The 'preman state': a case that hired muscle is part of how Indonesia is run

Hercules Rosario Marshal is a familiar face in Jakarta, and his mass organisation GRIB Jaya was reportedly part of the rioting that turned the 27 August protests over the asset forfeiture bill deadly. Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir uses that as a starting point in an essay for Indonesia at Melbourne, and his argument is harder than the usual complaint about gangsters. He calls Indonesia a "preman state", a thug state. In his reading, violent groups are not a gap in state power but one of the ways it works.

The personal thread is old. Hercules served as an operational helper with the 328th Airborne Infantry Battalion under Prabowo Subianto during operations in East Timor in the 1980s, then moved into Jakarta's underworld selling security. In 2012 he founded GRIB Jaya to back Prabowo's Gerindra party, with Prabowo as its chief patron. Since Prabowo won the presidency, Mudhoffir writes, the group's standing has reportedly grown stronger rather than weaker.

Then he pulls the timeline back. The Dutch hired local strongmen, jawara and vrijman, to collect taxes. In 1959 General Nasution set up Pemuda Pancasila to break up communist youth groups, and in 1965 the military armed militias for the anti-PKI killings. Under Suharto, General Ali Moertopo managed criminal networks, and the Petrus "mysterious shootings" of the 1980s killed off rival thugs. After 1998 these groups broke into local pieces but stayed close to whoever held local office. The list of unpunished mass violence runs through Suharto, Megawati, Yudhoyono, Widodo and now Prabowo, and that history is why Mudhoffir makes his hardest claim: the rule of law here has never really been built.

Why it matters

This matters most to anyone whose land, market stall, building site or campus sits where an organised group wants something, because the useful question is not "is this legal" but "who is protecting them". Read the asset forfeiture fight with that in mind: a law that lets the state seize property is powerful in clean hands and dangerous in dirty ones, which is why the secrecy around the draft worries lawyers. Watch whether any prosecution follows August's violence, or whether it joins the list.