, after a while of apparently being followed, we were able to get away.

RG: I noticed that you gagged a little bit on the word “elected,” and I want to get back to that in a moment. But first, for an American audience that is fairly well educated, but the history of Indonesian politics is often kind of off the center stage, even despite its kind of central role in our CIA’s history, our State Department’s history, our American Imperial history.

So, can you go back a little bit? Start with the Non-Aligned Movement. What was the Non-Aligned Movement? What was Indonesia’s role in it, and how did that shape how the country’s history unfolded and its relationship with the U.S. unfolded?

AN: Well, President Sukarno — who was the founding president of Indonesia after they won independence from the Dutch colonialists in the 40s — Sukarno was the main moving force behind the Non-Aligned Movement, which basically stressed the aspiration of independence for what were then called third world nations. The idea was they would stand between the Soviet Bloc and the United States.

RG: Right. And “third world” wasn’t a pejorative at the time. It was, like, there’s these two blocks, these superpowers, and then there’s a third one.

AN: Well, it was a broader term referring mainly to poor and developing and attempting-to-develop countries. But many of them, perhaps a majority at a certain time of the countries in what was called the third world, were either in, or sympathetic to, the Not-Aligned Movement, and Sukarno was really the key mover in that.

And he, Sukarno, a civilian, was overthrown by the Indonesian army in a coup in 1965. That Indonesian army was armed, trained, and supplied by the United States. And General Suharto, who took over during the coup, he, with his army, immediately launched one of the largest slaughters in world history to consolidate their power. They killed anywhere from 400,000 to a million civilians across the country. Some estimates go higher. And they did that with explicit U.S. support; the CIA supplied a death list of 5,000 names of people that they wanted targeted.

And that did indeed consolidate their power. And, after that, the army worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. Including in 1975, when they invaded East Timor, the small neighboring nation of East Timor.

General Suharto met face to face with President Ford and Henry Kissinger to get their permission, and he got it. They gave him weapons, they invaded East Timor. And, over the course of their occupation, they killed a third of the population, which in proportional terms was the most intensive slaughter since the Nazis.

RG: And so, how did the Indonesian people eventually rally and restore, or move on a path back toward democracy?

AN: Well, General Suharto lasted until 1998, when he was finally overthrown by a street uprising. And one of the factors in that uprising was a massacre that took place in 1991 in occupied East Timor: November 12th, 1991, the Santa Cruz Massacre. And I happened to be there, I happened to survive that massacre.

RG: You and Amy Goodman, and other journalists, right?

AN: Yes. I was there with Amy Goodman and Max Stahl from the U.K. was there, and he filmed from a distance what happened. A crowd had gathered outside the Santa Cruz cemetery, they were commemorating the death of a young man who had been killed by the army ten days before. And then, the army marched on the crowd. And I thought if they saw there were outside witnesses there, maybe we could stop them.

So, we went to the front of the crowd, but that didn’t stop them. They were carrying their US M-16s. They beat me, they fractured my skull with the rifle butts. And then they opened fire on the crowd from very close range; the closest people were ten feet away from them. They killed at least 271 civilians on that day, but we survived, and were able to report this to the outside world.

And then, back in the U.S., mobilized grassroots support helped to found a group called the East Timor Action Network. And, over the years, we were successful in getting Congress to pressure the Executive Branch, and to all but cut off all U.S. military aid to Indonesia and General Suharto.

And, later, Suharto’s security chief Admiral Sudomo told me that that arms cutoff was pivotal in Suharto’s downfall. Because, as the Indonesian population took to the streets in 1998 in this mass uprising, according to Sudomo, Suharto’s security chief, the troops were reluctant to open fire on the crowds as quickly as they should have, because they were afraid that if that happened, in his words, it would be another Santa Cruz, meaning they would lose all the U.S. aid, since practically all their military aid had already been cut off by Congress. And that hesitation proved fatal for the Suharto regime, because people saw to their surprise that they could come down to the streets and demonstrate, and face the soldiers, and not necessarily be killed. So more and more people came out, it became an overwhelming mass force in the streets.

And then, finally, first outside a university called Trisakti, a few soldiers did open fire, a few people were killed, and because by that point people had grown accustomed to demonstrating for weeks without being killed, when it finally happened at Trisakti and in a couple of other places, it was just a mass explosion of outrage.

And, within days, Suharto had fallen. 

RG: I just want to underline that for a second, because we often talk about U.S. military aid in the abstract, and we’ll say, alright, this massacre happened, this slaughter happened, and it was done with U.S. weapons. The kind of implicit response sometimes is, yes, but that government is bad, and they would have done that anyway. You can withdraw some U.S. military support, but that you’re not going to change the nature of evil in the world.

And what you’re saying is, actually, no. Like, the U.S. military aid was a necessary and essential function, a necessary and essential piece of Suharto’s ability.

AN: A condition was derived from it. Yeah.

RG: And pulling that away, it undermined him fatally.

AN: Yes, that’s a very good point. Another argument that’s sometimes made is, well, if we don’t give it, somebody else will give it.

In a large number of the cases — I haven’t gone through it systematically — but I would guess, with the countries I’m familiar with, maybe close to a majority of the cases, the U.S. aid to oppressive militaries and intelligence services at a minimum increases their repression. And sometimes, as you just mentioned, is the thing that enables the regime that brought those forces into existence, that enables it to survive. And pulling that aid can, at a minimum, be expected to decrease the repression, and often, with still larger impact, it can endanger the survival of that repressive regime that is being artificially propped up by the U.S. in the first place. And that’s exactly what happened with General Suharto.

But what Indonesia is faced with now is that Suharto’s son in law, General Prabowo, the worst of all the massacre generals in Indonesia … And that is saying a lot because, as we just described, these were two of the epic slaughters of the 20th century. First, the consolidation of power by killing half a million to a million civilians, and then the invasion of Timor, where they killed a third of the population. And this man is the worst of the generals, and now he is set to become the next president of Indonesia. And he is also the general closest to the U.S. He described himself to me as “the Americans’ fair-haired boy.”

RG: Yeah, you had this fascinating interview with him that you wrote about for us recently at The Intercept, where he talked openly about what he saw as the PR problems related to the Santa Cruz massacre, and what his ambitions were for the future.

Talk a little bit about how he understood his role in those atrocities, what went wrong, and what he could do right in the future. And “wrong,” we’re using it not in a moral term, but kind of in a pragmatic — from his perspective — term.

AN: In terms of the Santa Cruz massacre. He was not involved in that one, that was not one of his. He did many other massacres in Timor. For example, at Kraras on Mount Bibileo, he commanded a massacre where many hundreds were killed. And he did similar operations, including political assassinations in Ache and West Papua. In West Papua, in one case, he brought in a helicopter disguised as a Red Cross helicopter, and, as people approached, they machine gunned them from the air.

But what he said about the Santa Cruz massacre, he said that “was an imbecilic operation.” And he said it was imbecilic, because they did it in front of me and the other surviving outside witnesses. And he said, you don’t do that in front of the foreign press, you don’t do that in the capital city. You do that in an isolated village where no one will ever know.

And he did not admit to the massacres, his own massacres. But, in some cases, he all but admitted to it. For example, in ‘98, when the mass demonstrations had Suharto in danger, General Prabowo staged a series of kidnappings of pro-democracy activists. He kidnapped 24 activists, and he disappeared 13 of them. They’ve never been heard from since, their bodies have never been found.

He also staged a series of what are known as The Anti-Chinese Riots, where his men — his special forces troops in plainclothes and their operatives — did arson, burning, shootings, mass rapes, aimed mainly at the ethnic Chinese population. And when I asked him about various military crimes that were committed in ’98, he blamed a number of them on General Wiranto, another general who was his chief rival. But when I asked him about the Anti-Chinese Riots, he did not attempt to blame Wiranto, and he spoke of them with something like pride, basically saying: that was a very professional operation.

RG: Why is he not in prison? And how did his opponent go from beating him and preventing him from taking office to now supporting him and ushering him into office? How did we wind up 25 years later where we are tonight?

AN: Well, he should be in prison, he should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity along with his U.S. sponsors. And, in fact, in the early years of the Jokowi administration — President Jokowi, the incumbent, the civilian — Jokowi discussed with his staff putting General Prabowo and some of the other massacre generals like General Wiranto and General Hendropriyono on trial.

I discussed this with some of Jokowi’s staff, once in a meeting at the palace; at the time, I was publicly calling for them to all be tried, along with their U.S. sponsors. And what his staff said when we discussed it at the palace essentially was, well, yes, this is necessary, and we’re working on it. But it’s dangerous, we have to proceed slowly. It will take time. So, internally, his administration, in fact, was working on or heavily considering a war crimes tribunal for Prabowo and the other generals.

And when he ran for president — first in 2014 and then in 2019 — and defeated Prabowo, one of the things he said was that we, Indonesia, cannot return to dictatorship. He didn’t speak openly about war crimes trials, but the insinuation that many took was that he was in favor of that. And, in fact, at that time, Jokowi, as he was running against General Prabowo, had the support of many human rights advocates and massacre survivors. And, as I mentioned, in his first years, they were internally discussing bringing them the generals to trial.

But all through his time in office, he was constantly under pressure from the army and from General Prabowo, who was by that time retired. For example, at one point, the Jokowi administration convened a forum called The Symposium — where survivors of the 1965 slaughter that Suharto, with U.S. backing, after they did the coup as they were consolidating power — survivors at this symposium were allowed to come and speak publicly about what had happened to them, and what had happened to their families, their loved ones who were murdered.

And this was a real breakthrough in the public speech of Indonesia, and the army was just outraged. There was no talk at The Symposium of trials of the generals, or even of stopping the practice of killing civilians, which continues to this day. In West Papua, which is in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago, an area which is under de facto occupation, and where Freeport-McMoRan, the U.S. mining giant, is stripping the mountains, and turning the rivers green with their pollution. There, they continue to kill civilians.

But there was no discussion of that ongoing practice of killing civilians. There was just a recollection of, and reflection on, the 1965 mass killing. And the army was outraged. Jokowi had to go to army headquarters and bow down before the generals. And he actually made a speech to them where he made what on its face was a nonsensical statement. He said, “I will never apologize to the PKI,” meaning the Indonesian Communist Party. But the Indonesian Communist Party no longer existed, it had ceased to exist decades before, as its remnants were utterly annihilated in that 1965 slaughter. And the term PKI — Indonesian Communist Party — only lived on because it was the catch-all term that the army used to refer to those dissidents who it hadn’t yet killed.

So, Jokowi went and humbled himself before the soldiers, but that didn’t work, that didn’t calm them down. After that, in response to that symposium, there was a street movement which turned to violence. I actually wrote about it in The Intercept in 2017. That movement operated on a religious pretext but, behind the scenes, it was being pushed by the army, particularly the generals loyal to General Prabowo. And there was a series of events like this, which really shook President Jokowi.

And then, in 2019, when he was running and defeated Prabowo, right after the Prabowo forces staged yet another street riot, with burning and looting, and at that point, Jokowi basically said, well enough, I can’t take this anymore. He had his people reach out to general Prabowo to try to bring him inside the tent. And he offered him the job of minister of defense. 

Prabowo accepted, he came inside shortly thereafter. And, once inside, immediately, as Jokowi had hoped, the threat of coups, the riots, all evaporated instantly. And Jokowi and Prabowo started to grow close because Jokowi, who had slowly been ramping up repression during his time in office — particularly against labor rights and a whole series of other things — he was looking for a way to extend his own term. He was term-limited to two terms, as the system works in the United States.

So, for this election, he was looking for a successor who would work with him, and he settled on General Prabowo, who by that time was his defense minister, who had come in and, with Jokowi, continued the policy of army killings of civilians in West Papua. And Jokowi even lent General Prabowo his own son, Jokowi’s own son, Gibran, as his running mate. And he did that, even though the president’s son was legally underage.

As in the U.S., there’s a minimum-age requirement — in Indonesia it’s 40, the son is 36 — but he rammed approval for it through the Supreme Court, where the president’s brother-in-law was at that time the chief justice. And through the electoral commission, both of those actions by the electoral commission, the Supreme court, were later ruled by other official oversight bodies to be unethical, but it made no difference. Because Jokowi had made his deal with General Prabowo, and he, the president, was really the main force behind the Prabowo campaign that just concluded, and the whole state apparatus was mobilized to put General Prabowo in power.

And this is especially meaningful and ominous for Indonesia’s population of poor people, regular people, who, to a large extent, live at the mercy of the Aparat, the army and the police. And the army and the police were going around directly ordering people to vote for General Prabowo. And, at the same time, the social welfare agencies, which hand out bags of rice and cooking oil — which are very important to many families in maintaining a minimal standard of nutrition, because they can’t otherwise afford it — and they were explicitly telling people, if you don’t vote for General Prabowo, your food allotments will be cut off.

Sometimes people, in order to pick up the rice and cooking oil, they were obliged to go to General Prabowo’s campaign offices, where, when they went in, they had to show their I.D. cards, their photographs were taken, they were put on a list, and they were given a stern warning: if you don’t vote for the general, we will find you and we will cut off your food. And, at the same time, local government officials… And, in Indonesia, the system is almost entirely nationalized, what we would call federalized in the United States, so there aren’t really truly local officials in the sense of autonomous from the central government. They all ultimately branch out from the central government. These local officials were being threatened with prosecution for corruption if they did not mobilize the resources they controlled in their neighborhoods, and their districts, and their towns, and cities, to elect General Prabowo. 

And then, on the national level, especially in terms of targeting of the middle class and young people, Prabowo very smartly hired the campaign consultant who had helped Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines, the elected president, and Prabowo was presented as a “gemoy,” a fat, cuddly, adorable cartoon character, a dancing cartoon character who appeared in TV ads. And this was quite a leap, considering not just that General Prabowo was a mass murderer, the most notorious mass murderer in Indonesia, but also that his rhetorical style is to yell, to threaten.

He routinely blames anyone who criticizes him, accuses anyone who criticizes him of being an “antek asing,” a foreign lackey, even though he himself is the Indonesian officer closest to the United States over the years that he was carrying out the worst of his crimes. So, all of these forces together made him an almost unstoppable political force. That and the power, the option of electoral fraud.

In the piece in The Intercept, I describe a meeting that took place — well, it was the Wednesday of the previous week, so it’d be about, I guess, ten days before this is released — where military and intelligence officials discussed the existence of a plan to, if necessary, do electoral frauds by tampering with the local vote tabulation sheets, and then, with the data entry process at the regional administration office. And then, if needed, hacking of the national elections commission system.

And the final result that was announced yesterday gave the general about 58 percent. And it’s still not clear how much of that was real, how much of that was fabricated, or if they actually needed to resort to tampering with the vote count, because there was so much pressure brought to bear by the state beforehand, that might not even have been necessary. We don’t know yet, that hasn’t become clear yet.

What is clear is that President Jokowi, the incumbent civilian, has dragged General Prabowo into office, and he’s dragging Indonesia back to a new version of the Suharto era.

RG: You know, Jokowi may think that he pulled off something clever here, but as somebody watching this just unfold from the outside, the first thing I wonder, is Prabowo just going to finish off Jokowi at this point? Like, once he’s in power, why would he tolerate even a quasi-allied power center that could be a rival?

AN: It’s an interesting question.

RG: Right? Did Jokowi just dig his own grave?

AN: Well, I don’t think it will go completely in that direction, because even though Prabowo will have full power once he’s in, and he has called for going back to an older version of the Indonesian constitution, which would give the president even more extensive powers, and would essentially give him the power to appoint most of the members of what is the Indonesian equivalent of the U.S. Senate. So, he really will be able to rule.

I don’t know that he would have any motive for necessarily turning on Jokowi because, at this point, there’s no indication that Jokowi would be at cross purposes with him. Jokowi gave him his son as his running mate, the son would become vice president. And Jokowi remains popular because of two basic reasons: one, he’s the first president in Indonesian history who speaks the language of the people, literally. It’s referred to as “bahasa pasar,” market-talk, and that’s the way Jokowi speaks, and it’s different from the higher flown language that other politicians and national figures use, and that people see on TV. And he’s very effective at making a connection with people.

And he also did a lot of public works and economic development programs that many people liked during his term in office, President Jokowi did. So, at least until recently, where it’s declined somewhat, he has been very popular, so I think Prabowo will want to take advantage of that popularity and not clash with him.

But the people who will be in danger, the people who will be in trouble with general Prabowo and the presidency, are basically anyone who he perceives as an enemy or a potential enemy. In 2014, when he first ran for president against Jokowi, I published my interviews with him, where he talked about imagining becoming a fascist dictator. Where he said Indonesia is not ready for democracy, where he talked about how the Santa Cruz Massacre was imbecilic, because it was done in front of surviving witnesses.

In 2019, when he ran against Jokowi, I published an internal government document which described a meeting at Prabowo’s house, where he and his generals — Prabowo’s generals — made plans for mass arrests of his opponent once he took office. Including, remarkably enough, mass arrests of many of the Islamists who are aligned with ISIS who, during that campaign in ’19, were the grassroots basis for General Prabowo’s campaign. And they were very good, they did a very effective door-to-door campaign job on his behalf but, in the meantime, he and his generals were planning to arrest them as soon as they took office. Because, as they said in this meeting, according to the minutes, this would get them in good with the United States.

RG: No doubt it would.

AN: Yes, probably so.

Now, no equivalent planning document has leaked this time around, but there’s no reason to think that General Prabowo’s thinking or plans have changed at all. He’s still someone who imagines himself in the role of the fascist dictator. There’s every reason to think that he will — as his people planned in ’19 — to go after his opponents in a massive way.

So, it’s now very dangerous, not just for the independence movement in West Papua, which includes a small armed resistance force, but also many civilians and activists, but also for grassroots activists of all kinds across Indonesia. Especially human rights activists who expose and criticize the army, labor activists, environmental activists, anti-corruption activists, because corruption is a central part of the Indonesian political and economic system. And also, it may start to get uncomfortable for people who are critics of the United States, if Prabowo decides to continue his past practices of currying favor with the United States.

It’s very interesting, it’s a very interesting maneuver that he uses. Because, on the one hand, he goes around denouncing everyone as an antek asing, as a foreign lackey but, at the same time, in every matter of substance, he does what he can to prove his loyalty to the United States.

For example, in the period leading up to the last election, one of his top aides, Arif Wibowo, was filing a workers rights lawsuit against Freeport-McMoRan, the U. S. mining giant, and General Prabowo stepped in to kill that lawsuit. He ordered him to pull it, because he said, well, they’re a big investor, we can’t be bothering them like this, we’ve got to help them.

Now others, including the workers of Freeport-McMoRan and environmental activists in Papua and elsewhere, all these people face grave danger, because they’re up against the worst mass murderer in modern Indonesian history, who will be sitting in the palace.

RG: And what’s been the U.S.’s contemporary role in Prabowo’s rise? Is he a kind of zombie U.S. dictator just surviving from the past, the dead hand of CIA’s past? Or has the U.S. been taking active measures to help usher him into power?

AN: It is more a consequence of the past actions, but the U.S. does not oppose him in any way now.

As Suharto was falling in 1998, as the U.S. often does, it drops its people, its local operatives, its local agents, very quickly. As Suharto fell, Prabowo was suddenly, overnight, not as useful as he had been. He was Suharto’s son in law, he was Washington’s best channel to Suharto. General Prabowo was essentially working simultaneously for both the U.S. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and his father-in-law, General Suharto. But, with Suharto gone, Prabowo immediately became less powerful.

Just weeks after Suharto fell, Prabowo attempted a coup against the new civilian president, Habibie, who had been the vice president to Suharto. He failed in that coup attempt. But also, within the Indonesian army at that time, after Suharto’s fall, Prabowo’s status declined. His rivals in the army moved against him, and they actually publicly blamed him for one of his crimes, actually one of his smaller crimes, and that is the kidnapping of the 24 activists in Jakarta that I mentioned earlier.

They didn’t blame him for any of the mass killings, they didn’t blame him for the Anti-Chinese Riots, but they focused on those particular kidnappings, and the 13 who were still disappeared. And one of the basic arguments they made was, well, these crimes were not authorized. And, I don’t know, that may have been true. We don’t know. Clearly, everything that he had done was in accord with the policy of General Suharto, and the subsequent policy of the Indonesian armed forces, and also the policy of the U.S., which was backing them, and arming them, and training them, and sustaining them politically. But the argument they made was, well, these particular kidnappings were not authorized, essentially, they were out of line with policy.

So, Prabowo was demoted and temporarily humiliated by his own army. And he went into exile in Jordan for a time. And, as this was happening, the U.S. also distanced themselves from him. And, in fact, when I met with him in 2001, which was not long after this, he had already come back to Indonesia — and he comes from a rich family to begin with, he was running a very rich palm oil business — he was clearly bitter about how he felt the U.S. at that point had betrayed him. It was in that context that he said, “Oh, I was the American’s fair-haired boy.” Now Wiranto, General Wiranto, his main rival, now he is their fair-haired boy.

RG: Yeah, you can’t trust your American spymasters. 

AN: No, this has been proven time and time and time again, in country after country, because Washington just makes a calculus of power. If you suddenly don’t have the power, what good are you? That’s the basic approach. Unless they see your potential to return to power, as Prabowo is now in the process of doing.

But that one particular case of the kidnapping of the activists, it’s interesting. In Indonesian political discussion, it’s the one case that you’re essentially allowed to talk about. It’s the one thing that most — or, I don’t know if most, but a lot — of the population has heard about. A lot of the population has heard about those kidnappings, because it is discussed in the press from time to time. But almost all the rest, including the largest slaughters, are expunged from the textbooks, are almost never mentioned in the press. Certainly, the U.S. sponsorship of those atrocities is also never mentioned in the press. That one incident was the one case of Prabowo having his sponsors in the army and in Washington distance themselves from him.

But, in more recent years, As Prabowo has staged his political comeback, the U.S. has been OK with him. In this current election, just-concluded election, there were three candidates. I think the U.S. was neutral as to which one they would back. They’re ready to accept Prabowo. It may prove to be a bit embarrassing to them once he comes in, if, at least outside Indonesia, people start talking about some of the massacres that he did with full U.S. sponsorship and support.

But, you know, they’ve basically got no problem with him, they’re ready to accept him. And I think he will be thrilled to once again be working together with Washington.

RG: And from Pakistan to Gaza they have plenty of other embarrassments at the moment to deal with, so, what’s one more on the pile?

And, last question. Just curious, from your perspective, how concerned are you about being in Jakarta? Does he still feel like it’s imbecilic to go after Western reporters who have a megaphone and can bring negative attention to human rights abuses in Indonesia? Or do you think that now that he’s moving into power, he might be willing to take more risks than he was, even in the past? 

AN: Well, you don’t do it in front of witnesses, you do it where there are no witnesses. No, it’s my own situation, I’m not worried about that. I mean, I was banned by Suharto, entry is a threat to national security, and was arrested by the army many, many times. During Prabowo’s last two presidential campaigns, ‘14 and ’19, in both cases his campaign announced that they had filed criminal charges against me. First, for publishing what he had said to me, and then later for publishing the document about his plans to do mass arrests, including mass arrests of his own supporters.

But, no, I’m not worried about that. But the people who do have reason to be concerned are activists across Indonesia, and especially people across West Papua, where the current Indonesian military — for years now, before Prabowo takes office — has already, on a regular, persistent, unending basis, been killing whatever civilians they feel is necessary to keep pro-independence sentiment in check. And now, there’s a very good chance that that will get even more intensive in West Papua, and become much more dangerous for activists across Indonesia, especially human rights activists.

RG: Well, Alan, thanks so much for your reporting over the years, and your continued reporting on this. And thank you for joining me here and sharing all this on Deconstructed.

AN: Oh, you’re welcome.

RG: That was Alan Nairn and that’s our show.

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