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  Even so, Indonesia’s was a fraught transition. In Singapore, the elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew gave Habibie’s presidency a couple of months. His first big test—of the army’s loyalty—came on his second day in the job.

  Overnight, he had been putting together names for his new cabinet. One place remained to be decided: the combined post of armed forces commander and defense minister. The alternatives in the very senior ranks to the incumbent, General Wiranto, included officers with backgrounds in the tainted Kopassus Special Forces and one who’d been involved in violent suppressions of protest; all the rest were political unknowns. Habibie decided to stay with Wiranto and called him at 6 a.m. to tell him.

  At 7:30 a.m. a military aide, Major General Sintong Panjaitan, came to see Habibie at his home. The Kopassus commander Major General Muchdi Purwopranjono, and a senior Kostrad officer, Major General Kivlan Zen, were outside with a letter signed by the Kostrad commander, Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto, and the retired father of the army’s “dual function” doctrine, General Abdul Haris Nasution. The aide suggested that Habibie receive the letter in person and read it, which he did at the door to his office. It advised that Prabowo be made chief of the army and that the incumbent, his close former Kopassus ally, Lieutenant General Subagyo Hadisiswoyo, be moved up to armed forces chief.

  The two generals then asked for “instructions” from the president. Habibie said, “I have read the letter.” They pressed him again. “I have read the letter,” Habibie repeated.

  “Give us instructions,” the two generals demanded.

  Habibie gave the same answer and went into his office. The tactics of Supersemar had failed this time.

  But the matter was not over. At 9 a.m., as Habibie drove to the palace on the north side of Merdeka Square, masses of troops and armored vehicles filled the streets and nearby parkland. His motorcade diverted to a side gate. Wiranto was waiting on the palace steps and took Habibie aside.

  He reported that troops from outside Jakarta, under the command of Kostrad, had moved into the capital and taken up positions, concentrating on the presidential palace and Habibie’s house. This had been done without the permission of the armed forces commander, Wiranto. Habibie ordered Wiranto to replace Prabowo as Kostrad chief and Muchdi as Kopassus commander “before sunset,” and that they recall all their forces back to base.

  Wiranto moved to carry out the orders, scheduling a formal replacement ceremony for 3:00 p.m. Shortly before that time, Prabowo arrived at the palace and asked to see Habibie. Apprehensively—Habibie knew Prabowo well from the Suharto and Islamic studies circles and was aware of his hot temper and schooling in applied violence—the president agreed.

  With Habibie’s military aides hovering on the sidelines, Prabowo walked in—without his customary sidearm, to Habibie’s relief. “This is an insult to my family and my father-in-law’s family,” Habibie recalls Prabowo declaring, in English. “You have fired me as the Kostrad commander.”

  “You are not fired; you’re being replaced,” Habibie said, explaining the reason was the unauthorized deployment of Kostrad troops in Jakarta.

  “I intended to ensure the president was safe,” said Prabowo.

  Habibie replied that that was the duty of the presidential guard, which came directly under the armed forces commander. “It is not your job,” he said.

  “What kind of president are you?” Prabowo retorted. “You are naive!” After attempting to bargain for an extension of his term, citing the reputation of the Sumitro Djojohadikusumo and Suharto families, and after trying to call Wiranto on his mobile phone, Prabowo was ushered from the room by Panjaitan, an old rival in the Kopassus hierarchy. Habibie says he hugged Prabowo in farewell and sent greetings to his father and father-in-law.‡

  The episode marked the beginning of a tacit partnership between Habibie and Wiranto. Suharto’s decades of control had created a highly obedient military machine. Officers could make money, murder and torture activists who challenged the regime, terrorize civilians via murderous paramilitaries, and massacre perceived Islamic extremists at Tanjung Priok or Lampung, but they would defer to commanders up the line. The killers among the generals were balanced with “palace” officers, who were steeped in the nuances and balances of power in Jakarta.

  Wiranto was one of these palace generals. To him, disobeying or overthrowing a constitutionally installed president was barely thinkable, although opportunities did present themselves in the first half of 1998. Prabowo denies intending to carry out a coup d’état that day, and that’s probably true. The style of the Indonesian army, as pioneered by Suharto, was the “creeping” coup. The first stage was to overawe the sitting president, and the next was to steadily gather executive power from the footing of the army command.

  With Habibie concentrating on political reform and economic rescue, Wiranto was left to manage a strategic retreat from the military’s most egregious political involvement, though it was not without violent insubordination when it came to East Timor. Prabowo, Muchdi, and others were drummed out of the military later in 1998, and eleven Kopassus officers and soldiers faced a court-martial for their involvement in the Tim Mawar (Team Rose) abduction, torture, and disappearance of student activists over 1997–98, and some were given short jail terms.

  Habibie’s ties with Suharto were already cut, as he soon discovered. The new president made several attempts to reach out to his predecessor and repair their relationship by asking for his guidance, he told US ambassador Cameron Hume in 2007. Suharto declined the approaches. Finally, after nearly three weeks, on Suharto’s birthday, June 8, Habibie called Wiranto while the defense chief was at Suharto’s house and asked to be put through. When Suharto came to the telephone, Habibie wished him a happy birthday and asked to be allowed to come and see him to hear his advice. Suharto refused and said that, for the good of the country, the two should never meet again. Habibie should focus his energies on his job; Suharto would “remember Habibie in his prayers.”

  The two never spoke again. Even a decade later, when Suharto was dying, Habibie was turned away. It was another example of Suharto’s cold, self-centered personality freezing out a trusted acolyte who showed independence and criticism. Habibie wrote that Suharto “treated me as though I never existed.”

  In fact, it was fortunate that the old general retreated into his shell, as Habibie was freer to follow both his instincts and the tide of sentiment outside parliament. A week after taking office, he appeared before the parliament, the DPR, and agreed that a special session of the MPR be convened by the end of 1998 to formulate new rules for free and fair parliamentary elections the following year, which would be followed by an MPR session to elect a new president. Habibie declared that the old rules about political parties were to go: “Anyone at all may form a political party.”

  New parties quickly formed outside the previously authorized trio of Golkar, the PPP, and the PDI—though until elections were held, they were outsiders to the halls of parliament, where Golkar members held a majority, with Habibie now the party chairman. The chairman of the modernist Islamic movement Muhammadiyah, Amin Rais, formed the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN, National Mandate Party), which pushed a liberal agenda and opened its ranks to non-Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid likewise decided against turning the NU into a political party again and formed the more widely inclusive Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB, National Awakening Party).

  Habibie made no move to remove those leaders of the PDI who had been installed through the machinations and violence of the later Suharto years. Megawati Sukarnoputri thus remained distant, and in October she defiantly called a party convention in the Bali hotel built by her father with Japanese war reparations money. It took place after mass rallies outside, attended by thousands of mostly young supporters who waved red and black flags. Inside, the thousand delegates gave Megawati full powers to appoint her own council for what became the Partai Demok
rasi Indonesia—Perjuangan (PDI-P, Democratic Party of Indonesia—Struggle). Her style of populism was relaunched. Motherly in her approach, she had none of the oratorical flair of her father, but her speeches declared the “Indonesian people” to be sovereign and implicitly asserted that she was now their mouthpiece.

  With these main parties in the van—Golkar, PDI-P, PAN, and PKB—Indonesia moved toward the elections of 1999, its first free elections since 1955, and their respective leaders—Habibie, Megawati, Amin Rais, and Wahid—emerged as leading candidates for the presidency. Apart from Habibie, in the highly compartmentalized technology sector, none had any experience in government. The latter three had spent their entire political careers testing the limits of criticism and opposition under Suharto, sometimes in favor and sometimes not, receiving at different times blandishments, threats, and repression. Uncertainly, in alliances and rivalries that varied from day to day, they pushed their ambitions in a political theater where many of the screens and gags of the previous three decades were suddenly removed.

  In his first month, Habibie revoked the 1984 decree allowing the Ministry of Information to cancel the publishing licenses of newspapers and magazines and lightened the obligation for private television networks to carry government news bulletins. He also revoked the draconian 1963 antisubversion law that had been used by Suharto’s government in its last years as a catch-all weapon against critics, such as the trade unionist Muchtar Pakpahan and the Islamic liberal member of parliament Sri Bintang Pamungkas. Although powers to suspend publications and ban books remained, the changes removed the threat of immediate censorship and closure, which freed up the media’s coverage of politics.

  Habibie also ordered the release of many political figures. They included Sukarno’s former foreign minister Subandrio and the 1965 coup plotter Colonel Abdul Latief, and both elderly figures emerged to fill in some details of those events for an avid media audience. Three months into his presidency, Habibie also reached out to the shattered and fearful ethnic Chinese minority, banning the use of the distinction between pribumi (indigenous) and non-pribumi. Later steps authorized the practice of Taoism, allowed the use of Chinese writing, and eased the burdensome proof-of-citizenship requirements.

  Although in Jakarta there was excitement and optimism among the educated elite, elsewhere on the archipelago long-suppressed ethnic and religious antagonisms were bursting out. In Kalimantan, the Dayak headhunters were again slaughtering hundreds of transmigrants from Madura. Across Java, local Islamic groups attacked and destroyed several Christian churches and places of allegedly sinful behavior. Mobs killed scores of individuals during a rumor-fed panic about black-clad ninja killers carrying out assassinations of dukun (mystical practitioners and faith healers). Crowds of supporters of Amien Rais and Wahid clashed at political meetings in East Java.

  In Java and its cities, new groups of fundamentalist Muslims emerged, often dressed in Arabic-style garments. One was the Front Pembela Islam (FPI, Islamic Defenders Front), which had been set up by an Indonesian of Yemeni descent, Habib Muhammad Rizieq Syihab. It specialized in preman-style attacks on minority places of worship, on bars selling alcohol, and on demonstrations for religious tolerance. Another was the Laskar Jihad (Soldiers of Holy War), led by another from the Hadramaut community descended from migrants from that Yemeni region, Ja’far Umar Thalib, a former volunteer fighter in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. When clashes broke out in two places where Christian and Muslim numbers were closely balanced, Ambon and the central Sulawesi region of Poso, thousands of Laskar Jihad volunteers boarded interisland ferries to join the fight. By early 1999 both places were in a state of civil war, with thousands killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes.

  In Papua—still officially known as “Irian Jaya”—a crowd of indigenous people in Biak raised the “Morning Star” flag of the banned independence movement. After calling in reinforcements, the army and police attacked and killed scores of protesters. Dozens of survivors were taken out to sea by the navy and dumped overboard to drown.

  East Timor had been slipping out of control since army troops had fired on a crowd commemorating the death of an independence activist at Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991, with scores killed and dozens “disappeared.” The capture the next year of the guerrilla leader José Xanana Gusmão, and his subsequent twenty-year jail sentence, installed him as a new symbol of resistance.

  A new generation of youthful activists tested the limits of expression. The arrival of the Internet, mobile phones, and smuggled satellite telephones helped them get their stories out. The once-divided Timorese exiles formed a new political front and began more effectively putting the case against Indonesian rule. Prabowo and other officers from the Kopassus side of the military responded by recruiting and arming militias with fanciful patriotic names, which were then ordered to seek out and attack independence supporters. Ali Alatas, foreign minister for the last eleven years of the Suharto government, would later say that Santa Cruz was the “turning point” at which international support for Jakarta’s rule in Timor started to wane.

  Within the ICMI, the Islamic intellectuals’ group founded by Habibie, the position of East Timor had been debated, says Adi Sasono, a member whom Habibie made his minister for cooperatives and small business. They concluded that East Timor was not an intrinsic part of Indonesia, having been outside the successor state to the Netherlands East Indies that was declared in 1945, and had only been incorporated as a result of Cold War pressures from the United States and Australia. It remained a “high-cost” burden for Jakarta, with the government constantly on the defensive over human rights abuses.

  Through the remainder of 1998, this thinking seeped into the Habibie government’s exchanges with foreign governments. Australia’s government, under Prime Minister John Howard, became particularly alarmed at the possibility of Indonesia suddenly exiting East Timor, says Sasono. “They were saying: ‘Please do not leave in a hurry. It will be an Australian burden.’”

  In December 1998 Howard sent Habibie a letter, suggesting that Indonesia offer the Timorese a period of political autonomy for a decade or more, followed by a referendum on independence. This was based on the model used by France in its Pacific territory of New Caledonia. The proposal did not appeal: aside from the invidious comparison with a European colonial power, it offered Jakarta a long and expensive cultivation of the Timorese with the high probability of a slap in the face anyway.

  Habibie decided to use Australia’s switch away from outright support for Indonesian jurisdiction of East Timor as a reason to cut the territory loose. Indonesia had been in long and inconclusive talks with Portugal and the United Nations about an internationally recognized act of self-determination in Lisbon’s former colony. Now Jakarta resolved to agree to such an act. Sasono recalls long and agonized discussions in the cabinet, with the military arguing that the sacrifice of 2,100 soldiers and police, plus 1,500 Timorese auxiliaries, should not be thought of as wasted. “Will we add more?” Sasono recalls Habibie responding. The decision to hold a referendum in 1999 was announced at the end of January that year by Habibie’s information minister, Lieutenant General Yunus Yosfiah (who, coincidentally, was a former Kopassus soldier who had fought in Timor as a member of the original covert cross border attacks in late 1975).

  The events of 1998–99 in Indonesia’s regions of conflict showed the ambiguous nature of the military’s bargain with Habibie, and Wiranto’s ambivalence. On the one hand, the armed forces supported the constitutional rule of the Habibie presidency, notably by abstaining from a coup d’état and by suppressing direct attempts by military figures, such as Prabowo, to overawe the civilian leadership. On the other hand, army elements were arguing that they should continue applying forceful solutions to conflicts. Thus, Wiranto announced troop drawdowns in both Timor and Aceh in August 1998, only to have it revealed that the “withdrawn” units were secretly deploye
d elsewhere in the two regions. Likewise, the formation and dispatch of Laskar Jihad groups to Ambon and Poso received assistance from local military commands in Java, and certainly they were not impeded from boarding ships in Surabaya en masse to sail to the conflict zones.

  In East Timor, preparations for the August 30, 1999 referendum under UN supervision proceeded, with the Indonesian army simultaneously “guaranteeing” security and yet standing back as militia groups brazenly carried out murderous attacks. It emerged that a network of mostly Kopassus officers, directed at the top by Lieutenant General Feisal Tanjung (from the normally weak position of coordinating minister for politics and security), was running this campaign of intimidation. In the end, it failed: 78.5 percent of the population of East Timor voted for independence.

  In a final, disgraceful exercise, the military supervised the sacking and burning of Dili and other towns. With logistical assistance provided by the minister for transmigration, A. M. Hendropriyono (another ex-Kopassus lieutenant general), vast numbers of the local population were forced across the border into West Timor, in an effort to show that the Timorese were voting with their feet for Indonesia and that the UN-supervised ballot was therefore fraudulent. On September 12 Habibie agreed to let an Australian-led force take over security in East Timor under a UN mandate.

  While this mayhem continued, the form of a new and more democratic Indonesia was taking shape. Initially, Home Ministry officials proposed that the parliament (the DPR) have 495 elected members: 420 from single-member electorates and seventy-five chosen by proportional representation (with fifty-five of those appointed from the armed forces). A further eighty-one regional delegates and sixty-nine group delegates would join them to form the wider legislature that would appoint the president, the MPR. The single-member system had the advantage of connecting voters with their representatives, rather than letting parties choose their parliamentary numbers, often after murky payments.