Prabowo Subianto

Prabowo Subianto   (politician, officer, deep state operative)
Born	17 October 1951 Jakarta, Indonesia
Nationality	Indonesian
Alma mater	Property "Has almaMater" (as page type) with input value "Fort Benning" contains invalid characters or is incomplete and therefore can cause unexpected results during a query or annotation process.[[Fort Benning<Fort Bragg|Fort Benning<Fort Bragg]]
Parents	Sumitro Djojohadikusumo
Siblings	• Hashim Djojohadikusumo • Rahayu Saraswati Djojohadikusumo
A CIA assessment pointed him out as "the type of officer who could rise to national leadership"  Indonesia/Minister/Defence In office 23 October 2019 - Present  Commander of Kostrad In office 20 March 1998 - 22 May 1998 Employer Indonesia/Military  General Commander of Kopassus In office 1 December 1995 - 20 March 1998 Employer Indonesia/Military

Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo is an Indonesian officer and politician.

His father, a CIA asset, was ministry of economy in what was probably the most corrupt government in the world.

Prabowo himself was trained by the US special forces and took part in a number of operations, including the genocidal counterinsurgency in East Timor and creating the 1998 anti-Chinese pogroms in an attempt to keep power.

The Americans saw his presidency coming almost 40 years ago. Then a captain in the military, he exemplified "the type of officer who could rise to national leadership," CIA authors wrote in a now-declassified 1985 intelligence assessment, and believed he would eventually succeed Suharto "both as national leader and as guardian of the family fortunes".

Family background

Prabowo Subianto was born in Jakarta in 1951, part of an elite Indonesian family with ancestral ties to Javanese sultans.

Due to political differences and allegations of corruption, his father, Sumitro, fell foul of the nation’s founding president Sukarno and moved his family variously between Kuala Lumpur, London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Zurich for about a decade. They returned to Indonesia at the beginning of the Suharto years in the late 1960s.

Sumitro himself fled Jakarta and joined the insurgent Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia in the late 1950s. Considered a leader of the movement, he operated from abroad, liaising with Western the CIA and MI6 while seeking funding and international support. After the overthrow of Sukarno and the establishment of the New Order under Suharto, Sumitro was invited to return from exile and in 1967 was appointed Minister of Trade. He was involved in the high-level planning of Indonesia's economy.

Prabowo Subianto in 1983 married Siti Hediati Harijadi, aka Titiek Suharto, President Suharto's second daughter. However, the couple separated in 1998 amid the violent political crisis in Indonesia, in which Prabowo was blamed for fomenting some of the anti-Chinese pogroms and afterwards went into exile in Jordan. They have not reunited ever since.

Military career

In 1985 Prabowo Subianto attended the Advanced Infantry Officers Course at Fort Benning, in the United States for special operations training with the US Special Forces, where he learned the tactics he later used.

He rose through the Indonesian ranks to become a top general and commander of the elite special forces squad, Kopassus. He was assigned to counterinsurgency in East Timor.

Suharto's 32-year authoritarian government collapsed in 1998 under the weight of the Reformasi [reform] movement and the Asian financial crisis. During mass protests, the deep state started an anti-Chinese pogrom, where at least 1,200 people were killed, in an attempt to hold on to power. The bid to quell protests failed, and Suharto fell. Less than 70 hours after a new president was in office, Prabowo staged a failed coup attempt. There were 128 fires at one time," Prabowo said in an interview. :"This was an operation: planned, instigated, controlled." The same year, Prabowo was dismissed by a military tribunal for his role in the abduction of democracy activists, twelve of whom remain "disappeared".

His military career was marked by accusations of hardman tactics ranging from secret coup-plotting against his father-in-law, Suharto, to fomenting deadly anti-Chinese riots.

In 1996, he used false flag tactics to rescue Western and local hostages in West Papua. The helicopter used in the mission wbore the insignia of the Red Cross, giving villagers a false sense of comfort and drawing some into the open. People were killed. All but two of the hostages were freed. In the early 1990s, as the commander of Kopassus Group 3, the now Major General Prabowo attempted to crush the East Timorese independence movement by using irregular tactics (hooded "ninja" gangs dressed in black and operating at night) and, in main towns and villages, militias trained and directed by Kopassus commanders.

According to Pentagon documents, he brought U.S. troops to Indonesia on dozens of occasions, a presence that helped to facilitate at least two covert U.S. operations. Prabowo told Allan Nairn that the U.S. troops he brought in did "reconnaissance" for "the invasion contingency" — the preparation of U.S. plans for a possible invasion of Indonesia.

Political career

The Americans saw his presidency coming almost 40 years ago. Then a captain in the military, he exemplified "the type of officer who could rise to national leadership," CIA authors wrote in a now-declassified intelligence assessment.

Prabowo described himself in an interview as "the Americans’ fair-haired boy." He worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. as he carried out massacres, torture, and disappearances that his fellow officers, he said, sometimes mocked him as "the American."

Joko Widodo beat him in both the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections. Before that, he lost as the vice-presidential candidate for political matriarch Megawati Sukarnoputri in 2009, and in 2004 failed to secure the presidential nomination from the party of former authoritarian Suharto. The main reason Prabowo by 2024 was able to secure power, was the arm-twisting support he got from Indonesia's sitting president Widodo - illustrating the continuity of deep state governance.

2024 Presidential election

According to Allan Nairn writing for the Intercept government officials told him "they don’t want to leave it to chance."

The levers of state power are playing a pivotal role in the campaign. Local officials are being threatened with prosecution if they do not back the general. And across the country, army and police are instructing people to vote for Prabowo, a directive with special weight for poorer people who live at their mercy.
At an internal meeting last Wednesday, army and intelligence officials discussed the existence of a plan to, if needed, use the state apparatus to do electoral fraud, according to two people familiar with the scheme. The prepared procedure involves police and "babinsas" — the army’s eyes, ears, and hands at the neighborhood level - receiving and distributing money to fix precinct-level tabulation sheets, as well as, in some cases, the computer data entry below and at the administrative district level, with an option for hacking the internal system of the electoral commission.

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