His authority would face challenges from within and without. While the nation was distracted by the tense election, the new parliament had cunningly changed many of the rules concerning its membership. The DPR speakership no longer went to the party which had the largest number of seats in the customary way but would now be appointed by majority vote, meaning the PDI-P could not expect the key role for Megawati’s daughter, Puan Maharani. Corruption investigations against DPR members could be stayed indefinitely by the president, instead of the previous maximum of 30 days. A powerful audit committee was abolished, and wider authority given to DPR members to “suggest” spending on projects in their districts.
However Prabowo’s majority support in the parliamentary ranks started to fracture too. Moves began in Golkar to oust Bakrie as chairman and bring this party of deal-makers back into alignment with its former leader now returning to the vice-presidency, Jusuf Kalla. Yudhoyono’s Democrats were also moving towards the emerging new government.
Widodo’s other rival power center was Megawati. Her presidency had begun with the murder of Theys Eluay in Papua and ended with the poisoning of the human rights advocate Munir, with the return to an attempted military solution in Aceh in between. Numerous former generals, some with sinister records of political violence, remained embedded in the PDI-P, and were no doubt keen on positions of power. This group could be a brake on further military reform. As president also, Megawati had turned against the decentralization she had earlier supported (except in the divide-and-rule case of Papua).
Yet Widodo himself is a product of political devolution, and his achievements in Solo show its better side. Some provinces had become notorious for the corrupt political dynasties that emerged since the reforms—notably Banten, in the industry. But apart from Widodo’s record in Solo, which has been maintained by his former deputy mayor and now successor F. X. Hadi Rudyatmo, there are many other success stories. In the Jembrana regency, on the western side of Bali, an academic turned bupati named I Gede Winasa introduced touch-screen voting machines for local elections and biometric time clocks to keep bureaucrats at work, and extended free education and health services. In the northern Sulawesi province of Gorontalo, a Muslim region carved out of the mostly Christian province of Manado in 2001, the first governor, Fadel Mohammad, set out to run his government like a “chief executive officer,” introducing more salary incentives for officials, abolishing such perks of office as personally assigned cars, introducing information technology, and sending staff to management courses at leading universities. Alex Noerdin, who was elected governor of South Sumatra in 2008, was able to reorganize the province’s finances to extend free education through to the senior high school year.
At his Jawa Pos media group in Surabaya, proprietor Dahlan Iskan set up the Institute for Pro-Autonomy in 2001, and began evaluating all the regional governments in East Java. The newspaper continues to publish an annual ranking of their performance. Within a few years, the survey was influencing elections. In the Bojonegoro regency, a negative evaluation by the institute outweighed the endorsement of the incumbent bupati by two influential kyai (religious leaders), and he was thrown out. Local budgets used to be shrouded in secrecy; now they are made available online and dissected by the institute’s analysts.
In the Blitar regency, a network of public health clinics published a schedule of services and standards of staff behavior, an initiative copied across East Java. In Surabaya municipality, the government introduced online registration for places at public schools to avoid favoritism, with examination scores the basis for selection to the most sought-after senior high schools. The institute has extended its surveys to several other provinces in Java, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan. Rohman Budijanto, its director, admits there is a “Jakarta syndrome” that tends to deride regional autonomy, while ignoring the scandals besetting the central government (where the parliament is routinely cited as the most corrupt institution in public opinion surveys). The autonomous regional governments continue as wells of creativity in Indonesian governance, he says. “It is impossible for us to re-centralise power in Jakarta.”
The quality of performance by a region’s government is generally in inverse proportion to its natural resource wealth, it has to be said. The electoral laws also serve to maintain the Jakarta syndrome. Local political parties are banned, except in the special case of Aceh under the 2005 peace agreement. Everywhere else, parties must have a nationwide organization to run in the national elections. They must win at least 3.5 percent of the vote to gain any representation at all in the national parliament. The system so far has been weighted against the rise of local heroes outside the existing parties. Given the corruption within these parties, there is still a risk that people will become disillusioned with democracy. A new political movement requires the harnessing of a broad-based social network that is already in existence. The case of the PKS was one example. Another emerging force is that of organized urban labor, which is showing its muscle with mass strikes and demonstrations to win increases in minimum wages.
One figure gaining a national profile is Said Iqbal, president of the Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia (Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions), who has a master’s degree in engineering. The distinctive flavor of contemporary trade unionism came out one evening at his headquarters in the down-market Cililitan district on the eastern side of Jakarta. Tens of thousands of his members had swarmed into the center of the city that day, stopping all movement, to demand a wage rise. Iqbal and his colleagues broke off an interview to make their evening prayers facing Mecca. The New Order regarded independent trade unions as nascent communism; repressing them became a large part of the duty of army garrisons as factories spread in the 1980s. This repressive policy gained notoriety with the 1993 abduction, rape, and murder of the activist Marsinah after a protest at a factory in East Java. Educated, devout, and using the label pekerja (a classless term for “worker”), rather than the name buruh (laborer), once favored by the PKI, the trade unions are considering the formation of a political party. Such an Indonesian labor party would be a counterpoint to the big-business representation in Golkar and other existing parties.
As Indonesia faced the 2014 elections, the constitutional court signaled a further evolution of the country’s democracy, in the direction of openness. It had sat for ten months on its judgment in a case arguing for simultaneous elections of the president and parliament, to prevent the bargaining and extempore coalition formation that was occurring between the separate elections. The court accepted this argument, effectively abolishing the requirement for presidential candidates to have the support of 20 percent of the DPR membership or members representing 25 percent of the electorate. However, to prevent “chaos and legal uncertainty,” it deferred application of its ruling until the elections of 2019. Why the court had not published the decision promptly in March 2013, in time to be applied in 2014, remained shrouded in judicial mystique. But looking forward, it pointed to coalitions and policies being formed behind presidential candidates well ahead of elections, instead of in the final weeks of campaigning. It also strengthened the hand of Widodo, who would have the option of standing for re-election in 2019 without the support of the PDI-P or the Sukarno dynasty if his personal popularity remains high.
As the Yudhoyono decade came to its end, Indonesians were taking lessons from the failure of a democratic experiment in a nation with which they were often compared. While watching Egypt’s overthrow of a long-running military-backed dictatorship, similar in many ways to the New Order, and its return to martial law two years later amid chaos, Indonesians counted their blessings. Their military had not returned to the barracks and frontiers but had abandoned a direct role in politics. Their political parties were diverse and were required to compromise and work together. A plurality of political institutions allowed creative thinking as well as malfeasance, but both sides of the picture were exposed in a remarkably open society. Indo
nesia under SBY had not done its theoretical best, but nor was it doing badly.
14
Indonesia in the World
Nature has ordained that Indonesia, lying between two continents—the Asian mainland and Australia—and washed by the waters of two vast oceans—the Indian and the Pacific—must maintain intercourse with lands stretching in a great circle around it. From time immemorial, it has had relationships with all of them, varied as they are. Its position at the very heart of a network of communications has for centuries made the archipelago a halting place for all races and a staging base in international travel.
When in April 1953, soon after Indonesia’s independence, the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Hatta, wrote these words in his essay “Indonesia’s Foreign Policy,” published for an international audience in the journal Foreign Affairs, he was articulating an approach that would remain remarkably consistent throughout the six decades that followed. Only eight years after a global war had raged through its islands, Hatta saw Indonesia as occupying a benign geographic and diplomatic position. The American navy controlled the Pacific Ocean on one side; the British navy, the Indian Ocean on the other. Neither power had any evil intent toward the new republic. “On the contrary, they are desirous of seeing Indonesia remain independent and become prosperous,” Hatta wrote. “Are they not the very people who hold that the infiltration of Communism can be prevented only by raising the economic level of the masses?”
The two big communist powers, meanwhile, were too far away to threaten Indonesia. The new nation could therefore concentrate on its own development, without being forced to line up with either side in the Cold War. It was not neutralism: Indonesia would not ignore the great international issues of the day but would take a stance based on its own evaluation of rights and wrongs, in a foreign policy that came to be abbreviated as “free and active.” As Hatta put it: “Our Republic will rally to or support every effort within the framework of the United Nations to do away with, or at least grind off, the sharpness of the controversy between the two trends or blocs, so as to ward off as much as possible the cropping up of a large-scale conflict that may set off a third world war.”
To emphasize his determination not to be counted in any big power’s bloc but rather to seek a middle path, President Sukarno convened his famous Afro-Asian summit in Bandung in 1955, laying the ground for the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.
Many tides have flown through the archipelago since then. Hatta himself resigned a year after Bandung, in quiet protest at Sukarno’s autocratic tendencies and his partnership with Indonesia’s communist party. The United States intervened with covert support for the PRRI/Permesta rebellion. The Soviet Union supplied arms to Sukarno’s government, and the People’s Republic of China ideological support to the communists. By 1965 Sukarno was proclaiming a “Jakarta–Phnom Penh–Beijing–Pyongyang Axis”; the Americans and British were feverishly prodding the army to overthrow him and suppress the communists.
The New Order cut Indonesia off from China. But it kept diplomatic ties with Moscow, Havana, Hanoi, and Pyongyang, as well as with the Eastern European nations then under communist rule. Nor did Suharto openly embrace the United States, though he accepted its economic and limited military support. His regime was not popular in the Non-Aligned Movement. Supporters of Salvador Allende wrote “Jakarta” on walls in Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup. Some Africans felt solidarity with the Papuans; others with the Timorese, former subjects, like themselves, of the Portuguese empire. Suharto was mortified when, in 1996, the visiting South African president Nelson Mandela asked to visit the jailed Timorese guerrilla leader, José Xanana Gusmão. Yet Suharto never veered away from formal insistence on remaining nonaligned.
In 1975 the elderly Hatta was still summing up Jakarta’s foreign policy as “mendayung antara dua karang” (“rowing between two reefs”). That year, as communist forces achieved victory in the South Vietnam and Cambodia conflicts, the reaction of Suharto and other anticommunist leaders in the region was not to rush behind America’s skirts (the Nixon doctrine had already told allies in Asia to boost their own defenses before expecting any help). Instead, Suharto and the leaders of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines decided to tighten cooperation within their Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As the American position in Indochina worsened in 1971, it had already declared Southeast Asia a “zone of peace, freedom and neutrality.”
ASEAN became and continues to be the inner ring of the “great circle” of countries in Indonesia’s world. Progressively expanded to a membership of ten countries, with the inclusion of Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma), the regional association is the hub for alignment of trade, diplomatic, and social policies. In 1992 ASEAN began gradually applying a regional free-trade agreement, aimed at eliminating tariffs on all traded items originating within the group by 2015. As the largest member by population and economic size, Indonesia now sets the pace for the grouping and hosts its headquarters. Under the New Order, however, Indonesia tended to be the slowest ship in the convoy, especially on anything that another member might consider interference in domestic affairs, such as human rights standards. Postreform, Jakarta has been much more activist: for example, it urged Myanmar’s military to follow the contemporary Indonesian example rather than the Suharto-era one.
ASEAN also became the center of an emerging regional “architecture” in Asia. Indonesia headed off pressure from the former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad for a strong linkage with East Asian countries in a turn away from the West. In 2005, helped by a new leader in Malaysia, Indonesia was influential in establishing the East Asia Summit, now an annual meeting of the ten ASEAN leaders with those of Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United States, and Russia. The summit, whose member countries comprise 55 percent of the world population and 56 percent of total world gross domestic product, remains the main Asian forum for discussion of economic and security issues.
ASEAN rejects the idea of military cooperation on a regional basis, although several member states have bilateral training and exercises between their defense forces. Malaysia and Singapore belong to the Five Power Defence Arrangements, set up with Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1960s; it is still a mechanism for joint exercises, particularly in air defense. Thailand and the Philippines have defense treaties with the United States, while Singapore has less formal but close defense and intelligence relationships with the United States and Australia. Indonesia maintains a studied detachment, balancing its sources of military equipment between American, Russian, and European suppliers, and is wary of any arrangement that might be construed as a military pact.
It has a prickly relationship with Australia. Most of Indonesia’s political and military leadership experienced the humiliation of withdrawal from East Timor in 1999, leaving it to an Australian-led stabilization force, whatever their thoughts about the wisdom of the 1975–76 annexation and the subsequent occupation. In 2006 a group of Papuan independence activists crossed the Torres Strait in a small boat to claim political asylum in Australia; that set off a diplomatic crisis in which Yudhoyono recalled his ambassador from Canberra. Canberra signed a hastily drafted treaty stating its recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in Papua, but the relationship remains hostage to events in Papua that might set off anti-Jakarta protests in Australia or provoke the flight of more refugees.
Repairing the “neglected” relationship with Indonesia has become a regular refrain of incoming governments in Canberra. The new conservative government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott came to power in September 2013 declaring that its foreign policy would focus on “Jakarta, not Geneva,” and that ties with Indonesia were Australia’s “most important foreign relationship.” It turned out that this did not mean the closest or friendliest relationship, however, but simply the one that required the most work to keep ci
vil.
The 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures had embarrassed the United States in its dealings with Jakarta. In 2013 the trove of US National Security Agency material released by the whistle-blowing computer specialist Edward Snowden exposed Australian as well as American intelligence gathering in Indonesia. The leaked reports said both countries monitored local mobile telephone conversations from facilities within their embassies in Jakarta and elsewhere. A document from the Australian Signals Directorate, the electronic espionage arm of Canberra’s defense department, reported on a program in 2011 to intercept the mobile phones of Yudhoyono and his wife, as well as those of several senior ministers. Abbott declined to give an apology of any kind. He caused further offense by insisting such spying was partly to protect Indonesia itself. The backlash saw interruptions to the cattle trade and to cooperation in combatting human trafficking. The leaks emphasized to Indonesians that Australia’s “inner circle” was still based on its postwar intelligence pact with other English-speaking countries: the so-called UK-USA Agreement, or “Five Eyes” pact, between the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
When Australia was not raising hackles in Jakarta, the country most likely to offend was, oddly enough, the one most similar in language and culture. Indonesians resented the superior attitudes found among Malaysians, well ahead in average income. Reports came back of harsh treatment of Indonesian domestic workers by their Malaysian employers and the forced repatriation of millions of Indonesians working illegally in the country. The inclusion of Javanese dances in Malaysia’s cultural repertoire brought angry charges of false appropriation.
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