Indonesia's Military Identity Crisis and the Attack on Activist Andrie Yunus
On March 12, 2026, four members of the Indonesian Armed Forces' Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS TNI) threw sulfuric acid at Andrie Yunus, an activist with KontraS (the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence). On April 29, 2026, the case was heard at the Jakarta Military Court II-08, where prosecutors characterized the attack as an act of "personal revenge" (Ibrahim, 2026). At first glance, this framing makes the incident appear to be a private dispute, with four soldiers gone rogue and acting on individual grudges. But a closer look at how military institutions actually function reveals something far more troubling. There is a structural failure in how members of the TNI understand their relationship to the institution they represent. This article argues that the core problem in the Andrie Yunus case is not simply the individual wrongdoing of the four accused soldiers. It is a broader conceptual failure within the TNI's culture and training systems...