Tangerang isn’t the only city in Indonesia in which angkot minivan drivers have gone on strike to demand that app-based ride hailing services be banned from their city. In fact, angkot drivers in Bandung staged an even bigger one yesterday, paralyzing the city’s entire minivan transportation system.
As was the case in Tangerang, some angkot drivers in Bandung committed acts of violence during their protest. Just how violent they got was captured in this viral video showing several angkot drivers attacking a car after they mistook it for an “online taxi” – a local term for app-based ride-sharing services like Uber and Grab.
The video shows a family in sheer terror as an untold number of angkot drivers assaulted their car. Screams, prayers, and repeated pleas of “Please stop! There’s a baby in here!” can be heard throughout the disturbing video.
Egi Muhammad, 29, was driving his family near Jalan Sriwijaya yesterday morning when angkot drivers holding a protest nearby assaulted his car as shown in the video. He said his family members were all traumatized after the incident.
“At the time, everyone inside was panicking, my wife, my sister, my mother were all screaming,” he said after the incident at a police station, as quoted by Kompas.
At the time, Egi was driving a party of six, including his one-year-old baby.
“All of a sudden people were banging on the back of the car. And then they shouted ‘online! Online!’ thinking our car was an online taxi,” he said.
“Someone tried to grab the car key. I tried to hold on, I was being pulled out, but I held on [in the car], but then someone hit my head. And then [the attack] stopped when police came.”
Luckily, no one in the family was physically hurt. However, there was substantial damage to the car, including a smashed back window and numerous dents.
Bandung Mayor Ridwan Kamil later announced on Twitter that the perpetrators of the attack on Egi’s car have been caught, though it’s unclear how many there were.
Besides this particular act of barbarism, the angkot driver protest in Bandung was reportedly largely peaceful. That said, the protesters seem to have gotten what they wanted as the West Java province’s Transportation Agency pledged they would invalidate the Transportation Ministry’s regulation on online taxis in the region, effectively making them illegal.
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