The massive violent brawls that take place between Indonesian middle and high school students, known as tawuran, were recently spotlighted in a gripping Al-Jazeera report that examined not only the horrific nature of these battles (more than130 students have been killed in tawuran in and around Jakarta in just the last 5 years) but also the cultural forces that prevent parents, educations and police from stopping them.
A new viral video that’s emerged on Facebook shows that one of the only ways to stop these fights from escalating is to intervene directly. The dramatic video shows the start of what could have become a bloody battle on a busy street in Bogor, West Java, and ends with two GrabBike drivers riding into the fray to force the warring students to stand down.
The video, taken from a railway bridge overhanging the busy street, shows traffic moving quickly along the road next to a shopping center. At around the :30 second mark, a young man in black emerges onto the street, followed by several of his friends. A group of students in white on the other side of the road gathers and suddenly their weapons are drawn and they begin chasing one another as vehicles are whizzing by.
At around the :53 second mark, a group of students emerge from the shopping center followed by a GrabBike driver. Another GrabBike driver approaches from the opposite direction, trying to block the brawlers in their tracks. The students run around them but one of the drivers rams into one fighter just hard enough to get him to drop his blade. Another student goes to pick it up but the Grab driver runs over it with his bike.
After that the same Grab driver chases after a group of the young gangsters and stops his bike right in front of them. He gets off and yells them, even trading blows with a few. He takes off his helmet and, though he is seriously outnumbered, the young men clearly don’t want to try and take him on, turning around and slinking down the street instead.
It’s hard to call the GrabBike drivers heroes without knowing more context about the video and why exactly they intervened (as one commenter on the video pointed out, maybe they are alumni of the enemy school?). But we’d like to assume that they’re simply badasses who were sick of seeing kids throwing their lives away on stupid school battles and decided to teach a few of them what it really means to be hard. Hopefully, that’s how it actually went down, and these students will take the lesson to heart.
