The president’s former military colleagues, such as Agus Widjojo, say that no one should have been surprised at this. “That is SBY,” Widjojo says. Another former colleague, the retired general T. B. Silalahi, who became a presidential adviser, told the Americans in 2008 that Yudhoyono had been the “golden boy” of his military academy class, graduating as its medal winner, and had been promoted quickly and “protected from controversy throughout his career.” As a battalion commander in Timor, Yudhoyono had been kept at headquarters in Dili, and as second in command of the Jakarta garrison in 1996, he had remained disconnected from the infamous attack on Megawati’s party headquarters, Silalahi was quoted as saying. As we have seen, he steered through the turmoil of 1998 and the violence of 1999 in Timor on Wiranto’s staff without any taint being attached to him. Indeed, Silalahi claimed, Yudhoyono had supported students and “worked with moderates to ease Suharto out of power.”
Behind the Javanese reticence, some saw an individual diffidence in Yudhoyono. The son of a modest-income priyayi family in a small town in East Java, he married into the family of the illustrious General Wibowo and has often seemed more like the adoptive son of that family than the self-made career soldier that his academic and service records describe. His intellectualism and extensive foreign exposure—at American military colleges and universities, at courses in Malaysia and Europe, and in the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia—may have estranged him from his nationalist military colleagues, who were steeped in brutal domestic counterinsurgency campaigns, or he may have felt they did.
But his wariness would have been encouraged by the precarious calm of Jakarta politics when he won office and the weakness of his backing, aside from the popular mandate. His Partai Demokrat had no deep base or great sources of funding and had to get its legislation through the DPR political casino. Powerful military rivals looked on, envious and contemptuous that a “thinking general” should overtake them. They and the political party leaders had the ability to whip up demonstrations and scandals in the DPR. The example of Wahid’s impeachment was all too recent. Fears of a military takeover took a long while to recede, as the alarm over the 2006 coup in Bangkok indicated.
Although these excuses were wearing thin by the second term, some of the criticism of Yudhoyono failed to appreciate the nature of politics and leadership in a democratic system of checks and balances. The powers of the presidency had been greatly limited by the reforms of 1998–2004, and those of the parliament, the judiciary, the provinces, and the regions greatly enhanced. The role of the military as the enforcer of the president’s policies had ended. The capacity of the police to win public trust or enforce the law had not yet grown. Extremist voices and unscrupulous cabals had less to fear.
To his credit, Yudhoyono supported the work of the KPK, the anticorruption commission, and its special linked courts, even when their investigations and prosecutions struck deep into his own party over the Hambalang sports complex scandal; by 2013 they seemed to have shattered his hopes of leaving a strong PD, one able to field a successor. He also identified himself closely with the effort to preserve Indonesia’s forest cover through the REDD+ schemes, an initiative that persists, despite the many obstacles it has faced. Suggestions of special laws to protect the president from personal criticism were not taken up in legislative attempts, and Indonesia’s remarkable media freedom came to be uncontested and largely uncontrolled, except through ownership strings. In short, Yudhoyono presided over a decade of unprecedented peace and prosperity in Indonesia, and although religious minorities suffered from the tyranny of the majority in places, Yudhoyono himself embodied a new kind of educated, worldly moderation in politics and religion.
If there was one contender to replace Yudhoyono and remedy his legacy of “indecision,” it was Prabowo Subianto. That the former Kopassus commander and former son-in-law of Suharto could emerge from the darker side of the past and become a serious challenger showed the failure of the reform-era leaders—Yudhoyono in particular—to address the brutal side of the New Order, assign accountability, and draw the historic lessons.
As we have seen, Prabowo carried a huge weight of suspicion arising from many incidents during his military career. He was a ferocious and successful proponent of the vicious counterinsurgency war in East Timor from the late 1970s. In August 1983 a ceasefire between the Indonesian army and the Falantil guerrillas under José Xanana Gusmão broke down at an area called Kraras. Timorese auxiliaries suddenly turned on a unit of Indonesian combat engineers—for shooting local men and molesting a woman, according to some accounts—and killed sixteen. The army sent in a battalion, scattering the population into the bush. At the end of August, Prabowo arrived with a Kopassus task force and began operations around Kraras. In early September soldiers selected thirty-two civilians, two for each dead soldier, and executed them.
The provincial governor at the time, Mario Carrascalao, later wrote in his memoirs that the East Timor military commander, Colonel Rujito, told him such reprisals were army policy. Some accounts put Prabowo on the spot and in charge of the executions; he has not given a clear account of his activities in Timor around that time. As part of his antiguerilla activities, Prabowo fostered Timorese irregular fighters; some of them later moved to Jakarta as street criminals for political hire. One was Hercules Rozario Marshal, who became a “godfather” of extortion in the capital for decades and who set up a movement to support Gerindra, with Prabowo as head of its advisory board.
Earlier in 1983, Prabowo and his Kopassus unit prepared to arrest the then army commander, Benny Murdani, and other senior generals for an alleged plot against Suharto. More senior Kopassus officers disarmed the unit, and the defense minister, General Mohammed Jusuf, later found Prabowo’s suspicions to be wide of the truth. By then, Prabowo had married Suharto’s daughter Titiek. He was moved sideways into the Kostrad command, not returning to Kopassus until 1995, when he was given three rapid promotions ahead of his peers. In 1997–98, Kopassus personnel under his command formed a hit squad called Tim Mawar (Team Rose), which abducted and tortured nine student leaders and democracy activists.
The influence of Prabowo has also been seen in a rash of media disinformation that blamed the economic crisis on the machinations of the United States, the IMF, Jewish international financiers, and unpatriotic Sino-Indonesian tycoons. It was noted that Prabowo had been cultivating an Islamist audience through the hardline Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (Islamic Propagation Council of Indonesia) and several of his more devout military colleagues. One senior ethnic Chinese business figure, Sofyan Wanandi, has said Prabowo accused “Chinese Catholics” of trying to topple Suharto by taking their capital out of the country. Prabowo had told Wanandi he was ready “to drive all the Chinese out of the country even if that sets the economy back twenty or thirty years.”
In March 1998 Suharto promoted Prabowo to the Kostrad command, putting him in charge of most of the army troops ready for rapid action, including Kopassus. We have seen how, later in 1998, he attempted to overawe the newly installed replacement president, B. J. Habibie, the day after Suharto’s resignation; how the new administration court-martialed and jailed several of the Kopassus officers and soldiers belonging to Tim Mawar; and how a military “honor board” then expelled Prabowo from the army.
The most specific allegation against Prabowo derives from the Tim Mawar abuses. The senior-most Kopassus officer sent to court-martial and jailed over the abductions was only a major, Bambang Kristiono. He insisted it was all his initiative, done without informing his superiors. Prabowo accepted only command responsibility and claimed that, having been cashiered from the army, he had paid the penalty. His brother, the businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, even suggested that the abducted activists should be grateful for being returned alive.
As for the irregular forces Prabowo raised and unleashed in Timor, he has argued that local militias and self-defense forces were part of Indonesian mi
litary doctrine and common to any counterinsurgency campaign. “That’s what the Americans found out in Iraq,” he told one interviewer in 2009. He drew another analogy with the Iraq campaign, comparing the Tim Mawar case to the American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What was a human rights abuse for one regime was “extraordinary rendition” for another. Prabowo has scoffed at the allegations he was commencing a coup d’état, in the style of Suharto’s gradual moves against Sukarno, when he confronted Habibie in May 1998. With the thirty-four battalions of Kostrad behind him, who could have stopped him if he had wanted to seize power?
Drummed out of the army and divorced from Titiek Suharto, Prabowo spent two years in the political wilderness—appropriately, in the Biblical setting of Jordan, whose King Abdullah was an old friend from the days of their military training together in the United States. He then returned to Indonesia; his brother Hashim had restored his fortune through the sale of the Kazakhstan oilfield, and with his help Prabowo acquired a pulp and paper business from the jailed Bob Hasan and later moved into coal-mining leases, palm oil, and fisheries. His home base became a high-security ranch at Hambalang, in the foothills just outside Jakarta.
In 2004 Prabowo contested internal elections in Golkar to choose the party’s presidential candidate, coming last; his old army foe Wiranto was the winner. Prabowo decided he needed his own machine. That year he won election as chairman of the largely dormant Indonesian Farmers’ Association, his modern campaign tactics and funding overwhelming his rivals, and through the organization he connected with voters across Java, in particular. Prabowo also became leader of the association that promoted pencak silat, a form of martial arts similar to jujitsu in the Malay culture, and later of an association of traders.
In 2008 he resigned from Golkar and established Gerindra, declaring himself its candidate for president. At the 2009 elections, the party gained only 4.5 percent of the vote and twenty-six seats in the 560-member parliament, far below the threshold required to nominate Prabowo as a presidential candidate. He negotiated a written pact with Megawati Sukarnoputri: he joined her campaign as her vice presidential candidate; in return, she and her PDI-P would give him and Gerindra top billing in an alliance for the 2014 elections. The pair were trounced at the 2009 presidential election, winning 27 percent of the first-round vote, compared to Yudhoyono’s 60.8 percent.
Over the following five years, Prabowo worked hard to clean up his credentials and build grassroots support, helped by a lavish advertising campaign that he and his brother financed. Through the farmers’ association, he signed up millions of members for Gerindra; he toured Java, telling villagers how they were falling behind in Indonesia’s resources and commodities boom. He brought thousands selected as cadres for live-in training at his Hambalang ranch. All had to deposit their mobile phones and other devices and devote themselves for three or four days to mastering the Gerindra platform brochure and door-knocking techniques.
Prabowo studied the campaign of Barack Obama and became the leading user of social media among Indonesia’s politicians. He also hired a number of American political campaign managers, principally the controversial publicist and film-maker Rob Allyn, to apply more sophisticated and differentiated messaging than had been hitherto seen in the country’s politics. To educated audiences, at home and overseas, he delivered statistics-heavy speeches pointing to a future in which depleting natural resources and a growing population would meet in a great disappointment of hopes. Nearly half the money circulating in Indonesia was in Jakarta, and almost 40 percent more in other large cities. No wonder Indonesia’s Gini coefficient was showing greater inequality. Where others, such as Yudhoyono, blamed the weaknesses of government on corruption, Prabowo reversed the linkage: corruption and inefficiency derived from weak government.
One great source of weakness he saw was the proliferation of autonomous governments since 1998: where China had one autonomous body on average for each 42 million of its population and India one for each 34 million, Indonesia had one for every 484,000 people. With thirty-three provinces and 502 kabupaten and municipalities, Indonesia had created “gross inefficiencies” for itself. By the end of 2012, Prabowo pointed out, seventeen serving or former provincial governors and 138 bupati or mayors were in jail, facing trial or under investigation for corruption. Even local election campaigns were costing a thousand times the monthly salary of a bupati: how could that be recouped except by milking official funds?
Prabowo set out a “big push strategy” to ramp up food and biofuel production from new estates, to invest in more infrastructure and social services, and to “simplify and increase the efficiency of all executive, legislative and judicative institutions.” To encapsulate his vision of a prosperous and respected Indonesia, Prabowo was wont to cite the Kopassus motto, “Siapa Berani Menang”—a translation of the motto of Britain’s Special Air Services Regiment: “Who Dares Wins.” As the 2014 elections approached, opinion polls by Indonesian media organizations showed Prabowo to be among the top two or three preferences for president. A very young electorate, it seemed, had no memory of, or concern for, Prabowo’s past and liked the machismo he projected.
Human rights issues, however, continued to cast a shadow over Prabowo in elite circles and internationally. The 1998 military “honor council” had not been a trial, and he had been dismissed from the army not for the abductions but for “disobeying orders.” In 2000 Prabowo became the first person barred from entering the United States under the International Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Other governments of signatory countries feared that they might be obliged to allow prosecution over the Tim Mawar abductions, should Prabowo enter their territory.
In Indonesia, Prabowo tried to allay grievances by recruiting three of the nine acknowledged abduction and torture victims as candidates and campaign staff. But he also employed the former leader of the Tim Mawar, Major Bambang Kristiono, after he completed his jail term. Human rights organizations began questioning the fate of thirteen activists who had disappeared in 1997–98; Prabowo has denied any knowledge of them. Some suggest they may have been eliminated by the Jakarta military garrison, then under the command of Syafrie Syamsuddin (later the head of the defense department under Yudhoyono, and also persona non grata in the United States).
As much as any specific human rights cases, however, many of Prabowo’s former army colleagues and civilian contemporaries worried about his personality. To them, his 1983 attempt to arrest General Benny Murdani and the events of 1998 indicated an impulsive character prone to acting on conspiracy theories. Some were even reminded of Adolf Hitler’s use of his 1933 election gains to create a totalitarian state, suggesting that Prabowo was using populist support to recentralize power in the presidency.
The candidate himself worked to allay these fears. On the personality question, Prabowo was said to retain a professional “anger manager” on his staff. The very public conversion of his brother Hashim to an evangelical version of Christianity also sent conciliatory signals to the Chinese community and other predominantly Christian groups. Whereas other secular parties were setting up Muslim wings, Gerindra took the unusual step of starting an affiliate Christian association, with Hashim as its head. Prabowo himself vowed to get the contentious Yasmin church in Bogor built as soon as he was elected.
The brothers also made efforts to improve Prabowo’s standing in Washington, endowing a chair in Southeast Asian affairs at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, named after their father. A group called Business Executives for National Security—led by a wealthy mining executive, Stanley Weiss—promoted Prabowo as the potential Lee Kuan Yew of Indonesia, which might then emulate Singapore’s rise out of developing-country status.
In 2012 Prabowo at once showed off his political clout and created an immense obstacle for himself. The governorship of the national capital was coming up for election
. Prabowo persuaded Megawati to bring in the popular mayor of the central Java city of Solo, Joko Widodo, as her party’s candidate. Widodo would face the Golkar incumbent, Fauzi Bowo, who was notorious for his huge payments to smaller parties to win their support.
A carpenter’s son, Widodo grew up in a house with woven bamboo walls, in a squatter settlement along a river bank in Solo, from which his father also ran a lumber business. Widodo did well at state schools and gained entrance to the prestigious Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, where he gained a degree in forestry engineering. After work in forestry concessions in Aceh, he returned to Solo and started up his own furniture making business, which made products for both domestic sales and export. Widodo had been mayor of Solo since 2005. Becoming known affectionately as “Jokowi,” he had protected its ancient buildings and historical precincts, cleaned up its parks and streets, and restored it as a cultural and tourism center. The city’s image as a recent host of Islamic extremists, centered on the Ngruki pesantren, had receded. Although he belonged to the PDI-P (his father was an avid follower of Sukarno and made pilgrimages to the first president’s grave in Blitar), Widodo had managed to avoid the label of “politician.” Skinny, modest, and prone to on-the-spot inspections and public encounters (known in Javanese as blusukan), he was seen as “one of us” by the Indonesian public, and not one of the political class.
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