Is the Jakarta elite out of touch?

Is the Jakarta elite out of touch?

By Percival Manglano

JAKARTA (JP): Gerry van Klinken, editor of Inside Indonesia,
had an interesting article published in the Far Eastern Economic
Review on March 18.

In Is Indonesia Breaking Down?, Van Klinken vowed to "take a
serious look at the accepted wisdom on what lies behind the
epidemic of social unrest" in Indonesia. He proved to be no
friend of standard explanations: "Common sense is often
uncommonly wrong" he charged.

In Van Klinken's view, commonsense explanations of Indonesia's
unrest were too often articulated in terms of a social breakdown.
Phrases such as "a society tearing itself apart" or "as
Indonesia's social fabric unravels" were customarily used to
supposedly help understand the stream of violent images and
reports coming out of Indonesia. In fact, Van Klinken argued,
they did quite the opposite.

Van Klinken's article appeared, and was presumably written,
long before good news began dominating headlines in Indonesia.
Does the reader remember how terrible things looked during the
first few months of this year? There was no end in sight to the
long string of violence, from the May and November 1998 Jakarta
riots, to the Banyuwangi "ninja" killings and Ambon, Sambas, Aceh
and East Timor massacres. Now, our spirits have been much raised
by the apparent success of the elections. But then, no day seemed
complete without a photograph of a machete-wielding, head-banded
rioter or a headline starting Three killed in the latest violence
in....

Van Klinken identified the "Jakarta elite" as the main
manufacturer of the faulty common wisdom of the time. He
described the elite as being "out of touch with their 200 million
brethren". It was as if, unable to understand what was happening
around them, the elite was dismissively labeling the whole
situation as disorderly.

In addition, the Jakarta elite commonly identified itself as
the instigator of the social breakdown, as if nothing could
happen in the country without it having a hand in it. On the one
hand, the Jakarta elite stated Indonesia was falling apart; on
the other, it blamed itself for it.

It was precisely during those times of apparent disorder that
Van Klinken stood up and said "No, Indonesia is not falling
apart." He accused the Jakarta elite of not knowing what they
were talking about. They were wrong, among other reasons, he
said, because they were not visiting the violence-stricken areas
and asking people what had actually happened there.

In 1997, Van Klinken visited the riot-torn town of Tasikmalaya
in West Java. Gus Dur had recently stated that "the riots had
been instigated by a number of intellectuals from Jakarta". What
Van Klinken found on visiting the town, however, was that its
inhabitants explained things on a purely local basis.

The riots had nothing to do with Jakarta provocateurs or a
breakdown in civil society but with down-to-earth, local factors:
"insensitive police, over-confident young activists and well-
connected local Chinese businessmen". (Unfortunately, and this is
perhaps the weakest part of the article, Van Klinken assumed the
explanations he was confronted with in Tasikmalaya equally
applied to other violence-stricken areas in Indonesia during the
next two years.) "Abdurrahman Wahid," Van Klinken concluded, "was
out of touch with the grass roots".

Van Klinken argued that, in fact, what was really happening,
but remained hidden underneath the media's obsession with
violence, was a revival of local communities. This was happening
at the expense of the power of the country's capital, and, by
implication, of its elite. Local figures, such as Achmad Kandang
in Aceh, were standing up to "big capital and a brutal military".
This rejection of the centralized old ways resulted in
anticorruption protests that "forced literally hundreds of local-
government officers throughout the archipelago to resign over the
last year". This local drive, Van Klinken implied, was just
another aspect of reformasi, far removed from the Bundaran HI
demonstrators and People's consultative Assembly (MPR) occupiers.
The violence was a tragic side effect of this local
transformation, an indicator of the tensions that had built up
until then.

In conclusion, Van Klinken said: "It would be a mistake to
think of the unrest only as evidence that the social fabric is
unraveling. Rather, what is unraveling is an elitist concept of
statehood, and the authority of an elite whose world this has
always been."

Van Klinken's article, thus, makes two major points about the
Jakarta elite: that it is out of touch with the rest of
Indonesia, and that it is seeing its traditional centralized
powers threatened by a revival of local government. This article
will now elaborate on the first of these two points.
Unfortunately, the article's author has not traveled outside
Jakarta enough to make an informed argument about the second.

In a clever editorial move, the Far Eastern Economic Review
decided to publish on April 1, two weeks after the publication of
Van Klinken's article, an article under the title of Indonesia:
Asia's Yugoslavia? by an American Enterprise Institute scholar,
John Bolton. Bolton's article followed precisely the Jakarta-
elite-type approach Van Klinken so deplored, even if Bolton
himself is not a Jakarta elite member. It talked of Indonesia in
terms of "ethnic and sectarian strife", "ethnic and religious
clashes" and "political turmoil and instability".

Bolton's article told us very little about Indonesia, but it
told us a lot about his trade. Indeed, because of this, it helps
us explain why Van Klinken may have become so frustrated with the
Jakarta elite's apparent shortsightedness.

Bolton did not really attempt to explain or understand what
was happening in Indonesia. Only one of the article's eight
paragraphs actually discussed events specifically happening in
Indonesia. As a think tank scholar and a former U.S. assistant
secretary of state, Bolton's main concern was U.S. foreign
policy. His goal was to suggest how the U.S. should conduct its
foreign policy toward Indonesia. Bolton, quite unoriginally,
wanted a "more forward-leaning American involvement in
Indonesia's crisis". To get his message across, he simply drew a
superficial parallel between Indonesia now and Yugoslavia in
1991/1992 and concluded the U.S. should not commit the same
mistakes it committed then.

Now, to better understand the Jakarta elite's intellectual
reflexes, we should consider what the Jakarta elite's
responsibilities are, and how it takes the decisions conducive to
fulfilling these responsibilities.

Simplification is an essential part of the decision-making
process. It is probably one of its most regrettable sides. But it
is nevertheless necessary. Decision-makers have to take action in
the face of uncertainty; a sure way of minimizing uncertainty is
to base judgments on simplifications. The Jakarta elite to which
Van Klinken referred to, is part of that world which does not
really have to understand or explain what is happening in
Indonesia to perform its duties. They are decision-makers and
therefore prone to simplification. It matters little if Gus Dur
was as out of touch as Van Klinken claimed him to be, because his
job is not to understand in itself what the root of every
instance of unrest in Indonesia is. As a political leader, his
responsibilities are to shape policies and make decisions. To do
this he needs to simplify and distort reality. This generally
applies to that Jakarta elite, whether business or political,
which Van Klinken criticized; it is what makes it an elite in the
first place.

Thus, decision-makers stand apart from academics whose
analyses are not a prelude to action. When Jakarta elite
decision-makers act, people get laid off, earn money or die. Van
Klinken, on the other hand, is an academic who will not be made
accountable for any mistakes his analysis might lead to. If he is
wrong, and Indonesian society is indeed tearing itself apart, the
most that will happen to him is that another academic will write
a scathing paper explaining how foolish Van Klinken was in
reaching the conclusions he did.

So, if the Jakarta elite doesn't really have to know what is
happening in Indonesia, what does it need to know? What the elite
will be judged by is not how well they know what is happening in
Indonesia, but how well they know what other members of the elite
think is happening in Indonesia (thus, cocktail parties). This
way they will be in a position to anticipate their colleagues'
actions and take decisions accordingly. This way people will be
laid off, earn money or die.

Pure academics are rare these days. Too often, people holding
academic positions write as if their writings could lead them to
decision-making positions. Van Klinken is a clear exception. It
is refreshing to read -- alas, so rarely so -- the writings of an
academic who does the fieldwork necessary to back up his
statements.

Percival Manglano received his M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze
School at Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, Maryland, the United States.