Loyalty and obedience of the Indonesian Military

Loyalty and obedience of the Indonesian Military

The military need explicit rules to ensure its members'
accountability, says Kusnanto Anggoro, a senior researcher at the
Centre for Strategic and International Studies and a lecturer at
the postgraduate studies program of the School of International
Relations, University of Indonesia.

JAKARTA (JP): When Prime Minister Winston Churchill
characterized the British navy as consisting of little more than
"rum, sodomy, and the lash", his intent was to ridicule the
stultifying effects of ethical failure.

He spoke, in effect, for all services. In Indonesia, the
military can do no wrong. Many, including President Abdurrahman
Wahid, have blamed individual officers -- rouge elements and/or
deserters of the armed forces -- but defended the military
against accusations that it was responsible for the atrocities in
Aceh and elsewhere.

For sure, Abdurrahman, or Gus Dur, and Churchill are in
different political and cultural settings. Churchill lived amid
already stable civil-military relations where the profession of
arms has a long tradition, with a high and exacting standard and
an inherent nobility derived from the nature of war and the
conditions of service.

Meanwhile, Gus Dur faces a situation where the military
command is breaking down.

Nevertheless, in both cases distinction between individual
officers and military institutions signify only one thing: it is
impossible to calculate in advance the potential impact of
disobedience upon the military forces of a nation, despite their
loyalty to the country.

In fact, a man can be selfish, cowardly, disloyal, false,
fleeting, perjured, and morally corrupt in a wide variety of
other ways, and still be outstandingly good in pursuits in which
imperatives other than those upon the fighting man are brought to
bear.

One can be a superb creative artist, for example, or a
scientist of the highest order, and still be a very bad man. What
the bad man cannot be is a good sailor, or soldier, or airman.

For many years, the major culprit within military
organizations has been the personalization of the military
profession.

Promotion repays loyalty. The legacy of the New Order is still
pretty strong. To a large extent, the dual function doctrine had
made its way into the military, and resulted in a generation of
senior generals who believed in, and attempted to apply to their
duties, the rationalist doctrine of universal quantifiability.

This proved to be a fundamental and crucial error, as loyalty
is not a substitute of obedience, but only a small and
subordinate element of it.

Involvement of the military in business is another source of
ethical failure. It is also a critical problem within the ranks
of the military itself, because the ethical standards of the
businessman that soldiers have been and are being encouraged to
emulate, are not only not mutually reinforcing, but in fact
mutually exclusive.

The ethic of the businessman is self-interest, while that of
the soldier is self-sacrifice.

Thus, when Chief of the Armed Forces Adm. Widodo said before
legislators that the Indonesian Military (TNI) remains loyal to
the President, he was conveying only part of the problem.

A military coup is of course out of question within the
current context of Indonesian politics. "Rouge elements" of the
military, or the so-called oknum in Indonesian, may have nothing
political in mind, let alone something that relates to creating a
military regime.

Yet, no one can be sure about the disobedience of the
military.

The role of the TNI in modern democratic Indonesia lies at the
root, not only of the ethical drift currently afflicting the
military, but also of the military's poor public image.

In fact, the determination and treatment of the root causes of
the alleged "crisis of ethics" in Indonesia is a more complex and
longer term exercise.

Unfortunately, no law would automatically correct such ethical
failure, though they may construct order and enforce obedience,
conformity and acceptance of the military to the civilian
authorities and democratic practices.

If we return back to basics, soldiers are traditionally
expected to possess military virtues in all facets of their
lives. This is inherent in the idea that the military is not a
job, but a way of life.

Therefore, military institutions should form a repository of
moral resource that should always be a source of strength within
the state.

They must promulgate and enforce explicit rules derived from
formal ethical standards and hold personnel accountable for
following minimal standards of duty and conduct demanded by these
rules, and sanction or even punish those who fail to do so.

As Sir John Hackett suggests in The Military in the Service of
the State (Colorado: Westview Press, 1979), boards of inquiry,
court martials and public censure may in part mitigate the
symptoms of ethical failure.

All these should be embodied in the law on the structure and
organization of the armed forces, not in the law on National
Defense.