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.