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Indonesia
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Quinton Temby
Quinton Temby

Opinion | Why Indonesian militants of different stripes are exchanging anti-Chinese sentiment and extremist memes on Telegram

  • The country’s salafi-jihadist and opposition Islamist groups are showing significant signs of cross-pollination on social media and other apps
  • An increasingly common narrative characterises the Jokowi government as a tyrannical un-Islamic regime controlled by Chinese interests

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Quinton Temby
There are early signs of cross-pollination and convergence among Islamist opposition movements in Indonesia, based on an analysis of activity on the encrypted chat platform Telegram. This blurring of lines comes amid a government crackdown on Islamists, and indicates that some actors may have been radicalised and crossed into violent extremism since the banning of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) organisation in December last year.
At the start of President Joko Widodo’s second term, opposition Islamists such as the FPI and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) ran Telegram channels with around 100 subscribers, while pro-Islamic State (Isis) militants ran channels with many hundreds. Now, opposition Islamists run channels with tens of thousands of subscribers while Isis militants have been suppressed into small channels of around 100 members. As soon as pro-Isis channels in Indonesia gain any critical mass, they are shut down by Telegram, presumably based on reporting by counterterrorism authorities.

The effect of Telegram suppressing jihadi channels and the Indonesian government clamping down on opposition Islamist groups and driving them into the virtual sphere has created fertile ground for cross-pollination between pro-ISIS and pro-FPI militants. Today, an increasingly common narrative in both Islamist and jihadists chats characterises the Jokowi government as a tyrannical un-Islamic regime controlled by Chinese interests.

This was foreshadowed in the Telegram chats that sprung up around the post-election violence of 2019. For the first time in Indonesia, groups emerged in which pro-Isis militants shared common cause with the conservative Islamist opposition activists. Both sides were galvanised by opposition to the government and the police. Typically, pro-Isis militants would agitate against taking part in street protests, while opposition activists bridled at Isis sympathisers’ glorification of Syrian war propaganda.

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Protesters in deadly clash with Indonesian police after re-election of President Joko Widodo

Protesters in deadly clash with Indonesian police after re-election of President Joko Widodo

Anti-Chinese sentiment and digital convergence

Since 2019, anti-China sentiment has emerged as a crossover issue for militants in Indonesia, playing a role among these circles that is similar to anti-Shia sentiment in the recent past, and serving as an early indicator of ideological convergence.
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