The Special Kodim School

 

Sometimes, when society gets sick enough, it starts eating its own children. And sometimes—Christ, sometimes—the cure is worse than the disease.

You want to know about horror? Real horror isn’t some clown in a sewer or a haunted hotel in Colorado. Real horror is what happened on the streets of Jakarta in the 1990s, when the city’s teenagers turned into something that would make the kids from Lord of the Flies look like choir boys at Sunday service.

It started innocent enough, the way these things always do. Student brawls—hell, what city doesn’t have those? But this was different. This was Jakarta in the grip of something darker, something that had been festering since 1968 like an infected wound that nobody wanted to lance. By 1980, the kids weren’t just throwing punches anymore. They were carrying blades. Sharp, gleaming things that caught the streetlight like broken promises.

The Barisan Siswa—the Basis, they called themselves. Sounds almost noble, doesn’t it? Like some kind of honor society. But these weren’t your garden-variety delinquents tagging walls and smoking behind the gymnasium. No sir. These boys—and some girls too, don’t kid yourself—had turned violence into a religion. They named themselves after bus routes, for Christ’s sake. Boedoet 806. Like some kind of twisted gang sign painted in blood on the city’s concrete arteries.

You know what the worst part was? They fought for nothing. Absolutely nothing. No territory to defend, no girl to impress, no honor to uphold. They fought because fighting had become as natural as breathing. Violence was their communion wine, their daily bread. The streets of Jakarta had become their church, and every broken bottle, every sirens wail, every mother’s scream was just another hymn in their unholy service.

By the early ‘90s, the city was drowning. These weren’t just schoolyard scuffles anymore—this was warfare. The kids were hijacking buses like pirates, terrorizing drivers, turning public transportation into a rolling nightmare. Teachers were afraid of their own students. Parents locked their doors and prayed their children would make it home alive. The whole damn city was walking on eggshells, waiting for the next eruption of teenage rage to paint the streets red.

That’s when Major General A.M. Hendropriyono stepped into the picture. Now, Hendropriyono was military through and through—the kind of man who saw problems like nails and figured every solution needed a hammer. Commander of Jakarta’s Regional Military Command, built like a brick shithouse and twice as unforgiving. When he looked at Jakarta’s burning streets, he didn’t see societal breakdown or systemic failure. He saw a discipline problem. And discipline problems, well, those had military solutions.

“Naughty kids, troublemakers, those who always cause chaos,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of absolute authority. “They are the ones targeted to be schooled there. Their own teachers will teach them, but the location is at the Kodim.”

The Kodim. Military barracks. Where boys learned to become men, and men learned to follow orders without question.

And so, in August of 1993, the Special Kodim School was born. Not in some boardroom or education committee meeting, but in the mind of a general who believed that what these kids needed was a good, hard dose of military discipline. Take the worst of the worst—the knife-carriers, the drug users, the instigators—and throw them into an environment where “No sir!” and “Yes sir!” were the only acceptable responses.

Lieutenant Colonel Imam Basuki laid out the criteria with the precision of a man selecting ammunition: students who had strayed far from any recognizable code of ethics, who carried weapons, who dealt drugs, who turned classrooms into battlefields. Gender didn’t matter—if you were a girl who could start a riot with a whisper, you were just as eligible for their particular brand of reformation.

The first batch lasted four days. Four days in military barracks, sleeping in repurposed administrative rooms, learning that there were consequences in this world that couldn’t be negotiated or ignored. Four days of wake-up calls at 4:30 AM, of structured learning from 7:30 to 1:30, of mopping floors and washing dishes and discovering that the world didn’t revolve around your teenage angst.

They set up shop in Kodim 0501 Kwitang, transforming military offices into dormitories and classrooms. Eight by eight meters of space where four seventeen-year-olds learned what it meant to have every minute of their day accounted for. Two from STM PGRI 8, one from SMAN 25, one from SMA Ksatriya. Their names don’t matter now—they were just the first in what was supposed to be a grand experiment in social engineering.

The atmosphere was everything you’d expect from a military installation and nothing like the chaos these kids were used to. No school bells—just orders barked by non-commissioned officers. No wandering the halls between classes—just supervised movement from point A to point B. Psychologists, health workers, psychiatrists, and what Hendropriyono called “handlers”—spiritual experts whose job it was to tame the untamable.

“Let there be humans being handled,” the general said, “because they’re hard to control, really naughty.”

Handled. Like wild animals. Like broken things that needed fixing.

And here’s the thing that’ll chill your blood—some of the kids liked it. Beno B.M., caught with a dagger in his school bag, told reporters he didn’t feel pressured. Found the lessons easier to grasp. Others spoke of feeling calm for the first time in months, maybe years.

Think about that for a minute. These teenagers—these children—had been living in such chaos, such constant threat of violence, that military discipline felt like a relief. That’s not rehabilitation, friends. That’s Stockholm syndrome with a uniform.

The program expanded. Tangerang got its own Special Kodim School in September, eleven more kids ready to be “handled.” The machinery of military order grinding away at teenage rebellion, trying to sand down all the sharp edges that society had helped create.

But you know what they say about the road to hell, right? It’s paved with good intentions and littered with the corpses of failed social experiments.

The critics saw it coming from miles away. Professor Dadang Hawari at the University of Indonesia called it what it was—a band-aid on a severed artery. “Our teenagers are not ignorant kids who know nothing,” he said, understanding something that apparently escaped the military minds running the show. The problem wasn’t the kids. The problem was the society that had created them. Poverty, inequality, injustice—these were the real enemies, not some teenagers acting out the violence they’d been taught was normal.

Binsar Situmorang, a high school principal, put it even more bluntly: “If a child steals often because they have no money, once they leave the SK, they’ll return to it. It’ll stay the same. The problem is poverty—that’s what needs to be tackled.”

But nobody wanted to hear about systemic problems. Systemic problems are hard to fix. They require patience, resources, fundamental changes to how society operates. Military discipline? That’s easy. That’s quick. That gives politicians something to point to and say, “Look, we’re doing something!”

So the Special Kodim School continued, a monument to the seductive appeal of simple solutions to complex problems. For four years, it processed troubled teenagers like an assembly line, turning out young people who had learned to follow orders but hadn’t learned why they’d been angry in the first place.

And the violence? The brawls that had started this whole nightmare?

They got worse.

By 1995, the number of “problematic” schools had jumped from eight to fifty. Fifty schools where students fought at least twice during the academic year. Most of them technical schools, most of them populated by kids who saw no future beyond the next fight, the next chance to prove they existed in a world that seemed determined to ignore them.

The body count tells the real story. In the 1999/2000 academic year alone: 1,369 students involved in brawls, 26 dead, 56 seriously injured, 109 walking around with scars they’d carry for the rest of their lives. Sixty-seven deaths in 1999. Two hundred and ninety-seven between 2000 and 2005.

Numbers. Cold, hard numbers that spelled out the failure of military solutions to social problems.

In 1996, Brigadier General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—yes, the same SBY who would later become president—looked at the carnage and did something remarkable for a military man. He admitted failure. The Special Kodim School was shut down in July 1997, not with fanfare or press releases, but with the quiet acknowledgment that some problems can’t be solved with drill sergeants and morning calisthenics.

“Addressing juvenile delinquency,” SBY said, “required a holistic approach, focusing not only on individual discipline but also on improving the surrounding social, economic, and educational conditions.”

Holistic. What a concept. Treating the disease instead of just the symptoms.

But by then, it was too late for too many. The Special Kodim School had become just another chapter in the long, bloody book of Jakarta’s lost generation. A generation that had learned violence before they learned to read, that had been taught to fight before they’d been taught to hope.

The barracks went back to being barracks. The classrooms went back to being offices. And somewhere in Jakarta, in schools and streets and dark alleys, teenagers continued to carry knives and hatred in equal measure, because nobody had bothered to ask why they were angry in the first place.

That’s the real horror story, friends. Not ghosts or ghouls or things that go bump in the night. The real horror is what we do to our children when we’re too scared or too lazy or too proud to admit that the monsters we’re fighting are the ones we created ourselves.

Sometimes the cure really is worse than the disease. And sometimes, when society gets sick enough, it starts eating its own children.

And the children, God help them, learn to bite back.