Wednesday, September 3, 2025

The Dangers of Communism for Indonesian Democracy (2)

The so-called 17+8 demands in pink represent a set of political and social grievances that were deliberately crafted to be both confrontational and symbolic. The number seventeen often refers to the constitutional articles or the broader aspirations of the people regarding equality, justice, and transparency, while the additional eight demands highlight more immediate and pragmatic requests, such as economic security, education reform, and protection of civil rights. When merged, the “17+8” becomes a manifesto that combines principle with practice, vision with necessity, and ideology with the lived reality of the street. What makes it striking is not only the content but also the choice of colour. The use of pink is neither accidental nor trivial; it is a conscious strategy to subvert expectations. In political discourse, pink has often been associated with softness, playfulness, or even vulnerability, yet in this context, it is reappropriated as a sign of courage, unity, and defiance. It suggests that the movement does not need the harsh colours of authority—black, red, or military green—to assert its seriousness. Instead, it chooses pink to embody irony, creativity, and inclusivity, thereby giving a powerful visual identity to what might otherwise be dismissed as ordinary protest slogans.
In recent history, the colour pink has repeatedly appeared as an emblem of defiance, irony, and collective identity. During the early 2000s, the American activist group Code Pink chose the colour specifically to mock the militaristic culture of Washington. Instead of adopting sombre tones, they marched against the Iraq War dressed in flamboyant pink, turning what was once seen as frivolous into a banner of seriousness. Likewise, in Latin America, pink has been used in women’s marches to highlight the hypocrisy of governments claiming to defend family values while neglecting social justice. In Europe, pink triangles were originally imposed by the Nazis to stigmatise homosexual prisoners; decades later, the LGBTQ+ movement reclaimed the triangle and the colour pink as proud symbols of survival and dignity. These cases reveal that pink functions as a double-edged cultural weapon: what is meant to belittle or trivialise can be turned into a declaration of power, solidarity, and refusal to bow to dominant narratives. Thus, when we see the 17+8 demands in pink, they stand not alone but within a lineage of global resistance where colour itself becomes a language of protest.

In the Indonesian context, pink has long carried an ambivalent cultural weight—at once playful and subversive. On the surface, it is linked to celebration, femininity, or even kitsch aesthetics, yet beneath that lies a quiet undercurrent of irony. In Jakarta, the now-famous “busway pink seats” were designed as a protective zone for women, yet they also served as a commentary on how segregation was preferred to systemic safety reforms. In political campaigns, pink has occasionally surfaced as a colour of populist friendliness, used to soften the image of candidates who might otherwise appear rigid or elitist. More recently, young activists have reappropriated pink in protests and visual art to disrupt the dominance of “serious” colours such as red, white, or black. Pink banners, graffiti, and performance costumes have appeared in rallies to highlight not only gender equality but also broader issues such as corruption, ecological destruction, and inequality. In this way, when the 17+8 demands are clad in pink, the movement is simultaneously mocking the rigidity of formal politics and claiming a space of joy, creativity, and irreverence within Indonesian protest culture.

Here is the full content of the 17+8 Tuntutan Rakyat (“17+8 Demands from the People”):

17 Short-Term Demands (to be fulfilled by 5 September 2025)

These immediate actions were directed at various branches of government and institutions:
  • To the President:
  • To the People’s Representative Council (DPR):
    • Freeze any pay rises and perks for members of parliament; cancel new benefits, including pensions.
    • Publish transparent details of budgets, salaries, housing allowances, and other funds.Urge the DPR’s Honorary Body to investigate unethical or scandal-associated representatives.
  • To Political Parties:
    • Sack or sanction unethical representatives responsible for public outrage.
    • State publicly that their parties stand with the people during crises.
    • Involve party cadres in public dialogue with students and civil society.
  • To the Police Force:
    • Release all detained protesters.
    • End police brutality and enforce Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during demonstrations.
    • Arrest and bring to justice officers and commanders involved in human rights violations.
  • To the Armed Forces (TNI):
    • Return fully to barracks and cease involvement in civil affairs.
    • Uphold internal discipline; ensure TNI does not meddle in police functions.
    • Publicly commit to staying out of civilian spaces during democratic crises.
  • To Economic Ministries / Labour Authorities:
    • Guarantee fair wages for all workers nationwide.
    • Implement emergency measures to prevent mass layoffs and protect contract labourers.
    • Open dialogue with labour unions regarding minimum wage and outsourcing practices.
8 Long-Term Demands (to be achieved by 31 August 2026)

These are systemic reforms aimed at structural change:
  1. Cleansing and reforming the DPR: conduct independent audits, publicise results, raise standards for membership (e.g. no corruption history), apply KPIs, and eliminate special privileges such as lifetime pensions or special transport.
  2. Political party reform and better executive oversight: parties must publish their finances within the year, and DPR should ensure opposition functions as intended.
  3. Fairer tax reform: balance budget transfers to local governments and avoid burdensome tax increases.
  4. Enact and uphold Asset Seizure Bill: strengthen the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and related laws (e.g. anti-corruption legislation).
  5. Reform the police institution: make policing professional and humane; decentralise public enforcement and traffic control.
  6. Return TNI fully to non-civilian roles: revoke military mandates in civilian projects such as food estates; reform the Armed Forces Act.
  7. Strengthen human rights and oversight institutions: revise the Komnas HAM Act to broaden mandates, and empower the Ombudsman and Kompolnas.
  8. Review economic and labour policies: re-examine strategic national projects (PSN), protect indigenous communities and environments, reassess the Omnibus Law on Job Creation, and audit SOE governance.
Why the Colours Pink and Green?
  • “Brave Pink”: Pink was inspired by a photo of a woman wearing a pink hijab who boldly stood at the front line facing police during the 28 August protests. The pink became a symbol of courage born from compassion, transforming a traditionally “soft” colour into one of defiant strength.
  • “Hero Green”: Green references the jacket worn by ojek driver Affan Kurniawan, who tragically died after being struck by a police vehicle during the protest. It evolved into a symbol of hope, empathy, and the push for justice and reform.

The 17+8 Demands from the People consist of seventeen short-term and eight long-term calls, born from August 2025 demonstrations across Indonesia. The short-term demands target immediate relief—such as removing the military from civil policing roles, investigating cases of brutality, halting pay rises for lawmakers, and protecting labour rights. The long-term demands demand deeper democratic reforms—revamping parliament, political parties, police, human rights bodies, and economic policy frameworks.

The symbolism of pink within the 17+8 demands can only be understood when read across both global and local registers. Internationally, pink has shifted from a mark of ridicule or marginalisation into a badge of resilience, irony, and communal strength, whether in anti-war marches, feminist mobilisations, or the LGBTQ+ struggle. Locally, in Indonesia, pink operates as both a satire of authority and a reclamation of political space, turning what was once deemed frivolous into something deeply unsettling for the status quo. The colour therefore bridges worlds: it links Jakarta’s busway seats with Latin American streets, and Indonesian student banners with European protest art. To dismiss it as “cute” is to miss its sharper edge, for pink has become a tool to rewrite the language of dissent. In this light, the 17+8 demands in pink are not merely a list of grievances but a cultural statement: that resistance can be joyous, inclusive, and disruptive without losing its gravity.

The 17+8 Demands cannot be separated from the long history of political struggles in Indonesia, where calls for justice, equality, and reform have always existed in tension with fears of ideological labelling. Whenever the people raise their voices to demand accountability from the state, there is often a counter-narrative that seeks to discredit them, and the spectre of communism has repeatedly been used as a convenient weapon. In this sense, the colourful and creative language of the 17+8—embodied in Brave Pink and Hero Green—stands in sharp contrast to the black-and-white accusations that protests are secretly driven by communist influences.
To speak of communism in Indonesia is to step into a field charged with trauma, memory, and manipulation. Since 1965, the very word has been employed less as an analytical category and more as a blunt instrument of fear. Movements for labour rights, land reform, or student activism have at times been casually branded as “communist”, not because of their actual ideology, but because such labels serve the interests of those in power. Thus, the emergence of the 17+8 demands reopens this conversation: is the push for structural reform automatically “red”, or is it a natural continuation of democratic aspirations long suppressed under the shadow of Cold War paranoia?
Seen in this light, the transition from 17+8 to communism is not abrupt but rather a reminder of how Indonesian politics is haunted by its past. Just as pink and green were redefined as symbols of courage and hope, perhaps the time has come to re-examine whether the language of fear surrounding communism should also be confronted and reimagined. The question then becomes not only about the substance of the demands, but also about the narratives that rise to silence them.

To speak of communism in Indonesia is to step into a field charged with trauma, memory, and manipulation. Since 1965, the very word has been employed less as an analytical category and more as a blunt instrument of fear. Movements for labour rights, land reform, or student activism have at times been casually branded as “communist”, not because of their actual ideology, but because such labels serve the interests of those in power. Thus, the emergence of the 17+8 demands reopens this conversation: is the push for structural reform automatically “red”, or is it a natural continuation of democratic aspirations long suppressed under the shadow of Cold War paranoia?
During the New Order, the regime indeed monopolised the narrative, wielding the word “Communist” as a blunt weapon against critics and opponents. In that era, the stigma was state-engineered and relentlessly maintained. However, after the Reformasi, especially under the administration of Joko Widodo, the dynamic shifted. The state no longer carried the same monopoly of narrative, and the rhetoric of “Communism” as a political stigma gradually lost its sharpness. Instead, what began to surface was the reverse strategy: former PKI members and their sympathisers reframed themselves as victims, invoking human rights discourse to demand moral recognition and even material compensation. In this inversion, the same vocabulary of suffering that had once silenced them is now redeployed to claim legitimacy, thus ensuring that the politics of memory remains a contested battlefield in Indonesia.

The manipulation of the term “Communism” in Indonesian political discourse has evolved across two contrasting historical phases. Under the New Order regime, the label was aggressively deployed as a state instrument to delegitimise dissent and justify mass repression. After Reformasi, particularly during Joko Widodo’s presidency, the state largely relinquished that narrative terrain. In its absence, former PKI sympathisers and civil society actors began to reconstruct their own memory of history, leveraging human rights language to assert moral legitimacy—and often material entitlement. 

Leksana’s study underscores how such memories sprout organically within communities, while Wahyuningroem’s work shows how civil society filled the vacuum left by a retreating state, enabling these narratives to take hold.

In her book, Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia (2023, Amsterdam University Press), Leksana investigates how local communities in rural East Java—specifically Donomulyo, near Malang—remember and process the traumatic anti-communist violence of 1965 and its aftermath.
Rather than accepting the state-manufactured narrative that simplistically identified the PKI and its sympathisers as national threats, Leksana reveals that memory of those events is deeply rooted in local social relations, agrarian dynamics, and interpersonal networks. Memories are shaped by economic tension, social hierarchy, and clientelism—not merely by top-down propaganda.
Crucially, the book explores how the brutal purge in 1965 served not only to neutralise the PKI after the G30S coup but also to suppress the broader leftist class struggle of the 1950s–60s, especially demands for agrarian reform. By systematically eliminating left-wing grassroots movements such as the PKI, BTI, Gerwani, and Lekra, the violence effectively erased these struggles from national memory, recasting them as treacherous rather than as legitimate advocacy for social justice.
Leksana also explores the landscape of memory—what she calls "memory landscapes." In Donomulyo, the state-erected Trisula Monument (commemorating National Liberation) coexists with local markers such as mass graves and family memories. These landscape elements reveal the uneasy coexistence of official memory and lived history.
Perhaps most poignantly, in her final chapter, she delves into inter-generational narratives within families—how silence becomes a negotiated form of remembering or forgetting. Silence might mask trauma or imply complicity, but it also enables survivors and descendants to navigate memory without reopening old wounds. Oral histories, rituals, and even selective silence become part of a locally negotiated memory politics, challenging monolithic state narratives.

In her book Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia (2023, Amsterdam University Press), Grace Tjandra Leksana adopts a clear position: she argues that the violence following the G30S events of 1965 was not merely a political manoeuvre to dismantle the PKI, but a humanitarian tragedy that left a long trail of trauma. She does not write from the standpoint of communist ideology as doctrine, but rather highlights how the label “communist” was weaponised to justify violence, discrimination, and decades of stigmatisation.
Regarding the G30S-PKI affair, Leksana does not defend the coup itself. Instead, she critiques the state’s official narrative—one that emphasised the PKI’s brutality—as having foreclosed space for the stories of those who were stigmatised. In her view, many individuals with no direct involvement in the PKI were swept up in the violence of 1965–66, and when they or their descendants attempted to speak of their suffering, they were often dismissed, as the official historical narrative recognised only one truth: the PKI as the sole perpetrator of wrongdoing.
In other words, Leksana’s assessment of communism and the G30S-PKI is grounded in the frameworks of memory studies and human rights. She does not seek to justify communism, but rather interrogates how “communism” became a convenient stamp used to silence dissent and perpetuate violence. Her central focus lies in how collective memory is constructed, distorted, and contested within Indonesian public discourse to this day.
Leksana also delineates a sharp contrast between the post-1965 regime (the New Order) and the Reformasi era that followed. Under the New Order, memory of the G30S-PKI was tightly managed by the state. The Suharto regime constructed an “official memory” propagated through school curricula, propaganda films such as Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, monuments, and annual commemorations. All of these reinforced a singular narrative: the PKI as traitors to the nation, instigators of chaos, and eternal enemies to be eradicated. This monolithic account not only erased alternative stories but also stigmatised anyone who expressed sympathy for the victims as a potential threat.
After Reformasi, the situation reversed. The collapse of the regime loosened the grip of state-sponsored memory, and efforts emerged from victim groups and former PKI sympathisers to assert their own narratives. Leksana observes that this period marked the beginning of a memory struggle: the state was no longer dominant, while civil society, NGOs, academics, and survivor communities sought to recover marginalised histories. Within this context, the notion of “reconciliation” surfaced as a public discourse, though not without friction—many parties continued to resist giving space to victim narratives, fearing it might “revive communism.”
Thus, Grace Tjandra Leksana illustrates that while the New Order repressed memory by locking it into a singular narrative, the Reformasi era opened up a more fluid arena of memory contestation, where claims to historical truth and moral legitimacy confront one another.
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