Day: February 14, 2024

With Myanmar’s junta plowing ahead toward a full-scale draft, young men say they are staying indoors to avoid getting dragooned into the army to fight in a war in which the military is losing ground and men.

Most youths have no desire to fight – for the junta or the armed resistance, said a 22-year-old Mandalay resident who asked not to be identified. 

“We have no choice as the junta is cornering us to join the army,” he said. “Now we don’t dare to go out – day or night. There are a lot of abductions [for forced recruitment], so I’m worried. My friends say they will join the [resistance] but I don’t know what to do, since I can’t fight.”

With recent rapid advances by ethnic armies People’s Defense Force, or PDF, militias of civilians who have taken up arms against the junta, the military appears to be on the defensive as hundreds of soldiers have surrendered.

Junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing announced on Feb. 10 that the People’s Military Service Law, enacted in 2010 by a previous military regime, would go into effect immediately. On Tuesday night, the junta announced the formation of a committee to oversee the conscription process.

But reports suggest that the military and pro-junta militias are already rounding up as many able bodies as they can with the goal of forcing recruits to undergo simple training, putting weapons in their hands, and dumping them onto the battlefield.

Eligible citizens have told RFA Burmese that they would rather join the armed resistance or flee Myanmar than fight for the junta, which seized control of the country in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat.

One young resident of Yangon told RFA he would likely be killed if he is forced to join the military.

“I don’t want to join and my friends feel the same, but … we can’t resist because they have weapons,” he said. “So, we have to take the training they’ll give us and if I get a chance, I will go to the liberated areas [controlled by anti-junta forces].”

The ‘right’ to defend the country

Junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told military-controlled media on Tuesday that the national conscription law provides every citizen “the right” to receive military training to defend the country, and urged people not to be concerned because they wouldn’t immediately be sent to fight.

“Just like us professional soldiers, you have to carry out national defense duties only after undertaking proper military training,” he said.

According to Myanmar’s compulsory military service law, men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 face up to five years in prison if they refuse to serve for two years.

Professionals – such as doctors, engineers and technicians – aged 18-45 for men and 18-35 for women must also serve, but up to five years, given the country’s current state of emergency, extended by the junta on Feb. 1 for another six months.

According to the 2019 census, there are 6.3 million men and 7.7 million women – totaling nearly 14 million people – who are eligible for military service in Myanmar, Zaw Min Tun said Tuesday. The number is equivalent to just over one-quarter of Myanmar’s population of 54 million.

He added that parents “don’t need to worry” because there are more than 3,000 wards and 60,000 villages across the country, “so only one or two persons per ward need to join the military.”

Zaw Min Tun’s comments did little to sooth the concerns of Yangon resident Wai Lwin Oo, whose 23-year-old son is eligible for the draft.

“Parents are extremely concerned,” he said. “There are only two options and as a parent, the last thing I want to do is tell my children which path to choose … There are no parents who are amenable [to the conscription law].”

Round-ups underway

Residents of Yangon and Mandalay told RFA that since the military service law was announced on Feb. 10, young people are nowhere to be seen in the city after 8 p.m.

Additionally, RFA received reports on Wednesday that at least 25 young people from Ngwe Than Win Ward in Yangon region’s Thanlyin township had been rounded up for conscription by joint forces of the junta and pro-junta militias conducting house-to-house inspections since Monday.

The following day, at least 10 others were taken into custody from Thanlyin’s Darga ward, according to Private Sanda, an official with the local People’s Defense Force.

RFA also received reports on Wednesday that the junta has been recruiting residents of five townships in Myanmar’s southwestern Ayeyarwady region for military training using a raffle drawing since January.

Residents said that whoever is selected in the raffle in Kyonpyaw, Myanaung, Kyangin, Kyaiklat and Mawlamyinegyun townships and refuses to join the military is being made to pay up to 1 million kyats (US$475).

A lawmaker, who declined to be named, said that the junta is targeting Ayeyarwady because the region is firmly under its control, adding that the military has a “very high demand for soldiers” because its troops are “surrendering, fleeing into other countries, and dying” on the frontlines.

Attempts by RFA to reach junta officials for comment on the reported round-ups went unanswered Wednesday.

‘Human shields’ on the battlefield

Zaw Min Tun, the junta spokesman, has been cited in media reports as saying that the conscription law will be put into practice after the traditional Thingyan New Year holidays in April, and 5,000 conscripts will be called up in each round. No further details have been provided.

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, responded to the junta’s announcement of the formation of the Central Committee for Militia Recruitment on Tuesday with a statement urging people not to comply with the conscription law.

Nay Phone Latt, the spokesperson of the Prime Minister’s Office of the NUG, told RFA that the shadow government is making preparations to assist young people who do not want to join the military, if they flee to the liberated areas.

“The revolutionary forces and we, the NUG, have already liberated more than 44 townships, and there are also ethnic areas [outside of junta control],” he said. “If people come to these areas, we are already preparing plans on how to cooperate in helping and protecting them.”

Nay Phone Latt said that, in the face of a growing number of military defeats, the junta is applying the conscription law because it wants to “legalize its abduction of people to use as forced labor or human shields on the frontlines.”  

In addition to announcing the formation of the Central Committee for Militia Recruitment on Tuesday, the junta also said it had enacted the Reserve Force Act, which would allow it to recall retired and demobilized military personnel to serve for up to five years.

Those who refuse face a prison term of up to three years, the announcement said.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw and Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Satellite photos show nighttime activity in two North Korean cities near the Chinese border, indicating that the reclusive country may be preparing to welcome cross-border tourists and boost trade, an expert told Radio Free Asia.

Images taken by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Polar-orbiting Satellite System taken at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 6 showed bright lights in the northwestern city of Sinuiju and the customs area of Dandong, a city that lies across from Sinuiju on the Chinese side of the Yalu River. 

Light was also detected in the Samjiyon tourist zone, a major government project that was supposed to be a tourism cash cow upon its completion in December 2019, but has been unable to live up to expectations because all international tourism was cut off due to the pandemic just one month later. 

The zone’s ski resort, hotel, train station, and areas of Samjiyon’s downtown were illuminated in the satellite pictures, suggesting that North Korea was preparing to open up to tourists during the holiday period between the Lunar New Year last weekend until the Day of the Shining Star, which marks the life of leader Kim Jong Un’s predecessor Kim Jong Il this Friday.   

In contrast, the images showed that the rest of North Korea, which suffers from severe power shortages, was, as usual, awash in darkness save for the capital Pyongyang.

The activity around Sinuiju and Dandong suggests “night work is in full swing in the customs office,” Bruce Songhak Chung, a researcher at the South Korea-based Korean Institute for Security and Strategy told RFA Korean.

“Looking at Sinuiju, the area around the Dandong-Sinuiju customs office is brightly lit,” said Chung. “This appears to be due to logistics trade activities between Dandong and Sinuiju using the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge. I also thought that it might be a gift for General Secretary Kim Jong Un.” 

North Korean traders have a responsibility to prepare luxury goods for Kim per instructions from the Central Party.

Chung also noted that there was faint light detected at the Uiju Airfield, about 14 kilometers (nine miles) from the border. He said that may indicate that nighttime workers are carrying out the quarantine process on cargo from China.

In Samjiyon, meanwhile, the lights at all the tourism relevant locations strongly suggest it will be open for business very soon, Chung said.

“The area around Samjiyon City was brightly lit,” he said. “I assume that is to resume tourism in the Mount Paektu district. Areas such as ski resorts, hotels, and ice rinks were renovated and lit up at night to prepare for tourists.”

 North Korea is known to have recruited about 100 Russian tourists for a 4-day, 3-night trip from February 9th to 12th. The itinerary would have taken them to Masikryong Ski Resort in Wonsan, Kangwon Province, which is nowhere near the border. 

That the ski resort in Samjiyon is lit seems to strongly indicate that cross-border tourism will resume soon. 

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on China, will lead U.S. lawmakers on a trip to Taiwan next week, a report says.

Gallagher and six other lawmakers will arrive in Taipei on Feb. 21, according to a report by the Financial Times that cites Taiwanese officials. The trip is intended as “a show of support for Lai Ching-te ahead of his May inauguration as president of Taiwan,” it says.

A spokesperson for Gallagher did not respond to a request for comment, but the lawmaker has previously said he planned to lead a delegation from his committee to Taiwan sometime this year. 

The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, also did not respond.

Gallagher has led the select committee since it was created in January 2023 after his party won back control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. Since then, he has become one of the most prominent critics of the Chinese Communist Party in Congress.

The Wisconsin Republican’s trip is likely to draw an angry response from Beijing, which in August 2022 cut off military-to-military communications after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosis’s visit to the island. Those ties were only restored late last year after a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden.

However, there have been more recent trips by American lawmakers, with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, leading a delegation there in April last year. 

During the trip, McCaul even likened Xi to Adolf Hitler, but the response from Beijing was nevertheless far more muted than after Pelosi’s trip.

Still, Gallagher’s visit could prove more provocative.

His committee has, among other things, investigated Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghur ethnic minority in China’s far-west and U.S. financial complicity in such policies, as well as China’s international propaganda efforts and its threats to the United States.

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told Radio Free Asia that Beijing “firmly opposes the U.S. having any form of official interaction with Taiwan,” including trips by lawmakers.

“We urge the U.S. to have a clear understanding of the extreme complexity and sensitivity of the Taiwan question,” Liu said. 

“The US needs to exercise extreme prudence in handling Taiwan-related issues, and must not obscure and hollow out the one-China principle in any form or send any wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence” separatist forces,” he added.

Next week’s trip may also serve as part of a last hurrah for the 39-year-old Gallagher, who looks set to return to the private sector within the next year after what will be eight years in Congress.

Long described as “a rising star” in the Republican Party, the former Marine announced this week he will retire at the end of the current congressional term, saying “Congress is no place to grow old.”

An offshoot of an ethnic Mon organization announced on Wednesday that it will no longer negotiate with Myanmar’s military and will join with anti-junta forces in the fight against the regime.

A splinter group from the New Mon State Party said it has concluded that political dialogue with junta officials wasn’t helping the Mon people reach its goal of establishing a federal union that would “ensure national equality and self-determination.”

“As military council forces continue arresting and killing people, firing artillery shells in Mon state and carrying out airstrikes and arson attacks in Mon state, it is no longer possible for further political discussions with the military council,” the group said in the statement, using a formal name for the junta.  

The breakaway group called itself the “New Mon State Party (Anti-dictatorship)” in the statement, in contrast to the New Mon State Party, or NMSP.

The party’s armed wing, the Mon National Liberation Army, has fought against Myanmar forces since 1949 under various names.

In 2018, the NMSP signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, which was introduced in 2015 to end years of fighting over minority rights and self-determination. Some 10 ethnic groups have signed the agreement, or NCA.

The NMSP had remained neutral following the Feb. 1, 2021, military coup d’etat. Mon representatives have met with junta officials three times in the last few years, but with no concrete results, the deputy leader of the splinter group, Nai Banyar Lei, told Radio Free Asia.  

The splinter group is led by Nai Zeya, who was previously the NMSP’s general secretary, the statement said.

Internal disagreements 

Nay Phone Latt, the spokesperson for the shadow National Unity Government, welcomed the new Mon splinter group to the opposition.

“There has been a lot of evidence that it will be very difficult to solve the crisis peacefully with the military council in any way,” he said. “We have realized that the future of our country will be peaceful only if all the ethnic revolutionary forces join hands and end the military group.”

The split within the Mon organization is unsurprising, given the increased amount of fighting with the military throughout the country and the accompanying political tension, said Col. Saw Kyaw Nyunt, the secretary-general of the Karen Peace Council, which is a signatory to the NCA.

Other ethnic armed organizations in the country have also experienced similar internal disagreements over whether continued dialogue with the junta is worthwhile, he said.

Another signatory of the NCA, the PaO National Liberation League, announced on Jan. 26 that it was joining allied forces fighting against the military junta. The PNLO is located in southern Shan state.

Other NCA signatories that have taken up arms against the post-coup military are the Karen National Union, the Chin National Front and the All-Burma Students’ Democratic Front.

RFA couldn’t immediately reach NMSP spokesperson Nai Aung Ma Ngae to ask about the splinter group’s announcement. Junta spokesman Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun was also unavailable for comment.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed.

For the first time, China’s state broadcaster filmed a portion of its must-watch Lunar New Year TV gala live from the far-western region of Xinjiang, featuring a famous Uyghur actress and dozens of dancers performing a medley of songs.

The six-minute segment, “Dance Music from Xinjiang” – set in the historic city of Kashgar, once a Silk Road trading post – was meant to show “the cultural diversity and beauty of this region through its folk songs & dances,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on X.

Except that very little of the segment was actually Uyghur. The mostly Muslim Uyghurs traditionally don’t even celebrate the Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival. 

The songs were sung in Mandarin, the dances were not authentically Uyghur and the performers’ costumes were more Middle Eastern in style, members of the Uyghur diaspora told Radio Free Asia.

Plus, the segment starred Dilraba Dilmurat, a Beijing-backed Uyghur actress regarded by many overseas Uyghurs as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Chinese government. The headpiece she wore was also not culturally authentic.

‘Relentless smiling’

Far from celebrating Uyghur culture, the segment was criticized by advocates as a bid to erase it.

“This kind of relentless smiling and dancing is in itself a form of forced labor,” said Rachel Harris, an ethnomusicologist at University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies whose research focuses on Uyghur music. 

“I don’t see any kind of real expression of freedom and joy in what I [saw] on the stage there,” she said. Instead, it was “the latest in a long Chinese Communist Party tradition of portraying the ethnic minority peoples as happy and belonging to the People’s Republic.”

“I really feel that the greater the repression, the more lavish the spectacle,” she said. “There seems to be a kind of proportion going on there.”

Because Kashgar is the heart of Uyghur culture, broadcasting the Spring Festival gala from the city implies an enforced acceptance of Han Chinese festivities, “making the locals feel displaced, as if living in China means living as Han Chinese,” Norway-based Uyghur activist and Kashgar native Abduweli Ayup told Radio Free Asia.

“It is immensely distressing for a Uyghur to be coerced into assimilating into Han culture overnight, akin to forcing them to consume pork,” he said, forbidden in Islam – which Chinese have pressured Uyghurs to eat.

‘Look at this’

Chinese officials, however, claimed the segment negated criticism of Beijing’s policies in the region.

“Anyone who smeared China as ‘marginalizing’ ethnic minorities should look at this,” former editor of the state-run Global Times editor Hu Xijin wrote on X. “On the top stage of China’s 2024 Spring Festival Gala, girls from #Xinjiang are gorgeous, and traditional #Tibetan culture was fully displayed.”

In a gushing portrait that lauded Dilraba’s “exotic” beauty ahead of the Spring Festival gala, the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post said the 31-year-old actress has more than 80 million followers on Weibo and earned more than US$500 million in endorsements in 2019.

“Her talents are held in such high regard that she has even been complimented on her dancing by the country’s foreign ministry,” the paper said, adding that she has won a Golden Eagle Award for best actress for her portrayal of a woman with a dual personality in the series “Kela Lover” in 2015.

During the segment, one Chinese singer sang about the beauty of Uyghur women while Dilraba danced – rather jarring amid eyewitness accounts of forced sterilization, organized rape, and forced marriage of Uyghur women that have come from former victims and inmates at concentration camps that China has installed across Xinjiang.

An estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have been put in such camps – which Beijing said are vocational centers that have since been closed – where they are subjected to forced labor.

The United States and other governments have branded China’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities a genocide, and an exhaustive United Nations investigation concluded that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs may amount to crimes against humanity.

Ethnic unity campaigns

Far from celebrating Uyghur culture, Chinese authorities have sought to diminish and even eradicate Uyghur culture and customs – a part of its broader “Sinicization” campaign.

They have targeted Muslim communities with “ethnic unity” campaigns under which Han Chinese “relatives” are imposed on Uyghur families who put pressure on them to observe non-Muslim traditions, including drinking alcohol, eating pork and celebrating Chinese festivals.

In fact, Beijing chose Kashgar as a site to celebrate the Lunar New Year so it could show that its Sinicization policies in Xinjiang have been successful, said David Tobin, a lecturer on East Asian studies at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.

“Presenting Kashgar as a site of Chinese civilization – a city that is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing – is a means to communicate to the outside world and to the Uyghur people that it has always been part of China’s territory and was always part of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that the city has been majority Uyghur and a site of many important religious sites for centuries,” he said.

The show depicts Sinicization as a “benevolent practice by showing that Uyghurs wish to participate in the gala, that they wish to sing and dance happily,” said Tobin.

“This is part of the Communist Party story of China as a benevolent force that includes minorities, but converts them to show that China is not a violent power, [and] it’s directly related to the mass state violence and arbitrary detentions that accelerated under Xi Jinping in 2017,” he said.

According to the gala’s production team, the sets were designed to “blend the architectural essence of Kashgar’s ancient city with the stage,” allowing the audience to feel immersed in the city’s ancient lifestyle while modernizing the millennia-old city through strategic lighting and stage design.

But Abduweli Ayup dismissed the set design as “a faux castle crafted by artificial intelligence,” however.

Victory against ‘terrorism’

Beijing is hoping to highlight the “success” of its suppression of Uyghur culture in Xinjiang as a victory against “terrorism” – a term it applies to Uyghurs who engage in normal behaviors like reading the Quran and wearing veils or growing beards, said Taiwan national security researcher and Islamic scholar Shih Chien-yu.

“There has never been a Spring Festival Gala stage in Xinjiang before, not in Urumqi nor Kashgar,” Shih said. “This new development signals Beijing’s confidence in its local ‘counter-terrorism’ efforts.”

“From a propaganda perspective, the aim is to show overseas Uyghurs and even foreign governments that the re-education camps in Xinjiang are a thing of the past, and societal tensions have been alleviated,” he said.

Shih hit out at what he termed “the deliberate stylization and commercialization of Uyghur culture” in the show.

“Kashgar’s … residential areas were once integral to local life, akin to Mong Kok in Hong Kong or Ximending in Taipei,” he said. “Now, the authorities have turned these areas into tourist attractions, historical remnants, sending the message to local people that their history and traditions no longer exist.”

“The subtext is that one can reminisce about the past through dance and historical rituals, and maybe the locals keep speaking their language, but ultimately, they are a part of China,” Shih said.

Henryk Szadziewski, director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said CCTV’s New Year’s Gala and the commentary by Global Times editor Hu Xijin were meant to “tell the world that Chinese government policies targeting Uyghurs have been successful, that Uyghurs have been cleansed of their extremism.”

“And China believes that they have done it in some kind of humane way,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Indonesians elected Prabowo Subianto as their president by a wide margin on Wednesday, according to projections by reliable exit polls, as the former army general rode on the coattails of the extraordinarily popular incumbent, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

The 72-year-old defense minister’s almost guaranteed victory comes at the end of a fractious voting season marred by accusations of dynasticism, eligibility, nepotism, and partisanship. His running mate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, is the eldest son of Jokowi, the man who twice before had defeated Prabowo in his quest for the presidency of Southeast Asia’s largest nation.

The Prabowo-Gibran ticket won by a big enough margin that the vote would not have to go to a runoff round in June, as had been anticipated as a possibility based on previous surveys in the final weeks before the vote.  

“All the calculations, all the survey agencies, including the ones that are on the side of the other candidates, show that the Prabowo-Gibran pair won in one round,” Prabowo said in a victory speech in Jakarta on Wednesday night. 

Unofficial figures by late night Wednesday showed that the defense minister had won 58% of the votes of the nearly 95% counted by independent pollster Indikator Politik at sample polling stations across the country.

His two rivals in the race to succeed Jokowi, former Jakarta Gov. Anies Baswedan and former Central Java Gov. Ganjar Pranowo, respectively, had captured 25% and 17% of ballots cast, so-called “quick counts” at exit polls showed.

Prabowo addressed his supporters at a sports stadium in the Indonesian capital after he and Gibran made their way there to claim victory. En route, they waved from their vehicle with an open roof to supporters who had lined the roads to cheer them on.

Prabowo urged the crowd to stay humble.

“This victory must be a victory for all the Indonesian people …We will be the president and vice president for all the Indonesian people,” he said, referring to citizens of the Muslim-majority country.

Checkered human rights record

Yet some analysts warned that a Prabowo presidency would be a threat to the nation’s hard-won democracy because of his checkered human rights record during his past career as a special forces commander. 

Prabowo’s consistent message through the campaign was that he would continue with Jokowi’s current policies – including a multibillion dollar project to move the national capital from Jakarta to Borneo. 

Jokowi, who is barred from running for a third term, did not officially endorse any of the three presidential candidates, but it was generally viewed that he favored Prabowo and his son. 

Many political observers had noted that Jokowi would be a kingmaker. After all, his approval rating in early December was 76% – a stunningly high number for a two-term president reaching the end of his tenure.

As of Wednesday night, Jokowi had not commented on results reflected through exit polls.

The 2024 vote is only Indonesia’s fifth direct presidential election since transitioning to democracy in 1998.

During the victory speech on Wednesday night, local media reported that Prabowo also gave a shout out to his ex-wife, Siti Hediati Hariyadi, who is known as Titiek Soeharto, and is also a daughter of ex-President and dictator Suharto.

In his speech, Prabowo said he knew almost all of Indonesia’s presidents, including Suharto, Indonesia’s second president who ruled for 32 years before stepping down in 1998 amid the pro-democracy movement.

“I know the second president quite well too, why are you laughing? Don’t you believe it?” Prabowo joked about his former father-in-law, as the crowd got noisier, according to a report on the website of CNN Indonesia.

A ‘brutal past’

It was under Suharto’s rule that Prabowo is accused of having committed human rights abuses.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, did not believe a Prabowo presidency would be a good idea for Indonesia.

“That Prabowo Subianto has now found it politically advantageous to transform himself into an ostensible democrat does not change the very real prospect that he would revert to his brutal past should he manage to ascend to the presidency,” Roth, a visiting professor at Princeton University, said on X, formerly Twitter.

A regional political analyst, Richard Heydarian of the University of the Philippines’ Asian Center, said Indonesia was voting into power a Philippine-style democracy.

“[W]here disinformation is endemic, strongmen can look ‘cute’ with [public relations] stunts, where human rights is taken for granted, and where a few self-styled dynasties, new and old, dominate a whole political system!” he posted on X.

In mentioning “cute,” he was referring to Prabowo, whose image makeover during the presidential campaign had earned him the nickname “gemoy,” meaning “cuddly” or “cute.” He didn’t say who “new dynasty referred to.”

A Jokowi dynasty?

For most of last year, Jokowi had been asked whether he was trying to build a political dynasty by promoting his family members and loyalists to government. He always denied it, of course.

And while he didn’t endorse the presidential ticket that included his son, over the past few months, he made several highly publicized appearances alongside Prabowo, often dining with him.  

Jokowi also had many up in arms when he said he had the right to campaign and pick sides, but later said he wouldn’t.

These weren’t the first controversies that the trio – the president, Gibran and Prabowo – were involved in.

A stunning Constitutional Court ruling in October revised the minimum age for presidential and vice-presidential candidates from 40 to any age for those who have served as regional heads.

The ruling would allow Jokowi’s eldest son, 36-year-old Gibran, to run for the posts if he so desired. Six days later, Prabowo announced that Gibran would be his running mate

The court’s chief justice during the ruling was Jokowi’s brother-in-law, Anwar Usman. He was dismissed from his post in November after being found guilty of violating the principles of impartiality, integrity and independence, in relation to the ruling.

Many critics and ordinary Indonesians slammed the court’s decision as nepotistic and questioned whether he was qualified to run for vice president. Jokowi continued to deny he had any role in either decision.

Back then, some analysts told BenarNews that Gibran’s nomination had not been a spontaneous decision but the culmination of calculated preparation that involved influencing the Constitutional Court.

For many observers the court ruling cemented what they had been speculating – that Jokowi, the first Indonesian president not from the military or political elite, was trying to build a political dynasty.

BenarNew is an RFA-affiliated online news service. Sulthan Azzam in Padang contributed to this report.