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Indonesia's president encourages cops to shoot drug dealers

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has instructed his country’s police force to shoot drug dealers, stoking fears that Indonesia may soon copy the famously brutal drug war deployed in the Philippines by President Rodrigo Duterte.

“Be firm, especially to foreign drug dealers who enter the country and resist arrest. Shoot them, because we indeed are in a narcotics emergency position now,” Widodo said in a speech at a national meeting of Indonesia’s United Development Party in Jakarta late Friday evening.

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Widodo’s remarks came shortly after Indonesian police shot and killed a Taiwanese man allegedly resisting arrest while attempting to smuggle one ton of crystal meth into Greater Jarkarta. After the incident, National Police Chief General Tito Karnavian praised the police response and cited Duterte as inspiration. “From practice in the field, we see that when we shoot at drug dealers, they go away,” he said.

Karnavian said he told officers “not to hesitate shooting drug dealers who resist arrest.”

Indonesia already has tough drug laws on the books, and courts have handed out death penalties to convicted traffickers, including two Australian citizens, executed in 2015.

Human rights advocates expressed concern over the prospect that the Philippines’ bloody anti-drug crackdown, which has resulted in more than 7,000 deaths in less than a year, may spread to another country in the region.

Indonesian leaders “should denounce the Philippines’ ‘war on drugs’ for what it truly is: a brutal, unlawful assault on the rule of law, human rights, and basic decency that has targeted some of the country’s poorest, most marginalized citizens,” said Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. Kline urged Widodo to issue a message to the “police that efforts to address the complex problems of drugs and criminality require the security forces to respect everyone’s basic rights, not demolish them.”