Words on Concrete

 

Let’s start with the smoke.

It rose over Jalan Gatot Subroto in front of the gate of the Indonesian House of Representatives, the DPR RI, in thick, stinging clouds that hung in the air like something that didn’t want to leave. Tear gas does that. It doesn’t just burn your eyes. It gets into the back of your throat and sits there, a bitter little tenant, and for hours afterward you taste it every time you swallow. This was Labor Day 2025, and the roar of thousands of protesters was still rolling through the street, a roar that would come back in August with the big demonstrations. If you’d been standing there, you would have felt it in your sternum.

And in the middle of all that, on a heavy concrete barrier at the edge of the road, somebody had painted a sentence in fat black letters:

ULTRAS PERSIJA AGAINST FASCISM!

You might have glanced at it and kept running. Most people would have. It looks like the kind of thing a person does on impulse, a can of spray paint and a hot head and ten seconds before the cops arrive. But here’s the thing about words on walls: they almost never come from nowhere. They have parents. They have grandparents. Somewhere back in the dark there is a long line of people who said the thing before, and said it differently, and who passed it down to the kid with the spray can without either of them ever shaking hands.

So let’s go back and find the family.

The Visitors

Punk came to Indonesia the way a lot of strange things come to a lot of places: in a traveler’s bag. Late 1980s, people passing through from all over, carrying records and attitudes and a certain way of wearing their jackets. Nobody threw a parade. But the thing took root, and by the middle of the 1990s it had grown into something bigger than a sound. It was a place where young people made things, music and paper and ideas, and where they also, quietly at first, made politics.

The scholar Anne R. Kiss writes about this in her 2024 article. She notes that in 1996, a punk group in Bandung put out a zine called Submissive Riot. Think about that for a second. A photocopied thing, stapled by hand, passed around from one set of fingers to another. It was one of the early political zines in the Indonesian punk scene, and it didn’t stay a one-off. The people behind it became the Front Anti-Fasis in 1997 and published another zine, Militansi.

Zines are a small thing. A fool might call them a trifle. But small things are what the big things are made of, and a zine is a seed that fits in your pocket.

Kiss shows that the idea didn’t stay locked in the organization, either. It leaked out. It got into lyrics. It got onto album covers and into the visual language of the whole scene. Two compilation albums, Riot Connection and Extratimes 2, carried anti-racist and antifascist messages. And then there was Standing Terrace, a band that overlapped with Bandung’s football culture, using that same language in its work.

Football culture. Remember that. We’re getting to it.

The story doesn’t end with the fall of the old order, either. After Reformasi, you might expect the networks to dissolve, to drift apart once the immediate enemy was gone. They didn’t. The Front Anti-Fasis merged with other groups and became the Jaringan Anti-Fasis Nusantara, JAFNUS, and in 2007 that grew into the Jaringan Anti-Otoritarian, the JAO. The names changed because the world changed. The people involved were looking at the state again, and at the society around them, and deciding what the fight looked like now. A language that can do that, that can bend without breaking, is a living language.

The Terraces

Now the other half of the story. Punks and football fans were never really in separate rooms.

Both grew up in the same cities, among the same young people, and they used the same tools to say who they were: music, clothes, symbols, and the city itself, its walls and its streets and its corners. Andy Fuller and Fajar Junaedi make the point in their 2017 study. Ultras in Indonesia, they argue, don’t live only inside the stadium. They look out through the gates. They see the city they were born in, with all its problems, and they engage with it.

The ultras movement itself is a traveler, like punk. It began in Italy in the 1960s and spread across the world. In Indonesia, the new media gave it wings. Suddenly a kid in Jakarta could see how people were supporting their clubs thousands of miles away: the styles, the symbols, the choreography, the chants, the flares burning red in the dark. But, and this is important, nobody just photocopied it. Andri Prasetiyo, in his 2018 study, shows that ultras identity was shaped by local life, by what it actually felt like to be a young person in that city, in that neighborhood, supporting that club.

Which brings us to the real heart of it. What travels isn’t only a way of supporting a team. Words travel. Symbols travel. And those words and symbols are not empty. They carry their histories with them like a coat that still smells of the place it came from.

Four Letters and a Number

Take ACAB.

All Cops Are Bastards. You’ve seen it on walls, on scarves, maybe tattooed on a forearm. Sometimes it’s written as 1312, the numbers standing in for the letters of the alphabet: A is one, C is three, B is two. It has roots in British street culture, and the punk scene made it famous. From there it slipped into football, picked up by hooligans and ultras in one country after another.

When it arrived in Indonesia, though, the welcome was not universal. Vice reported that the slogan showed up around Persija Jakarta’s supporters, the Jakmania, and that some of them pushed back. They thought it was too European. A foreign thing. Not theirs.

I find that fascinating, and a little reassuring. A symbol can’t force its way into a place. It has to be let in, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it gets embraced. Sometimes it’s thrown out on its ear. And sometimes it gets taken apart and put back together as something new, shaped by what a particular community has lived through. That’s how language works at the street level: not decreed from above, but chosen, argued over, adapted. A kid picks up a symbol, turns it over in his hands, and asks, Does this fit my club? My city? My life?

Tribun Cinta

You can hear the overlap if you listen.

Sudut Timur is a punk band that came into being because its members loved Persija. That’s the origin: not a political program, not a manifesto, but love of a football club. In 2022 they released an album called Tribun Cinta, full of songs about what it’s like to stand in the stands and give your heart to a team. Punk on one side, the terrace on the other, and the two of them shaking hands in the middle of a song.

It matters because it shows us something that’s easy to forget. Supporter culture isn’t made only inside the stadium. It’s made in music, in the street, in the whole sprawl of the city. Prasetiyo’s research says as much: ultras subculture can be part of a young person’s identity while melting into urban space well beyond the stands.

Now, a word of caution, and I’d be lying if I skipped it. The presence of antifascist language around Persija does not mean that every Persija supporter believes the same things. A stadium is a crowd, and a crowd is never one mind. Some people in those stands would paint that slogan themselves. Some wouldn’t touch it. Some never thought about it at all. So the phrase “Ultras Persija Against Fascism” shouldn’t be read as the voice of all Jakmania. It’s better read as one voice, one expression born where supporter subculture, street subculture, and the political life of the city happen to cross.

Bandung, Again

And Bandung, where we began, shows the pattern even more clearly.

Andry Wibowo, in his analysis, describes how closely punk traditions and the spirit of the Bobotoh, Persib’s supporters, have blended. The band Standing Terrace is part of it. So is the collective Bandung Barat Crew. So is a platform called Bobotoh Antifa. They have voiced anti-racist messages openly, in song lyrics, on banners hung from the terraces, and on photocopied zine pages.

Photocopied zine pages. The same humble medium we met back in 1996, with Submissive Riot. You see how it circles? The old tools are still in use. The old language still has legs.

Older Than the Word

Here’s a thing that might surprise you. Some of this is much older than the imported vocabulary.

Long before anyone in Indonesia had heard the word “ultras,” indigenous communities had already turned the green rectangle of a football pitch into a place of symbolic resistance against the injustices of Dutch colonial rule. Indhar Wahyu Wira Harjo explores this in his 2022 study. A football field, it turns out, has never been only a football field. It can be a place where people who are denied a voice find one anyway, in the shape of a game, in the way they play and the colors they wear.

So the link between football and questions of identity and injustice isn’t a recent import. It’s an old thread. The new symbols simply got tied onto it.

The Wall Again

Come back, now, to the barrier on Jalan Gatot Subroto, with the gas still hanging over it.

Ultras subculture doesn’t stay inside the stadium. When supporter groups look hard at the social and political realities they grew up in, it spills out and becomes part of the city itself. Music, graffiti, clothing, zines, terrace symbols: all of them blur the line between the stands and the street until it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

That’s why those words, ULTRAS PERSIJA AGAINST FASCISM!, in the middle of a demonstration, deserve to be read as part of a much longer story. They don’t prove that every Persija supporter is an antifascist. They don’t prove anything so simple. What they show is that a language born at the crossing of punk, ultras culture, and local experience can surface in places much larger than the stands where it began.

So don’t read it as a slogan standing alone. Read it as a footprint. Behind it is a long road: from a stapled zine in 1990s Bandung, to the terraces, to the concrete in front of the parliament, with the smoke rolling over everything.

And what does it mean? Nobody gets to decide that once and for all. The meaning was never nailed down. It belongs to whoever picks up the can, and to whatever street they’re standing on when they do.