Knocking at the sturdy wall named ABRI

TNI Bukan Tentara Rakyat

By Coen Husain Pontoh

Published by Solidaritas Nusa Bangsa, 2000

Page, 198

Price : Rp 17,000

JAKARTA (JP): You are jailed for opposing the military's involvement in politics. A year later you walk into a free world with a book about your jailers in your hand. That is the story of Coen Husain Pontoh, the author of this book.

As the title is an absolute negation of decades of almost- sacred myth: the TNI is a people's army, this is clearly a reformist's book.

A student activist in the East Java capital of Surabaya who was jailed by the Soeharto government in the late 1990s, Coen predicted a long time ago that the political setback suffered by the military today is but a small victory of the reformation movement.

The reality now is that the military's representation in the House of Representatives and the People's Consultative Assembly has been assured up until 2004 and 2009 respectively. The reformist movement seems to have gone nowhere.

The military, Coen warned, still wield true political power, and it is not impossible that it will regain its former glory.

Coen, an activist of the militant People's Democratic Party (PRD), which was banned by the New Order government, discusses these issues in his book, which he wrote after emerging from one year of incarceration at a prison house in Surabaya in July 1998, two months after Soeharto fell from power.

His crime: his opposition to the military's role in politics.

It is obvious what kind of man he is by looking at the way he responded to his imprisonment. Rather than nurturing a hatred against the military he buried his head in books and dug into the history of this most feared and powerful institution in Indonesia. This illuminating book is the fruit of that study.

The smooth flow of words, free from revengeful emotion, is one of the strongpoints of this 198-page book, especially when one remembers that the author is the very victim of his subject.

It attempts to unveil the upbringing of the military in a fledgling nation, which is very important to understanding why the military behaves the way it does. Coen picked up historical notes from numerous sources and blended them into coherent reading.

He implies that the military's internal dispute over civilian supremacy stems from a conflict between the Japanese and the Dutch military traditions. There is one more element in the juvenile Indonesian army, the Laskar Rakyat (People's Warrior).

Coen discovered the much covered-up origin of conflict within the Indonesian armed forces between those who perceived themselves as the better "educated" force and those considered the "less educated" force. In short, a conflict between the elite and the commoners.

The book could not have appeared during the Soeharto years when the military went all-out to portray itself as an untainted defender of the people. As one goes from chapter to chapter it feels as though one myth of the military is being knocked off after another.

One example is the Oct. 17, 1952 incident (chapter 3.3) when military trucks took thousands of people to the front gates of Merdeka Palace.

Earlier, the mob, numbering no less than 30,000 people, had ransacked the legislature building.

The military, or more precisely, the army, wanted the then president Sukarno to dissolve the legislature. Sukarno, however, refused to budge and the first attempt by the military to seize power was defused.

From this episode one learns that provoking unrest runs deep in the veins of the Indonesian military.

Another move in the same vein, was when an officer's attempt to stir a riot in Jakarta in October 1956 was foiled.

The book is very important for the younger generation especially university students, student activists and NGO activists whose formal schooling failed to introduce them with a more honest history of the Indonesian military.

In fact it could be an excellent reference book for school students and serve as a good starting point for discussions.

For the general public it unveils the other side of the story they have become familiar with during Soeharto's 30-year rule of the Indonesian military.

Had the book been available a decade ago, the people's resentment of the military would not have been as deep as it is today.

Fighting against the military's role in politics is an issue of conscience, Coen says in his book. If he did not fight against it he would feel guilty for failing victims of violence in the country from Aceh to East Timor to Irian Jaya, and also victims of the 1965 bloodbath.

Apart from defense matters, the Indonesian Armed Forces or ABRI (as it was known up until 1999) has had a strong grip on politics for over three decades, hence the term dual-function. Some critics, however, say it should be called a triple-function because of the military's key role in the economic sector.

As the reformation movement is undergoing a "disorientation" under the leadership of Gus Dur and Megawati, Coen dismisses as naive the widespread view that if one goes on pushing TNI to the wall, a coup d'etat will result.

The book comprises five chapters which don't just examine the birth of ABRI and its growth into a modern institution. Coen, who hailed from Baroko, a small village in North Sulawesi, put ABRI's history in the context of pre-independent Indonesia since the 19th century up until independent and post-independent.

The weakness of the book, as observed by George Aditjondro in his introductory remarks, is that it fails to elaborate on the source of funds which the military used to finance its numerous operations, overt or covert. (Harry Bhaskara)