No, this video does not show Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto pledging to abolish the military and police

This article is more than one year old.
Published on April 10, 2019 at 07:45
Updated on April 10, 2019 at 08:42
2 min read
By AFP Indonesia

A video viewed more than 100,000 times on Facebook purports to show Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto pledging to abolish the military, the police and prosecutor offices if he wins the upcoming election. The claims in the posts are false; the video has been edited and used out of context from an original in which he promises to not misuse the agencies if he wins the election.

The clip can be seen in multiple Facebook posts, such as this April 6, 2019, entry which has since been viewed more than 85,000 times, as well as here and here.

Below is a screenshot of the Facebook post with the most views:

Screenshot of misleading Facebook post

Translated white text in red area in the video reads: “PRABOWO WILL ABOLISH THE POLICE, THE INDONESIAN MILITARY, PROSECUTOR OFFICES, THE POSITION OF REGENTS AND GOVERNORS, ETC.”

Subianto’s speech in Indonesian translates to English as: “Here, at this televised moment, I swear that, if I got elected president, I would never use the police, the military, the intelligence, the prosecutors, the regents, the governors. I would never use them.”

AFP copied the Indonesian speech on Google and found it was used as a quote in this March 29, 2019, report by Indonesian news outlet Suara.com.

The report’s translated headline reads: “Prabowo pledges to not use military, police for political interest”.

Using some keywords from Subianto’s speech in the Facebook video, AFP found the longer version of the video was shared to Twitter here on March 31, 2019, by Fadli Zon, deputy chairman of Subianto’s Gerindra Party.

Kampanye Akbar di Bogor kemarin, P @prabowo berjanji ketika jd Presiden tak akan menggunakan polisi, tentara, intelijen, jaksa, bupati, gubernur untuk kepentingan politiknya. Beda sekali dg sekarang. #PrabowoMenyapaBogor pic.twitter.com/eU70aT3p35
— Fadli Zon (@fadlizon) March 31, 2019

In Zon's clip, Subianto says: “Here, at this televised moment, I swear that, if I get elected president, I would never use the police, the military, the intelligence, the prosecutors, the regents, the governors. I would never use them for my personal political interests.”

The edited versions of the misleading Facebook video deleted the moment when Subianto said: “... for my personal political interests” heard at 0:19 in the original footage.

Also on March 29, 2019, state-run news agency Antara reported on the same occasion in this article.

Subianto is facing President Joko Widodo in the presidential election in April. The Jakarta Post reported about their ballot numbers here.

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