Indonesian politics after Suharto
Richard Tanter, "Indonesian politics after Suharto", Arena Journal, (new series) 11 (1998).
I. Images
Over one million devout Muslims attended the Istighosah Akbar II, a prayer meeting in Surabaya on May 30th organized by Nahdlatul Ulama. A week later several hundreds of thousands of Muslims attended another day-long NU prayer meeting in Jakarta. On July 23, NU, with 40 million members, established a new political party, Rise of the Nation (PKB).
"Pak Harto, who is he now?"
Attorney-General Soedjono, answering journalists questions as to why the state will not provide lawyers to defend former President Suharto. Five days later, President Habibie replaced Mr. Soedjono by Lt.-Gen. Muhammed Ghalib, who pledged to continue to probe corruption allegations concerning former President Suharto.
"The Board also, I should mention, commended the staff, led by Mr. Neiss, for the extraordinary work they had done during this arduous negotiation - and it is arduous when you are in Indonesia and the phone rings all night when you are trying to sleep."
Stanley Fischer, First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, May 1998.
10 Indonesian warships are to be stationed off the coast of East Timor in order to evacuate Indonesian migrants from East Timor. July 1998
"You know about Indonesia, mister? You reckon we oughta give 'em more of our money to get out of the shit they got themselves into? You tell me why we gotta do that."
US immigration official at JFK airport, June 1998.
II. The forces of Indonesian politics.
That Indonesian politics is in a transitional state - in some ways remarkably different from the 30 years of the New Order regime, in others very much unchanged - is easy to say. What is very much harder to say where it is going. What is certain is that the forces that led to the resignation of former President Suharto are still very much in play. The most useful thing to do at present, rather than attempting to predict the future, is to sketch the character of these forces that will set the limits of possibility for political actors in Indonesia in the near future.
1. The long-standing external pre-conditions of Indonesian rentier-militarization remain intact, and have acquired greater and more immediate forms of intervention.
The massive and obvious intervention in the steering of the Indonesian political economy by the International Monetary Fund since mid-1997 may be misinterpreted as simply a characteristic of a new phase of the globalization of finance and transnational governmental authority. It is certainly that, but more importantly, builds on the basic structure of post-1966 Indonesia under Suharto.
All states, even the largest have a degree of dependence on external political and economic pre-conditions. In the case of Indonesia, these were - and are now even more - fundamental. The militarization of New Order Indonesian politics would have been impossible were it not for the fact that for more than two decades the Indonesian state derived the majority of its revenues from two sources: taxes on oil and natural gas exports, and foreign aid. Both of these sources of income were purely rentier in character. Indonesia happened to be sitting on hydrocarbon resources for which foreign companies were happy to pay rent (royalties). And 30 years of massive aid from advanced capitalist countries reflects not humanitarian sympathy for the poor of Indonesia, but a felt need by these countries to pay the price necessary to secure the conditions of sustained and stable capital accumulation. This of course involved, inter alia, repression of domestic anti-systemic forces through holocaust. Foreign aid is in that sense, another form of rent received by the Indonesian state.
These huge external sources of rent made available to the Indonesian state had two important consequences that remain central, though very much contested, now. Firstly, the state was largely freed from the requirement to finance its expenditures through taxation of the citizenry. This in turn allowed the state to become radically autonomous from any social base. The path to representative (not to speak of "democratic") states in the past two hundred years rests on the requirement of the ruling bloc to effect some form of compromise with those social groups whose taxes it requires in order to maintain the conditions of system reproduction. For the past thirty years this as been obviated in Indonesia. The result was an almost unrestricted impulse to militarization.
Secondly, huge external sources of rentier-income provided the resources for a baroque fluorescence of domestic patronage politics, and the proliferation of rent seeking crony capitalism. If the immediate cause of the collapse of confidence in the Indonesian financial system was the path of corruption and collusion leading from the presidential palace, then the deeper cause was the happy system of patronage politics and ramshackle financing that flourished on the fast running current of oil and foreign aid.
Equally, it was the shift in the character of these external pre-conditions that led to Suharto's collapse. For more than three years it has been clear that international capital had become deeply disenchanted with Suharto for two reasons. The rentier gorging of the public purse by Suharto cronies reached a level where political stability was becoming threatened. Even more importantly, the clash of Suharto's promotion of his family's interests with the interests of Japanese capital (especially automobile producers) and the Clinton administration (e.g. over trade liberalization) had reached the point where Suharto had simply outlived his usefulness. When newspapers such as The Economist began to list Suharto as one of the "last surviving dictators" (along with Fidel Castro and Kim Il-sung/Kim Jong-il), it was clear that Suharto had lost the external legitimacy on which his rule was founded. Only the timing of his exit was in doubt.
In the current crisis, the primacy of the external source of legitimacy has become brutally clear. Not only is the "discipline of the markets" transmitted through currency fluctuations, but also the IMF, as the representative of an informal consortium of creditor nations and banks, holds Indonesia to its contractual policy obligations through conscious intervention. This surveillance is as unrelenting as its is minute. Officials of an IMF monitoring team, for example, meet at the end of each working day with officials of the Indonesian bank re-structuring agency (INDRA) to review progress toward conformity with the government's letter of intent to the Fund.
Of course, for the great majority of Indonesian citizens, the IMF's intervention has been almost immediately catastrophic. Prices of long-subsidized basic commodities such as cooking oil and gasoline were raised dramatically, even before the effects of the currency collapse. Unemployment, already very high (Indonesian census data lists those who work one hour a week as "employed"), is rapidly escalating to never before seen levels. Sixteen banks were closed in late 1997 at the behest of the IMF, without benefit of guarantee for depositors' funds. Concatenating business failures of the great and small mean disaster for millions of citizens.
The IMF is often viewed as a kind of all-seeing, all-knowing "super-capitalist", intervening wherever necessary to restore - or establish - the basis for sustainable capital accumulation. For the IMF, the Indonesian experience has been a disaster. The social and political consequences of its policies within Indonesia has been so severe, that it allowed the Habibie cabinet to reintroduce a number of subsidies slated for withdrawal, and acknowledged the need for a "social safety net" to tide the country over "the worst" of the transition. Contrary to its image of omniscience, the IMF badly misjudged almost every aspect of its Indonesian intervention. The Fund attempted to apply its standard operating procedure to Indonesia, and instead of standard reluctant compliance found its "client" facing catastrophic political collapse, and itself under sharp attack in the US Congress. Undoubtedly under advisement from various sections of the Clinton administration, and with the plausible excuse of the collapse of the currency, the Fund rapidly acknowledged the need for "readjustment" of its plans.
Yet, the bloodying of the IMF does not mean it will abandon its programme. On the contrary, while it has released already promised funds to a desperate Indonesian government, and has increased its own commitment further still, the IMF programme of monitoring remains firmly in place. Without doubt, the main domestic pillars of the Indonesian rentier state will be dismantled in short order, at whatever social cost. External legitimacy remains primary.
2. The apparatus of repressive legislation, surveillance and terror constructed during the Suharto era remains intact, but its employment is seriously restricted
For three decades, Suharto ruled Indonesia with a mix of patronage, exclusionary and repressive laws, terror, and a nation-wide system of surveillance directed by mainly military intelligence organizations. The more gross forms of patronage are under direct threat from IMF conditional loan requirements, and in time, the logic of deregulation of monopolies will threaten other forms of patronage politics.
To date, little of the apparatus of repression has been modified. President Suharto enthusiastically embraced the 1945 Constitution, re-introduced by President Soekarno in 1959 when he replaced the system of parliamentary democracy with that of Guided Democracy. The power inherent in the constitutional capacity of presidential law-making by decree was enhanced by electoral laws and laws regulating formal organizations that severely limited non-state forms of political mobilization, and enhanced the non-elected representation of the military and state bureaucracy in parliament.
A system of grassroots surveillance controlled by the Army and the Armed Forces Intelligence Organization [BAI] reaches into every village and urban neighbourhood. Though its effectiveness and comprehensiveness may be over-estimated at particular places and times, it provides the state, and the Armed Forces command in particular, with a powerful resource for political intervention. This surveillance network is likely to have suffered some loss of capacity as previously unlimited slush funds dry up and some informers find it politic to be at least temporarily uninformed. More importantly, such bureaucratic surveillance apparatuses depend upon clear direction from above to establish targets and priorities. While the national and armed forces political situation is confused, this capacity will be diminished.
Surveillance, however, has always been coupled with terror in Indonesia. Three types of terror were important in the Suharto era. Firstly, constitutive terror: the regime was founded on the anti-communist holocaust of 1965-66, when upwards of half a million unarmed alleged communists were murdered by the Army and its civilian allies. The fact that this still cannot be spoken of freely adds to its power. Even in the last days of Suharto, ABRI officers would revive the repressed trauma by referring to the possibility of "another 1965". Secondly, peripheral terrorselective terror at the centre: at different times, extreme violence and organized terror tactics were used against a series of particular groups at the centre of Indonesian society: real or imagined radical Islamic groups, East Timorese activists in Java, labour activists, and criminal gang leaders (the "petrus" killings).
During the turmoil of the first half of 1998, selective state terror was employed by the Armed Forces against two groups in particular. In a frenzy to discover links between activists in the streets and their alleged masters in the elite political world, a number of young activists were kidnapped and tortured (and some possibly killed) by Kopassus (Special Forces) teams in the months before the fall of Suharto. While the putative objective of the kidnappings was to obtain information, the spread of fear and suspicion in activist circles would have been equally important.
Under cover of the riots of May 14-15, days before Suharto's resignation, organized teams of agents escalated the terror of women and the Chinese population in general by systematically raping and attacking Chinese women. This mimicking of Serbian "ethnic cleansing" tactics in fact repeated the pattern of sexual and ethnic targeting employed to great effect in the holocaust of 1965-66.
With resources such as this, the apparatus of repression is still in place, and undoubtedly holds great potential for violent intervention in Indonesian politics. One of the key objectives of intelligence surveillance and intervention over the past decade has been to maintain control over labour activism that has flourished naturally as a result of export-oriented industrialization. At this point in its industrial development, Indonesia's main attractiveness as a production platform is its extremely low-cost labour. In this regard, Indonesia is competing in particular with China and to a lesser extent, with the Philippines and Vietnam. Consequently, there is a structural rationale for the maintenance of this repressive apparatus of surveillance and repression.
Having said that, however, there are clear limits on how this capacity for repression can be employed. Since Suharto's resignation, human rights activists, journalists, and religious leaders have rapidly widened the scope of what can be safely said. The Armed Forces have been into an astonishing degree of defensiveness, and have been forced to accept serious formal inquiries into the sexual terror of May 14-15 and the disappearances of the young activists. Restrictions on the formation of trade unions and political parties have been lifted, leading to a blossoming of political organizations. The Indonesian Human Rights Commission [Komhamnas] and the Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence [Kontras] have been particularly effective in utilizing existing legal capacities to press the military.
Undoubtedly at some point in the near future ABRI will wish to intervene violently in the political process once again, and it certainly has the structural resources to do so. However, the limited degree of freedom that has been seized by political activists and journalists will not be easily taken back. Moreover, while Indonesia's foreign backers enthusiastically embraced the anti-communist holocaust of 1965-66, they are much less likely to accept massive state violence today. This is, of course, not due to a conversion of the heart, so much as to a shift in their own interests, and to the growth of communication and political linkages between Indonesian political groups and those in donor countries. Just where the new waterline between repression and tolerance is drawn remains to be established by a series of daily democratic and class struggles.
3. Political players: ABRI, bureaucracy, political parties, and Islam.
Since restrictions on political parties were lifted in late May, some 38 new parties have been announced by mid-July, and more will be formed in due course. Three officially sanctioned parties from the Suharto era still exist in some form: Golkar, the United Development Party [PPP], and the Indonesian Democratic Party [PDI]. PPP, the Suharto regime's puppet Islamic party will count for little. Golkar under the direction of its newly elected chairman, State Secretary Akbar Tanjung will try to mutate into a conservative party supported by the state bureaucracy, using the remaining possibilities of patronage politics to the hilt. The new Golkar immediately signaled its direction by formally recalling Suharto's children as its parliamentary representatives. PDI, presently split into pro- and anti- Megawati Sukarnoputri wings, will re-form under Megawati's leadership, but its real electoral potential is not yet clear.
The most important of the myriad new parties is Rise of the Nation [Kebangkitan Bangsa], established by the 40-million member Nahdlatul Ulama. NU was itself a major parliamentary party in the 1950s and 1960s, mobilizing the votes of more or less traditional rural Muslims who took their religion seriously in East and Central Java in particular. NU's longstanding leader Abdurrachman Wahid pulled the organization out of party politics in the 1980s. Wahid's astute argument was that party politics, in particular under the New Order arrangements, was both pointless and corrupting. NU, he argued should return to its origins in community organization, religious and secular education. Under new conditions, the organization, with Wahid's blessing, has elected to return to party politics, with an unrivalled organizational and electoral base. Other Muslim parties are expected to be formed, in particular from the more urban and middle class oriented Muhammadiyah led by Amien Rais, but these are unlikely to rival a well-organized NU-based party.
The remaining unknown political force is ABRI, the Armed Forces of Indonesia. Before Suharto's resignation, Shiraishi Takashi, one of the most astute foreign observers of ABRI, argued that while the military had structural power, it was unable to translate that into actual political power. Intervention by the military independent of the president would have been extremely difficult, argued Shiraishi, because key senior ABRI officers were too divided in their loyalties, and there was no sign of rebellion in the middle officer ranks.
Shiraishi's conclusion holds even more today, though the explanation for the limits on the military's ability to intervene independently in circumstances short of extreme political collapse is somewhat different. The purge of Suharto's son in law Lt.-Gen. Prabowo Subianto from the command of the Strategic Reserve [Kostrad], and other command shifts has consolidated the position of Armed Forces Commander and Minister of Defence Wiranto. On the other hand, the institutionalized "dual-function" [dwi-fungsi] role of the military in political life is coming under widespread criticism. Even LIPI, the government's tame thinktank, has questioned the rationale for ABRI's non-elected bloc of votes in the MPR. Within the military itself, there have been officers critical of the corrupting consequences of dwi-fungsi.
More importantly, the coming years will be dominated by the social and political consequences of the financial crisis, in which the military's room to move successfully independently will be limited. Firstly, ABRI is itself closely associated with the rentier-capitalism that has brought the country to its knees. Secondly, foreign support for massive intervention is unlikely. Thirdly, while foreign legitimacy is primary, it is closely connected to immediate threats of domestic political instability: domestic illegitimacy above a certain point can trigger restrictions on domestic repression. Fourthly, there is at present, unlike 1965, no domestic "enemy" image against which massive violent repression could be justified, even within the military.
Whether Habibie lasts until presidential elections planned for the end of 1999 is impossible to predict at this stage. At present the military is be able to convert its structural power into a veto power of any serious candidate of whom it collectively does not approve. How long that power will last is uncertain. Much will depend on the skill of party leaders and activists. The military's interests will be best served by pointless and endless political infighting amongst political parties, providing evidence to support its long-standing rationale for power: only the military stands for a unified national interest.
4. Domestically, class and economic factors primary
Class has always been important in post-independence Indonesian politics, but its effects have been largely muffled by the complications of countervailing sources of group formation. That will now change.
Rentier-militarization, while still significant in Indonesia, is now obsolescent. High levels of foreign and domestic investment in export-oriented manufacturing and advanced services, together with US- and IMF-led intervention for systematic trade and financial liberalization, has created a very different dynamic of capital accumulation. Class politics, as the ABRI intelligence agency's concern to penetrate and disable labour has suggested for over a decade, is extremely important, if not yet paramount. Rapid industrialization in the West Java region surrounding Jakarta, and around Surabaya in East Java, has generated labour activism of a strength and depth quite different from the enclave unionization of the 1950s and 1960s that gave the PKI much of its urban strength.
One of the first acts of the Habibie cabinet was to lift restrictions on union formation. As the effects of the financial crisis deepen, labour militancy will increase, leading to more open confrontation with security forces over issues such as wages, taxes, and commodity prices and subsidies. A key question is how emerging political parties, especially, the NU-based PKB responds to such militancy. In 1965, conservative rural Islam was associated in class terms with rural landlords deeply antagonistic to the PKI. Three decades later, the situation is very different. Faced with World Bank predictions of an unemployment rate of 20% and 50 million Indonesians in poverty, a mass party with an Islamic base facing severe deprivation may, by necessity, find itself making class issues central.
The large but complexly structured urban middle class will also become politicized along fault lines deriving from positions in relation to state power (and privileged access to it), economic policy, budget issues, and civil rights.
The contradictory conditions of maintaining export-oriented industrialization under conditions of financial and political crisis will ensure that class politics remain on centre stage in Indonesia, whether openly or under the banner of religion.
5. East Timor: a key part of the solution.
The last part of the equation is the resolution of East Timor. The war in East Timor has often been seen as irrelevant to the central drama of Indonesian politics. It is now clear that this view is quite wrong. Not only is the East Timorese self-determination dependent on shifts in Jakarta, but progress in Indonesian politics is now to some degree dependent on a resolution of the Timor war.
The passing of Suharto makes clear there is no rational Indonesian interest in East Timor that cannot be reasonably negotiated. The generals who planned and benefited politically from the invasion are all dead or disgraced. ABRI careers are no longer made in Timor, and professionally minded officers harbour considerable bitterness at the waste and accountability of increasingly scarce resources. The oil and other concessions are matters for negotiation. An independent East Timor will always lie in the shadow of Indonesia.
Mainstream Indonesian newspapers are now openly discussing East Timor rationally, and at the highest levels of the Indonesian political world there is a strong awareness of the high and continuing diplomatic cost to Indonesia of what was after all, the conceit of past leaders. Abroad, there is little doubt that the US has moved a long way from its 1975 approval of the invasion: what possible US interest is being served by the war? It is clear that the US would strongly encourage any positive diplomatic development, and the IMF, despite its "purely financial" charter, likewise. On Indonesia, where the US leads, Japan will follow. Resolution of Timorese demands for self-determination and the end of the war would ease one wing of Congressional hostility to boosting IMF funding - something which the Clinton administration and the IMF badly need if they are to "save" Russia. With so much in flux in Indonesia, it is hard to be confident. But there is no doubt that, as never before, East Timor diplomacy is necessarily on the Indonesian agenda.