¹ On the night of March 8, 2017, after Ahok failed to win an outright victory in the first round of his campaign for the governorship, Anies Baswedan, the ultimate victor, visited the home of Hary Tahoesoedibjo and secured his public support (Saeun Muarif, “Hary Tanoe Resmi dukung Anies, Kenapa FPI Diam?” Seword, March 10, 2017).

² Margaret Scott, “Indonesia: The Saudis Are Coming,” New York Review of Books,“ October 27, 2016. Douglas Ramage agreed: ”The Indonesia we used to talk about – Nahdlatul Ulama, Muhammadiyah – their influence has waned a bit“ (Douglas Ramage, quoted in Nithin Coca, ”The Fall of Ahok and Indonesia's Future.“ The Diplomat, April 21, 2017.

³ E.g. Mohshin Habib, “Saudi Arabia's ‘Lavish’ Gift to Indonesia: Radical Islam,” Gatestone Institute, International Policy Council, April 29, 2017: “Prior to Saudi Arabia's attempts to spread Salafism across the Muslim world, Indonesia did not have terrorist organizations such as Hamas Indonesia, Laskar Jihad, Hizbut Tahrir, Islamic Defenders Front and Jemmah Islamiyah, to name just a few. Today, it is rife with these groups, which adhere strictly to Islamic sharia law, Saudi Arabia's binding legal system, and which promote it in educational institutions. Like al-Qaeda and ISIS, they deny women equal rights, believe in death by stoning for adulterers and hand amputation for thieves, and in executing homosexuals and ”apostate“ Muslims. The most recent example of the way in which this extremism has swept Indonesia took place a mere three weeks after the Saudi king wrapped up his trip. On March 31, at least 15,000 Islamist protesters took to the streets of Jakarta after Friday prayers, calling for the imprisonment of the capital city's Christian governor, who [was] on trial for ‘blaspheming the Quran.‘”

⁴ Tom Allard and Agustinus Beo Da Costa, “Exclusive - Indonesian Islamist leader says ethnic Chinese wealth is next target,” Reuters, May 12, 2017.

⁵ It should be noted that of those 1000, the majority were urban poor non-Chinese, most of whom were trapped in shopping malls that were set on fire.

⁶ Nithin Coca, “The Fall of Ahok and Indonesia's Future.” The Diplomat, April 21, 2017.

⁷ Allan Nairn, “Trump's Indonesian Allies in Bed With ISIS-Backed FPI Militia Seeking to Oust Elected President Jokowi,” The Intercept, April 18, 2017; reprinted with Introduction by me, Asia-Pacific Journal, April 27, 2017, here.

⁸ Arya Dipa, 18 January 2017). “Petition calls for disbandment of FPI,” The Jakarta Post, January 18, 2017.

⁹ Ian Douglas Wilson, The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 151.

¹⁰ John T. Sidel, Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 139: “In August 2008, activists had founded the FPI with the evident blessing – and rumored active support – of Major General Djadja Suparman, new commander of the Greater Jakarta Regional Army Command…. Clad in body-length white tunics… FPI members would reappear on subsequent occasions in 1999 and 2000, wielding sabers and machetes and claiming to speak in the name of Islam.”

¹¹ Susan Berfield and Dewi Loveard, “Ten days that shook Indonesia,” in Edward Aspinall, Herb Feith, and Gerry van Klinken, eds. The Last Days of President Suharto, (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 1999), 57–58. Cf. Joseph Davies, “Did Prabowo Mastermind the May 1998 Riots?” The Indonesian Army. July 7, 2014: “Starting in the mid-1990s, Prabowo and his henchmen encouraged anti-Chinese and anti-Christian violence to divert attention from internal problems, suppress the ‘openness’ (keterbukaan) movement and, after the monetary crisis, strengthen the regime's negotiating position with the IMF. Working through his Center for Policy and Development Studies (CPDS) (which he founded with General Hartono) and its progeny, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Prabowo and his shady partners incited anti-Chinese and anti-Christian riots across Java during the late-1990s before the regional economic crisis. They used incendiary rhetoric, anti-minority conspiracy theories and Prabowo's criminal underlings as paid provocateurs, all as part of a strategy to stunt the budding democracy movement and deflect public dissatisfaction with New Order excesses.”

¹² Tonny, “Prabowo and his anti-Chinese past?” New Mandala, June 2014.

¹³ Sita W. Dewi, “Jakarta Politics Heating Up,” Jakarta Post, October 4, 2014. More than ten police officers were injured in the riot, and at least 20 FPI members were arrested. Nevertheless, “Gerindra Party Jakarta chairman and council deputy speaker M. Taufik, who once spent several years in prison for graft, thanked the group for holding the rally and promised that he would do whatever was necessary to end Ahok's career.”

¹⁴ Nithin Coca, “The Fall of Ahok and Indonesia's Future.”

¹⁵ Nairn, “Trump's Indonesian Allies in Bed With ISIS-Backed FPI Militia Seeking to Oust Elected President Jokowi,” The Intercept, April 18, 2017. Admiral Ponto also told Nairn that for the movement's military sponsors, the Ahok issue is a mere entry point, a religious hook to draw in the masses, but “Jokowi is their final destination.”

¹⁶ Katie Reilly, “Donald Trump's Indonesian Business Partner Says He Might Run for President,” Fortune, January 3, 2017.

¹⁷ Nairn, “Trump's Indonesian Allies.” Hary's attendance raised an ethical issue when he told media that “he attended the inauguration on invitation and as a business partner of the Trump organization…. If other people have difficulty getting to [Trump], I can do it easily. I communicate with his children over our businesses. I can meet with his kids anytime. I just need to pick up the phone. My WhatsApp messages are also responded” (Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermot, “Trump's Indonesian business partner says he attended inauguration as a ‘partner of the Trump Organization’,” CNNMoney, February 10, 2017).

¹⁸ See e.g. Matt Egan, “Trump adviser Icahn may have broken trading laws: Senators,” CNNMoney, May 9, 2917; Michelle Celarier, “Trump Adviser Carl Icahn Is a Blinding Supernova of Conflicts of Interest,” New York, January 2017.

¹⁹ Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, “Below a Mountain of Wealth, a River of Waste,” New York Times, December 27, 2005.

²⁰ Jon Emont, “Foreigners Have Long Mined Indonesia, but Now There's an Outcry,” New York Times, March 31, 2017.

²¹ Perlez and Bonner, “Below a Mountain:” The tensions erupted in a major riot in 1996, resolved by a high-level meeting which Prabowo reportedly chaired. Subsequently, “from 1998 through 2004, Freeport gave military and police generals, colonels, majors and captains, and military units, nearly $20 million. Individual commanders received tens of thousands of dollars, in one case up to $150,000.”

²² Anton Hermansyah, Viriya P. Singgih and Farida Susanty, “Jokowi warns Freeport,” The Jakarta Post, February 24, 2017.

²³ Richard C. Paddock and Eric Lipton, “Trump's Indonesia Projects, Still Moving Ahead, Create Potential Conflicts,” New York Times, December 31, 2016.

²⁴ Jon Emont, “Foreigners Have Long Mined Indonesia, but Now There's an Outcry,” New York Times, March 31, 2017. A month later TheMotleyFool reported that Freeport might be “be ”on the verge of losing what is arguably its most important asset, as Indonesia prepares to strip ownership from it of the massive Grasberg copper and gold mine“ (Rich Duprey, ”Indonesia Still Looking to Strip Freeport-McMoRan of World's Largest Gold Mine,“ The Motley Fool, April 20. 2017.

²⁵ Fergus Jensen and Bernadette Christina Munthe, “Freeport collects export permit after Pence visit,” Reuters, April 21, 2017.

²⁶ Paddock and Lipton, “Trump's Indonesia Projects, Still Moving Ahead, Create Potential Conflicts.” In 2015, Setya Novanto, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was temporarily forced to surrender his leadership post, because he was heard on an audio recording seeking a $4 billion payment from Freeport

²⁷ Hary, already one of Indonesia's wealthiest men, may even become Indonesia's Trump. “Like Trump, he built his fortune–an estimated $1.1 billion–in real estate and media on a mountain of debt. He tweets nonstop to more than 1 million followers. He stages beauty pageants. He loves reality TV. He has a glamorous wife. Just as the tabloids boiled down Trump into a first name, The Donald, the Indonesian press likes to refer to Tanoesoedibjo simply as Hary. And Hary doesn't seem content to stop there. He too has started aspiring to political power–specifically, the presidency of the world's largest Muslim country, its fourth largest by population and its sixteenth-largest economy by GDP. Like Trump, this billionaire sees the path to power through an antielitist campaign…. ”Tanoesoedibjo has the money to finance the electoral machinery and the media to actually influence public opinion,“ says Rainer Heufers, cofounder of the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, a Jakarta-based think tank. ”He has, therefore, the potential to become a relevant political player in a relatively short period of time.“ To Heufers, Hary gives every sign of moving Indonesia from a participatory democracy to one with a more authoritarian bent” (Abram Brown, “Meet The Donald Trump Of Indonesia: Another Billionaire Who Wants To Be President,” Forbes, March 28, 2017).

²⁸ Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 247.

²⁹ Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State (Langham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 9; citing “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008. Many fear also the risk of their possible internment and confinement, since the Army Field Manual (FM 3.39; 2-40) now envisages “I/R [internment/resettlement] tasks performed in support of civil support operations [that] are similar to those during combat operations” (U.S. Army Field Manual, 3.39, Chapter 2: Internment and Resettlement in Support of the Spectrum of Operations, 2-40). I have argued for a decade that Americans should demand the lifting of the State of Emergency enabling this that was proclaimed in September 2001 (itself now arguably illegal under the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1601-1651; Scott. American Deep State, 40-41).