Berets and pens: Civil-military ties

Berets and pens: Civil-military ties

This is the first of two articles by Southeast Asian historian
Hermawan Sulistyo, Ph.D, the executive director of the Research
Institute for Democracy and Peace in Jakarta.

JAKARTA (JP): Many developing countries emerging from
decolonization inherited various structural legacies from their
colonial masters. One is the subservience of the military, whose
primary role was seen as defending the country against external
aggression, to the civil authorities.

In Southeast Asia, a political tug-of-war is evident between
the military and civil authorities. Newly independent Southeast
Asian states -- Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam,
the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei and Thailand (although
Thailand is often excluded from this list of newly born state,
despite the fact that it also experienced the Japanese
interregnum) -- inherited similar features of civil-military
relations.

Southeast Asia provides a good and relevant intellectual
landscape, cases as well, to review the relationship between the
two sociological categories of classes.

Yet different historical roots of civil-military
relationships, the formation of respective armed forces,
direction of political processes and economic, social and
political contexts, all contributed to different patterns of
relationships.

History also shows that one among many parameters that can be
adopted to measure the nature of civil-military ties is the
degree of military involvement in governance in particular and in
politics in general.

Theoretically, the military's presence in politics has its
raison d'etre as a means of security and defense to counter,
control and overcome a critical situation produced by parties
threatening the existence of the state -- its sovereignty,
territorial unity and the nation's living values -- thus writes
military thinker Hasnan Habib. But disputes emerge over the
criteria of threats and the quality of military involvement in
politics.

The armed forces by definition reserves the right to use
coercive measures with their guns, which means they already
posses a strong source of political power.

Adding another source of power would only strengthen their
power; and since "power tends to corrupt" an armed forces
controlling more than one source of power would also tend to
become corrupt.

Perhaps it is only Thailand that had pre-World War II
experience in the difficulty in starting civil-military
relations. The military launched a coup in 1932 but it lost the
opportunity to seize absolute power and full control of the
state. Although the period between the coup and the coming of
World War II saw a significant role played by the Thai military,
the "berets" were not the only player in the political arena.

Traditional norms and values, particularly those concerning
the Theravada belief in the religiously symbolic role of the
king, partly contributed to the Thai military's position in
politics. No coup has ever succeeded in Thailand unless coup
supporters had the blessing of the king.

Southeast Asian countries were armed, for the first time in
their histories, by the Japanese during its short interregnum
period from 1942 to 1945. Struggles for independence led Vietnam
and Indonesia to take different paths to forming their states,
particularly the formation of their respective armed forces.

The Philippines, which gained independence from the United
States in 1946, inherited its colonial master's tradition of
placing the military under civil supremacy.

Myanmar received its independence from the Britons with a
similar tradition. But through a turbulent yet "smooth and
forceful" transition of power between 1959 and 1962, the civilian
leaders, led by the late U Nu, were ousted permanently from
politics.

A two-year political struggle between civilian leaders and
military officers did not yield Gen. Ne Win's promise of a
Turkish-style temporary military involvement in civilian affairs.

The former Cochin-China areas -- Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos --
followed different roads. The area remained turbulent until the
mid-1970s, mainly due to ideological conflicts. Situated as
"buffer zones" in the prolonged Vietnam war, Cambodia and Laos
established Westernized armed forces: small, elitist, ineffective
and corrupt.

Postwar Cambodia and Laos, however, show the transformation of
military leaders into effective civilian leaders -- Prime
Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia is one such example.

Vietnam, by contrast, developed a military posture similar to
Indonesia: a people's army, guerrilla-type and rather original in
its doctrine and strategies.

An independent Vietnam is also transforming its nature of
armed struggle into politics; military leaders are becoming
civilian leaders.

Meanwhile, Malaysia and Singapore did not experience the
turbulence of its neighbors. British traditions were kept alive,
making the two countries -- and later also Brunei -- take a
different path than Myanmar.

Contemporary Southeast Asia, from the mid-1970s to the
present, saw more established patterns of military involvement in
politics, reflecting the nature and characteristics of civil-
military relationships.

The Philippines, Singapore and Brunei clearly place their
armed forces under civil authority, while other countries,
particularly Myanmar and Indonesia under Soeharto, reluctantly
provide room for the military in civilian positions. The
remaining Southeast Asian countries move between these two types
of civil-military relationships.

Of all the countries, Indonesia is a special case. Five days
after the new republic was proclaimed on Aug. 22, 1945, the first
armed forces was set up by the government. It was called the
People's Security Body (BKR).

The central administration of the BKR was placed under the
Central Indonesian National Committee, and under the regional
committees at the provincial level.

This historical fact, unfortunately, did not provide
precedence for civil supremacy over military institutions.
Instead, historical facts became "historical rights" for the
military's social and political role known as dwifungsi, or dual
function.