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  Golkar was keenest on this system, having numerous governors, bupati, mayors, and other officials—people well known in their districts—to run as candidates. An outcry from the other parties and students at this possibility forced a reversion to a mostly proportional system of representation and a reduction in the military ranks to thirty-eight seats in a DPR of 500. The eligibility rules set stiff requirements for each party to have a nationwide organization, thereby to avoid a plethora of regional parties setting up. Elections were set for June 1999, and forty-eight parties fulfilled the criteria. With voters given a ballot paper containing only party symbols, not candidate names, electioneering became a matter of linking party leader with symbol.

  But who was running against whom? It was clear that Megawati and her PDI-P were challenging the dominance of Habibie and Golkar, and that they expected to prevail. But who were her allies? Muslim parties wavered on whether Islam allowed a woman leader, especially one suspected of being a part-Balinese “Hindu.” Wahid, or “Gus Dur,” was proving especially hard for her to pin down. Never in good health, he had been felled by a massive stroke early in 1998, which had left him nearly blind and with erratic judgment. He had been Suharto’s wiliest critic and then had embraced his desperate last-minute plan to save his presidency. One moment he was Megawati’s best friend, insisting her gender was no barrier, and the next he was casting doubt over whether she was acceptable to the majority.

  The election was raucous, marked by large-scale motor cavalcades and mass rallies, but it was largely free of violence and fraud. In the result, Megawati indeed emerged with the largest vote, 33.8 percent, while her PDI rival virtually disappeared. Golkar came second with 22.3 percent, Wahid’s PKB gained 12.6 percent, the Suharto-created Muslim party, PPP, won 10.7 percent, and the PAN of Amien Rais a disappointing 7.1 percent. Megawati’s sense of entitlement to the presidency grew, but she neglected the reality that the system still required a president to win more than 50 percent of the votes in the MPR, where her party held only 185 of the 700 seats. Instead of cultivating the minor parties, she remained aloof.

  Amien saw an opportunity for a third player and began pushing an alliance of Islamic-based parties called the “Central Axis,” with Wahid as its presidential candidate. Wahid, meanwhile, kept professing that he supported Megawati for the presidency, and the leader of his PKB parliamentary block maintained that the Central Axis was “not serious” about proposing Wahid. When the MPR met, Wahid forced his own party to break a deal with the PDI-P about appointments to the powerful positions of speaker in both the MPR and the DPR. Amien Rais got the MPR chair, and Golkar’s Akbar Tanjung the parliamentary speakership. With Amien and Tanjung out of the way, Wahid could now work on an alliance with Golkar, if Habibie was not running.

  Even after the Central Axis and other parties nominated Wahid for the presidency, Megawati continued to believe that he would swing in behind her. Then the other shoe dropped. Habibie delivered his “accountability” speech (his formal report on his presidency) to the MPR, and it was rejected in a 355–322 vote. The establishment could not forgive him for “losing” East Timor. He then announced he would not be standing again. The same day, Wahid was elected president by 373 votes to Megawati’s 313 votes. She accepted an invitation to run for the position of vice president, winning a vote handsomely and immediately calling on her supporters to remain calm.

  If Habibie’s seventeen months as president had been tumultuous, the twenty-one months of Gus Dur’s presidency became increasingly wild. He showed a contemptuous attitude to Megawati, frequently making remarks to visitors about her mental capacities and several marriages. The same attitude extended to the parties that had backed his candidacy. In early 2000 he dismissed two of their most respected figures from his cabinet for alleged and unspecified “corruption,” though the finger of suspicion about financial misdealings had been pointed at Wahid himself by at least one of the ministers concerned. This was over the allocation of $1.2 billion in loans from a state bank to a struggling conglomerate whose owner had donated heavily to NU.

  In mid-2000 the DPR used its previously unexercised right of “interpellation” to call Wahid before it to explain. He reluctantly appeared, made a statement that explained little, and struck a belligerent stance, declaring that the government of Indonesia was “a presidential system” in which the president was “not accountable to the House.” He later withdrew this remark, acknowledging the DPR’s right to question the president.

  Wahid continued to travel frequently and to make startling suggestions. Some drew praise. He changed the name of Irian Jaya (in western New Guinea) to Papua, and introduced special autonomy laws. In Aceh he floated the idea of a referendum on autonomy but then hastily withdrew it, instead offering Syari’ah law in the context of wider autonomy. He proposed abolishing Suharto’s 1966 ban on the teaching of Marxism but then quickly backed away from that, too, in the face of opposition from Islamist and military circles. General Wiranto was made coordinating security minister but sacked after a report on the violence in East Timor gave him formal responsibility for it.

  Two new scandals emerged. First, it was revealed that Wahid’s masseur had received a loan of Rp 35 billion ($3.5 million) from the state logistics body, Bulog, which was charged with food price stabilization. And second, a donation of $2 million from the Sultan of Brunei had gone into Wahid’s personal funds. The cases consumed the DPR. In February 2001 it voted to accept an investigation, which concluded that Wahid had been involved in these untoward transactions, and declared him to have violated his oath of office by failing to uphold laws and indulging in KKN (korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme—corruption, collusion, nepotism).

  This was the first stage in a process that could end in a special session of the MPR and the dismissal of the president. Wahid attempted to forestall the vote by asking his senior military assistant, the coordinating security minister Lieutenant General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to declare a state of emergency and thereby dissolve parliament. The military, or at least Yudhoyono, refused.

  Wahid responded to the DPR’s resolution in March 2000, declaring that he had no knowledge of or involvement in the Bulog loan, and that the Brunei money had been a personal gift and was therefore not state funds. This was plausible—the misuse of a superior’s name is common enough in Indonesia—but the DPR was incensed by what it perceived as Wahid’s wider failings of leadership and was increasingly drawn to Megawati’s conservative approach to national security issues. It censured Wahid again.

  Finding the president’s response unsatisfactory, the DPR then summoned a special session of the MPR. Over June and July 2001, Wahid again and again suggested he would use his emergency powers, and he dismissed the reluctant Yudhoyono from the cabinet. The MPR brought forward its session, and Wahid issued his emergency decree, only to have it declared invalid by the Supreme Court. The MPR convened on July 23 and voted 591–0 to dismiss Wahid and elevate Megawati to the presidency.

  While the short presidencies of Habibie and Wahid were marked by turmoil and reform, the three years of Megawati’s presidency were characterized by inertness and complacency, although reforms already in train continued to be implemented. In her first National Day speech to the DPR, she said she had called her family together and made them give a “solemn pledge” not to give the smallest opportunity for KKN. Those in the audience might have glanced over at her husband, Taufik Kiemas, a PDI-P representative, whom the US embassy was describing in its secret cables as “notoriously corrupt.”

  Megawati also showed a fondness for the Indonesian military, despite having herself been a victim of its capacity for brutal political intervention. Back in March 1999 she had told a Singapore audience that she believed firmly in civilian supremacy, but also that “our archipelagic state, which takes the form of a unitary state, very much requires an effective and professional military.” As vice president, she had shown a much less sympathetic attitude to t
he Papuans than Wahid. “It is sad that after all this pain and struggle to be part of Indonesia, then you emotionally declare your independence,” she told a Papuan gathering in September 2000.

  Four months after Megawati became president, the leader of Papua’s main political movement, Theys Eluay, was ambushed and strangled to death after leaving a dinner at a Kopassus base. Six Kopassus soldiers were tried and given light jail sentences of twenty-four to forty-two months. Megawati’s army chief, General Ryamizard Ryacudu, whom she was to promote to armed forces chief in the dying days of her presidency, commented, “For me, they are heroes because they murdered a man who was a rebel, the leader of rebels.”

  In September 2002 she reappointed the retired major general Sutiyoso, a former Kopassus officer, as governor of Jakarta, despite his having been the Jakarta garrison commander who had organized the 1996 attack on Megawati’s own party headquarters, an incident in which five of her supporters had died and twenty-three others had been disappeared. Victims’ families were given envelopes of money and told to be quiet. Amid bitter protests that were dispersed by water cannons, her delegates in the Jakarta assembly endorsed Sutiyoso. Megawati claimed, “It was not because of me.”

  Two former Kopassus-graduated generals with shadowy reputations from the later Suharto years and the 1997–9 transition, A. M. Hendropriyono and Muchdi Purwoprandjono, became director and deputy director of the Badan Inteligen Negara (BIN, State Intelligence Agency). Their organization would cap Megawati’s term in office by orchestrating the assassination of the human rights activist Munir Said Thalib in September 2004.

  As we will see, Megawati returned to an attempt at a massive military solution to Aceh’s rebellion in May 2003. Within two years of her presidency, fourteen people had been sentenced to jail terms of up to three years under laws that made it an offense to show “deliberate disrespect” toward the president or vice president, laws adapted from the lèse-majesté codes of the Netherlands East Indies. By November 2006 she was bemoaning her endorsement of the 1999 political reforms, which she now said had fatally handicapped her presidency. Perhaps it was just as well. Her mental reversion to the populist rule of her father seemed complete.

  The Indonesian political system had indeed changed. Four sets of amendments to the 1945 constitution between 1999 and 2002 had greatly altered its balance of powers. The legislature had shown its teeth, using its interpellation powers to summon, question, rebuke, and dismiss the president. Two had fallen in the MPR in the space of just two years. The president now had to give an account of his or her policies virtually every year and was limited to a maximum of two terms, though the balance was tilted back with the commencement of direct presidential elections in 2004.

  Also that year, the military’s representation in the parliament was ceasing. The police had now been separated from the armed forces and put under civilian command. A constitutional court operated alongside the Supreme Court and showed a willingness to strike down legislation. A new judicial commission aimed to depoliticize the appointment of judges. The central bank, Bank Indonesia, had been given an institutional independence outside the cabinet. The national audit body was giving fearless reports on the bureaucratic misuse of funds.

  Perhaps most dramatically, a decentralization law enacted under Habibie that took effect in 2001 saw substantial responsibilities and revenue flows devolved to the provinces (which now numbered thirty-three) and the kabupaten (regencies) and urban municipalities (which numbered 502). All now had direct elections for their executives and legislatures. Having been a state in which the public involvement in politics was no more than a ritual, within five years Indonesia was now almost constantly engaged in electoral contests at one level or another.

  Notes

  *Endy M. Bayuni, “How Soeharto Schemed and Habibie Botched It,” The Jakarta Post, October 9, 2006.

  †R. E. Elson, “Engineering from Within: Habibie the Man and Indonesia’s Reformasi,” SAIS paper, March 2007.

  ‡B. J. Habibie, Decisive Moments (Jakarta: Ilthabi Rekatama, 2006); “Habibie’s Book of Problems,” Tempo, October 9, 2006.

  5

  Tsunami

  It came without warning, though it had long been building up deep under the ocean floor, way out at sea—an earthquake measuring a mighty 9.0 to 9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, the third biggest ever measured on a seismograph, equivalent to the energy released in a nuclear war. In Banda Aceh, a city on the northern tip of Sumatra, it brought two massive shocks and collapsed many buildings. Survivors among the 400,000 residents rushed out into the open for safety, huddling on the rippling ground and dodging falling debris.

  As some pulled bloodied bodies from the wreckage, a new panic gripped the confused people standing about. They accelerated away in cars and motorbikes or started to run. The undersea earthquake on December 26, 2004, set off by the pent-up pressure of the Indian Ocean tectonic plate against the Southeast Asian plate, sent shockwaves through the sea, causing tsunami waves on the surrounding shores. Thousands of villagers and tourists at resorts in Thailand and Sri Lanka were killed. The Indian air force station and most villages on the low-lying Nicobar Islands were swept away by the massive waves, as were cricketers on the long beach at Chennai and thatch-hut fishing villages along the Tamil coast. Moving at 800 kilometers an hour, the shockwaves took some time to reach these places.

  Aceh was too close to be given much warning, even if an alert system had been in place. Twenty minutes after the earthquake, the sea near Banda Aceh pulled back two kilometers. Then waves described by many survivors as being as high as coconut trees—about ten meters—rolled into the city, a fast-moving flow of gray-black water sweeping along cars, trees, planks, barrels, and a few desperate people perched on top.

  Banda Aceh and other populated areas along the northern and western coastlines of Indonesia’s Aceh province turned out to have suffered the worst of the disastrous tsunami, with an estimated 200,000 lives lost in just half an hour. Residents still use the term “nuclear” to describe its apocalyptic effect. Yet the tragedy also brought an opportunity for Indonesia to break with an ugly past, one that, as we shall see, it did grasp. “It was a divine knock on the heads, telling us to stop,” says Mohammed Nur Djuli, a key figure in a war that had raged for more than thirty years in Aceh.

  As it was, it took days for the scope of the devastation to reach the outside world. The province had been closed to outside observers for much of those thirty years, as the Indonesian armed forces tried to suppress a persistent separatist movement, the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM, Free Aceh Movement), to which Nur Djuli belonged.

  The military effort had intensified the year before, in May 2003, when the central government in distant Jakarta called off a faltering cessation-of-hostilities agreement with the rebels, reapplied martial law, and sent in 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers. This was preceded by a show of force that was modelled, to the best of Indonesia’s modest resources, on the George W. Bush administration’s “shock and awe” overtures in Iraq (which the Americans had invaded two months earlier), with mass parachute jumps, amphibious landings by marines, naval bombardments, and supersonic booms from fighter jets.

  Five years after the “contagion” of the Asian financial crisis had caused Suharto’s apparently unassailable political system to break apart amid a debt crisis and street protests, Jakarta had regrouped under a president from the nationalist mainstream of Java, Megawati Sukarnoputri. The first of her three husbands had been a dashing air force officer killed in a plane crash in the Papuan territory wrested from Dutch control in the closing years of her father’s presidency. She had a susceptibility to military glamour, and solutions.

  For its part, the Indonesian military was still smarting from the loss of East Timor in 1998–99. Its hardliners were determined to stop the same thing from happening in Aceh, where half the population of 4 million people had turned
out to demand a referendum on independence, like that given to the Timorese. By the military’s own admission in 2001, only 30 percent of the province’s villages were under government administration, with the rest run and taxed by GAM.

  Aside from restoring military prestige and upholding the “unitary” nature of the Indonesian republic, which had become an article of faith for Jakarta officials, vital economic resources were at stake. Soon after Suharto’s military had seized power from Sukarno in 1965–66, oil exploration leases had been sold to foreign developers in areas known since Dutch times to be sound prospects. An American company, later part of ExxonMobil, struck massive gas deposits around Lhokseumawe on the flat north coast of Aceh. As the new century opened, the highly protected petroleum enclave was still earning Jakarta about $4 billion a year.

  By late 2004, after a government campaign that was supposed to take six months and eliminate GAM as a fighting force, the Acehnese still lived under a suffocating blanket of military posts, cordons, and checkpoints, and in daily fear of arbitrary arrest, interrogation, torture, rape, retaliatory mass executions, the burning of whole villages, and disappearance. Groups of preman freely roamed military-held areas, under the guise of youth groups with patriotic names, to help intimidate the population. So-called false flag rebel groups operated under the guidance of Kopassus. Jakarta’s intelligence agency carried out bombings and killings to blacken the names of the actual separatists.