Since 1995 over 70 indonesian football fans died. For the Persija Jakarta ultras, every away trip could be their last. 11FREUNDE takes a road trip through a war zone.
It’s absurd the authorities moved this game to a so-called neutral venue in Surakarta – they already banned away fans at matches between Persija and Persib years ago. The problem now is that Persija’s stadium is closed for renovations ahead of the Asian Games. The team have been playing home games in Bekasi, on Jakarta’s outskirts – but already in West Java, Persib country. The police have shunted the derby problem to someone else – creating this convoy and all that goes with it. A suicide mission.
“Psst,” hisses one of the guys. “Adjap!” He sneeks up behind one of the policeman then reveals a sticker with “A.C.A.B” emblazoned on it. Even Rifki, the boy in the windbreaker, breaks into a big smile. As if this whole trip were a game, like Battleships on the motorway. One ship’s hit, but the rest of the fleet is good to go. “Persib are weak and we are strong!” says Rifki, as the convoy gets moving again. Outside the bus, the lights from American fast food restaurants fly by, as if from a distant universe, another lifetime. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and so on and so on. You and I are gonna live forever.
Until now, there’s been little public debate about football violence in Indonesia. Eight years ago, a film did come out that touched on the subject – Romeo Juliet, a love story between a Persija supporter and a female Persib fan. The director wanted to show that the two sides could get on. But some fans were outraged, claiming the plot was pure fantasy. Beyond that, the Indonesian magazine Tempo occasionally reports on fan culture in a knowledgeable, investigative way. A few months ago, the Guardian ran a translation of a Tempo story under the headline “Jakarta’s Hooligan Problem”. It was the first time the topic had been covered extensively in a major western news outlet.
Apart from that, it’s down to lone campaigners with little to no lobbying power to try and change the situation. That includes journalist Akmal Marhali and former official Llano Mahardika. A couple of years ago, they formed the organisation “Save our soccer” (SOS), to get some kind of monitoring system off the ground. With the help of numerous volunteers, they have shone a light on the game in Indonesia, keeping a tally of the riots, the deaths. A day before my departure for Surakarta, I meet them in a café in central Jakarta. Marhali, 38, is wearing beige trousers, a black shirt and a determined look. He’s brought a stack of documents with him. He leans closer when we speak, as if he’s scared someone will listen in. “65 deaths!” he says and lets the number hang in the hot air.
65 deaths in Indonesian football since 1995, each one catalogued by him and his volunteers. In 2017 alone, they recorded 11 football-related deaths. The real number could be even higher. Marhali shows me a graph showing how each of the victims died: punches and kicks (24), stab wounds (14), others fell from moving buses, were hit by fireworks or shot. One guy was beaten to death because he failed to celebrate a Persija goal with enough enthusiasm. The Persija fans around him assumed he was a Persib supporter who had snuck into the home end. But where does this rage come from? Why such disregard for human life?
The clues all point towards the past and the decades of dictatorship under Suharto. Some of the men who massacred over a million communists in the mid-sixties are still alive today – and are treated as heroes. They speak publicly and in gruesome detail about the murders they committed. They talk about the heads that rolled, the penises they cut off, and do it with a smile. But Indonesia’s fascination with the extreme also has something to do with the post-Suharto years, the period after 1998. Then, the country’s regions and cities took on more political significance and a strong sense of local patriotism emerged. That country was undergoing a rude awakening. Punks walked Jakarta’s streets, art galleries were opening, newspapers printed critical articles and even if football stadiums had always provided more freedom than elsewhere, suddenly you could sing, shout and swear like never before. Above all, you could fight. At the same time, the internet was taking off and showing young Indonesians, what they’d been missing all these years. All of a sudden, the world didn’t seem so big – even Indonesia with its 17,504 islands seemed orderly and easy to get a handle on. You just had to click on the right links.
“Who can young people here trust? Where are the role models for them?”
Today, the country has a democratic government but, says Marhali, that doesn’t mean everything is clean and above board. That’s especially true in football, where the people in charge were once decision-makers in the Suharto regime. “Who can young people here trust? Where are the role models for them?” asks Marhali, before embarking on a half-hour lecture about officials who make Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner and co sound like boy scouts. He tells me about corrupt companies, who own four or five first-division teams at the same time, an open goal for betting syndicates from Singapore and Malaysia.
He pulls out his phone and shows me secret recordings made by him and his colleagues. In one of them, a briefcase of money swaps hands for a match to be cancelled. He tells me about Nurdin Halid, the former football association president who spent two of his eight years in power in prison for tax offences. Massive fan protests broke out in 2011 when he stood for re-election. Oil billionaire Arifin Panigoro used the incident to set up an illegal second league. He bought up all the teams in it or founded new ones. After that, 15 teams played in the national first division. Another 19 played in the parallel, illegal “Super League”. This is Indonesia!
In such a maze of madness, the issue of fan violence barely raises an eyebrow with government or the football authorities. There’s always something more important going on. In late May 2012, Islamic hardliners stopped Lady Gaga from performing in Indonesia. At roughly the same time, three Persib fans were killed at the Clasico. “Fans and violence aren’t part of our remit,” the country’s football association, the PSSI, would announce in 2016. The PSSI’s new general secretary, Ratu Tisha Destria, has nonetheless promised a more modern approach. She wants to set up a department for fan issues.
Marhali is sceptical. He flicks through a back issue of 11 Freunde. His eyes settle on an image of Bayern fans kettled by police. “We need something similar here,” he says. “Security checks at stadiums, better infrastructure, cameras, a professional ticketing system, European officials.” In a matter of moments, Marhali has laid out a mini law and order programme. Perhaps it’s a sign of his frustration. Is an iron fist really the only way to solve the problem? Marhali thinks for a moment. He would prefer, he says, a lighter touch. “Do you know what would be good?” he says, his eyes lighting up. “If we could just let football die for a few years. Just one or two. Then we could build it back up from scratch.” He would also like to organise a benefit tournament for all the victims of football violence. Every club would take part and pictures of the dead would be hung around the stadium. “We would make them visible,” he says. “That way, fans would have to talk to each other about them.” He pauses. “You know what the football association says about that? ‘Mr. Marhali, that’s not a good idea.’”