Indonesia scales back military training after five deaths in cooperative program
Military drills for a civilian cooperative program left five trainees dead, forcing Indonesia to scale back a flagship Prabowo initiative built to reach 80,000 villages.
Indonesia has scaled back basic military training for managers in President Prabowo Subianto’s village cooperative drive after five participants died in the first two weeks of a 45-day course.
The training began on June 14 and was due to run through July 31, with the Defense Ministry overseeing sessions at regional military units and 67 military facilities nationwide in earlier tallies. The Defense Ministry linked the five deaths, which occurred between June 17 and June 26, to cardiac arrest, heat stroke, tuberculosis and pneumonia. A woman from East Java was the first known fatality, collapsing at the Mulawarman Regional Military Training Command in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. All participants had passed pre-training medical screening, including blood and urine tests, chest X-rays, ECGs, ultrasounds and mental health evaluations, before entering the course.
After an evaluation, Defense Ministry spokesman Rico Sirait announced the format had been restructured. The Defense Ministry will bring in the Health Ministry and conduct a broader review of health monitoring, early detection of medical risks and the intensity of training. The program focuses on discipline, leadership, teamwork and professionalism.
On June 28, Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights urged the government to end basic military training for cooperative managers and fishing village managers altogether. The commission said the people chosen for those roles need business management, member service and organizational governance skills, not military discipline.
The Red and White Cooperatives program was launched in July 2025 and is intended to create around 80,000 village cooperatives across Indonesia, selling basic goods, subsidised cooking gas and fertiliser. It is tied to Prabowo’s target of 8% economic growth in 2029. Reuters put the training population at nearly 35,000, while earlier figures put 30,000 village-cooperative candidates and 5,476 fishing-village candidates in military training at the same time.
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