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ormer president Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie said that student organizations should stay away from politics.

“Student organizations [should] just focus on professional training,” Habibie said in a seminar held to celebrate the 66th anniversary of the Association of Islamic Students (HMI) in Jakarta on Sunday.

Habibie said that more and more student organizations were becoming involved in politics.

He said that student organizations needed to decide on their primary goals.

“Most of these organizations are still imbued with decades-old values,” he said, as quoted by Antara news wire.

The HMI is one of the most-politically wired student organizations in the country, with some of its former leaders later becoming major political players.

Former Democratic Party chairman Anas Urbaningrum was a former chairman of HMI between 1997 and 1999 and was said to have used the organization’s network to seize control of the party in the 2010 congress.