In July 2013 the London company announced a two-stage deal to sell its 29 percent of Bumi Resources back to the Bakries and to acquire the remaining Bakrie shares in Bumi PLC. Rothschild bitterly denounced the proposed deal and launched a court action to unseat Tan. It was unclear whether, with this separation, the Bakrie group was avoiding another debt crunch. Refinancing at a massive 11 percent margin on the London interbank interest rate meant a payment of $150 million due in August 2013. Then another subsidiary owed $350 million in September. In 2014 all pretax cash earnings would be consumed by interest payments, unless coal prices sharply increased. In addition, the Jakarta holding company PT Bumi faced $750 million in loan paybacks to the China Development Bank and also had a $375 million convertible bond issue maturing. Some analysts, including the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, concluded that the Bakries’ finances were unsustainable without major asset sales. Aburizal Bakrie was, meanwhile, still gearing up as leader of Golkar in the money-chewing parliamentary and presidential election campaigns of 2014.
If Bakrie cut a sorry figure as a standard-bearer of Indonesian (and pribumi) corporate governance, and if the Bumi PLC saga was a lesson in naivety and failure of due diligence at the London end, many other new figures—both pribumi and Chinese—in the top business ranks have more inspiring stories. William Katari’s Wings Group challenged Proctor & Gamble and Unilever in the soaps and toothpaste market; Chairul Tanjung rose in the media and retailing sectors; Djoko Susanto built a chain of 7,000 Alfamart convenience stores; Rusdi Kirana built his Lion Air into the largest rival to state carrier Garuda in a decade; Purnomo Prawiro expanded his Blue Bird taxis to a nationwide fleet of 22,000 vehicles and set new standards of service and safety.
Media groups flexed new muscle in the liberal era. The Kompas print group, led by Jakob Oetama, and the Surabaya-based Jawa Pos group of Dahlan Iskan now dominate the newspaper scene, as does the Tempo group in magazines. In the absence of cable television, the six free-to-air television groups remain the big moneymakers, particularly as the issuing of new broadcast licenses is frozen. In addition, the networks are helpful to the political careers of owners such as Chairul Tanjung, Surya Dharma Paloh, Dahlan Iskan, and Aburizal Bakrie; the latter three emerged as presidential hopefuls in 2014 (though unsuccessfully).
Despite many continuities in the corporate lineup from the New Order, the return of stability in the demokrasi era has not quite meant business as usual. Closeness to the president is no longer a guarantee of getting the best contracts from government. The media and the anticorruption commission are ferocious watchdogs for any corrupt deals. Although police and prosecutors can still be employed to harass complaining customers and inconvenient business partners, defamation is no longer a criminal offense, meaning that critics can no longer be threatened with jail.
Of course, good relations with political players are still a help, but decision makers are dispersed across the decentralized political system. For some pribumi entrepreneurs, government relations have been tackled in person—by getting elected or being appointed to cabinet, or by forming their own political parties if they are unsatisfied with their reception. Indeed, Aburizal Bakrie and Jusuf Kalla have become leading figures in Golkar’s parliamentary ranks. The Acehnese former street trader Surya Dharma Paloh did not take his lack of promotion in Golkar lying down, forming his own Partai Nasional Demokrat (PND, National Democrat Party) in 2011. During Yudhoyono’s second term, Dahlan Iskan of Jawa Pos (the Java Post newspaper) accepted an appointment as minister for state-owned enterprises.
Founding families still mostly own and run the big business houses, including the former cukong conglomerates, but they have surrounded themselves with professional managers and now operate under somewhat stricter reporting and auditing requirements. With second-generation owners taking over, many of whom have been raised in Indonesia and educated at Western universities, the era of the robber barons is fading in Jakarta, if not in the coalfields and plantations of Kalimantan and other outer islands.
9
Between Mecca and the South Sea
In a little shrine in West Java, two young men sit cross-legged, heads bowed in pious absorption over open copies of the Koran. An example of orthodox Islam? Not exactly. Behind one worshipper is a large oil painting of a young woman, her shoulders bare, wearing a green gown that shows off the curves of her body. She is set against a background of blue ocean waves. The other man sits beside a bed that is draped in green silk, with a multitiered ceremonial parasol and a green chandelier above it. The shrine sits on a little outcrop of volcanic rock, jutting into the surf of the Indian Ocean shoreline.
The province of West Java, modern successor to the ancient kingdom of Sunda, is known as one of the most devoutly Islamic regions of Indonesia. In recent years it has voted in a governor from a new Islamist party, the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party), which some say draws inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the like-minded Islamist party that has ruled Turkey since 2002. As the PKS gathered in electoral strength over the first decade of this century, many Indonesians worried that it had a hidden agenda, one it would reveal only on gaining power: to convert the country into a state ruled by Islamic law, instead of the multifaith model enshrined by Sukarno in his Pancasila compromise of 1945.
Yet here, close to a fishing and tourism town called Pelabuhan Ratu, an older and indigenous form of worship is still peeping through this wave of purist Islam. While reading the words of Muhammad, two devout young men are seeking to draw strength from Nyai Loro Kidul, a female deity or spirit said to reside in the ocean south of Java; her name is sometimes translated as “Queen (Ratu) of the South Sea.” She is a wrathful spirit, needing to be appeased with annual offerings. Her color is green, though a richer aqua green than that of Islamic banners, and one not to be worn by seafarers or bathers along this treacherous shore.
Sukarno had a modern tourist hotel built here, one of the four financed by Japan’s war reparations. Guests in one room soon started complaining of disturbed sleep, of visions in the night. Room 308 remains set aside for Nyai Loro Kidul. No one else can stay there, though visitors can enter to commune with the goddess. Over centuries, she has been the mythical consort of successive kings and sultans in the Javanese dynasties. The late Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta, highly educated in the Netherlands, wrote of how she appeared to him while he meditated. When he lay dying in 1988, royal servants in the kraton reported sightings of her bidding farewell the much loved and respected ruler, independence leader, and vice president.
Java could be mapped intensively according to concentrations of geomantic forces, which draw seekers of spiritual strength on ziarah (pilgrimage) on auspicious days in the Javanese calendar or on Muslim feast days. The place might be the graveyard of the Yogyakarta and Solo royal houses at Imogiri, built by Sultan Agung of Mataram in the 1640s. Or it might be the mythical haunt of gods in the great Hindu narratives, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These dramas might have been located originally in the landscape of India, but in Javanese tradition their characters—Rama and Sita, the warring Pandawa and Kurawa, plus local inserts like the clown-god Semar and his three doltish sidekicks—lived and fought in Java “before there were people.” It might be the Sendang Semanggi, a spring near Yogyakarta, or the Gua Sirandil, a sea cave near Cilicap, or the Gua Semar, a cave on the misty Dieng Plateau, inland from the Borobudur monument.
The mythical heroes and great historical characters are believed to leave some of their power at their dwelling places, graves, or sites of great achievement. With patient meditation and fasting, and by sprinkling flower petals and lighting incense, ordinary people can soak up some of this power. Some take it further, into a deep mysticism known as Kebatinan, in which meditation, self-denial, and ascetic practices, such as sitting under waterfalls, take the practitioner to a higher plane of consciousness. In the early part of his career, Suhart
o used to meditate in the Gua Semar, since he identified with this native wise fool of the wayang theater. In 2002 the police chief I Made Mangku Pastika, seeking a breakthrough in the Bali bombing case, went to a mountain to clarify his mind: the vital clue soon arrived to identify the vehicle used in the car bombing of a nightclub.
Pastika is a Hindu, like nearly all the 4 million Balinese. But most of those following such practices in Java will have “Muslim” on their identity cards and, if asked, would declare themselves as such. This ambivalence infuriates scholars and preachers of Islamic orthodoxy. In Islam, worship at the graves of saints or great men, even that of the Prophet Muhammad himself in Medina, has been contentious down the ages. The purists of the Sunni tradition see it as superstition: the dead leave nothing of their being, and graves are simply a reminder of mortality, but better an unmarked burial place in the desert anyway. The great split of Islam started soon after Muhammad’s death, with his descendants venerated as caliphs. In Java, installing a human intermediary between a formless Allah and the individual of the ummat (Islamic community) can signify more than superstition and folk impulse. It can point to the stubborn survival of the pre-Islamic faith, both the Hinduism of the premodern era and even earlier forms of animism.
Even late in the twentieth century in Indonesia, it seemed that this was a social reality that simply had to be accepted—perhaps reluctantly by strongly devout Muslims, but with relief by those who saw this syncretism as a sturdy foundation for a pluralist nation that encompassed many non-Muslim religions. If large segments of the population of Java, two-thirds of the Indonesian nation, could adhere to an accommodating mixture of tradition and theology, then Indonesia would be predisposed to religious tolerance.
The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s book The Religion of Java (1960) became for decades the dominant paradigm in the West with which to explain the “moderate Islamic” character of Indonesia. He saw the Javanese as falling into three aliran (streams). One was the santri (devout), comprised of those who were highly observant of the rituals and demands of the Muslim faith: prayer five times a day, the halal diet, observance of the fasting month of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Around them was the mass of villagers whom Geertz categorized as abangan (roughly meaning “vernacular”), who might attend the mosque on Fridays and observe Ramadan but who might also make offerings to spirits, seek magical help from faith-healers, and take moral lessons from the Hindu epics. The third category comprised the Javanese aristocracy and gentry, the priyayi, who could be quite overtly Hindu in style—by using Sanskrit names, for example, and in some cases by pursuing highly developed forms of Kebatinan.
Historians suggest that this divergence resulted from the pathways by which Islam came to the archipelago and from the political structures of that time. The religion came along with the trade in textiles and precious commodities that ran through the sea routes along the southern edge of the Asian landmass, from China and Japan around to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Muslim communities were observed by Marco Polo in Sumatra at the end of the thirteenth century. The adoption of Islam by the ruler of the new trading city-state of Malacca in the fifteenth century helped it spread to the trading seaports around the Java Sea. It was a religion suited to the commercial classes, supporting the notion of parties dealing on a footing of equality and trust in the marketplace.
Then came a new example of the good Muslim in the shape of Sufi missionaries, who showed a pathway to transcendental religious experience not unlike that pursued in Hinduism. Indeed, many of the Sufis would have come from India or Central Asia, where mystical elements would have been absorbed into their practices, making them already attuned to the attitudes of the Javanese in the agricultural inland. The earliest of the legendary Wali Songo (nine saints) said to have brought Islam into inland Java in the fifteenth century, Maulana Malik Ibrahim from Samarkand, seems to have been such a missionary.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the kingdom of Mataram arose in central Java, the last to have independence before the tightening of Dutch rule. Its rulers adopted Islam and the title of “sultan.” But this was an expedient strategy to help them face the rising power of coastal states, so the conversion was a surface one. Rulers and the priyayi continued their existing practices of building power and legitimacy from their perceived closeness to great spirits and deities. By the time Islam penetrated through inland Java, many compromises had been made.
Yet conversion has been and remains an ongoing process. Dutch rule helped make Islam a self-identifier for the subjects of the Indies and helped rally support behind rebellions in Java, West Sumatra, and Aceh during the nineteenth century. The cooption of many elements of the priyayi class and the outer-island rajahs into the colonial administration tended to discredit the holders of traditional power and customary belief.
The greater interconnection of the world through the steamship and the telegraph brought Indonesia’s Muslims into closer contact with schools of thought arising in the Middle East. More were able to make the hajj to Mecca and learned of the Wahhabis, who were seeking to return Islam to its austere and simple origins. Some young people went to study in Cairo and became immersed in the reformist school, which not only sought to strip away the compromises with pre-Islamic beliefs but also looked at ways of combining Islam with the modern world.
In 1912, two significant movements began that showed a stirring within Indonesia’s ummat. The Sarekat Islam was an early nationalist organization, formed largely among santri elements in trading ports and market towns. The apolitical Muhammadiyah organization set out to reeducate Muslims through a network of schools and local branches in the spirit of the reformists of Cairo.
Clifford Geertz described how Muhammadiyah’s followers took the santri in new directions. They emphasized the importance of individual effort, of engaging in secular activity, of keeping faith pure, and of observing proper behavior, and advocated the use of logic and pragmatism. The more traditional Javanese Muslims tended to be fatalistic, to weave religion into all aspects of life, to accept other beliefs and practices, to take a more literal approach to texts, and to value inward religious experience over outward activity. They tended to gravitate to the NU, formed in 1926 partly in reaction to the rise of Muhammadiyah.
The two organizations grew in strength through the twentieth century, until each could claim 30 to 40 million members, making them the largest Muslim bodies in the world. The NU was more inclined to jump into politics, contesting the elections in 1955 and 1971 under its own name (and later, in the reformasi era, through the PKB). The Muhammadiyah held back as an organization, though many of its members entered politics through the various Islamist parties. Labels are difficult: “orthodox” does not necessarily mean conservative; “progressive” or “modernist” can also look orthodox and revivalist.
As we have seen, Sukarno came from the priyayi stream on his father’s side, while his mother was a Hindu from Bali. Although he adopted the forms and practices of Islam, he was a careful balancer of the three forces of his precarious Nasakom coalition. At the very beginning of the Indonesian republic, he turned aside demands for a Negara Islam Indonesia (Islamic Indonesian State) by producing the Pancasila doctrine, and he later also resisted the fallback position of the Islamic party: the Jakarta Charter, which would have obliged all those who identified as Muslims to follow the requirements of the faith.
Suharto arrived in power by smashing the communist component of Nasakom and then turned his attention to taming the other two. The gradual eclipse of Sukarno between 1965 and 1970 was accompanied by machinations within the PNI to promote New Order sympathizers. On the religious front, Suharto started his long presidency as very much a product of his upbringing and experience. Like many of his fellow army officers, he was “small town Java” (to use Harold Crouch’s words), distinctly abangan in upbringing, and had been exposed to Kebatinan through an apprenticeship with a well-known dukun (fai
th-healer). His early postindependence experience in the field had come when he had quelled a rebellious Islamic militia in Java, and he’d then fought the Islamist rebellion in South Sulawesi.
In the early years of his national leadership, Suharto’s immersion in Javanese mystical practices was scarcely a secret, and he made much use of names from the wayang theater as political symbols. His political operatives under Ali Murtopo, who included priyayi and Catholic figures, tackled political Islam through several initiatives. A friendly figure, John Naro, was installed as head of the main Muslim political party, Parmusi, which from 1977 was dragooned with all the others into the blandly named PPP. At the same time, Murtopo’s Opsus group kept contact with surviving members of the Darul Islam and Negara Islam Indonesia insurgencies in West Java, always handy for black operations to discredit mainstream Muslim groups. The regime also fostered Kebatinan, to the point that, in the early 1970s, it seemed the practices would be recognized as an official religion. This, too, was not without its political dangers, however: the messianic Mbah Suro cult in East Java caused the army to crack down in 1967 out of a fear that remnants of the PKI might use mysticism as a cover to regroup; the elite-level Kebatinan circle, led by the minor bureaucrat Sawito Kartowibowo, in 1976 suggested that Suharto had lost the wahyu that made his rule legitimate.
However, Suharto was careful to appoint widely respected Muslim figures as his ministers of religious affairs, who were responsible for dispersing official support for mosques and schools and administering the hajj. As years of high economic growth began to lift living standards, it became apparent that greater relative prosperity was being accompanied by a general rise in piety and religious observance. (This is not a phenomenon unique to Indonesia: witness the rise of Christian evangelism in nineteenth-century Britain, for example.) Observing Islam enhanced the people’s feelings of respectability and provided them with a framework for living in a confusing modern world—this was especially true for people newly moved from villages to cities. In an environment where the young, in particular, were beset by temptation, Islam provided a moral compass and plenty of people and places to go to for guidance and help.
Demokrasi Page 18