Bonek Football Hooligans
Jan 26th, 2010, in News, by Patung
The shame of Indonesian football, Bonek, Persebaya Surabaya supporters, run amok.
Bandung via Solo
Thousands of supporters of Persebaya Surabaya football club, known as bondo nekat, or bonek for short, travelled to Bandung, West Java on the KA Pasundan train on 22nd January, to see their heroes go down 4-2 to Persib Bandung.
Their journey was plagued by accidents and violence, with three supporters falling to their deaths from the train. The supporters, most of whom had not paid for tickets, threw rocks at passing houses, stole food from vendors at train station stops, and generally ill-behaved.
At Jebres station in Solo, Central Java, their throwing of rocks at homes in a nearby housing estate caused residents to return fire, and a rock throwing battle royale ensued, with dozens injured. l6
Journey Home
The journey back from Bandung, in a specially provided, Bonek only, service, was a mixed affair. Upon entering the Yogyakarta district supporters of PSS Sleman were moved, for unknown reasons, to give the Bonek parcels of food and drinks.
However on arrival at Jebres station the Bonek were set upon by thousands of people who had gathered in wait, and who threw rocks and caused about 70 people to seek medical treatment. Police were forced to fire warning shots in the air to disperse the crowds.
The Battle of Solo
Upon their return to Surabaya the local government prepared about 2,000 rice meals to hand over to the Bonek on their arrival at Wonokromo, Gubeng, and Semut train stations, to forestall any hunger driven rioting/stealing. Trucks were also provided, to transport the Bonek safely back to their home neighbourhoods.
Damage Bill
Train company PT Kereta Api puts the damages and vandalism bill at 750 million rupiah, or about $75,000, with a further 250 million rupiah from lost ticket sales, as almost none of the Bonek travellers bought tickets, and is currently in somewhat confused negotiations with the government of East Java province over compensation.
81 Comments on “Bonek Football Hooligans”
-
Hi Deta,
No, it’s a great point: the wage structure makes unemployment and laziness more rational. If you measure reward per unit of energy, the lazy bastards are getting much more than the ‘workers’. If you’re right, that is.
The question is whether or not this dilemma explains the Bonek phenomenon. Are they reacting to economic frustration, or is it just fun as a teenager to run rampage for a few days and smash things ?
Maybe there are sub-categories of Bonek and maybe some misguided Asian studies student from Australia will propose Bonek studies as a masters or honors thesis and publish in ‘Inside Indonesia.’ Who knows, she may even end up sleeping with some Bonek as part of her ‘studies.’
-
and maybe some misguided Asian studies student from Australia will propose Bonek studies as a masters or honors thesis and publish in ‘Inside Indonesia.’ Who knows, she may even end up sleeping with some Bonek as part of her ’studies.’
Damn, you don’t like my idea of hanging with them, filming bits of it, and making a story about it. I won’t sleep with them though.
-
deta says:
Hi Achmad,
I don’t think it needs a masters thesis to explain that their reaction is partly hunger driven, even if perhaps they wouldn’t admit it. The fact that they couldn’t even afford the ticket is enough to explain it. The second hypothesis that it is just fun as a teenager to run rampage and smash things applies for students’ tawuran, not the action of adult boneks. And I wouldn’t suggest you to sleep with one of them either…. -
Ross says:
Yesterday we saw lots of young and older Indonesians venting their frustration in the streets of Jakarta. Very little violence. Very little vandalism. Those are good kids. Bonek are bad and need punishment, not understanding.
-
Frank-cfc says:
No they need education something that a huge number of young people in Indoensia have not had, all Indonesians must take responsibilty for that fact. Punishing them even more for the collective failure of Indonesian society to offer free education for all its youth will only compound the problems that are so evident here.
-
Education is fine, the more the better, but you don’t need a school diploma to tell the difference between right and wrong.
Don’t talk down to the poor. Plenty of barely educated, impoverished people still live decent lives without descending into anti-social savagery.
Birch the boneks!
-
unamenulis says:
BONEK..
Bondo Nekat,.they are made Hooliganism more popular in Indonesia..
ah..however, they are make our nation fotball more colorfull! 🙂 They also made whole people know that we are feel frustation with PSSI who cant make our football better.. ”
hmm, Bonek.. you are so courageous!! :p
-
Odinius says:
ET said:
Not made famous, simply exported. I still have known the times one could simply attend a match, have a drink afterwards in the supporters café and that was it. The ball (no pun intended) started rolling when the English came en masse to attend the cup games on the continent.
Did a bit of research and it turns out we’re both wrong. Apparently it does come from England, but it grew dormant after the First World War. The current, global spate of hooliganism actually began in Latin American in the 1950s. Hooliganism didn’t really re-emerge in England until the early 1960s.
-
ET says:
…every country in the world who watches football has hooligans so why would the youth of Indonesia not want to take part too.
Monkey see, monkey do.
-
Seksi Mr. Patoengs,
I just think you can do better. 😛
Seksi, Mbak Deta Yth.,
Starving adults generally don’t have the energy to run rampage. It’s a bit of a historical myth. I don’t know the specifics of the bread riots in 18th century france, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual rioters had enough calories. Bonekism takes alot of energy, running, throwing, running again.
And yes, doesn’t take a masters’ degree – that’s the point about the Asian Studies students. 🙂
-
timdog says:
Mas Achmad, you are in particularly seksi form on this thread.
The Bonek studies, the earnest Asian studies student… me like…However, at risk of providing in initial hypothesis for the earnest young lady in question when it comes to writing her thesis (gosh, I can picture her perfectly), here’s something to throw into the debate.
Do you think there is a connection between Bonekism and the inferiority complex+over-compensatory pride (with regards position in the wider Javanese frame) that seems to be a feature of pasisir (and especially Suroboyo) outlook? I think so…
-
bs says:
And yes, doesn’t take a masters’ degree – that’s the point about the Asian Studies students. 🙂
hear, hear!
yet another way of stamp collecting 😉But, staying with education, most degrees in Indonesia aren’t really worth anything. An “educated” young man will still have difficulties finding a job. No job, no wife, no … well, you get it. Large groups of angry young men have almost always led to violence.
And when the general consensus is that this is just “faith” and people accept things as they come, it will never turn for the better. I hope one day these kids wake up, think f**k faith, and start working instead of ngapain-ngapain all day.
-
@ Timdog,
There has to be some reason the Suroboyo bonek are the craziest. I’ve been asking taxi drivers about boneks for years and the consensus is Persebaya ones are the worst.
The taxi drivers also claim that if you want to incite and inflame a group of bonek, you needn’t bother with clever or witty insults, merely shout, their team is ‘jelek’ and ‘can’t play,’ or that they are ‘penakut semua.’ (Then run, of course). That should be enough to set the little bastards off.
-
hehehe, years ago i was sitting at home, turned on the tv and what do you know, there was a live show with a whole bunch of feyenoord hoolies, i recognized a couple of ’em, guys i was working with in the greenhouse. this woman was trying to have a discussion with them. she also invited the ajax hoolies from amsterdam, the sworn enemies of the rotterdam feyenoord hoolies but when they heard rotterdam was coming they didn’t come.
next thing you know there’s a sign saying “because of circumstances this broadcast is cancelled…. what happened was that a big group of masked ajax hoolies stormed the tv studio, feyenoord ran out and trashed all of them, a big battle, war for real. very lucky for the woman presenting that show because the plan was to group-rape this woman presenter live on television to show the whole world that feyenoord hoolies are the craziest. if they would’ve succeeded i’m pretty sure it would’ve been headline news the world over….it was always funny, if there was a match and the english would come to town, most cafe’s in rotterdam would either close or have their windows boarded up. not the cafe, cafe the rhythm, where i was working, we were always open and never had any problems, the place would be flooded by english and dutch supporters getting drunk together, always an incredible nice atmosphere and if there was a fight they were nice about it and took it outside, all in an asterix and obelix kinda way, thinking about this actually brings a smile to my face!
i remember one time i had to pick up one of the bargirls, natalie in the other cafe she was working, a cafe called the miami bar which was a real hoolie cafe, me and natalie were going to go out together. at that time i didn’t know any hoolie, only by reputation, so i come into the place and that day there was a match in town against germany. germans are HATED in rotterdam. seriously, if you’re a german and you’re in rotterdam the best thing you can do is shut the hell up and say you’re swiss or something because rotterdam was the only city in holland that was flattened in the second world war, totally razed to the ground and folks in rotterdam have long memories… so i come into the bar and everybody there is out of their minds from coke, pills, alcohol, speed you name it. there’s two black guys sitting there silently covered in blood.i swear there were big puddles of blood on the floor all around them. i ask natalie, what’s up with those guys? don’t they need an ambulance or something? and natalie is like oh no it’s not their blood, they just came back from town hunting german tourists… those two guys are now a hip hop group (and i like them a lot!) called the sluipschutters (sharpshooters) and they look and sound like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbRkTFXNpPU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3_aEzn0AkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFV1iyS3p3c
i love these guys, they’re for real not studio gangstas like most of the rappers you see on tv…
so i’m sitting at the bar and there was this huge, giant guy who was in love with natalie and i’m the unknown guy picking her up to go out. this hulk of a man comes up to me, hovers above me all menacing and i’m thinking, well…that’s it, end of the line. he shakes me hand and says, hey, i’m gijs how you doing??? this guy later on became a good friend of mine and still is and like i said before we were a bouncer team for a couple of years…
shit… i miss rotterdam….
-
@madrotter
You worked in the Rhythm? When was that? I’d hang out there on Friday night around 1994-1995. I was probably the youngest kid in there at the time. Great place.
Groeten uit Rotterdam
-
i worked there from ’92 till the end of ’96 almost 5 years i’ll see if i can dig up some pictures from that time. the rhythm is still there and when i’m in holland i still go there but it’s not the same anymore. also worked in the twijfelaer now the exit…
i got loads of pictures but they all in a box in holland but again, i’ll see what i can dig up…
ah here’s one from around ’96 when i was with this girl for a while
-
en trouwens de groeten terug uit bandung man!
here’s another one,1995 at home my first harvest at home at the time…
-
Frankly, madrotter, your story about the tv lady shocked me, and I am rarely shocked. These people are animals, not people at all.
-
just telling it how it is ross, it ain’t something i would be involved in that’s for sure
-
Yeah, I understand that, and I’ve known some tough characters in my time, but there are rough diamonds, ‘honest villans,’ as they say in England, and there are very bad people, but such depravity as you describe defies even my vocabulary of railing..
-
hehehe well in all honesty, these are innocent puppies compared to the psychopats they call cops here in indonesia…
-
That sure is a familiar face Madrotter. I doubt though you’d remember me.
I was about 16 at the time and still a bit shy. A friend of mine was at the sailors school and he and some punker named Serge (crazy but nice guy, you might know him) took me to the Rhythm. Those days had cool gigs at Nighttown and great concerts in de Kuip .Shortly after I ended up working in nightlife to partly support my study. After six years of that I sort of got tired of nightlife and I haven’t gone out partying in years (besides having a beer and a talk with a friend in a pub/cafe). Rotterdam’s nightlife isn’t what it used to be. One of my friends from that time still works as a bargirl at het Stadhuisplein. But I think you like that place as much as I do …
Anyway, since you worked there, thanks for the good times 😉
@Ross
These Feyenoord and Ajax hoolies also met in a meadow just to fight each other. This resulted in the dead of one of them, Ajax hooligan Carlo Picornie. This guy is sometimes still featured in songs the Feyenoord fans sing during games. -
Your stories are fun to read, Madrotter, but I can’t exactly say they paint Rotterdam in an appealing light. Sounds bloody awful. And Ross is right, the story about the hooligans and the tv lady was really beyond horrid.
Of course, every big city has its thug life, and it’s usually fairly easy to avoid if you’re street smart, so that’s probably unfair…
-
Burung Koel says:
so i come into the place and that day there was a match in town against germany. germans are HATED in rotterdam. seriously, if you’re a german and you’re in rotterdam the best thing you can do is shut the hell up and say you’re swiss or something because rotterdam was the only city in holland that was flattened in the second world war, totally razed to the ground and folks in rotterdam have long memories…
Did you get your bicycles back?
There’s a good read about the Holland – Germany rivalry in ‘Football Against the Enemy’ by Simon Kuper. I’m not Dutch, but I laughed when Franck Rijkaard gobbed Rudi Voeller in 1990.
-
Yesterday we saw lots of young and older Indonesians venting their frustration in the streets of Jakarta. Very little violence. Very little vandalism. Those are good kids. Bonek are bad and need punishment, not understanding.
There is a difference between understanding and forgiving. What boneks did was indeed unforgivable and needs punishment. But if we understand the real reason behind it, maybe, just maybe, we can prevent another vandalism incident from happening.
Education is fine, the more the better, but you don’t need a school diploma to tell the difference between right and wrong.
Don’t talk down to the poor. Plenty of barely educated, impoverished people still live decent lives without descending into anti-social savagery.
They just don’t have the opportunity like boneks do. It is a common belief that there is a higher opportunity for the uneducated, impoverish people to run rampage and vandalisms than the educated, well off ones. At least, by giving these people education, they can express their feeling in more educated ways.
Punishing them even more for the collective failure of Indonesian society to offer free education for all its youth will only compound the problems that are so evident here.
Oh yes, Indonesia provides free education, but it’s only until the ninth grade, if you’re lucky. On the other hand, the education fee for the tenth grade and above, particularly the university fee is getting more and more unaffordable. The cynic would say that by implementing this education fee system, Indonesia encourages it’s youth to get education only until the ninth grade, just to ensure the availability of a huge resource of cheap-less educated-working class-labours.
-
Yes, deta, much of what yo say is sensible and facutal, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean wen you say that ‘they just don’t have the opportunity like boneks do.’
Do you mean the desperately poor people who behave like decent humans don’t have the boneks’ opportunity to behave abominably?
Of course they have. You can be a real anti-social swine or a kind, considerate person wherever you are, whatever your income, whatever your education.
Consider the examples I gave of rich rat-bags, the Hilton killers and Theo Whatsisname the sports day holligan!
(I note all the in-crowd at JIS are still keeping quiet about what happened after the brute ran amok – I’d love to uncover that cover-up!)
All these rich, and probably well-schooled if not well-educated, barbarians, are just as bad if not worse than the boneks. Yet they had all the advantages life can offer. I pass rubbish-collectors and street-cleaners and people with no obvious work at all who are very badly-off in economic terms and are unlikely to have got far in school, but they aren’t out beating up or murdering folks.
We have free will and free choice, not in what restos to dine in maybebut in how we maintain our self-respect and show respect to others.
The Hilton thug should have been executed, and Theo Twit and the boneks would be none the worse for regular thrashings.
-
rotterdam can be pretty cool in the summer! lots of festivals and stuff…
i remember that hilton killer case that really was incredible, he shot at that poor waiter, his gun jammed at first if i remember correctly and then he shot again, all because the woman he was with had her credit card bounce right? and he was the son of some tycoon if i remember right. i do remember taht the waiter was some poor guy from nusa tengara.
what ever happened with this psychotic loonie?
bs, so many folks in those years i don’t remember ’em all;)!
-
If I’m right, m-r, he go five years, and in view of Tommy the Greaseball’s rapid reductions in sentence, assuming a young waiter’s life is calculated at less value than a high court judge’s, I guess he’ll be out by now -here’s a clip from The Age 17/6/05
A businessman from one of Indonesia’s wealthiest families has escaped with a seven-year jail sentence after murdering a waiter who told him a credit card had been rejected.
Adiguna Sutowo shed a few tears but appeared otherwise unmoved as judges in the Central Jakarta District Court read out the sentence to a room packed with some of the hired thugs he brought with him.
Adiguna congratulated his legal team led by Mohammad Assegaf, the same lawyer used by former president Soeharto, who was a great friend of Adiguna’s father, Ibnu Sutowo.
In a country where heavy sentences are often handed out for small offences and money sometimes influences a verdict, the case has created huge interest.
-
In fact it was seven years, ordered in 2005, and the bastard was out, after getting time-off for being such a sweetie, by late 2007. There’s a Tempo report on it.24/1/08
But even more interesting for those of us who hate both corrupt brutal pigs and goat-bearded vermin, here’s a clip from a blog that I found during my search.
Pentolan FPI Hadiri Sidang Adiguna Sutowo
Posted on Juni 4, 2008 by pormadi
03/03/2005 11:36 WIB
Pentolan FPI Hadiri Sidang Adiguna Sutowo
Supriyono Pangribowo– detikcomJakarta- Ketua DPP Front Pembela Islam (FPI) Habib Hasan Al Jufri
menghadiri sidang kasus pembunuhan Rudy Natong dengan terdakwa Adiguna
Sutowo. Selain itu, sebanyak 20 orang dari majelis taklim Bekasi juga
memberikan dukungan kepada Adiguna.“Saya hadir atas nama pribadi bukan FPI. Saya simpati ada kasus seperti
ini, ini kan belum jelas belum diputuskan hakim tetapi sudah ada
komentar miring. Saya lihat ada orang-orang yang menghakimi. Padahal, hakim
belum memutuskan,” kata Ketua DPP FPI Habib Hasan Al Jufri sebelum
sidang di Pengadilan Negeri Jakarta Pusat, Jalan Gajah Mada, Kamis===========
So all this stuff about how the FPI may be fanatics but at least they take strong moral stand on things is now seen for what it is – a load of crap!
Comment on “Bonek Football Hooligans”.
Copyright Indonesia Matters 2006-2023
Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact
I agree Deta, the divide between the rich and poor is massive but then why dont the people of this so called One Nation stand up and be counted and do something about it. The young hooligan needs a leader an educated prson to direct his frustrations in the right non violent way, so he can change his life for the better. I hear so many Indonesians complaining about the way things are here but yet they do notthing of any real significance. Take to the streets, in your millions if you all feel the same, and dont leave it to the few brave ones who protest in their few thousands, and say enough is enough.
I personaly think the potential of Indonesia is massive, it without doubt could be a leader in the Asian world, but change lies in the hands of its everyday working class people, and they have to make it happen because the goverment are quite content to let things run as they run now.