Handle Indonesia with care

By Santi W.E. Soekanto

JAKARTA (JP): By any standard, Indonesia is an improbable country. It is a wonder how it has been able to withstand for so long the polarizing forces that have always accompanied its existence.

British economist Anne Booth wrote in 1996 about how the very improbability of such a huge and heterogeneous collection of islands forming itself into a single country was once a source of national pride.

Not anymore, according to many Indonesians. A niggling sense of shame began to creep in about four years ago, coinciding with the international exposure of Indonesia's failures to handle many of its problems.

Individuals returning from overseas trips talked about trying to conceal their nationality during gatherings.

"Sometimes they looked at us with pity, sometimes with contempt. Some people lashed out at us over East Timor -- I wasn't even born when Soeharto 'integrated' the territory," one said.

Let us start with the forest fires that choked the breath out of many neighboring countries in 1996, to the economic collapse in 1997, from the famine in Irian Jaya and other remote regions, the massive rioting that killed thousands in 1998, to the revelations of gross rights abuses and the deadly sectarian conflicts in 1999. And, of course, the unceasing bickering among the political elite of today. All are cause enough to turn Indonesia into both a regional and international pariah.

Sociologists would assess the "multi-dimensional crisis" currently threatening Indonesia's survival as something that is sociologically "natural" because of its long-standing potential for disintegration.

First, it has a long history of rebellions in its regions that dates back to the early years of the republic. Political dissent is a long-standing issue in Irian Jaya, Aceh and also its "former colony" East Timor, where armed political movements have been waged for years and responded to with massive military operations.

Second, Indonesia's diversity might have been a source of pride when the country was united -- as was expressed in the term Bhineka Tunggal Ika. But the term also means an uneven degree of integration among its more than 300 ethnic groups that vary enormously in size and cultural sophistication. This constitutes a threat to national integrity.

Scholars have pointed out how Java has had an unbroken tradition of dense population and powerful states for 1500 years. Speakers of the Javanese language number at least 80 million.

By contrast, in parts of eastern Indonesia there are tiny language groups whose recorded history dates only from the colonial period and whose integration into the broader archipelagic economy has always been weak and sporadic.

It is small wonder that the Republic of Indonesia emerged at all. Now this is not a cue for anyone to declare, "had we taken the option of federalism after independence, we would have been better off now." History is history after all, and the decision to opt for a fragile unitary state in 1945, as opposed to federalism, should remain a lesson for all.

The third reason is regional discontent over Soeharto's policies. These covered many spheres but at least three major issues have been identified: the decades of economic injustices, the state and military abuses of human rights, and the highly centralized New Order regime that left almost no space for regions to have a say in how their resources were being managed.

Now that the New Order is no more, the glue that had been keeping the country together has also gone. Which is why Indonesia began to unravel -- so people say.

The fourth reason for the threat of disintegration is something that has been spoken of from time to time, but has yet to be explored further: the presence of forces that seek to undermine Indonesia's geopolitical importance by fomenting unrest and discouraging separatist campaigns.

For example, the Christmas Eve 2000 bombings which took place almost simultaneously in a number of provinces and caused further sectarian tension, have been perceived by many analysts as a manifestation of the existence of a highly organized force such as the military seeking to take over power from civilians.

Another example was the West's meddling in the East Timor debacle. In an interesting article titled "Indonesia, Master Card in Washington's Hand" in Indonesia (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, October 1998), Noam Chomsky revealed how Washington ignored its own restrictions on arms sales with Indonesia. Further, the UN Security Council's order that Jakarta withdraw from East Timor became an empty gesture because the U.S. State Department rendered it "utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook."

This, according to the then UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his memoirs, was because the U.S. wished things to turn out as they did. Chomsky pointed out how within a few months some 60,000 Timorese had been killed after the annexation, "almost the same proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the second world war."

Chomsky believes the atrocities that continued until the late 1990s took place with the decisive support of the U.S. and its allies.

How ironic that it is also the West that condemned Indonesia in the 1990s for gross abuse of human rights in East Timor when violence had always been there throughout the territory's "integration." Doubly ironic that it was those very same countries and the UN that forced Indonesia to evacuate East Timor in 1999.

The most ironic situation, however, is the fact that groups of Indonesians are now pleading for the West and the UN to intervene into their affairs.

Parties in the sectarian conflict in Maluku, for instance, have for some time asked the UN to send its peacekeeping forces to the region, accusing the Indonesian military of unfairness and the government of incompetence in curbing the violence.

Now, students and activists in the restive Aceh province have asked visiting U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Gelbard for international intervention into the military-separatist conflict. The activists accused the Indonesian government of not having the good will to investigate the crimes against humanity committed in the province.

The Acehnese have the most reason to cry for help, given its violent history under the Military Operations status, but will international intervention really help?

The push for separation in Indonesian regions is a sign that the question of national disintegration is far from settled here. Regional discontent that threatens national integration is one thing but threats that come from other forces seeking to undermine Indonesia's geopolitical importance is a different matter altogether. This particular threat needs to be considered and handled well if Indonesia wishes to maintain its integrity.

Indonesia has undergone so much -- if this were our parents or our other loved ones that are ailing like this we would move heaven and earth to find a cure. We would not feel ashamed.

Indonesia, too, needs to be handled with care. It serves no one's interests to have it splintered into pieces. If it were to fall apart, it would suffer but so would Aceh and Irian Jaya and other regions now demanding separation.

As historian Robert Cribb says, "the thing that most Indonesians yearn for -- human dignity and prosperity -- seems much more likely to be achieved within the larger framework of Indonesia than within any possible combination of smaller states."

The writer is a journalist at The Jakarta Post.