Indonesia protests: Police fire tear gas on third day of unrest over laws to ban sex outside marriage

Unrest is personally embarrassing for President Jokowi, who is backpedalling after authorising controversial new laws for debate

Students run during a protest in Jakarta, Indonesia on Wednesday (AP)

Police opened fire with tear gas on students and activists who again took to the streets in Indonesia on Wednesday, the third consecutive day of protests against a string of controversial new laws and reforms.

Thousands of students clashed with police as they attempted to reach the parliament building in the capital Jakarta, the scene of similar violence after midnight on Tuesday that saw more than 300 people injured, according to official figures.

Stone-throwing protesters set fire to a bus stop before they were repelled by police hurling volleys of tear gas from the roofs of high schools near the parliamentary buildings, turning the nearby roads into a smoke-filled battleground.

The protests are against a number of mostly conservative reforms that the outgoing parliament is trying to force through before the end of its term on 1 October.

They include a sweeping new criminal code to replace Indonesia’s colonial-era Dutch laws, with a number of social and moral provisions routed in conservative Islam.

The new laws would ban sex outside marriage as well as criminalising any “offensive behaviour” in public, sweeping provisions which experts say would likely be used to target LGBT+ Indonesians.

They would also make it a criminal act to insult the president, judges and the courts, provisions which may make it difficult for some NGOs and civil society groups to operate.

The extension of already strict blasphemy laws would make it illegal to promote atheism.

And the new penal code includes a four-year jail term for abortions in the absence of a medical emergency or rape, and a prison term for black magic.

“[These reforms] are highly controversial and deeply flawed, and really need a lot more careful deliberation before they are finalised,” Tim Lindsey, director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society, told The Independent.

“For some reason the outgoing legislature is desperate to push through laws which are badly drafted or in fact regressive in nature.

A protester fires at riot police during university students’ protest outside the Indonesian Parliament in Jakarta (Reuters)

Protesters are also angered by the passing of a law last week to reduce the authority of the country’s anti-corruption agency.

The Corruption Eradication Commission, known by the initials KPK, was one of the few robust national institutions in a country riven with deep-seated corruption. Its success in targeting cross-party political graft had made it deeply unpopular with the country’s political elites, and several past attempts to gut it had failed.

On walls near the parliament building in Jakarta, protesters scrawled: “Parliament is the state’s clown” and “RIP KPK”.

The rallies are not yet on the scale of the civil society backlash that brought down the former authoritarian leader Suharto, or indeed the vast Islamist protests against the Christian governor of Jakarta over alleged blasphemy in 2016.

But they have spread to other cities including Palu, Garut, Bogor and Padang, the capital of West Sumatra, where police on Wednesday were unable to stop thousands of university students who stormed into the local parliament building. The angry protesters smashed windows and chairs and wrote insults against the government on the building’s walls.

And the unrest comes at a difficult time for President Joko Widodo who, despite still awaiting inauguration for his second term after a convincing April general election victory, is under pressure due to weeks of violent separatist unrest in the restive Papua region.

President Jokowi, as he is almost universally known in Indonesia, has asked parliament to delay votes on the new criminal code and three other reforms until the new legislature is sworn in next month. Parliamentarians have only consented to delay to an as-yet undecided date, and could conceivably still have time to pass the controversial changes.

The situation represents a personal embarrassment for Jokowi, whose government authorised the new laws for debate. The president, who campaigned on a ticket of business and infrastructure development and is not known for his interest in matters of law and order, claims he was not properly briefed by his justice minister.

Nonetheless, he is also responsible for courting the Islamist vote during April’s election, not least by appointing a hardline Muslim cleric as his running mate.

“What we are seeing is the rising use of religious identity politics on the national political scene,” Professor Lindsey said. “The election was heavily marked by the use of religious identity themes, and it’s pretty apparent that this has informed the conservative position of the new criminal code in relation to sexual and moral issues.”

Protesters are calling on Jokowi to pass an emergency executive order, rolling back the changes to the anti-corruption agency until the new legislature is in place. But the authorities are also taking a firm stance in a bid to avoid in Jakarta a repeat of the ongoing scenes of protest that have plagued Hong Kong in recent months.

Jakarta police chief Gatot Eddy Pramono said 39 police officers were among those injured in Tuesday’s clashes, and that some of the 94 people detained had been carrying petrol bombs.

Without providing further details, he hinted that the protests could be the work of groups beyond Indonesia’s traditionally formidable student movement. “We are still investigating whether they are students or other members of society with different interests,” he told reporters.

And referring to damage caused to fences and other vandalism around parliament in Jakarta on Tuesday night, he said: “If it is proven that they caused damage ... we will take strict measures against them and start the legal process.”

Additional reporting by agencies