Kanjuruhan Four Years On: 135 Lives and Football's Unpaid Debt of Justice

On the night of 1 October 2026, at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, a football match ended in a way no scoreboard could describe. After Arema FC's 2-3 defeat to Persebaya Surabaya, thousands of supporters poured onto the pitch. Security forces responded with tear gas. Within minutes, a panicked crowd surged toward a narrow exit, and Indonesian football entered the darkest night in its history. 135 people never went home. Four years later, on 1 October 2026, that number remains intact. No verdict has been handed down. No name has been held to the highest responsibility. There are only mothers still holding photographs of their children, and a slogan repeated every year: “Menolak Lupa” — refuse to forget. Kanjuruhan is not the first football disaster in history, but it belongs to the deadliest group. Recorded data shows 135 victims, 90 men and 45 women. There were 43 minors, the youngest just 3 years and 10 months old. Of the 92 adults, most were aged 18 to 25. The leading cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation from crushing. The mechanism of the disaster can be described in three layers. The first layer is context: an East Java derby between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya, with high antagonism. The second layer is the decision to deploy tear gas in the enclosed space of the stand — an act that triggered a chain reaction of panic. The third layer is the narrow exit design, unable to handle the throughput of a crowd at extreme density. The three layers resonated, and death became the inevitable consequence of a chain of systemic errors. The most important point in regulatory terms is that tear gas is strictly prohibited inside stadiums under FIFA safety regulations. This is not a minor technical detail. It shifts the question of responsibility from crowd behavior to the conduct of security forces — a shift with deep legal and moral significance. When a state agency violates the very rule it is tasked with enforcing, the disaster is no longer an accident. It is an accountable failure. Over years of monitoring stadium-safety issues, I have observed a troubling pattern. After a disaster, the first response is usually physical renovation. And that happened with Kanjuruhan: the stadium was refurbished. But physical renovation does not mean risk elimination. If crowd-control procedures, exit design, and security-escalation protocols are not thoroughly revised, the risk of recurrence remains intact. The demographic data of the victims tells its own story. 43 minors and a child under four mean that child-protection responsibility was misplaced in stadium safety design. 92 adults aged 18-25 mean that a young generation — the generation that should have been Indonesian football's future — was taken in a single night. This is not merely a statistic. It is a human-resource void, a cut in the social structure. The quality of sourcing must be stated clearly. Most facts in this story are recorded without named sources, and some demographic figures should be cross-checked against official records before being cited as authoritative. The Indonesian government established a Joint Fact-Finding Team (TGIPF) to determine the causes, but its recommendations on banning tear gas and reforming safety have not been fully reflected in practice. Four years on, victims' families continue to demand justice. Here emerges the most important counterintuitive point. We tend to believe that a disaster will automatically lead to justice, that the deaths of 135 people will force the system to change. But Kanjuruhan shows the opposite can happen: the stadium was fixed, while responsibility was not resolved. The decoupling of physical repair from justice is not a random paradox. It is a political pattern. When infrastructure improves, public pressure can ease, while those with the highest responsibility remain outside the dock. The slogan “Menolak Lupa” is not merely a memorial phrase. It is a sign that an accountability vacuum persists. People do not forget, because they sense that justice has not been delivered. The banner “They Did Not Die but Were Killed” at memorials is a legal statement expressed in the language of pain. And when a community must repeatedly remind itself that it refuses to forget, that is evidence the system has failed to remember on its own. Global solidarity has also been expressed over the past four years. FIFA flew flags at half-mast at its Zurich headquarters. Bayern Munich unfurled a banner at the Allianz Arena during a Champions League match. Stands at the AFF Cup carried commemorative banners. These gestures show that Kanjuruhan was registered at the highest governance level of world football. But they also raise a question: whether that solidarity is being converted into substantive reform pressure, or stopping at moments of silence. When the stands are empty, I hear the heart of football beating slowly. And in that emptiness, I hear what the noisy stands never told: that football can unite millions in a moment of silence, but protecting 135 lives requires rules that are enforced, not promises that are repeated. Four years, 135 lives, and a question still hanging. Has Indonesian football — and global football — truly learned the lesson of Kanjuruhan, or has it merely renovated the scene of a case that was never closed? Champions do not cry over defeat — they cry for the memory of immortality. But at Kanjuruhan, people did not cry for football. They cried because football failed to protect those sitting in the stands.