Hamish McDonald – A score of Australians has just been caught up in a nasty example of the repressive violence that could easily become the norm again in Indonesia as Soeharto-era forces regroup behind Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri's push for power.

The Australians, and visitors from several other countries, were hauled out of an "Asia Pacific Labor Solidarity Conference on Neoliberalism" in Jakarta by heavily armed police on Friday afternoon. They were carted off in police trucks, held in bare cells until 2am, and then sent back to their hotels minus passports – all on the suspicion they were violating the terms of their visas.

After the foreigners were pulled out, the police let loose a supposed Islamic militia group calling itself Angkatan Muda Ka'abah, which went to work with swords and sticks on locals at the conference.

One of the disturbing aspects has been the speed with which our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has agreed that the Australian visitors were in the wrong, and Indonesian police within their rights to question their visa status.

That is not a unanimous view even in Jakarta, where the police action has been roundly attacked. Not even the Indonesian immigration authorities agree. The spokesman at the Directorate-General for Immigration, Mr Mursanuddin Gani, was reported in The Jakarta Post yesterday as saying it had nothing to do with the police raid, had received no report on the status of the foreigners attending, and doubted they were breaking the rules.

Mr Gani pointed out that foreigners visiting Indonesia for special events such as conferences and business meetings were eligible for the visa-on-arrival facility. This visa was meant to attract foreigners to Indonesia, and that the purpose of their visit could be stated upon arriving in the country.

It is not yet clear whether all the Australians did list the conference as the purpose of the visit, or just put themselves down as tourists. Some said it was just one part of a longer holiday in Indonesia.

It is also unclear whether the seminar's organisers had obtained the police permit apparently required. But even if neither of these things had been done, it is not at all clear that the foreign participants exceeded their rights.

Did our officials have to give an implicit OK to the police action? Especially when Indonesian human rights groups, and The Jakarta Post in an editorial yesterday, have condemned the raid as an attack on freedom of expression and assembly. "The police and its thug friends have made a complete mockery of every value and principle that this nation has been struggling to establish in the last three years," the Post said.

Budiman Sudjatmiko, the organiser of Friday's seminar, would know how difficult is that struggle. The 31-year-old former student radical, sentenced to 13 years' jail for subversion in 1996, was one of the last of Soeharto's political prisoners to be freed, when President Abdurrahman Wahid ordered his release in December 1999. Police and intelligence agencies still treat him as a communist threat. Last month a bomb was set off at his parents' home.

Some of his Australian guests have also had their brushes with authority here in times when keeping Soeharto happy was the main game in Canberra. Associate Professor Helen Jarvis, an archival expert at the University of NSW, had her appointment as National Library acquisitions officer at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta vetoed by ASIO in 1979.

A few years later, Max Lane, an aid official at the embassy, found himself on the plane home after he told his ambassador, Rawdon Dalrymple, that his translations of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's novels, written in a prison camp for alleged communists, were about to be published.

You don't have to share the Australian protesters' perspective on global capitalism to be disturbed at the implications for everyone in the police raid.