Indonesia's democratic tug-of-war

The following is the second of two articles based on a presentation by Dr. Ignas Kleden of The Go-East Institute/Institute for East-Indonesian Affairs in Jakarta. The sociologist spoke at the Asian Leadership Fellow Program Reunion Conference 2001 in Bangkok on Aug. 7.

JAKARTA: Those who wanted to see Abdurrahman Wahid toppled were those who felt uneasy with the freedom he showed in dealing with the institutional set-up and bureaucracy. He was seen as someone who disturbed the quasi-mechanistic equilibrium of democratic institutions through his maneuvers and improvisations, making the whole system integration of democratic institutions appear dysfunctional.

The idea of system integration borrows from the systems theory of the possibly most influential living sociologist, a German, Niklas Luhmann. In his theory, every system is operationally closed and its operations determine what belongs to the system and what is outside the system. Every system produces itself and its environment.

All the stimuli from outside will be selected by the system and can only impinge upon its workings after these have been translated into the system's meaning and language. However, its self-closure is balanced by its cognitive openness; new programming is created within itself to cope with the new situation. Learning is like a mechanism of maintenance.

Present developments of democracy here suggest that if democracy is to be established through institutions, it has tended to become a closed system. It seems that the system of institutional structures originating in the Soeharto regime are still there. It maintains itself, it has selected new situations after the 1998 political reform, while translating these into its own meaning and its own language. There seems to be a fundamental difference in attitude between the initiators of the 1998 political reform, especially the students, and those who were part of the New Order's political system.

The students wanted to change the whole system by terminating the long lasting dual function of the military, the exclusion of all civilian elements of the New Order from the government and political institutions, as well as ending corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN) -- all the political wrong doings of New Order's bureaucracy.

In contrast. those who were part of the New Order are trying to show that they are open to political reform. However, the new situations and aspirations are translated into the meaning and the language of the New Order's political system.

This has obviously happened within Golkar, the former ruling party; Golkar politicians keep talking about the importance of constitutionalism as a system of procedures in politics but hardly say anything about the substance of the law -- justice. This is because justice as such will necessarily require the correction and the elimination of past mistakes: KKN, political violence, and human rights violations in which Golkar was supposedly deeply involved.

The whole legal argument of Golkar sidesteps public questioning and examination in most cases, hence they refer merely to procedures. When people asked about the huge amount of money used by Golkar to finance its political campaign during the 1999 general election, chairman Akbar Tandjung answered that the use of money has been audited by an official body, without saying anything about where the money came from and why Golkar could have such big amounts far exceeding the legally permitted amount.

This was why a number of non-governmental organizations accused Golkar of transgressing Article 14 of Law No.2/1999 which stipulates that a political party is not allowed to receive personal donations exceeding Rp 15 million, or donations from private companies, legal bodies or organizations in excess of Rp 150 million. In a lawsuit lodged at the Supreme Court the plaintiffs said Golkar received Rp 90 billion from the State Logistics Agency (Bulog), Rp 15 billion from Bank Bali and Rp 1 billion from the chief of the former Supreme Advisory Council (DPA).

The plaintiffs therefore demanded that Golkar be suspended as a political party or at least banned from joining the next election. The lawsuit was supported by most Jakarta students, but was dismissed by the Supreme Court. Despite the disappointing verdict, this lawsuit clearly demonstrates public demand to have past wrong doings unveiled and brought to court.

In a struggle like this there is a tension and even antagonism between a legalistic approach to the Constitution by stressing legal procedures, and the substantive approach aiming for justice. Neither choice has helped much. Of course one cannot ignore procedures which make up and guarantee due process of law. However, abiding by procedures without sufficient awareness and insight of what the procedures are for, is nothing but formalism. In contrast, the campaign to return to the substance of law without taking procedures into account could result unwittingly in self-righteousness, which often tends to become uncompromising, one-sided, extremely militant and even fanatical.

For the time being the political and legal struggle in Indonesia has to seek a middle path between empty formalism and self-justifying substantiveness. The last conflict between Abdurrahman, the House and the Assembly might exemplify the tension between the two approaches. Abdurrahman was obviously very convinced of the righteousness of his struggle for democracy, equality, freedom from fear and political repression, and justice for all. Yet the legislature and the Assembly stressed procedures to terminate his administration. Both sides spoke for and on behalf of constitutionalism.

The future of Indonesian politics will depend very much on an optimal equilibrium between political stability, due process of law and good workings of political institutions on the one hand and political rationality, serious commitment to justice for all, and continuous discourse on the norms and values of democracy. Values make up the rules or facts of democratic behavior which has something to do with its empirical aspects; whereas norms make up the ideal of democracy as something worth fighting for.

However, one has to be very careful to differentiate between two different, albeit closely related, things: justice and good life -- both implicit in the ideals of democracy.

The good life belongs to the private domain, giving as much freedom as possible to those concerned, to choose from among the existing values which support pursuit of happiness. Meanwhile justice is a norm which gives as much obligation as possible to everybody to abide by its principle. Good life is something which holds good for a certain group of people and must not be generalized. A set of cultural values instrumental to achieving a good life in, say, Japan, must not necessarily apply to people from other countries.

In contrast, norms are principles which can and should be universalized. So what is just for a Japanese must be just also for anybody else regardless of country or culture.

Our political experience in the last four decades has showed clearly that the Soeharto regime made big mistakes in pushing cultural values as political norms. Key words were then national identity, eastern culture and finesse.

All these were emphasized as Indonesian political norms, whereas the normative principles of democratic politics such as equality before the law, individual freedom, justice and human rights were mistakenly played down as being merely western cultural values.

This tension between fact and norms, between values and norms, between institutions and rationality, will become one which will come up again and again in the years to come. This does not imply that the democratic struggle is doomed.

Rather it implies that the struggle for democracy is a political way to realize the perfection of human beings by overcoming human fallibility, time and time again.