Although they’ve been gone for over 50 years, banned from the country after a failed coup leading to an anti-communist purge that killed an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 from 1965-1966, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) has been talked about a lot in the news lately, with Islamist hardliner groups holding a rally in Jakarta today to protest their supposed resurgence.
Despite repeated claims by both hardliners and military officials that the PKI are somehow making a clandestine comeback, there is zero evidence that this is actually the case. And a new study strongly suggests that the Indonesian public isn’t buying their politicized attempts to recreate the red scare, with the vast majority of respondents dismissing the notion.
Specifically, the results of the latest survey by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) showed that 86.8% of the people disagreed with the statement that the PKI have risen again.
“The majority of people do not agree that there is now a revival of the PKI, while those who agreed only accounted for 12.6%,” said SMRC researcher Sirojudin Abbas at the the release of the survey results today as quoted by Detik.
Of the 12.6% who agreed that the PKI were on the rise again, 39.9% said it was a threat to the country while 36.9% said they only presented a small threat while the remaining 15.5% said they posed no threat.
The survey was conducted with 1,220 respondents selected by multistage random sampling. SMRC said the survey had a 3.1% margin of error.
The issue of the PKI has been making numerous headlines recently after the police shut down a private seminar for survivors on the 1965 mass killings held by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) on Sept 16 (for allegedly not having the proper permits) and then, on the following day, hundreds of angry protesters besieged the LBH Jakarta building after fake news that they were holding an event supporting the PKI (it was, in,fact, a pro-democracy art event).
