Riding Along With the People Saving Lives During the Jakarta Protests

It took five men to carry their fallen friend toward the ambulance parked outside St. Theresia Catholic Church, in Central Jakarta. Behind the men, a protest in support of failed presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto was teetering on the verge of a riot once again. The protests were in their second day and both had started out peaceful before ending in violence. In the distance, clouds of teargas and the bright flashes of fireworks rose above the crowd. The air was a constant rhythm of explosions, loudspeakers, and shouts, making it sound like we were in a war zone, not a usually busy business district in Central Jakarta.

The man, conscious but unresponsive as he winced in pain, was bleeding heavily from his head. He caught a rock, possibly thrown by a fellow protestor, in the skull and was in desperate need of medical care. Muhammad Dheri, half of a two-person EMT team, hopped into the driver's seat and took off, speeding down the unusually empty streets with the sirens blaring. We were heading to Tarakan Regional General Hospital, a nearby hospital that was treating most of those injured in the protests and riots.

Dheri was silent as he maneuvered the ambulance at 60 kilometers-per-hour down the street. The police waved us through at Jl Sabang and we were at the emergency room in less than 10 minutes. A nurse rushed the injured man into the ER and Dheri was finally able to relax.

"I’ve driven injured protesters to this hospital twice today," he remarked.

The Indonesian capital has its own ambulance fleet, but a meager budget and the realities of trying to respond to an emergency in a city with some of the worst traffic on Earth means that few EMTs get the chance to regularly respond to traumas like the kinds pouring in from the protests. Usually, EMTs transport patients between hospitals or back-and-forth to their homes. But hundreds were injured across two days of protests and riots in Central and West Jakarta, stretching medical services thin and forcing EMTs like Dheri to work overtime.

"I'm assigned to work all day," he said as he turned and walked back to his ambulance. The protests would eventually quiet down around midnight but continue until dawn. Prabowo issued an early morning call for calm on Thursday and told the protestors to go home. But by then, hospitals like Tarakan had already seen more than 200 injured in the protests come through their ER doors. Six to nine—the numbers are confusing—would die, most of them of stab wounds inflicted by unknown assailants in the first night of the protests.

Amdan, a 15-year veteran of the Jakarta Public Heath Office, told me he's never seen so much chaos. He was assigned to Tarakan hospital when the protest kicked off on Tuesday night. By Thursday morning, 168 patients had come through the door. More than a dozen needed operations to save their lives.

As we spoke, his phone rang. A man was found lying unconscious on the street in Slipi, West Jakarta, the site of the worst of the violence. The EMT on the phone wanted to know if Tarakan had room. Amdan got the green light from the ER staff and told the EMT to bring the patient in before hanging up the phone.

He had dark bags under his eyes and looked fatigued as we spoke. "I went to bed at 5 am, only to wake up half an hour later," he explained.

The protests had him feeling on edge. Part of it had to do with how unpredictable the crowds were. "When anti-government protests like this take place, it’s better to wait until it dies down before taking the victims to a safer spot," he explained. "All the ambulances have government plates, so we’re scared of being targeted by the masses."

But a bigger part of it has to do with how difficult it is for the city's emergency response agency to respond to this kind of mass incident. The city's public health office only has 48 ambulances to service a city of more than 10 million people. While more than 30 city hospitals were put on high alert during the protests and more than 330 medical personnel sent out into the field, the emergency response hit a bottleneck when it came to getting patients from the scene to the waiting ER doctors.

Amdan originally spent his time with an EMT crew in Slipi, where the protests looked more like a street brawl as rioters battled it out with the army and police. But on Wednesday night, he didn't transport a single patient. Jakartans are so used to getting people to the hospital themselves that few sought out the help of the nearby ambulance. He soon decided that he would be of more help at a hospital, not in the field.

“Not all the casualties were brought in with ambulance,” he said. “Some were taken with a motorcycle. When it got super late, I decided to head back to the hospital.”

By Thursday morning, the protests were over, for now. Prabowo's supporters showed no signs of wanting to end this yet, with many saying they were happy to stay in the streets for ten or more days. But he had asked them all to return home and continue their Ramadan fasting on Thursday.

Prabowo is expected to file a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court alleging widespread voter fraud soon, which means we're still at least a month away from the entire election fight being over. And, in the aftermath of the riots, many who were on the fence are now tired of this whole ordeal.

But, for Amdan, the politics of all it didn't matter. He had a simple job, make sure the hospitals ran smoothly. "I don’t discriminate," he said. "Anyone who is hurt needs to be treated.”