Democracy wins, but danger lurks

Democracy wins, but danger lurks

Sadanand Dhume , Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Bali

At midnight on Saturday, the dance floor at the Hard Rock Cafe
in Bali was heaving. Apart from a careful pat down at the door
for guests, the scene was no different from two years ago, before
Islamist bombers killed 202 people at two nearby clubs and
quickly emptied the HRC, and the rest of the island, of tourists.

Indonesians are optimistic these days, and not merely because
Japanese salarymen and Australians in beach wear are once again
swaying to the beat of Filipino cover bands in Bali. The country
has held two remarkably peaceful elections this year and this
past week witnessed the inauguration of a new president, elected
with a strong mandate -- about 60 percent of the vote. The
orderly election has given a firm "yes" to the oft-repeated
question: Is Islam compatible with democracy? But the
compatibility of Islam with economic development remains at
issue, as does the answer to another critical query: Will Islam
be the main global influence on Indonesia?

In some ways, omens look good. New president Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono is a well-spoken former general with a doctorate in
agricultural economics. On the campaign trail, he wooed voters in
part by crooning treacly ballads. As outgoing President Megawati
Soekarnoputri's top security minister, he led the crackdown on
the terrorist group Jamaah Islamiyah.

In him, Indonesians seek strong leadership, their version of
Vladimir Putin or Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra.

Can the new president steady a ship that has been adrift since
the end of Gen. Soeharto's 32-year reign in 1998? It won't be
easy.

Yudhoyono is Indonesia's fifth president in a little over six
years. In that time, the country has gone from being one of
Asia's tiger economies -- mentioned in the same breath as Korea
or Thailand -- to a byword for ethnic conflict and corruption in
the company of Bangladesh and Nigeria. Foreign investors are
skittish. Per capita incomes hover near 1997 levels. The
relationship between the presidency and a fractured parliament
remains a work in progress.

Yet it's a longer-term issue that raises the most serious
doubts about Indonesia ever regaining its former luster. While
China, India, and Vietnam reap the benefits of global flows of
capital, technology, and managerial expertise, Indonesia must
wrestle with another trend: The globalization of political Islam.

Islam is relatively new in this part of the world. It took
root only in the 1400s, after the glories of Islamic civilization
-- Moorish Spain and pre-Mongol Baghdad -- had faded, and baely a
century before the first European gunships slipped into Southeast
Asian waters.

Over the past three decades, however, old truisms about the
world's most populous Muslim country and the resilience of its
culture have been challenged. Among the strongest global currents
shaping Indonesia have been those from the Islam of the desert.
Onion domes have replaced traditional Javanese sloping roofs on
mosques.

Headscarves are becoming a common sight on college campuses.
Some of the impetus for these changes has been domestic: Uniform
religious education enforced by the Soeharto regime after the
anti-Communist bloodbath of the 1960s, and a turn to faith by
millions seeking to cope with dislocations caused by a rapidly
modernizing economy.

At the same time, petrodollars from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
have financed mosques and preachers demanding a "purer" reading
of the faith. Rising incomes have allowed more Indonesians to
study in religious schools in the Middle East and Pakistan.

The consequences are already visible. The new speaker of
Indonesia's parliament belongs to the Prosperous Justice Party, a
highly disciplined cadre-based organization whose roots can be
traced to the banned Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. In recent
years, a demand that Indonesian Muslims follow sharia law has
resurfaced, despite having been dismissed by the country's
founding fathers at independence in 1945.

Only a tiny percentage of Indonesian Islamists espouse
violence, but that has been enough to make the last six years the
bloodiest in Indonesian history since the pogroms of the 1960s.
It's the terrorist attacks -- Bali, the Marriott hotel bombing in
2003, and the recent attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta
-- that make headlines.

Much more goes on under the international radar screen. In the
Maluku, the once fabled Spice Islands, Muslims and Christians
have clashed in a bloody civil war that has effectively
segregated the island of Ambon on religious lines. Indonesia
appears to have proved the compatibility of Islam and democracy,
but that proof is not final.

How do you respond when freedom of the press is interpreted as
the freedom to idolize Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord
Shamil Basayev? Does democracy include the right to organize in
secret cells and continue agitating for the implementation of
sharia?

The second question is even trickier. Thanks to its Islamist
movement -- and unlike its competitors in China, Vietnam, and
India -- Indonesia faces external factors beyond its control. In
short, events in Baghdad or Gaza can bring thousands to the
streets and paralyze Jakarta's central business district while
leaving Shanghai, Hanoi, or Mumbai unaffected. To make matters
more complicated, much of Indonesia's business elite is ethnic
Chinese and non-Muslim.

Moreover, the views of Islamists on a range of issues -- from
banking interest to birth control -- are at odds with what the
rest of the world has learned about economic development.

For now, it's too early to say which way Indonesia will go.
Miniskirts in the malls and beer on the supermarket shelves show
that Indonesia is light years away from becoming a Saudi Arabia.
Yet it's hard to see Indonesia's struggle with radical Islam
simply melting away in the night. Instead, as the movement
continues to gather strength, it will either change the nature of
the Indonesian state from within or force it to consume an ever
greater portion of its energies in fighting it. It may be too
early to predict a winner. It's not too early to predict the
contours of the battle.

The writer, a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far
Eastern Economic Review and The Asian Wall Street Journal, is
writing a book about Indonesia. He can be reached at
sdhume@dhume.net.