Soldiers are now giving the Pancasila lecture on Indonesian campuses

Active-duty TNI officers have started giving the compulsory Pancasila lecture on Indonesian campuses. An army major general addressed a Pancasila class at the Bandung Institute of Technology in April, and another did the same there in September. Padjadjaran University has a military speaker booked for 2 October. In August, regional commanders addressed new students at Hasanuddin University and Makassar State University, and a soldier spoke on the same subject at Muhammadiyah University of Papua. Writing for Indonesia at Melbourne, Muhammad Yoppy Adhi Hernawan, who teaches at Padjadjaran, says militarisation has now reached the classroom.

His objection is not about rank but about what the two jobs require. Law 12 of 2012 makes Pancasila compulsory in undergraduate study and protects academic freedom in the same breath. Military discipline law is built on hierarchy and unity of command, which means a subordinate obeys a service order. A student has to be free to disagree with the lecturer, and a soldier is trained not to. The five principles also pull against each other in real cases. In a land dispute the state side can appeal to national unity while residents appeal to social justice, and in June East Java's provincial legislature reported that kind of argument between the navy and residents of 10 villages in Pasuruan.

Hernawan also weighs the military's own record against its claim to teach civic values. Human Rights Watch documented the disappearance of activists under the New Order in 1998, and senior officers of that era now hold the presidency and the defence ministry. This year a military court convicted four serving intelligence personnel over the acid attack on the rights defender Andrie Yunus. An appeals court then cut two sentences and reversed two dismissals, and nobody has established who ordered the attack. Amnesty International has recorded online accounts posing as military units that brand critics "foreign agents." One commander told new students to practise Pancasila rather than debate it.

Why it matters

If you are sitting the compulsory Pancasila course, the test is whether you can ask the speaker a hard question, about Pasuruan or about Andrie Yunus, without being called disloyal. The course is required and the grade is real, so watch who is standing at the front of the room this semester. Deans and faculty senates still choose that speaker, which means the choice is theirs to defend.