The largest urban conglomeration is around Jakarta. The 2010 census put the resident population of the national capital district at 9.5 million. Yet the surrounding cities of Bekasi, Tangerang, Depok, and Bogor are linked dormitory and industrial centers. Up to 4 million workers commute into Jakarta from places as far out as Sukabumi, on the southern side of West Java’s mountains. The population is remarkably stoic, even cheerful, for what would elsewhere be regarded as an urban nightmare.
The encroachment of housing on the uplands and mountain slopes to the south of the city has lessened the landscape’s capacity to retain the monsoon rains, which arrive each November and remain for several months. The network of drainage canals into the Java Sea, built by the Dutch, is now clogged with silt and rubbish. Even the preliminary downpours of the rainy season can bring the entire city to a halt, with flash flooding of road intersections. Conversely, water shortages occur during the midyear dry season, as about 40 percent of the capital district’s population relies on groundwater wells for their household water.
Much of the groundwater and reticulated city water is highly contaminated. The Citarum River—which flows for 160 kilometers from near the West Java provincial capital, Bandung, to the Java Sea through Jakarta—has long been listed by international environmental institutions as among the world’s top ten pollution concentrations. Textile, footwear, and garment factories near its source and metal industries along its banks pour in untreated waste that contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Households add untreated sewage and rubbish, the latter piling up in vast floating masses behind bridges and weirs.
Despite this, about 28 million people depend on its waters, in one way or another, from source to sea. The river provides about 80 percent of the surface water tapped for Jakarta’s water supply; millions wash themselves and their clothes in it as well. They are put at risk of skin diseases, cancers, and toxic metal accumulation. The government launched a $3.5-billion cleanup program in 2009, with a $500-million loan coming from the Asian Development Bank over fifteen years. Five years later, the river is still listed among the world’s worst pollution spots.
Another twenty-nine rivers around Indonesia are listed by the government as being highly polluted with chemicals and bacterial agents, including human waste. In 2013 about 68 percent of the Indonesian population had access to improved sanitation systems, but a World Bank study found that poor sanitation was still costing the equivalent of about 2.3 percent of gross domestic product from losses of economic output for health and environmental reasons. Less than 5 percent of sludge from septic tanks and about 1 percent of household waste water was treated, and about 14 percent of urban dwellers still had to defecate in open spaces.
Air quality is another environmental issue in the cities. The major cities of Jakarta, Surabaya, and Medan have fewer than thirty days in total of clean air during the year. Unleaded petrol was mandated in Jakarta, Cirebon, Bali, and Batam from around 2001 but took time to come into widespread use. In 2005 a study of school-age children in Bandung found that two-thirds had lead content in their blood that was well above World Health Organization standards. Unleaded petrol was mandated in the city the following year, and significant improvement in bloodstream lead levels was noticed within two years. Even with unleaded fuel, the vast number of cars and motorcycles has created a persistently high level of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particle pollution in the cities. Lagging investment in public transport has boosted the people’s reliance on private vehicles. Commuting times into Jakarta from outlying towns are measured in hours for those not able to access the limited surface rail network. Some workers choose to spend their evenings in shopping malls, cooking their own meals in special kitchens, and take only an hour or two getting home rather than the four hours the commute would last straight after work. The Jakarta city administration started plans for a mass rapid transit system in 1980; it was not until 2013 that it signed the first contracts for construction. Meanwhile, it adopted palliative measures, including dedicated bus lanes, the conversion of buses to natural gas fuel, and a monorail line that was abandoned partway through construction.
It was not simply a shortage of financial resources that held back solutions to these urban environmental problems. International agencies were ready to offer large-scale funding but were frustrated by the lack of coordination and drive among the city and central government agencies. Contradictory policies abounded, notably in the promotion of so-called green cars (smaller vehicles with relatively low-emission engines, costing under $10,000) in 2013 through lower sales taxes. Indonesia has often had well-conceived and bold ideas at the top, but they have been confounded by inept administration or subverted by vested interests on the ground.
Another source of resistance was the widespread feeling that the advanced industrial nations were now preaching what they had not practiced during their years of rapid growth. At a seminar on the environment organized by Sumitro in the late 1970s, the late nuclear physicist Edward Teller gained a spontaneous round of applause from Indonesian officials when he declared that the worst kind of pollution was “the pollution of poverty.”
Four decades later, a source of great hope is the flourishing, all over Indonesia, of civil society organizations that are concerned with the environment and customary land rights. They have stood up when prickly officialdom denied visas to activists from international environmental groups; they have investigated conflicts in the remotest parts of the archipelago, sometimes at great physical risk; and they have publicized their findings against hugely powerful interests. Environmentalism has now become a thoroughly indigenous concern.
13
From Sby to Jokowi
About a year before the 2014 elections, a new sticker appeared on the backs of cars and motorbikes in Yogyakarta. It has a picture of a smiling Suharto. “Piye Le Kabare?” the Javanese-language caption asks. “Isih Penak Jamanku To?” (“How are you doing? Wasn’t it better in my time?”) At Suharto’s birthplace, the village of Kemusuk, on the outskirts of the city, a new museum opened with innovative visual displays about the high points of his career. It quickly became a thriving spot for domestic tourists, who were delivered in busloads. The museum has a small mosque attached. By contrast, the sprawling Suharto family house around the corner, built near the humble cottage of his birth, is decorated with images of Semar and other wayang characters. A servant proudly shows a spring where the young Suharto used to meditate. A large pendopo (pavilion) contains the reinterred remains of his two maternal forebears who were renowned kyai (holy men) in Javanese mysticism. Aspiring political candidates come here to meditate in the hope of imbibing some of the wahyu (authority) of the Suharto line.
At the end of the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a decade widely seen as one that would “consolidate democracy” and launch Indonesia on a path to a more important global status in the twenty-first century, at least some in Suharto’s home region sensed that a nascent nostalgia for strong government was waiting to be harvested. It was based on a filtered view of an era slipping back into the past, one of which 60 million Indonesians of voting age in 2014 had no clear memory.
This was enabled by a widespread feeling that Yudhoyono had been, if not a failure, a disappointment. Three years into his first term, there was already a strong feeling in elite circles that he had “squandered” the mandate of his convincing victory over Megawati Sukarnoputri in the 2004 runoff, part of the country’s first direct presidential election. Nevertheless, in the 2009 election he had been so popular that he defeated Megawati in the first round with 60.8 percent of the vote; the PD, newly formed as a personal vehicle for his candidacy in 2004, became the biggest party in the DPR, its share of seats rising from 10 to 30 percent. With an even bigger mandate, no reelection to worry about in 2014, and the liberal-minded economist Boediono as his vice president, Yudhoyono was positioned to make the reforms that would put Indonesia’s fearful past beh
ind it and enable the nation to confidently seize the opportunities of the new century. Instead, his second term was a litany of hesitation and retreat in the face of pressure.
Returned to power in 2009, Yudhoyono convened a three-day “national summit” with business, academic, and regional government representatives to review shortcomings of governance. Then he ordered his new cabinet to prepare a “100-day plan” to make early use of the mandate and set priorities in some fifteen areas. First on his list was smashing the “legal mafias,” which had just shown their baleful power in the conspiracy of police and prosecutors to frame two commissioners of the anticorruption agency. Other priorities included the revitalization of domestic defense industries to reduce dependence on foreign-supplied equipment; better coordination of the police, intelligence, military, and social-religious agencies in overcoming terrorism; increasing the electricity supply; expanding food production; better land-use planning and controls to meet climate-change commitments; more investment in infrastructure; incentives for small enterprises; extending health insurance; and improving education.
Even before the one hundred days were up, however, the government’s momentum had dissipated and its attention been diverted by the Bank Century controversy, whipped up in the DPR by the Golkar faction, ostensibly one of Yudhoyono’s partners. As we have seen, the controversy led to the sacrifice in 2010 of one of his most highly regarded ministers, Sri Mulyani Indrawati. The government failed to apply an automatic adjustment to fuel prices, leading to periodic political crises over price hikes to prevent the ballooning of subsidies. An inordinate amount of revenue continues to flow to this form of “middle-class welfare,” instead of to measures such as the abolition of school fees in the upper secondary years or the financing of Yudhoyono’s ambitious health insurance scheme, launched in 2014.
As well, powerful ministries continued to subvert or contradict government policies, diverting more resources to nationalist symbols and deterring new foreign investment by applying conditions that mandated increased local equity and processing. Growth of formal jobs lagged behind the economic growth rate, and the informal sector actually started growing again as a proportion of workforce activity. An official survey in 2013 found that 37.2 percent of children under five had stunted growth, a slight increase from 2007.
Military reform halted when Yudhoyono took over. The territorial role was maintained, diverting resources from improving Indonesia’s external defense capability and perpetuating many corrupt and predatory moneymaking activities. Yudhoyono dragged his heels on the official divestment of military businesses, and it was carried out in a less than transparent manner, with some enterprises transferred to civilian proxies and the auditor in charge openly saying that the territorial role helped keep the military involved in illegal business. The military retained jurisdiction over its personnel for offenses against civilian law. Courts-martial jailed soldiers who were involved in shootings and murders, notably in the Theys Eluay and Cebongan prison cases, but for much shorter terms than civilian courts would have awarded.
Yudhoyono maintained impunity for military personnel who were involved in past human rights abuses and indeed kept some figures in high government positions, such as the defense department head Syafrie Syamsuddin (who was persona non grata in the United States over incidents in East Timor) and his cabinet secretary for some years, Sudi Silalahi (widely seen as an organizer of the Laskar Jihad militia, which had joined interreligious fighting in Ambon and Poso). This impunity stretched down to the lowliest members of the civilian militias raised in East Timor, as was clear from the immense pressure Yudhoyono placed on Dili to have Martenus Bere released in 2009. The acquittal of the retired general Muchdi Purwopranjono over the murder of the human rights activist Munir Said Thalib left unexplored the higher levels of the conspiracy within the BIN.
If nostalgia for the Suharto era has some political currency in 2014, Yudhoyono must bear some responsibility. He did not come out to question the mythology of the New Order. Toward the end of his presidency, he paid homage on October 1 at the Crocodile Hole, where the story of communist treachery is enshrined.
In 2012 came a moment in which Yudhoyono could grapple with the legacy of the 1965–66 massacres. His government’s own Human Rights Commission concluded a three-year investigation that found that the PKI massacres warranted redress. Survivors and family members of the victims emerged from the shadows to tell their stories to the media. Possibly influenced by the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s moving apology to his country’s indigenous people in 2010, Yudhoyono floated the idea of an apology for the massacres, balanced by the inclusion of the shooting of Muslim demonstrators at Tanjung Priok in 1984 and the abduction and sniper shooting of students in 1998. His legal adviser Albert Hasibuan said he had been charged with drafting the apology.
As it happened, that was the last that was heard about it. Yudhoyono’s military colleagues and the Muslim parties in his coalition persuaded him to drop the idea. It can be assumed that his wife and her family were also defensive: Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the president’s father-in-law, was the general who had set off the massacres in his sweep across Java and Bali at the head of the Special Forces. The desultory investigation of the former first family’s moneymaking ended with Suharto’s death in 2008.
The issue would not go away, however, reemerging with the release of the chilling documentary film The Act of Killing in the United States at the end of 2012. The Indonesian magazine Tempo collected book-length material detailing mass execution after mass execution across Java in 1965–66, with the leading perpetrators coming from the Pemuda Ansor, the youth wing of the NU.
An example was given to Yudhoyono by the mayor of a small city in Central Sulawesi. As a sixteen-year-old in 1965, Rusdi Mastura had been delegated by his teachers to join those who were guarding three local PKI committee members. Men had come to take the prisoners away one night. When Rusdi became mayor of Palu, he started inquiries into their fate. Witnesses came forward. They had been taken by the Palu army garrison outside town to a prepared grave and shot. In March 2013 Rusdi stood up at Palu’s town hall and issued a public apology, promising help with health and education to the bereaved families and to build a memorial to the killings.
Yudhoyono’s retreat was further shown up in September 2013 when the Dutch ambassador issued a public apology for the killing of up to 5,000 villagers in South Sulawesi around the end of 1946 by Dutch commandos under Captain Raymond “Turk” Westerling and handed compensation to the surviving families of the victims. A month after the Dutch apology, some families of the PKI dead and former political prisoners gathered in Yogyakarta. They were attacked and dispersed by vigilantes who called themselves the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front. “It is legal for us to kill them, just like when we killed PKI members in the past,” the leader of the attackers proclaimed to reporters. The police stood by.
But it was over issues of religious tolerance that Yudhoyono has disappointed the most, at least among more secular Indonesians, educated women, and minorities. He gave unprecedented deference to the MUI, raising it to an almost judicial status. The decision to adopt restrictions on the proselytizing freedom of the Ahmadiyah sect in 2008, in response to the MUI’s urging of a ban, gave the signal (no doubt unintended) for repeated attacks on Ahmadiyah communities and places of worship (of which about fifty remain closed).
A 1969 regulation on the building of places of worship was tightened in 2006, giving more power to surrounding communities to veto new constructions. Since then, about 600 churches either built or under construction have been closed or demolished. Yudhoyono’s government has not enforced court orders permitting church projects to go ahead. Even a Supreme Court order allowing a congregation to enter the Yasmin church in Bogor, just outside the capital, was not enough for the national police to be ordered to protect worshippers from a local Muslim group that was blocking their access.
The forc
es of orthodoxy later moved on to the Shia community among the Muslim ummat, a minority in Indonesia, although in some eyes the traditionalist Sunni followers of NU also veer close to Shiism. Yudhoyono’s religious affairs minister suggested to displaced Ahmadiyah and Shia communities that the solution to their problems lay in converting to the mainstream. His home affairs minister praised the FPI as a potential national asset. Yudhoyono himself tended to speak more of the sentiments of the majority than of the rights and freedoms of the minorities.
Toward the end of Yudhoyono’s presidency, moves were afoot to rein in some of the democratic and constitutional reforms that had applied since he took office. When direct personal criticism cut, his circle floated the idea of reinstating the presidential lèse-majesté law struck down by the constitutional court. In 2013 his party tabled a draft amendment to the election law that would end the direct election of bupati and city mayors, in the third tier of government. Such elections were wasteful of funds, encouraged corruption, and were often accompanied by violence, the bill’s supporters argued. Instead, the executives would be appointed by a vote of the district legislature, a process that critics saw as bringing back an even murkier process and blocking the rise of independent reformist candidates. The Ministry of Home Affairs appeared to be on a collision course with the population of Aceh over the use of the former GAM flag as the province’s emblem. The drift toward splitting Papua into more provinces was unaddressed in proposals for enhanced Otsus (special autonomy) laws that were passed on to Yudhoyono’s successor.
All this added up to a presidential style that was widely seen as unduly passive even by Javanese standards, which value caution, quietness, and compromise. His critics said Yudhoyono acted “more like a referee” or “led from behind.” “We have a president, but do we have a leader?” asked the senior journalist August Parengkuan. The Aceh peace settlement might not have happened if the vice president, Jusuf Kalla, had not exceeded his authority. Reporting its talks with several of the president’s advisers in 2008, the US embassy said that the “thinking general” had a firm grasp of the issues coming before his cabinet and often spoke at length and listened to everyone in the room but would tend to conclude without issuing instructions or summing up. He was forgiving of incompetence and intent on maintaining harmony. In the Ahmadiyah decision, Yudhoyono overruled nine of his advisers and accepted the single voice of the MUI, telling his staff he needed to retain the support of conservative Muslims and to save the face of three ministers who had made public promises of some sort of decree.
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