“Internal documents reveal Soros-linked funding behind Indonesia’s protests”, The Sunday Guardian, November 30, 2025
“Nationwide protests that shook Indonesia from late August to early September this year are now at the centre of a fierce new battle over foreign influence, with internal documents shared with The Sunday Guardian revealing how a George Sorosfunded network has been bankrolling organisations that supported activists at the heart of the unrest. Until now, however, those charges have rested largely on rhetoric, geopolitics and conspiracy-minded speculation. The 25 August-9 September demonstrations—now officially recorded as the “August 2025 Indonesian protests”—began as public outrage against a massive housing allowance and perks for Members of Parliament in the world’s thirdlargest democracy. As food prices, education costs and taxes climbed, students, gig workers and labour unions flooded the streets of Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan and dozens of provincial capitals. Clashes with police escalated into riots: government buildings were torched in Kediri and Surabaya, public transport infrastructure was burned, and solidarity protests broke out as far away as Germany and Australia. President Prabowo Subianto—a former general accused of past humanrights abuses who won the 2024 election on a populist, law-and-order, free-meal and “food estate” agenda—was forced to cancel an overseas trip as the domestic crisis deepened.
A cache of internal agreements, grant proposals and emergency funding contracts between the Jakartabased Kurawal Foundation and its partners—seen by The Sunday Guardian—shows, for the first time, how money originating in George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) has moved through an Indonesian intermediary to organisations that were directly involved in, or immediately protecting, networks at the centre of the August-September unrest, as well as to activist hubs mobilising resistance to President Prabowo’s flagship policies in Papua. At the core of this architecture is OSF’s new “Network Grants” programme—a flagship, long-term funding window that explicitly aims to provide “flexible, core, and long-term support to backbone organizations” and to “strengthen and sustain coordination, collective action and learning across issues, regions, and partners” in the name of advancing democracy, justice and human rights. In its own words, Network Grants exists to back “frontliners, ecosystem enablers, and issue framers”—activist groups, regranting hubs and think tanks that “shift ecosystems” and keep civic movements alive between waves of protest.
One of those ecosystem “enablers” is Kurawal. In a grant application titled “General Support Grant to Kurawal Foundation 2025-2028”, the Indonesian intermediary requests USD 1,670,782 from OSF—including USD 300,000 earmarked specifically for Papua—to consolidate a civil society movement across Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Kurawal describes itself to OSF as “an intermediary agency for social justice philanthropy…working for structural change” by “strengthen[ing] democracy institutions and practices” and “facilitating the emergence of democrats” who “disregard all other forms of (non-democratic) government”. It sets its 2024-2029 strategic priority as “consolidating civil society movement”, with five “pathways”: reclaiming contested local spaces for movements, “penetrating political space”, expanding civic space in Papua and “connecting movement space across the Global South”. An internal review Kurawal submitted to OSF in 2023 even notes that it has been “the only Indonesian funding organisation explicitly supporting social justice for democracy programs” in the country two decades after the fall of Suharto……”
Read full article at sundayguardianlive.com
