For Indonesians, the waiting game continues

For Indonesians, the waiting game continues

By Yenni Djahidin

WASHINGTON (JP): It's hot and humid in Washington, and this is
especially felt sitting outside a Starbuck's coffee shop on a
busy downtown street. The author of A Nation in Waiting, a best-
selling book on Indonesian politics sits sipping his coffee.

Adam Schwarz says he is now more of a business consultant than
a journalist. He also teaches at two prestigious universities,
John Hopkins and Georgetown.

During the interview with The Jakarta Post, Schwarz is wary,
perhaps afraid the interviewer would misquote his remarks. He
talked slowly so he could be heard clearly over the noise from
the street.

Now living in Washington with his wife, Schwarz visited
Indonesia last month to observe the general election.

He talks about the impressions he has and his current work:

Question: What are you doing now?

Answer: I am doing a couple of things. I am teaching at the School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins and at
Georgetown University. I'm also a consultant to businesses active
in southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia, looking to expand or
find new joint venture partners or having to deal with
environmental issues or labor issues or governmental issues.

Q: Are you still writing?

A: I am just in the process of completing an update to my 1994
book, A Nation in Waiting, and I have just published a book,
which I co-edited, called The Politics of Post-Soeharto
Indonesia, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Q: Can you tell me about the book?

A: That book came out of a series of seminars that I organized at
the Council on Foreign Relations, looking at different aspects of
Indonesian policy. The meetings took place in just a few months
just prior to Soeharto's resignation. And the papers were then
updated after Soeharto resigned to try to take a relatively quick
look at the some of the important issues that were going to crop
up in politics, in the economy, with regard to Islam just after
Soeharto resigned.

Q: Tell me about your impressions of the elections during your
recent visit to Indonesia...

A: Like a lot of the events and developments since Soeharto
resigned, there is both good news and bad news in the election.

The good news first. Let's start with the basics: The
elections happened. Almost exactly a year after Soeharto
resigned, genuine, relatively free and fair elections took place,
which is a major undertaking in a country the size of Indonesia
and a country that hasn't had much practice in organizing
elections. The election campaign was enthusiastic and relatively
violence-free. The turnout in most provinces and most places was
quite high. So in all those respects, it's a step forward.

There are obviously concerns about the slow vote counts, and
there are obviously concerns about the reported irregularities
and accusations of vote fraud, and there are concerns about the
political process more generally in terms of whether the election
results as seen in the parliamentary elections will be fairly
reflected in the MPR in November. A question many people asked is
whether the popular will, as reflected in the parliamentary
elections, will be upheld in the presidential election in a few
months time.

Q: With regards to the title of your book A Nation in Waiting,
what exactly is Indonesia waiting for now?

A: I suppose we have to say it's waiting for different things.
When I published the book originally, what I was referring to
with the title was basically two-fold. It was in one sense,
waiting for Soeharto to leave power, and the second meaning was
waiting to see what sort of country Indonesia would become once
Soeharto had left power and once Soeharto's strict rules on
public discussion, on public debate and strict rules on political
activity were removed. So, in that sense, obviously that waiting
is now over. Soeharto is gone.

In the second sense, the waiting goes on. It's still not very
clear how Indonesian politics will evolve. We still don't have
clear answers to some of the basic questions about Indonesia and
Indonesian politics. We are still waiting to see what sort of
relationship will develop between Jakarta and the outside
provinces. We're still waiting to see what role Islam will play
in Indonesian politics and how that would affect other religions.
We're still waiting to see how strong a factor ethnic politics
will become. We're still waiting to see what's going to happen
with East Timor, for example. So, in that sense, in the second
sense for which I had intended the title originally, I think the
title still holds up. I think the title is still relevant.

Q: When you wrote the book, could you have foreseen these
changes?

A: It was published five years ago. Nobody can predict the
future, but what I tried to lay out in my book was where the
pressures were likely to rise. The aspects of politics and of
policy that were unlikely to be sustainable. For example, it was
already quite evident in the early '90s that corruption was going
to become an increasingly problematic issue for Soeharto because
it was clear that his children were only going to become more
active in business. And it was pretty clear that Soeharto was not
going to act to put a limit on that. It was pretty clear that
there was going to be an increasing conflict between Soeharto's
style of politics and the demands of economic liberalization. And
we could see that conflict emerge in disputes over things like
the national car project. In the Busang gold mine fraud there was
a contradiction in the way policy was being run domestically and
the commitments Indonesia had made internationally.

Nobody could have predicted precisely how that conflict was
going to erupt into a crisis, but it was clear that the overall
approach that Soeharto was taking was not sustainable.

I'll give you one other example: It was clear by the early
'90s that given the shift between the public and the private
sector, in terms of economic output and the financing of economic
output, that it was unsustainable. That the poor degree of
financial supervision was a recipe for disaster. That the
inability of state bankers, of state banks, for example, to
impose strict lending criteria, which was inevitably going to
result in large non-performing loans simply because the people
who weren't paying the loans back had political protection.

Q: Why did the changes take as long as they did?

A: What I tried to describe in my book were the areas of
vulnerability for Indonesian politics, the contradictions in
economic policy, the prevalence of corruption, the tensions
between the Islamic community, the tensions over the distribution
of wealth, particularly as it concerned the ethnic Chinese
minority. Those are all in the category of preconditions. What
was required to turn those preconditions into a crisis situation
for Soeharto was some sort of trigger that would weaken his
political standing. That trigger came in the Asian financial
crisis. The one area where Soeharto had not been vulnerable
previously was in macroeconomic growth, with the performance of
the overall economy. Once that began to falter, once the macro-
economy began to perform poorly, then Soeharto had lost his main
area of legitimacy as president. And then because of all these
other preconditions, he found himself with very little to fall
back on.

Q: Let's talk a little bit about your update of the book...

A: The book will be re-issued in a second edition in August. The
title is A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia's Search for Stability.
It contains two new chapters. The first basically completes the
story of the New Order. It picks up the story about where the
first edition left off, which is to say in early 1994. It carries
through, looking at politics, economic developments, foreign
policy, military politics, religious politics, right up into the
beginning of the financial crisis. It continues with a lengthy
discussion of Soeharto's response to the financial crisis. And
then a long account of Soeharto's last few weeks in power.

The second is a discussion of the first ten months of post-
Soeharto Indonesia. Again it goes back to the second idea of what
Indonesia waiting for and it asks the question: What possible
ways could Indonesia change now that Soeharto has left power?

How is the military role going to change? Will there be an
emergence of Islamic politics? What are likely to be the new
economic debates? To what extent are the forces of reform going
to be able to push through an agenda for reform, given that they
are up against powerful forces that want to maintain the old
status quo?

Q: Where do you think Indonesia goes from here?

A: I am cautiously optimistic about Indonesia's future. Every
time we discuss predictions for the future, we always have to
keep in mind what are our expectations. And my expectations are
that Indonesia is going to have a very difficult time over the
medium-term. Indonesia is up against two enormous challenges:
rebuilding its economy and rebuilding its political institutions,
which have been badly eroded over the last three or four decades.
To have to tackle both of those challenges at the same time is an
enormous, daunting task. Mistakes are going to be made, there are
going to be setbacks, there are going to be disappointments,
there are going to be unfulfilled expectations. I think you would
be unrealistic to expect that simply having a democratic election
is going to solve the problems. It is the start to solving the
problems. It is a necessary prerequisite to solving the problems.
But it is no more than that. There's a long period of problem-
solving still to go.

And I think maybe there is a historical analogy to be made. In
the early '50s, just after independence was secured, there was a
sense that many Indonesians felt that, now independence was
secured, the problems were over. There would be freedom, there
would be prosperity, there would be end to exploitation. But that
was not the case and those expectations were not met.

Independence was the beginning of a new way of life. It was an
opportunity to enjoy freedom and to enjoy prosperity, to return
the sovereignty to the people. Much like the elections of last
month provide an opportunity for a new way of life, for a
different sort of government, a more representative government, a
more accountable government, a more just government. But it's
only that, an opportunity. And it's now up to Indonesians to
seize that opportunity and to use this to bring about those
results. But there is a great deal of hard work to be done.

Q: You also talk about the role of the military in your book...

A: It basically discusses the various dilemmas facing the
military. The military has been accustomed to a certain political
role, a certain political influence, a preeminent role and
influence, and now finds itself in a situation where not only is
it losing many areas of influence, it's finding its past
performance coming under a great deal of criticism. And so, one
of the dilemma's facing the military is, "How do we come to grips
with or come clean with problems of the past without so
discrediting the military that it forfeits any claim to having a
political role in the future?".

Another dilemma for the military is more on the personnel or
human resources level. How do you sharply contract the number of
military personal seconded to civilian jobs without adding to
legal and order problems? When the military doesn't have the jobs
for them, they can't afford these people, and the private sector
doesn't have the jobs to absorb these people, what's going to
happen to them?

Q: Do you have any prediction of who's going to be the next
president?

A: No. I think if Indonesia needs anything right now the most,
it is political stability. Indonesia has had political
uncertainty not only for the last year but really since the
beginning of the financial crisis. Some people would say that
since mid-1996 when Ibu Tien died and when Megawati
(Soekarnoputri) was thrown out of PDI (Indonesian Democratic
Party). The question of political uncertainty has come back to
the fore in the issue of succession and how the process would
work. The good news is that the process has started in the sense
that Soeharto has stepped down and Indonesians are now beginning
to answer these questions. But the answers are not yet in. We
still don't have a new president and therefore it's difficult to
peer into the future without any sort of confidence about what
sort of policy Indonesia will have, about what sort of
relationship is going to exist with the outer islands and all of
the other issues. Until we have answers to those questions, the
economy is not really going to recover in a robust way because
people don't yet have the confidence to put in long-term capital.

So, the important thing is that we now get a government that
can claim a popular and legitimate mandate from the people. Now,
the DPR (House of Representatives) elections of early June was a
start in that process. The rules of Indonesian politics are
there's going to be this five months' gap and second electoral
body to chose the president, that is the MPR (People's
Consultative assembly). And that presents a number of risks. And
the main risk is that Indonesia ends up with a government that
cannot claim that popular and legitimate mandate to rule. Without
that, we almost certainly will see continued political
instability. That would be a very unfortunate outcome for
Indonesia because it means that really no progress can be made on
a number of other areas which need immediate attention.