Joko Widodo

Fans Fled as Police Fired Tear Gas, Causing Deadly Rush For Exits

Video player loading — The Indonesian police fired tear gas into crowds of fans that rushed onto the field after a soccer match in the city of Malang.CreditCredit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Soccer fans in Indonesia rushed the field after a professional soccer match on Saturday night, prompting the police to fire tear gas into tightly packed crowds and setting off a stampede that killed at least 125 people, local officials said.

Fans had packed the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia, to see the home team —Arema — take on Persebaya Surabaya. After Arema lost the game 3-2, fans rushed the field.

The unrest prompted the police to fire tear gas which caused panic, Inspector General Nico Afinta, the East Java Police chief, said at a news conference. As of Sunday night, 125 people were dead, according to a spokesman for the national police. There were reports that an additional 300 had been injured. The death toll had risen and fallen throughout the day, and police said earlier tolls may have counted some of the dead twice.

The toll made Saturday’s match among the deadliest episodes in the history of soccer. In 1964, at least 300 people died in Peru after an unpopular decision by a referee at a soccer game touched off a riot at the country’s national stadium.

In a televised speech to the nation, President Joko Widodo said he had asked the national police chief to conduct a thorough investigation into what happened and ordered an evaluation of security at soccer matches.

“I regret that this tragedy occurred,” Mr. Joko said. “And I hope this is the last football tragedy in the country.

Credit…Yudha Prabowo/Associated Press

Human rights organizations condemned the use of tear gas, which is prohibited by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. Eyewitnesses said that the gas was at times fired indiscriminately into the stands, forcing the overcapacity crowd to rush for the exits.

“The excessive use of force through the use of tear gas and inappropriate crowd control was the cause of the large number of fatalities,” Indonesia’s Legal Aid Foundation said in a statement.

But the East Java police chief, Mr. Afinta, defended the use of tear gas, saying it was deployed “because there was anarchy.”

“They were about to attack the officers and had damaged the cars,” he said.

Overcapacity also exacerbated the situation, according to Indonesia’s Legal Aid Foundation. The local soccer committee had printed 42,000 tickets for a stadium with 38,000 capacity, according to Mahfud MD, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs.

He said the victims died “because of the stampede” — they were trampled on and suffocated to death.

“There were no victims of beatings or mistreatment of the supporters,” he said.

Credit…Yudha Prabowo/Associated Press

The soccer league, PT Liga Indonesia Baru, suspended play for at least a week and offered its condolences in a statement.

The national governing body for soccer, the P.S.S.I., also offered condolences and said an investigation was underway but appeared to cast blame on fans of the Arema club, saying it “regrets the action” of the fans.

Soccer violence has long been a problem for Indonesia, where violent, often deadly rivalries between major teams are common. Flares are often thrown on the field, and riot police are a regular presence at many matches. Since the 1990s, dozens of fans have been killed in soccer-related violence.

Sui-Lee Wee reported from Bangkok, and Muktita Suhartono from Jakarta. Dera Menra Sijabat contributed reporting from Jakarta, and Damien Cave from Sydney, Australia.

— Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono

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Russia’s Putin to make first foreign trips since launching Ukraine war

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a BRICS+ meeting during the BRICS summit via a video link in the Moscow region, Russia June 24, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via REUTERS

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LONDON, June 26 (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin will visit two small former Soviet states in central Asia this week, Russian state television reported on Sunday, in what would be the Russian leader’s first known trip abroad since ordering the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion has killed thousands of people, displaced millions more and led to severe financial sanctions from the West, which Putin says are a reason to build stronger trade ties with other powers such as China, India and Iran.

Pavel Zarubin, the Kremlin correspondent of the Rossiya 1 state television station, said Putin would visit Tajikistan and Turkmenistan and then meet Indonesian President Joko Widodo for talks in Moscow.

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In Dushanbe, Putin will meet Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon, a close Russian ally and the longest-serving ruler of a former Soviet state. In Ashgabat, he will attend a summit of Caspian nations including the leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran and Turkmenistan, Zarubin said.

Putin also plans to visit the Belarus city of Grodno on June 30 and July 1 to take part in a forum with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, RIA news agency citedValentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, as telling Belarus television on Sunday.

Putin’s last known trip outside Russia was a visit to the Beijing in early February, where he and Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a “no limits” friendship treaty hours before both attended the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games.

Russia says it sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 to degrade its neighbour’s military capabilities, keep it from being used by the West to threaten Russia, root out nationalists and defend Russian-speakers in eastern regions. Ukraine calls the invasion an imperial-style land grab.

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Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and David Ljunggren; Editing by Peter Graff and Mark Porter

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Global Leaders Pledge to End Deforestation by 2030

Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China and the United States, vowed on Monday at climate talks in Glasgow to end deforestation by 2030, seeking to preserve forests crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global warming.

The pledge will demand “transformative further action,” the countries’ declaration said, and it was accompanied by several measures intended to help put it into effect. But some advocacy groups criticized them as lacking teeth, saying they would allow deforestation to continue.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was scheduled to announce the deforestation agreement at an event on Tuesday morning attended by President Biden and the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo.

“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature — are the lungs of our planet,” Mr. Johnson is expected to say.

climate summit, known as COP26. Intact forests and peatlands, for example, are natural storehouses of carbon, keeping it sealed away from the atmosphere. But when these areas are logged, burned or drained, the ecosystems switch to releasing greenhouse gases.

If tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the World Resources Institute, after China and the United States. Much of the world’s deforestation is driven by commodity agriculture as people fell trees to make room for cattle, soy, cocoa and palm oil.

even make rain, supporting agriculture elsewhere. They are fundamental to sustaining biodiversity, which is suffering its own crisis as extinction rates climb.

Previous efforts to protect forests have struggled. One program recognized in the Paris climate accord seeks to pay forested nations for reducing tree loss, but progress has been slow.

Previous promises to end deforestation also have failed. A United Nations plan announced in 2017 made similar commitments. An agreement in 2014 to end deforestation by 2030, the New York Declaration on Forests, set goals without a means to achieve them, and deforestation continued.

The same will happen this time, some environmentalists predicted.

“It allows another decade of forest destruction and isn’t binding,” said Carolina Pasquali, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil. “Meanwhile, the Amazon is already on the brink and can’t survive years more deforestation.”

Supporters of the new pledge point out that it expands the number of countries and comes with specific steps to save forests.

“What we’re doing here is trying to change the economics on the ground to make forests worth more alive than dead,” said Eron Bloomgarden, whose group, Emergent, helps match public and private investors with forested countries and provinces looking to receive payments for reducing deforestation.

The participating governments promised “support for smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who depend on forests for their livelihoods and have a key role in their stewardship.”

have begun emitting more carbon than they store.

China is one of the biggest signatories to the deforest declaration, but the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, did not attend the climate negotiations in Glasgow. China suffered heavy forest losses as its population and industry grew over the past decades, but more recently, it has pledged to regrow forests and to expand sustainable tree farming.

By China’s estimate, forests now cover about 23 percent of its landmass, up from 17 percent in 1990, according to the World Bank. Though some research has questioned the scale and the quality of that expanded tree cover, the government has made expanded reforestation a pillar of its climate policies, and many areas of the country are notably greener than they were a couple of decades ago.

Still, China’s participation in the new pledge may also test its dependence on timber imported from Russia, Southeast Asia and African countries, including large amounts of illegally felled trees.

In a written message to the Glasgow meeting, Mr. Xi “stressed the responsibility of developed countries in tackling climate change, saying that they should not only do more themselves, but should also provide support to help developing countries do better,” Xinhua news agency reported.

Indonesia’s top intelligence official in Papua Province was a one-star general who did not believe in leading from his office. A Bali native, Brig. Gen. I Gusti Putu Danny Karya Nugraha rose through the ranks of Indonesia’s feared special forces and often went on patrol with troops in areas where separatist rebels were known to stage attacks.

“Ambushes and gunfights are common,” said Wawan Hari Purwanto, a spokesman for the State Intelligence Agency. “But he always chose to be at the front in every patrol and observation, including in gunfights. He didn’t want to be just behind a desk.”

On Sunday, General Danny, 51, walked into his final ambush. He was shot and killed near a church in remote Dambet Village in Papua’s central highlands. Now, human rights activists fear that President Joko Widodo’s call for a strong response to the general‘s death may prompt harsh reprisals against the Indigenous population in Indonesia’s easternmost province.

In announcing the killing on Monday, Mr. Joko called on the army and the police to hunt down and arrest every member of the group responsible for the general’s death. General Danny was the first general to die in action in Indonesia’s history, an army spokesman said.

takes up the western half of the island of New Guinea. It was occupied and annexed by Indonesia in the 1960s, but many Indigenous Papuans favor independence and separatist groups have been waging a low-level insurgency campaign for decades.

a local news outlet. There was no further explanation.

The ambush took place about 20 miles northeast of the giant Grasberg copper and gold mine, a symbol of the exploitation of Papua’s natural resources by foreign interests. Operated for decades by the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan, it was taken over in 2018 by an Indonesian state-owned company.

Mr. Wawan, the intelligence agency spokesman, said the ambush did not result from an intelligence failure and that the general was well aware of the risks.

“To die in the line of duty is a matter of the highest pride,” he said.

In a statement on Monday announcing General Danny’s death, the intelligence agency said it “continues to improve early detection and early prevention” of attacks by violent groups in Papua. The general’s visit was made in “an effort to increase the morale and spirit of the people who have been disturbed by the cruelty and savagery of the Papuan separatist and terrorist group,” the statement said.