Demokrasi Read online

  Demokrasi

  Indonesia in the 21st Century

  Hamish McDonald

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  untuk Tukiyem, Heri,

  Yon dan Fitri

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Abbreviations

  IntroductionIndonesia Revisited

  1Nusantara

  2The Crocodile Hole

  3The New Order

  4Reformasi

  5Tsunami

  6Beyond Dwifungsi

  7Supreme Commodity

  8Capital

  9Between Mecca and the South Sea

  10Korupsi: Geckos versus Crocodiles

  11The Eastern Margin

  12The Burning Question

  13From SBY to Jokowi

  14Indonesia in the World

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  This book is intended as a quick overview of contemporary Indonesia and, in some aspects, has been streamlined for ease of reading. In most cases, Indonesian names are rendered in standard modern spellings, even when their owners prefer the older Dutch-era renditions. Notably, the tj consonant becomes c, and the oe vowel becomes u. Monetary amounts are given in the US dollar equivalent at the exchange rate of the time, though at times of wild fluctuations—such as in 1997–8—this can produce wide variations. Again for ease of reading, attribution to sources is given in the text where possible, rather than in footnotes. Where the US embassy or its officials are cited as sources, the material has been drawn from the vast cache of US diplomatic reports published by WikiLeaks in 2010–11.

  Abbreviations

  ABRIAngkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia)

  BappenasBadan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional (National Development Planning Agency)

  BINBadan Inteligen Negara (State Intelligence Agency)

  BNPTBadan Nasional Penanggulangan Terrorisme (National Counterterrorism Agency)

  BrimobBrigade Mobil (Mobile Brigade, Indonesian National Police)

  DAPDewan Adat Papua (Papua Traditional Council)

  DPRDewan Perwakilan Rakyat (People’s Representative Council)

  FPIFront Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders Front)

  GAMGerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement)

  GerindraGerakan Indonesia Raya (Great Indonesia Movement)

  GolkarPartai Golongan Karya (Party of the Functional Groups)

  IBRAIndonesian Bank Restructuring Agency

  ICMIIkatan Cendekiawan Muslim Indonesia (Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals)

  KKNKorupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme (Corruption, Collusion, Nepotism)

  KNILKoninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands Indies Army)

  KNIPKomite Nasional Indonesia Pusat (Central Indonesian National Committee)

  KNPBKomite Nasional Papua Barat (National Committee for West Papua)

  Komnas—HAMKomisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia (National Commission on Human Rights)

  KompakKomite Aksi Penanggulangan Akibat Krisis (Crisis Management/Prevention Committee)

  KopassusKomando Pasukan Khusus (Special Forces Command)

  KopkamtibKomando Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan dan Ketertiban (Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order)

  KosgoroKesatuan Organisasi Serbaguna Gotong Royong (Federation of Miscellaneous Mutual-Aid Organizations)

  KostradKomando Cadangan Strategis Angkatan Darat (Army Strategic Reserve Command)

  KPCKaltim Prima Coal

  KPKKomisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (Corruption Eradication Commission)

  MalariMalapetaka Januari (January Calamity)

  MasyumiMajelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia (Council of Indonesian Muslim Associations)

  MPRMajelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (People’s Consultative Assembly)

  MubesMusyawarah Besar (Grand Consultation)

  MUIMajelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Ulemas’ Council)

  NasakomNasionalisme, Agama, Komunisme (Nationalism, Religion, Communism)

  NHMNederlandsche Handel—Maatschappij (Netherlands Trading Company)

  NUNahdatul Ulama (Muslim Scholars’ League)

  OPECOrganization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

  OPMOrganisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement)

  OpsusOperasi Khusus (Special Operations)

  OtsusOtonomi Khusus (Special Autonomy)

  PANPartai Amanat Nasional (National Mandate Party)

  ParmusiPartai Muslimin Indonesia (Indonesian Muslim Party)

  PDPartai Demokrat (Democratic Party)

  PDI—PPartai Demokrasi Indonesia—Perjuangan (Democratic Party of Indonesia—Struggle)

  PDIPartai Demokrasi Indonesia (Indonesian Democratic Party)

  PermestaPiagam Perjuangan Semesta (Universal Struggle Charter)

  PETAPembela Tanah Air (Defenders of the Homeland)

  PKBPartai Kebangkitan Bangsa (National Awakening Party)

  PKIPartai Kommunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia)

  PKSPartai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party)

  PNDPartai Nasional Demokrat (National Democrat Party)

  PNIPartai Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Party)

  PPPPartai Persatuan Pembangunan (Development Unity Party)

  PRRIPemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (Revolutionary Government of the Indonesian Republic)

  PSIPartai Sosialis Indonesia (Socialist Party of Indonesia)

  REDD+Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation

  SBYSusilo Bambang Yudhoyono

  TAVIPTahun Vivere Pericoloso (the Year of Living Dangerously)

  TNITentara Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Army)

  VOCVereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East Indies Company)

  Introduction

  Indonesia Revisited

  “I am enchanted with these islands!” exclaims the main character in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, set in the East Indies at the start of the last century. Many other foreign visitors continue to find magic in the Indonesian archipelago, which spreads as wide as the United States along the equator in Southeast Asia.

  For this writer and others, it was a romantic place to start a career as a foreign correspondent. Though the islands had been explored, occupied, and exploited by the West for centuries, the newly emerged Indonesia was somehow outside the world’s mainstream. It had an aura of beauty, sensuality, chaos, and violence. Those who came and stayed saw the possibility of a great but gentle nation arising here; one retiring American ambassador titled his book about Indonesia The Possible Dream.

  In the late 1970s, Jakarta was a city of intermittent electricity, frequent flooding, prohibitive rents (thanks to an oil boom), limited telephones, and taciturn officials. Yet our small house, which was off an alleyway called Gang Seka
yu, was surrounded by a welcoming community. Neighbors watched over our small child. The family of the respected hajji (a returned pilgrim to Mecca) welcomed her to Muslim ceremonies and exhibitions of silat (martial arts). A housekeeper from Kediri, in East Java, became like a second mother. This woman’s hometown became my case study of grassroots politics: there I met a former military commander and a venerated kyai (an Islamic scholar), who together had wiped out the local communists a decade earlier and who were now political enemies in the highly controlled “New Order” regime.

  Indonesia had changed, old hands said. Yet it was still possible to call at the home of the president at the end of the fasting month and shake Suharto’s hand. Nonetheless, my journalistic sins mounted up in the black book kept at the Ministry of Information. After three and a half years, further visa extensions were refused. I wrote a book, Suharto’s Indonesia, which for some years became a primer on the country. A decade as persona non grata followed.

  A conciliatory foreign minister, Ali Alatas, persuaded the system to relax, and in 1989 I resumed making short visits to a rapidly changing country. My book by now was out of date. At last Suharto was pushed from power in the financial crisis of 1997–8, in an almost unbelievable repudiation of what had seemed an unbreakable system. Then, in Dili, the violent side of Indonesia emerged. Back in Jakarta, we journalists waited long into the evening at the presidential palace; near midnight, the small figure of B. J. Habibie, Suharto’s successor, announced the end of thirty-four years of occupation in East Timor. When I saw the grim faces of the army generals around him, it seemed impossible that this experiment with democracy would be allowed to continue. Yet it has.

  Fifteen years later, Jakarta is beset with protest and bold media reports. Demonstrators mock the president in front of the palace. The city is bigger: the once-empty boulevards are choked with cars and lined with high-rise offices and shopping malls. Where a motorbike was once a luxury, now millions zoom through gaps in the traffic and along footpaths. Orderly commuters pack trains to and from the nearby towns.

  There are more mosques, and their muezzin and prayers broadcast more loudly. More of the women and girls wear the hijab, either a headscarf or a cowl. A more egalitarian spirit prevails: everyone is Bapak (Mr.) or Ibu (Mrs.), rather than the graduated titles of the more hierarchical recent past. During my several months back in Jakarta, no one addressed me as Tuan (Master), a term of the feudal and colonial era that was often reserved for European men. Instead of the gaunt men from the villages who once waited for customers and slept in their rented becak (pedicabs) at street corners, there are now clusters of ojek (motorbike taxis) and their drivers: burlier, urban types who are full of swagger.

  When I went to look at my old house, I discovered that the entire neighborhood had been razed, in preparation for a large construction project. The alleyway, Gang Sekayu, had disappeared from the map. Indonesia’s own leaders were thinking bigger.

  Today, analysts are forecasting Indonesia’s rise to the top half-dozen economies by GDP within two decades, and the nation is being mentioned as another important strategic “counterweight” to the fast-rising China. But it remains a country that is hard to figure out. This, then, is a new attempt to provide a starting point for understanding.

  1

  Nusantara

  Long derided by intellectuals and critics of the Suharto presidency, Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (meaning “Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park”) is a surprisingly enduring memento of the military strongman’s rule. The theme park was one of the earliest investments of the Suharto family after the general took power in the nation; it became the special project of his wife, Tien, and was financed by their Yayasan Harapan Kita (Our Hope Foundation), a fund that channeled donations from business tycoons anxious to remain in official favor.

  Commenced in 1970, Taman Mini aimed to acquaint Indonesians with the various cultures and ethnicities of the regions of their far-flung nusantara (archipelago). Pavilions to represent the then twenty-six provinces (East Timor was added after its formal annexation in 1976) were constructed in the appropriate traditional styles. Dance, costumes, music, and handicrafts presented a picture of calm, harmonious societies inside scenic landscapes, all close and accessible enough to illustrate the motto on the national emblem, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“Unity in Diversity”).

  After some years of mounting shabbiness during which Taman Mini seemed destined to be one of the discards of the Suharto era, the theme park is now back in vigorous life. Pavilions have been added to accommodate new provinces hived off from the old. East Timor’s pavilion has been turned into a small museum chronicling its twenty-three years as part of this happy family, with few clues in the display as to why its people had opted out. A new hotel, meeting places, and a technology hall have been added to the park, along with a Disneyesque fantasy subpark. Buses bring large groups from the vast metropolis of Jakarta and the nearby regions of West Java. The park’s internal roads have miniature versions of the traffic jams that afflict the city roads outside, as the middle-class patrons show off their new vehicles. Long queues of people wait to ride around the park on an elevated monorail or cable car. Once aloft, they can look down on fellow excursionists pedaling swan-shaped boats around a lake, which has mini-islands in the same array as the archipelago.

  That Taman Mini thrives is a testament to the longevity of Suharto-era capitalism (the family foundation remains the owner, with the late president’s eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, or Tutut, in charge) and to the growing market for organized recreation among Indonesians with time and a bit of money to spend. It reflects a continuing concern in Jakarta with national integration, one that goes back to a time well before Tien Suharto thought of building a theme park. No doubt subconsciously, as the late historian Onghokham observed, her vision mirrored that of the Orientalist scholars, artists, and officials of the later Dutch administration, who dreamed up Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indies). A common theme in popular art was the landscape of high mountains (the volcanoes dormant), green jungles, vivid flowers, and ripening rice paddies, which benignly support a tranquil and harmonious village life. For Dutch officials and, subliminally, their Indonesian successors, this ideal carried a message: Roost im Ordre (Peace and Order). Their duty was to leave this world undisturbed.

  Yet violent history pushes its way onto the canvas. Echoes of the separatist rebellion that only ended in fiercely proud Aceh in 2005 can still be heard. The position of Indonesia’s two Papuan provinces in western New Guinea—which could be revisited by the United Nations, should there be some change in the international balance of power and perception—remains a deeply sensitive issue in Jakarta. When a boatload of Papuan dissidents crossed the Torres Strait and gained political asylum from an embarrassed Australian government in 2006, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono withdrew Indonesia’s ambassador from Canberra—a step not previously taken in all the years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, not even when their troops were stalking each other in the jungles of Borneo during the 1963–65 Konfrontasi episode. Hence the constant harping in speeches by Indonesia’s politicians and military chiefs on the sanctity of the “unitary state,” and the expedient homage paid by visiting foreign leaders, especially those from Australia and the South Pacific, to Indonesian sovereignty within its existing borders.

  In the sweep of history, Indonesian-ness is a comparatively recent thing, and it’s still under construction in the country’s peripheries. The very idea of Indonesia is barely a century old. But there was much history on which to build. Indonesia’s land and waters have been a wonderland for modern-era archeologists, with relics and inscriptions still being unearthed or salvaged to add to the mosaic of knowledge about the kings, warriors, queens, concubines, sailors, traders, and priests who battled and schemed in distant centuries.

  The greatest early empire may have been that called Sriwijaya, which flowered from AD 683 and decli
ned in the thirteenth century. It flourished amid a hemispheric order and trading system in which Europe was barely a peripheral extension. An empire based on control of the seas, and with its capital near present-day Palembang, Sriwijaya dominated Sumatra and the Malayan peninsula at the center of the great east-west navigation routes, which extended from China to India, and beyond to the Red Sea and Africa. The empire’s sway covered the coastal areas of the islands around the Java Sea and most of Java itself. At times, Sriwijaya might have extended its power into present-day Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The religion of its courts alternated between Hinduism and Buddhism, evidenced by the ninth-century relics of two of its dynasties located near Yogyakarta in Central Java, the Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the Hindu temple complex of Prambanan.

  Sriwijaya has been an inspiration for later peoples; for the builders of modern Indonesia, the empire’s most useful legacy was its dispersal of the Malay language around the archipelago as a lingua franca. The language was used and taught by traders in rice and textiles from Java (which was the biggest producer in Southeast Asia until the nineteenth century), in pepper from Sumatra, in gold from Borneo, in cloves and nutmeg from the Moluccan Islands, in camphor and sandalwood from Timor, and in slaves and horses from the southeastern islands.

  As Sriwijaya declined and its capital sank under river silt, a mighty Hindu empire arose in the center and east of Java, with its capital close to the present-day town of Mojokerto, inland from Surabaya along one of the two navigable rivers of any significance on the island, the Brantas. Majapahit flourished from 1293 until around 1500, reaching its apogee under its king Hayam Waruk (who reigned from 1350 to 1389) and his energetic and ambitious prime minister, Gajah Mada. The empire’s power extended to vassal states across Sumatra, Bali, Malaya, Borneo, and the eastern islands, and its diplomacy reached the Champa kingdom in what is now Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam, the south of Burma, and China. Gajah Mada is said to have sworn an oath, referring to the palapa, or meat of the young coconut, not to eat delicious spicy foods until the boundaries of his empire were secure. In modern times, the legendary ambit of Majapahit has been used to support the current territorial limits of Indonesia—and sometimes to push claims beyond them. Tellingly, when Indonesia gained its first national communications satellite, Suharto named it Palapa after Gajah Mada’s oath.