Four Years Since the Kanjuruhan Tragedy: The Wound of 135 Lives That Became the First Clue to Safety Governance

Hook

October 1, 2026, close to ten at night. The final whistle blew at the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, in the match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya, but the gates had not yet released the crowd. Nobody cared about the result; they cared about anger and wounded pride. Fans poured onto the pitch, then came tear gas, then a crush of people who could not breathe, then death. That night, 135 people died.

I was in Rangpur then, watching not a scoreboard but a number—one heavier than any match result. Four years later, in October 2026, FIFA President Gianni Infantino sent a condolence message to Indonesia and promised to make Indonesian football safe. The injury was never the ending; it was the first clue.

Context

The first lesson I learned in my rehab room is this: a body's injury never arrives suddenly; it is the last point of a load curve. Before a muscle or ligament tears, a series of small decisions, fatigue, and stress have quietly accumulated. We only see the tear. Kanjuruhan is exactly such a systemic injury. The rupture happened on October 1, 2026, but the load curve had been building long before.

At the centre was Derby Jatim, the eternal East Java rivalry between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya. In football safety-risk modelling, the highest-risk fixtures are high-emotion derbies, where crowd pressure, policing, gate design, and match-day management all interact. This Liga 1 match was exactly that kind of fixture. After the match, riots, tear gas, and a crush at the exit gates were recorded. The death toll was 135.

Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission, Komnas HAM, investigated and concluded that human rights violations had occurred, that excessive force had been used, and that there had been failures in match-safety governance. That one sentence changes the character of the whole event. It is no longer an "accident"; it is a governance failure.

This is where the governance triangle enters: FIFA, PSSI (the Indonesian football association), and the Indonesian government. FIFA President Infantino speaks of cooperation with PSSI Chairman Erick Thohir and the government. Investment in Indonesian football through the FIFA Forward programme and other projects is also mentioned, aimed at infrastructure, grassroots, and player development.

That structure feels familiar to me. In a player's body, if load, recovery, and rupture do not align, injury is inevitable. In a nation's football, if stadium, policing, and accountability do not align, tragedy is inevitable. I learned to read pain before I learned to read the scoreboard, and here the pain was not on the scoreboard; it was at the gates.

Core

I want to read this event exactly as I read a torn ligament—mechanism first, verdict later.

Mechanism one: the derby fixture itself is a safety variable. We usually look at a derby only through points and history. But in crowd-safety risk modelling, a high-emotion rivalry means more police, more gate pressure, more stewards, and more management caution. When the fixture calendar is built, this load belongs in the calculation. If it is not, the match still happens—but outside the pitch a curve quietly rises. At Kanjuruhan that curve broke at its far end.

Mechanism two: tear gas. This is the pivotal rule-compliance crisis. International stadium-safety norms and policing-practice standards both place strict limits on using tear gas inside or around stadiums. The reason is simple: in an enclosed stand, tear gas makes people push to escape, and in escape corridors they lose their breath to the crush. It is a compound injury made of chemical exposure and crowd mechanics, where blame rests on the gas, the gate design, and the decision alike. Reading the tear-gas reference alongside Komnas HAM's excessive-force finding shows that not only did the crowd fail—the governance failed.

Mechanism three: exit-gate design. In my rehab diary there is a line—"Mechanism First." In football safety, a gate is not merely a door; it is a throughput variable. How much crowd, in how much time, through which path. Get that wrong and external air pressure rises while internal breathing falls. At Kanjuruhan the rupture occurred precisely here, at the exit gates, in the crush.

Mechanism four: the governance triangle and its blurring. FIFA, PSSI, and the Indonesian government promise to work together. That cooperation signals stability, because reform holds only when everyone pulls in the same direction. But it also creates a boundary risk. When the line between association independence and state involvement blurs, the accountability question circles endlessly—who answers to whom. Erick Thohir's dual role—PSSI chairman and a senior government figure—sits at the centre of that blur. Infantino names him, which is endorsement and pressure at once.

Mechanism five: FIFA Forward and development financing. FIFA Forward is FIFA's development-funding mechanism for member associations, sending money for infrastructure, grassroots, and technical development. Indonesia is named as a recipient. There is an analytical subtlety here I will not skip: this investment has a reputational function. Announcing development commitments on a tragedy's anniversary is not only good intent; it is an institutional-commitment signal. But my training says a promise without numbers is incomplete. This article gives no figures, no tranche size, no club-level accounting.

Mechanism six: the anniversary itself is an accountability checkpoint. Coverage four years on means the public still perceives the reform as incomplete. The phrase "unhealed wound" tells us the event remains alive in Indonesian football memory. One thing I learned in my rehab room: empty stadiums taught me that recovery has its own crowd. Here that crowd is public memory, and it returns every October 1.

Together these six mechanisms form a load curve whose far end holds 135 lives. To me that number is not merely a tally of grief; it is the scoreline of a systemic failure. The body keeps a match report no one else can see—here that invisible report is written in the files of a state and its institutions.

Komnas HAM's conclusion elevates this event from "crowd accident" to "governance and rights failure." That elevation is enormous, because the institutional risks of the two are not the same. An accident is treatable; a failure is reformable—but their prescriptions are entirely different.

Contrarian

This is where my deepest doubt arises, and I want to state it plainly, because Verify-Before-Voice runs in my blood.

Infantino's central idea is that safety is an important part of the transformation journey. The statement is principled and expected. But a message sent at an anniversary is usually a pressure-management act. It acknowledges grief while redirecting attention toward "transformation" and "the future." My job is to read the structure, not the statement.

So what is the contrarian question? Against the promise, there are no metrics. Komnas HAM established human rights violations, yet nowhere does this article say whether any sanction was imposed, any trial held, any compensation paid to affected families. That silence is a major transparency gap. Where the accountability chain is incomplete, reputation and institutional risk hang unresolved.

The hype-to-kill risk here is inverted. Instead of a rising star's backlash, the risk is "promise-to-non-delivery"—if reform stalls, this same message returns each year as an indictment of FIFA and PSSI. The most realistic reading, to me, is that reform is still in progress, not complete—because there are no quantified milestones.

One hidden-but-inferable point is that the reform is likely governed by a formal FIFA/PSSI safety-compliance roadmap not disclosed here. The real enforcement levers are probably policing protocols, no-tear-gas rules, and exit-gate redesign. Without these, the accountability gap persists.

One more uncomfortable note—FIFA's message is likely coordinated with PSSI communications. The "commitment" is a joint narrative, not an independent assessment. Looking at sourcing, Infantino's quotes and the Komnas HAM data are well supported, but several surrounding factual claims are unsourced. Source quality here is mixed. My practice is to print "not yet known" without embarrassment where sourcing is absent.

Takeaway

Kanjuruhan is, to me, an injury meant not to be forgotten but to be read. The question is not whether Infantino's message is sincere. The question is what signal we will see first the next time a derby fixture of this kind is staged.

What to track is clear: a formal FIFA/PSSI safety-compliance roadmap, accountability outcomes (sanctions, trials, compensation), FIFA Forward tranche releases and milestones, and whether crowd-safety incidents recur at high-rivalry fixtures. Together these four signals will form a picture—whether reform is real, or merely a recurring anniversary message.

Every transfer rumour is a medical file waiting to be opened; this story is one such file. The distance between promise and delivery is the real score. Four years on, where 135 names live only in memory, whether football treats safety as an item of reform or as the foundation of reform is what the next anniversary will tell us.