13-year-old girl dragged to police for wearing hammer-and-sickle T-shirt

This article caught my eye because although it is short and (fortunately) no harm came to the girl, it says a lot about the fears of the contemporary Indonesian state. It was published in the Jakarta Post on 13th September 2018. 

A female junior high student was forcible taken to the police station by the members of Indonesian youth organization, the Pemuda Pancasila (PP), after a video of her wearing a shirt sporting a hammer and sickle went viral on social media. This took place in Ujung Batu, in the province of Riau. The PP tracked down her whereabouts, went to her house and brought her to the police station for questioning. During the interrogation, the girl claimed to not know the meaning behind the famous Communist symbol; her parents had bought the shirt for her from a Ujung Batu market. According to the police chief, she was released immediately since she was underage and ignorant of the symbol’s meaning. The offensive garment has been confiscated.

Last semester, I watched The Act of Killing as part of my Anthropology of Human Rights class. Through this film, I got to know about Indonesia’s extremely harsh stance on Communism, so much so that they encouraged their own citizens to commit a mass genocide of Communists. A group that emerged from this was the PP - they are a paramilitary whose acts of state-sanctioned violence are celebrated. This article portrays that the fear of Communism is still strong in Indonesia, despite the fact that the genocide took place over 50 years ago and the film came out 6 years ago. As Christopher Duncan mentions in his essay, communist threats in Southeast Asia have long subsided, yet governments still intensely fear its resurgence. This leads me to wonder why, and if the responses by the state, both past and present, are justified in their large magnitude. It also shows that the PP still hold a lot of power, because there is very little criticism directed towards them (the author is Indonesian) when any outsider would have undoubtedly laid into them for dragging a 13-year-old girl to the police. 

I’m also curious about what this post has left out. For example, there is very little description about what it was like when the PP showed up at the girl’s house to “arrest” her. What was her reaction? What were her parents’ reactions? Since her parents were the ones who bought her the scandalous T-shirt, would they be brought into questioning? Of course, these are all questions that would be hard for a journalist to know/answer without the fullness of time, but I still wonder nonetheless.  

Post URLl: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/09/12/13-year-old-girl-dragged-t…