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  To the visible anger of some Jakarta ministers, the flag was still flying defiantly in towns like Bireun in 2013, an act that would bring violent repression and jail terms for Papuans who tried the same with their Morning Star flag. But at least there was hesitation, and cooler heads were advising that a permissive approach would soon take away any emotional reward from raising the emblem.

  It was another episode in which Yudhoyono stepped back from taking a firm line in either direction. Yet the opening of Aceh, the reconstruction, and the peace agreement had put a stamp of Western approval on Yudhoyono’s presidency in his first year of office, one in which he was still basking as his permitted two terms of office drew toward their close in 2014.

  6

  Beyond Dwifungsi

  In President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian army had one of its own back in the Merdeka Palace, following a bewildering variety of civilian presidents: a mercurial scientist-engineer, a bold-thinking but erratic Islamic mullah, and a phlegmatic dynastic daughter. The five years of these presidencies had seen the military retreat from its octopus-like hold on political institutions and many elements of the economy. Would the retreat continue?

  In that 1998–2004 reformasi period, the army had given up the most resented aspects of the Dwifungsi (Dual Function) doctrine formulated by General Nasution in 1958—a “middle way” in which the military did not take charge of government but was not simply a professional fighting force. This had been encouraged by the US Army’s doctrine of “civic action” for the soldiery in weak states and then enormously distorted beyond reasonable balance under Suharto. Figures are hard to come by, but in the late 1980s about 16,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers were in kekaryaan (civilian assignment) positions. At times these military personnel were more than half the senior executives in the civilian bureaucracy and three-quarters of the provincial governors and district bupati. Others sat in the national, provincial, and district legislatures.

  Under General Wiranto, the military wisely decided not to defend Dwifungsi in the face of overwhelming public and elite support for democracy and the civilianization of politics. The army withdrew any remaining officers delegated to civilian ministries and state enterprises, and abolished the three-star position of assistant to the chief of staff for kekaryaan affairs. Around the same time, the military formally severed its ties with Golkar, telling its personnel that they now had to help secure elections in an entirely neutral way. As we have seen, the armed forces’ representation in the DPR and the MPR also fell, and ended altogether in 2004. To emphasize the army’s political neutrality, serving personnel were not even permitted individual votes, despite the removal of block representation on their behalf, a measure that continued through the 2014 elections.

  Another notable strand of reform started in 2004 with the passing of a law requiring the armed forces to divest themselves of all business activities by the end of 2009. Under the New Order, side businesses had provided the forces with most of their operating funds, since the official budget at times covered only 30 percent of their needs. Companies owned by various military foundations gained lucrative contracts from state enterprises, such as the oil company Pertamina, often with help on the inside from kekaryaan officers or—as with the army’s holding company, Tri Usaha Bhakti—control over state rights, such as forestry leases. Units leased out spare land for factories, hotels, and golf courses.

  The army’s more dubious corporate activities included the provision of security for individual businesspeople, factories, offices, and mines, which in many cases was no more than a protection racket; and then there were outright illegalities, such as gambling, prostitution, logging, smuggling, and drugs. Ostensibly, the businesses (at least the legal ones) were justified as topping up the miserable salaries and barracks of the 450,000 uniformed personnel. But it was all too evident that only droplets were trickling down after the very senior officers had taken their shares. Although the 2004 defense budget of $2.2 billion barely covered half the military’s estimated expenditure for that year, Yudhoyono was tasked with ending the extrabudgetary support by the end of his first term.

  The reform that most challenged the military, however, was one that sounded very simple when it was first proposed by Habibie in 1999: to detach the police from the armed forces command and the Ministry of Defense. The goal was to make it a standalone agency, renamed the Indonesian National Police, that would operate directly under the president.

  Initially, nothing seemed different in practice. The police numbered only 170,000 for the vast nation. Their official budget was even more meager than that of the military. The police were generally despised: they collected small on-the-spot fines with a blow of the whistle, they ignored gambling joints and brothels, they stood back from thuggery committed against strikers and protesters, they assisted with land grabs, and they made themselves available for prosecution by the rich. “Polisi tak mampu” (or “The police aren’t capable”) was the general refrain from army personnel when they were reminded that the police now had legal responsibility for internal security.

  Yet vast change started as foreign aid in the security sector switched from the army to the police. The national police began a steady expansion that was to increase numbers to 400,000 over the fifteen years after 1999. Resources were poured into training, high-tech equipment, and other areas. The police continued to be a major problem in the fight against corruption, but by the time the first major strike came from a new threat to the state—a jihadist group named Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Congregation), which operated from the myriad mosques and Koranic schools in crowded Java—the police were able to demonstrate their competence in handling it. Within a month of the first Bali bombing, in which 202 foreigners and Indonesians were killed at Kuta Beach nightspots in October 2002, the Indonesian police had tracked down and arrested one of the perpetrators. Although further bombings hit Bali, the Australian embassy, and several luxury hotels in Jakarta over the next five years, a new antiterrorism unit, named Detachment 88, steadily wound up the most dangerous Jemaah Islamiyah cells by the end of the decade.

  That unit and the lead investigators, including police generals I Made Mangku Pastika and Tito Karnavian, attained a celebrity status once assigned to the military’s fighting generals. Consequently, the stocks of the police have risen, and those of the armed forces are falling in career favor among the young.

  “Compared to my era, where military cadets and young officers were favourites for mothers-in-law to be, now as in the general case, pragmatism is the word,” says an influential retired army general, Agus Widjojo, at the Jakarta think tank he now heads, the Centre for Policy Studies and Strategic Advocacy. “We are starting to feel we are trailing in the competition to attract the best and brightest of the young generation. We are late in trying to find a system to attract them. What shall we put in place as an incentive?” The police force is now more favored by young people than the army, navy, or air force, Widjojo says. “We see that police officers are better off compared to officers of the defence services, and they see no way for defence officers to have expectation to better their welfare. Because practically the defence forces are now cut off from their interaction with society. They only train, carry out tasks and missions.”

  The Indonesian army generals watched this development with some chagrin, but they were themselves partly to blame for it. The long string of human rights abuses—from the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre up to the abduction of students and the alleged promotion of anti-Chinese rioting over 1997–98, and the use of violent militias in East Timor’s 1999 referendum—had made the Indonesian military a pariah in the West. Its officers were barred from attending staff colleges and other specialist courses, and sales of military equipment and spare parts were embargoed, grounding much of the air force.

  The remedy would have been a thorough purge and the prosecution of personnel widely known to bear responsibil
ity for the various atrocities. Instead, the response was partial and partisan in terms of internal army rivalries. The notable prosecutions were of eleven Kopassus junior officers and soldiers in the Tim Mawar case. But only some received (very light) jail terms, and they were released early. Their two commanding officers at the time—the Kostrad chief, Prabowo Subianto (who admitted “command responsibility”), and the Kopassus commander, Muchdi Purwopranjono—were dishonorably discharged and did not face court-martial. Their colonel was let off. As we shall see, the main case was the court-martial of other Kopassus members who took part in the November 1991 murder of the Papuan leader Theys Eluay, which also resulted in light sentences and pats on the back from the then army chief, Riyamizard Ryucudu.

  Kopassus itself was reorganized in June 2001. Group 4, its component most notorious for the New Order’s extrajudicial killings, and Group 5 were dissolved and replaced by a training command and a new antiterrorism force of two battalions, named Unit 81. But the 6,000 Kopassus personnel—a number that made it one of the world’s largest Special Forces units—remained largely in place. Military chiefs insisted that the visible efforts, which included regular lectures on human rights by the International Red Cross and other bodies, satisfied all the necessary reforms.

  Numerous international witnesses observed the military-sponsored campaign to intimidate the East Timorese against voting for independence in August 1999 and the deliberate killing, destruction, and forced population movement that followed. The permissive and complicit stance of the Indonesian army and police were all too apparent. Leaked intercepts showed a chain of command and control back to generals in Jakarta. Indonesia’s own National Human Rights Commission identified many of those implicated. Yet at an ad hoc human rights tribunal, established in Jakarta, only six defendants were convicted: four of them Indonesian army and police officers, and two Timorese civilians. The convictions were all overturned on appeal, except for that of the hapless last provincial governor, a Timorese named Abilio Soares. Several other figures regarded as leaders in the state-sponsored terror campaign went on to higher positions; one of them, Mahidin Simbolon, became the military commander of the Papuan region.

  The American-led “War on Terror” that began after the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda in New York and Washington, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, began to break the isolation of the Indonesian military. Jakarta became a more important friend in the Islamic world. Australia and Britain took an early lead in resuming training with and support of Kopassus. The US military was prevented from following suit, however, by legislation known as the Leahy provisions. And all these governments maintained blacklists, against which defense attachés ran the names of personnel to be involved in training and visits. It was a constant source of Indonesian complaint and diplomatic démarche when high-level officers found themselves excluded.

  The Aceh peace settlement in 2005 took the last big internal conflict out of the hands of the Indonesian military. The following year it was to hand over responsibility inside Papua to the police, along with lucrative assignments, such as protecting the Freeport mine, while its own combat soldiers there were tasked with protecting the very quiet borders. “The question now is: what does the defence force do?” asks the retired general, Agus Widjojo. “I don’t see them out in the society. I don’t see them being employed in counter-terrorism, or anything. So there is a challenge to inject the tradition and classical form of pride that [serving in] a defence force is an honour to defend the sovereignty and national integrity of the country.”

  The pathway to this dilemma can be traced back to the very start of reformasi. In 1998 Yudhoyono, Widjojo, and another army general, Agus Wirahadikusumah, were invited to Canberra by the Australian defense department. The three had been classmates at the Indonesian armed forces academy in Magelang, Central Java, graduating in 1973. As the New Order began breaking open, they had all become known as critical and reformist thinkers who were advocating a more “professional” army that would fit into a more open society.

  Apart from being too liberal, any one of the three would have met the widely perceived requirements to follow Suharto within the New Order: they were all Javanese, Muslim, and of the army, and all had formal higher education and international savvy. Wirahadikusumah had New Order lineage, being the son of one of Suharto’s trusted generals who became a vice president, while Yudhoyono had married into an even more illustrious line. His wife, Kristiani Herawati, was a daughter of the Special Forces general Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who had led the forerunners of Kopassus in the deadly campaign against the PKI in Java and Bali.

  Wirahadikusumah was the boldest in advocating a complete and immediate return to the barracks. Widjojo supported a longer-term move in the same direction. Yudhoyono had had much more intellectual engagement with Western democracies than any of his peers. Two years after topping his class at the academy, he began the first of several postings overseas for military courses and a master’s degree in business administration in the United States, alternating with service in East Timor (where no specific abuses were attached to him or his unit). Yet those who talked with the group found Yudhoyono to be the least comfortable with the idea that an Indonesian president should be open to free criticism by an uncontrolled media. “That has always been SBY,” says Widjojo, speaking of his friend’s notorious caution.

  After returning from Canberra, Yudhoyono became the headquarters general in charge of social and political affairs, renamed as the Territorial Command, which supervised all the many garrisons of the army. He stood stoically at the shoulder of General Wiranto as reports streamed in of military-sponsored violence during the East Timorese referendum. Wahid made him minister of mines in late 1999 and then coordinating minister for politics and security from August 2000 but sacked him in July 2001 when he refused to back Wahid’s desperate plan for a state of emergency to prevent his impeachment.

  As a cabinet minister under Wahid, Yudhoyono is not known to have played any role, except passively, in what turned out to be the career suicide of his classmate, friend, and coauthor, Agus Wirahadikusumah, who had been a strong internal critic of Wiranto and had supported his sacking by Wahid in January 2000. Wirahadikusumah had also irked senior colleagues with his call for an immediate end to the “territorial” role of the army, by which it stationed posts at the levels of province, the regions (or kabupaten), the subdistricts (called kecamatan), and even the villages below them, where noncommissioned officers, known as babinsa, kept an eye on the very grass roots. In some ways this system was another aspect of Dwifungsi, allowing the army to closely monitor and intervene in civil affairs. It had been strengthened by Suharto, first in order to eradicate the PKI and then to enforce tight political supervision. But it had also become an excellent way to spot openings for moneymaking, legal or illegal.

  The territorial role was one of the army’s activities that the majority of senior generals were not willing to give up. It went to the historic heart of their strategic doctrine. The military’s change of name in 1998—from the Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (ABRI, Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia) to the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI, Indonesian National Army)—was drawing a line in the sand. It connected the military directly to the nation rather than to the state and harked back to the revolutionary days of 1945–49. “The territorial function is a religion for the TNI,” says Agus Widjojo, quoting military historian Salim Said. “They perceive the territorial function as the frontline for the oneness of the TNI with the people, the frontline for social stability and intelligence gathering, and TNI thought. As long as it is not used for political purposes or business purposes, it’s just normal.”

  Yet to its military critics, the territorial role was based on the strategic premises of the 1940–70 period. The first of these was that the Indonesian air and sea forces were not strong enough to prevent a foreign enemy from lodging in its territory, nor then to defeat that e
nemy with conventional power. Instead, Indonesian soldiers would have to be ready to sustain an indefinite people’s war, in which the support and supplies of the civilian population would be critical. The second was that the TNI had to prepare for a war for hearts and minds against an enemy within domestic communities—ideological, religious, or separatist.

  Wahid had Wirahadikusumah, the son of a general who had been one of Suharto’s vice presidents, elevated to head the powerful Kostrad command in March 2000 and saw him as a future army chief. In this new role, Wirahadikusumah quickly began making waves, holding discussions on military reforms with a few likeminded officers and civilians. He also uncovered a large amount of embezzlement in Kostrad’s welfare foundation. In June a mysterious document surfaced that claimed to be the record of a meeting held by Wirahadikusumah and another general, Saurip Kadi, at their military housing in Jakarta. It contained strong criticism of their senior officers and became the pretext for sidelining the two generals from important command roles. Wirahadikusumah died suddenly in August 2001, aged forty-nine, of a suspected heart attack.

  It can only be said that Yudhoyono was one of the majority of generals who did not support the call for a radical retreat to “professionalism.” On replacing Wahid, Megawati restored Yudhoyono as coordinating minister, and his time in that role included the return to conflict in Aceh in May 2003. Leaked cables from the US embassy in Jakarta show Yudhoyono equivocating about American suggestions to delay the withdrawal of foreign monitors, part of a diplomatic effort to keep the cessation-of-hostilities agreement alive.

  When Yudhoyono became president in October 2004, many hoped he would push boldly ahead with deeper reforms in the area of political security, after the regressions under Megawati. The Aceh peace accord encouraged these hopes. His sweeping first-round victory in the 2009 presidential elections gave him an unprecedented, powerful mandate. When one looks back on his personality and record, however, it’s clear that both Indonesians and outside observers should not have expected anything other than great caution from Yudhoyono in the area of military reform.