ABRI and democracy

In his address on Armed Forces Day, President Soeharto emphasized that the future development of the Armed Forces (ABRI) would always be realized in the larger framework of the nation's and the country's development. In that context the President said that ABRI's role in security and defense matters and in social and political affairs would still be needed in the future.

The advent of the era of information and communication has prompted an even greater acceleration in the processes of openness and democratization. On the international plane this is what has sparked demands for improvements and democratization in the United Nations, as expressed by the 10th Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Jakarta in September 1992. On the regional level, nation states, either individually, or on the basis of their group affiliations, are insisting on more democratic plans for cooperation on the basis of partnership and equality of status.

In the meantime, within each individual country, developments also require that the democratization process be assured based on the concepts and value systems that prevail. This phenomenon, which is becoming increasingly global in scale, also causes a growing interaction between various types of democracy with each nation striving to reap the greatest possible benefit from this process.

In our view it is in this context that ABRI's social-political role can act as a dynamizing force, not only to push forward and to stabilize the democratization process in all spheres of life, but to protect it from practices that could turn democracy into anarchy.

-- Suara Karya, Jakarta