Published On 31 Aug 2025
As deadly anti-government demonstrations spread outside the capital, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has canceled his trip to China, and TikTok, a social media platform, has suspended its live broadcast due to concerns about the “increasing violence” in the Southeast Asian nation.
The announcement made by Prabowo’s spokesman came on Saturday as Indonesian authorities reported that at least three people had died in an earlier arson attack on a parliament building in Makassar, South Sulawesi province.
The nearly one-year-old government of Prabowo faces its first significant challenge. After a police car hit and killed a motorcycle rider, they started in Jakarta on Monday over the lawmakers’ salaries.
According to presidential spokesman Prasetyo Hadi, “the president wants to continue monitoring [the situation in Indonesia] directly and look for the best solutions.”
The president apologizes to the Chinese government for being unable to attend the invitation.
On September 3rd, Prabowo was scheduled to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, China, as well as a “Victory Day” parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end.
According to reports, all 580 lawmakers in Indonesia are also paid a monthly housing allowance of 50 million rupiah ($3, 075) in addition to their salaries.
In a time when most people are struggling with rising living costs and taxes as well as rising unemployment, critics contend that the new allowance is excessive and insensitive.
Following the death of 21-year-old ride-hailing driver Affan Kurniawan on Thursday in Jakarta, the protests grew larger and more violent. The country was shocked and acquiesced to a national outcry against the country’s security forces after a video that appeared to show his death was posted on social media.
Prabowo, who served under Muhammad Soeharto as an army general, has urged calm and condolenced the victim’s death.
He has also urged the police and military to take decisive action to restore order.
According to local media reports, protesters reportedly set fires to regional parliament buildings in West Nusa Tenggara, Pekalongan city in central Java, and Cirebon city in West Java earlier on Saturday.
According to Detik.com, police in Pekalongan and West Nusa Tenggara and the protesters in Cirebon had looted parliamentary office equipment.
Plans for additional protests
In response to widespread outcry over a “housing allowance for politicians, which is ten times the minimum wage,” Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington, who is reporting from Jakarta, reported that “thousands of protesters remain on the streets” in the country’s capital.
Washington stated that while the government is urging calm, the protests are growing, with more cities receiving complaints and organizing demonstrations in the near future.
Local media also reported that a crowd had taken items including household furniture from Ahmad Sahroni, a lawmaker from the political party NasDem, and looted his Jakarta residence.
In an effort to stifle opposition to lawmakers’ demands for the government to bedissolved, Sahroni has been accused of responding insensitively. Such critics are “the stupidest people in the world,” according to Sachroni.
On Bali, where tear gas was used against demonstrators, protests also took place.
The short-video app TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, announced on Saturday that it had temporarily suspended its live streaming service in Indonesia.
Because of the spread of disinformation online, Jakarta summoned representatives of social media platforms, including Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok, and instructed them to promote content moderation. According to the government, such disinformation has caused protests against it.
We are implementing additional security measures to keep TikTok a safe and civilized environment in light of the growing violence in Indonesian protests, according to a statement from ByteDance.
The TikTok LIVE feature will be voluntarily suspended for the next few days in Indonesia, according to the statement.
With more than 100 million users, Indonesia has one of the largest audiences in the world.
Users complained that the service’s Saturday protest videos prevented them from using the live feature.
People had documented the protests with the well-known video app, which featured tear gas and water cannon shots at protesters.
According to Wirya Adiwena, deputy director of Amnesty International Indonesia, Indonesia’s government appears to be more concerned with ensuring it has “full control of the narratives [and] full control of the protests” than with addressing the real issues that people have, according to Wirya Adiwena, the government’s deputy director.
Source: Aljazeera
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