The President of Indonesia urged the police to kill drug dealers

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo urged the police to kill drug dealers who resist arrest.

"As I said, just be more solid, especially for foreign drug traffickers who are in the country, especially those who resist. Just shoot them on the spot, don't give them mercy," said Widodo in his speech.

Human rights activists condemned the speech, Widodo, but political analysts said that it will probably be well received in Indonesia.

The CSIS political analyst Tobias Basuki said that Widodo was consciously invoked the memory of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, trying to appeal to those nostalgic times in relation to the former leader. Suharto ruled Indonesia for more than three decades, until his retirement after the Asian financial crisis in may 1998.

Widodo is the first high-ranking Indonesian official, who called for extrajudicial killings of drug dealers last week. The head of the national police Tito Karnavian praised "war on drugs" Duterte in his speech on Thursday: "We see that when we shoot the drug dealers, they leave."

The actual extent of the drug problem in Indonesia is unclear, since the experts and government officials do not agree with the nature of the problem.

In 2015, the head commander of the National Agency for narcotics (BNN) Ananga Iskandar said that "every day, 33 people die from drugs" and that 4 million people are part of the epidemic of drug addiction.

But many experts have criticized these numbers Widodo has used to justify its hard-line policy against the perpetrators, stating that they are based on a small and outdated surveys of dubious assumptions.

sections: Politics, World News, Accidents