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.