Former U.S. ambassador praises Indonesian polling

By Yenni Djahidin

WASHINGTON (JP): The good news about the June 7 election in Indonesia is that it was peaceful and orderly. The bad news is that the party with the most votes will not necessarily become the next government, according to former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz, who was U.S. ambassador in Jakarta in the 1980s, joined the Carter Center delegation to Indonesia this month to observe first-hand what has been widely billed as Indonesia's first democratic general election in four decades.

Now the dean of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University, Wolfowitz shared his experience of his visit to Indonesia during an interview with The Jakarta Post in his office here last week.

Question: What are your impressions of the election process?

Answer: My impression of election day was that it was one of the most memorable experiences in my life. I think the whole world to some extent was surprised by how peaceful it was. I wasn't entirely surprised. I thought that if you looked behind the terrible violence of the last a year and a half, there has also been very strong signs of Indonesian people wanting to get together and wanting to build a new kind of country. And that was very evident on the election day. And I think the whole world saw it, and the whole world also saw this enormous excitement at both democracy and freedom. It was both the chance to vote and express your vote, but also, when ballots were counted, the chance to yell and cheer for the party you like and boo the parties you didn't like. At least that was the case in places I (visited). I guess I visited about 16 polling places in Jakarta at different times of the day and ten different places where they were counting ballots. Everywhere it was kind of the same thing. People would hold up a ballot and say which party it was and some people would cheer and some people would boo. And you could tell they were enjoying the fact they could do this for the first time.

So, that was a great thing. And I think also the commitment of so many ordinary Indonesian people from all elements of society to make this work as election officials, as party witnesses, as election monitors from Namfrel and from KIPP. It was truly moving and I think every member of the Carter delegation was somewhat carried away with that feeling, which, even if you kind of expected it, it was very, very moving. I think much of the world was surprised by it. And I think that's the enormously good news in the fact that it was so peaceful.

I think ordinary Indonesian voters showed much more sophistication than I might have expected in this respect. I think I was even a little bit surprised, I was afraid with 48 different parties on the ballot, each party would get two or three percent and no one would know what it meant. But in fact the votes really were concentrated on those parties that had a serious chance. And I think that shows a sophisticated electorate, at least relatively. Sometimes people hold up a notion of voters who pay no attention to personalities, no attention to how their fathers and grandfathers voted. That doesn't happen in any country that I know of and that doesn't happen in the United States either. I mean voters are voters and some of them are very sophisticated and some of them woke up that morning and decided when they got out of bed who they would vote for. On the whole, Indonesian voters showed themselves to be very concerned and pretty knowledgeable.

I would say also in that respect, at the risk of over- interpreting, that there is a message in that vote. I've read too many articles in some of the American newspapers at least that suggest this was all about personalities. It was, you know, "All that was going on is that people love Megawati because they heard amazing things about her father." I think that is a very simple minded view of what has taken place. I would suggest that it is at least as reasonable to say that there was an overwhelming vote for change and for reform, and that, in particular, means a vote against corruption. I think people knew that was what they were voting for. They might, in fact, be disappointed, it's much harder to deal with corruption than to complain about corruption. But the desire of the voters for change and particularly change in this area of corruption in the government is unmistakable.

Almost as clear is the vote in favor of candidates who talk about bringing the country together and bridging differences of cultures, ethnicity and religion as opposed to candidates who talk about dividing the country and building parties on ethnic or religious bases.

You can count up the votes in different ways in that respect, but it would be pretty hard to dispute that the voters voted against division and that bodes very well for the future. That's all the good news.

Q: OK, the bad news?

A: The bad news is quiet serious because you have a very strange electoral process. It's a legacy from the past, it's actually a legacy from the last parliament, which was hardly a democratically elected parliament. It's a system that makes it very hard to translate the popular vote into a clear mandate for a government. In fact, it's a system that makes it possible to completely frustrate the popular vote. And end up in principle with a president that nobody voted for, or a president that very few people voted for.

I think it would be a terrible waste of opportunity if that is the result. Instead of moving forward, there is a danger that Indonesia will actually be moving backward because that same enthusiasm that you sensed on June 7, the expectation of change, the expectation of a government that would represent the people, will be frustrated.

Q: Are you saying that if a president other than Megawati is elected there will be a problem?

A: I hate to say it directly because it's not my job to say who should be the president of Indonesia. I guess it comes close to that. The fact is that there's a clear leader and it's also clear that Golkar was clearly rejected in this vote. So, at the very least it seems to me if Golkar comes back with the presidency because of the various ways in which 100,000 votes in East Kalimantan count the same as 500,000 votes in Java, and then when you get to the MPR, people are persuaded by whatever means to vote against change, you end up with the government that again represents the old ways.

That would be just a clear frustration of popular will because whatever you say about Megawati individually, if you take her vote plus PKB plus PAN who identified themselves as an alliance against the status quo and for change, clearly a majority of the people voted for that group. So, without getting too deep into the personalities or the individuals, it certainly seems to me at a minimum there has to be a government that represents change.

I don't see how any such government cannot come to grips with the fact that she has by far the largest number of votes. At the same time it also seems that any government has to come to grips with the fact she has at most, about one-third, of the votes.

You can't govern any country with a third of the population behind you and certainly you can't govern a country as complex as Indonesia, with all the problems it faces, with a third of the country behind you. So if people think, in PDI-Perjuangan for example, "We have the biggest number of votes so we should run the whole government", then they are making a tragic mistake also.

Somehow, out of June 7, which was a wonderful event, I hope there will be the creativity to build a broad-based government that at least the overwhelming majority of Indonesians can say, "this is what the people chose". And hopefully even some people who didn't choose that government will say, "Well, this isn't a government I choose, but I accept the fact that my side lost the election".

Q: What do you think about the forming of coalitions?

A: I hope they get on with it. We have a certain gap between our (the U.S.) elections and when the president is inaugurated. It goes from early November when the president is elected to late January when the president is inaugurated. During that whole time, the new president is called president-elect. And everybody knows who that new president would be. And that president spends two and a half months picking his government, picking his ministers, his ministers are picking their sub-ministers. They're deciding on basic policies. And with all of that, two-and-a-half months to get ready, every American government that I know of stumbles in its first few months in office -- even though it has had two-and-one-half months to get ready. Indonesia faces a much harder situation. If they don't start to get ready building a government until the day the president is selected and inaugurated, then they're going to be months behind where they should be. What is really needed now, is not just to settle who's going to be a president and who's going to be in the coalition, that's very important, but one of the reasons to settle it is to start sending clear messages to the whole world and to the Indonesian people about the direction the country is going to go in because the longer that it is delayed the harder it's going be to dig out of the huge problems the country faces right now.

Q: What about the protests against the elections and the results. Is it a sign of democracy?

A: It is in part, but it's also sometimes a sign of democracy not to protest. Richard Nixon in 1960 believed he would have won the election if it hadn't been for votes that were stolen in the city of Chicago. It tipped Illinois to John Kennedy. And, he realized if he challenged the result, no one would believe in the election because if he challenged it and won, all of the Kennedy people would say he won it unfairly. And if he challenged it and lost all of his people would say Kennedy won unfairly. So, Nixon, who didn't always do the honorable thing, at that time did an honorable thing and decided to not challenge it.

I am not saying that people shouldn't challenge the results. I'm just saying that sometimes the democratic thing is to challenge and sometimes the democratic thing is to say OK.

What strikes me is that there is a relationship between these challenges and the delay in putting together a governing coalition because it seems that if a group can get together and say we decided to put together a coalition, we're working on the details, but between us, we represent 55 percent, 60 percent, 65 percent of the voters, then it becomes much less important whether somebody got 11 percent or 12 percent. Suddenly the differences that people are arguing over would be seen in a better perspective.

But as long as the process is wide-open the way it is, and the election seems completely undetermined and probably as if it would be thrown into the MPR and decided on November 10, then every small difference might end up counting and so people are more likely to fuss over a bad result in one place or another.

I hope that the election commission will use some good judgment and not be afraid to fix problems where there are problems. But I also hope that the political process will move along in such a way that disputes over individual election results won't seem to be all that important.

Q: The Islamic parties performed poorly in the elections. Your assessment?

A: Well, it depends on what you call a Muslim party. PKB (the National Awakening Party) looks like a Muslim party in many respects to me. I don't accept the idea that somehow, all the major figures, all major heads of parties are Muslims, the bulk of all the parties are Muslims. So I don't see that anyone has a right to say "We're the Muslim party and so and so is not a Muslim party". Frankly, if some splinter party in the U.S said we are the Christian party, and you Democrats and Republicans are not Christians, people would laugh them out of town.

What was important in this election, and that you were referring to, is that overwhelming numbers of Indonesians voted for parties and candidates who said, "We're all Indonesians". I also think people would make a big mistake if they think that there is the concern of the huge Muslim majority that sometimes they feel like they are almost a discriminated group in their own country. That's a real concern and a real issue and I hope any government that comes in will make some effort to deal with it (and not say), "Well, we settled that issue in the election and don't talk to us about it any more". I think it's an issue there. I think it has more to do with bringing the whole society along economically.

Q: What about the debate of Islam versus secularism?

A: It depends on what you mean by secular. It certainly is not secular in a sense of Turkey, you know, or for that matter the United States. The United States has become much more secular than it was when I was growing up. It used to be you had prayer in our public schools. Now, you can't have prayer in our public schools. In Indonesia... it was very striking and it was very moving, actually on election day, when the administrators (gave their oath) at the beginning of the election to the election officials. They each are asked to swear, according to their religion. They're not told you don't have to swear and they're not told you don't have to swear according to a religion. They are just told you can pick up the religion that you belong to. And that's not secular, but it's not sectarian. It's not putting one religious group ahead of other religious group. But it is also a very strong commitment to religious values. That's why the word "secular" doesn't actually apply to Indonesia. But there is no good word to describe Indonesia in that regard.

Sectarian politics, the kind of politics that says one group is better than another group, one group's views should dominate another group's views, is a very bad thing in the modern era. It holds countries back and it's particularly dangerous for countries where it's a threat to their national unity. That would be true in the United States, that is true in Indonesia. It's even bad in those countries where... maybe you just saw a terrible example of it in Yugoslavia, where even though one group dominates another group, when they try to completely impose their views on another group, the consequences are just awful. The people who try to introduce that idea into Indonesian politics are doing a big disservice to the country. Based on the good sense that the voters showed this time around and over a long period of history, Indonesians have basically shown a lot of good sense on this issue.