Is internal security vulnerable?

By Aleksius Jemadu

BANDUNG (JP): Last month President Soeharto called on intellectuals affiliated with the Association of Indonesian Moslem Intellectuals (ICMI) to study reasons for the riots which occurred in several places before and after the election (The Jakarta Post June 3, 1997). The matter was serious enough that the President decided a study was urgently needed. The main challenge ahead now is how to deal with a growing vulnerability of our internal security.

In the mass media, political scientists have offered different explanations for the riots. There seems to be a consensus among the analysts that people commit violent acts because they are fed up with social injustice and political degeneration. It is commonly believed that the government has grown stronger at the expense of the powerlessness of the common people.

But is our state really strong? If it is, why has it become vulnerable to violence? Barry Buzan, author of People, States & Fear (1991), suggested that the nature of a state consists of three components: the idea of the state, the physical base of the state, and the institutional expression of the state. The national security problem can be understood as a situation in which there is a threat to any of these components. Examining the links between these different components can be a fruitful insight into the national security problem.

Many would agree that people involved in the riots were resisting the state's institutional expression. The riots were not jeopardizing the state as an idea nor were they threatening the state's physical basis. We are therefore challenged to examine the proper function of government institutions deeper because they hold the authority and represent the state. The state's institutional expression is a crucial determinant in establishing a national security system.

It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that governments can easily exploit the links between their open security and that of the state to increase their leverage over domestic politics. Such an assumption is based on the fact that governments have their own interests and seek to preserve them in the name of national security or political stability.

Political leaders also make efforts to shape the political regime so that their presence at the top of the power hierarchy would be indispensable. In this way, governments try to justify their domination over domestic opponents by appealing to national security. In an extreme case, a national leader could turn out to be the political institution itself. This is precisely the reason why political succession in developing countries is much more complicated than that of developed countries.

The government as the institutional expression of the state never functions in a vacuum. Rather, it is embedded in the evolution of a political regime which is assigned to serve the interests of those in power. In such a context, there could never be an independent political process because all modes of political communication are dominated by the ruling elite. As a result, political leaders are more preoccupied with the systematic regimentation of the political system than with being flexible to people's demands.

To determine whether a state is strong or weak we need to distinguish between a state as a general will and a state in its concrete institutional manifestation. On the basis of such reasoning, we can distinguish between weak and strong states. Weak states are characterized by among others, high levels of political violence, a conspicuous role for political police in citizens' everyday lives, frequent ideological conflict, a lack of coherent national identity, a lack of a clear and observed hierarchy of political authority, and a high degree of state control over the media.

The frequent occurrence of riots and popular protest against the government indicates that the institutional expression of our general will is under increasing pressure. People are disappointed not so much with the idea of the state but with its institutional manifestation, which is increasingly embedded in the preservation of the existing political and economic establishment. It is therefore out of proportion if government authorities consider all protests against their policies acts of subversion.

There are several steps that need to be taken if we want to deal with the vulnerability of our internal security. First, at the philosophical level there must be a renewed understanding of the concept of the common good. This concept refers to an instruction to approach policy making in a way that all political decisions should attend to the interests of each social group in an impartial manner. Therefore, the concept does not describe a determinate goal but prescribes an approach by which the claims of all sections in society are considered in a spirit of impartiality (S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters, 1958).

Second, there is an increasingly persuasive suggestion to separate the national police from the Armed Forces. The Indonesian national police should develop as an independent organization so that it can cope with technological progress and professional demands. The national police should also have its own budget. Within the Armed Forces, the national police always gets the last priority in terms of budget allocation and human resources development. This is precisely the reason why the national police still lacks professionalism.

Third, embedding the state's institutional expression in the preservation of political and economic interests of the ruling elite could weaken the legitimacy of political power. Political development should not mean political regimentation because the latter will only serve the interests of those in power. Shouldn't we serve the sovereign public?

The writer is the Director of the Parahyangan Center for International Studies (PACIS) at the Catholic University of Parahyangan, Bandung.

Window A: To determine whether a state is strong or weak we need to distinguish between a state as a general will and a state in its concrete institutional manifestation.