Last month, National Narcotics Agency (BNN) Chief Budi Waseso stated his admiration for Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs (which has killed an estimated 2,300 people since he took office in June) and said that Indonesia should follow his lead with a shoot-on-sight policy for drug dealers.
It now looks as if Budi’s words were more than just praise for the Filipino leader. He seems ready to replicate Duterte’s bloody and highly criticized war on drugs on Indonesian soil.
Budi said that he was preparing special teams to combat drug dealers that would each be heavily armed and equipped with drug sniffing K-9 units. “We are just waiting for our standard weapon that we have ordered and will come in November,” he said in Surabaya Wednesday as quoted by state news agency Antara.
The BNN chief did guarantee that his team’s actions would not violate the law and human rights, though some might question the logic behind his justification for that.
“The Indonesian president has stated that there is a drug emergency situation that is already above the law, even the president has declared war on drugs. [Drug dealers’] actions are damaging millions of young people, which is even more of a violation of human rights,” Budi said.
Budi then cited the (debunked) figure that 40 people per day are dying because of drugs in Indonesia, and also his bizarre and completely unsubstantiated claim that drug dealers are now targeting Indonesian kindergarteners.
President Joko Widodo himself said in June that the law did not allow for the police to summarily execute drug dealers, but that if it did he would order law enforcement agencies to do so. But if Budi plays it like Duterte has, by claiming that every drug dealer shot by the police was actually :resisting arrest”, well, Jokowi may get his wish.
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