Challenges, rooms for Susilo in adressing violence

Challenges, rooms for Susilo in adressing violence

Sidney Jones,

Indonesia continues to be plagued by astonishingly diverse forms
of violence: vigilantism, communal conflict, armed insurgencies
and counter-insurgency responses, terrorism, land and resource
disputes, and shoot-outs between the army and police. That's not
counting the occasional high-profile murder of a beloved public
figure like Munir.

The challenges for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also popularly
known as SBY, are enormous. It's not as though Indonesia will
disintegrate or become dangerously unstable if these problems are
not solved.

But they could affect SBY's ability to deliver on promises of
economic growth and restore investor confidence, and over the
long term, if left to fester, they could lead to disillusionment
with Indonesian democracy, which has had such a boost with the
success of the 2004 elections.

At a more fundamental level, the basic human costs in terms of
lost lives and livelihoods should be incentive enough to get some
creative new policies into place.

But there are aspects of Indonesian violence that complicate
policy formulation.

Each conflict or pattern of violence has its own constituency.
For example, Indonesia's donors and some of its closest neighbors
see terrorism as the No. 1 security challenge, not only because
of terrorism's global reach -- the fact that a meeting in
Malaysia can lead to an operation in New York or training in
Kandahar can lead to attacks in Jakarta -- but also because
foreign civilians are often targets.

In combating terrorism, the Indonesian police are the lead
agency and have earned praise for their success in tracking down
key suspects in terrorist violence, even if some very big fish
remain at large.

But for most Indonesians, terrorism is not the main issue.
Their own lives are touched far more by crime, or by land and
resource disputes, than by bombings in Jakarta or Bali. Popular
frustration at police passivity in the face of thug violence has
led to vigilantism becoming a major problem -- and causing
hundreds more Indonesian deaths than Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) or
like-minded organizations have done.

And local police often appear as the villains in clashes over
land, as when they opened fire on farmers protesting the loss of
their land to a rubber plantation in Bulukumba, South Sulawesi in
June 2003 or when they were called in last month in Bojong, Bogor
to put down a demonstration of villagers unhappy that their land
was being used as a dump for metropolitan Jakarta's trash.

The reputation of the police may be rising in counter-terror
quarters, but it appears to be sinking in the eyes of the public,
if opinion polls are any indication.

This gulf in perceptions about which security issues matter
most has two consequences. It is relatively easy for groups
sympathetic to anti-Western violence to take control of the
public spin, and portray moves to arrest terror suspects as
persecution of Muslim activists -- especially when ill-treatment
or torture is alleged, and there appear to be some well-founded
claims.

It also makes it much more difficult for the government to
push ahead with any more energetic counter-terror program,
because it runs the risk of being accused of capitulating to
Western pressure.

The need is to bring the security concerns into better
balance. Local grievances probably deserve more attention,
together with improving police capacity at the local level and
seriously investigating allegations of police abuse.

At the same time, the Indonesian public deserves a better,
more thorough answer from the government to the question of why
it should be concerned about terrorism than it got during the
Megawati Soekarnoputri administration.

The constituency concerned about Aceh (Nanggroe Aceh
Darussalam) and Papua is very different. Despite the enormous
loss of life, particularly in Aceh, and the long duration of both
conflicts, they have remained extraordinarily localized.

What goes on at extreme ends of the archipelago doesn't seem
to have much of an impact on the middle, and the tight media
controls and restricted access only add to the sense of
remoteness.

But for the Indonesian military, unburdened by any major
external threat, separatism towers above all else as a security
concern, far higher than terrorism or communal conflict.
Separatism poses the only genuine threat to the unity of the
Indonesian state; therefore, in the views of many (but not all)
TNI officers, military force is the only possible answer.

SBY has made it clear that he doesn't share this view, but it
would be desirable to get some constructive alternatives on the
table fairly quickly -- particularly since the extension of the
civil emergency in Aceh on Nov. 18 seemed to be sending the
opposite message. The detention on corruption charges of Abdullah
Puteh, Aceh's notorious governor, in early December opens some
interesting possibilities for non-military steps: establishment
of a transition administration, improving post-emergency
governance, a new process of dialog with a much broader swath of
the Acehnese population than has hitherto been the case, justice
for the past, and renewed attention to the weaknesses of the
Special Autonomy law.

But many Acehnese are tired of talk and are beginning to think
that with the roll-over of the emergency, the ongoing media
restrictions, and the lack of transparency in accounting for the
cost of military operations over the last two years, they may be
in for more of the same.

In Papua, the mood is much more upbeat, at least in elite
circles. Despite the strange decision of the Constitutional
Court, basically saying the division of Papua was
unconstitutional, but the creation of West Irian Jaya would stand
as a fait accompli, many Papuans appear to be optimistic that SBY
will find a way to restore meaning to the idea of special
autonomy.

The key here is the creation of a single Papuan People's
Council (Majelis Rakyat Papua or MRP) that covers the entire
territory as originally proposed by the Papuan drafting committee
in August 2002 -- not one MRP per province as the Megawati
government came back with in late 2003. If SBY presides over the
emergence of a workable MRP, he will have taken an important step
toward addressing Papuan grievances. It will at least change the
atmospherics for the better and buy time to put a longer-term
strategy together.

Faced with so many different kinds of conflict and so many
different constituencies involved, SBY would have a difficult
time under the best of circumstances. Regional autonomy,
decentralization and pemekaran (administrative fragmentation) add
further layers of complexity.

But SBY also has opportunities, not to mention legitimacy,
from a direct election that his immediate predecessors lacked. To
turn those advantages to good use, he needs to have a team that
can take a broad look at the range of ongoing conflicts and
violence and ensure policy input from beyond the most vocal
vested interests involved (getting a few anthropologists and
resource economists with field expertise into the conflict areas
in question would be useful).

It is also utterly critical that no one in SBY's
administration be permitted to benefit from the corruption of
public funds designated for conflict prevention or resolution,
including funds for military operations, assistance to the
displaced, or counter-terror training. A zero-tolerance policy
here, and commitment to ensure that no agency stands above the
law, will help him immensely as he tackles the harder political
questions.

The writer is the Indonesian Project Director for the Brussels-
based International Crisis Group (ICG)