Military-backed New Order power as strong as ever

Military-backed New Order power as strong as ever

By Olle Tornquist

This is the second of two articles based on a paper presented
at an international seminar, Toward Structural Reforms for
Democratization in Indonesia, which was held in Jakarta from Aug.
12 to Aug. 14. The seminar was organized by the Indonesian
Institute of Sciences and the Ford Foundation.

JAKARTA: Faced with the threat of a new Saddam Hussein, the
West retreated. Too many business interests were at stake in
Indonesia. Forty percent of the world's shipping passes through
its straits. Just before Easter, the IMF adopted Australia's and
Japan's so-called flexible positions and postponed some of its
own far-reaching demands.

This, of course, was a perfectly rational political decision.
Given the situation and the interests of the powerful parties
involved, democratization as well as neoliberal marketism had to
give way to stability. If food and fuel subsides had really been
withdrawn by April, as the IMF initially requested, this would
have been an invitation to massive riots. Meanwhile, the World
Bank & Co tried to mobilize food and medical relief to meet
immediate needs (worth US$3 billion), and trusted the military to
keep people in check. The regime had got another temporary lease
on life, it seemed.

My own analysis showed a weakness at this point. For on April
10, the Indonesian government managed to convince the IMF that
essential subsidies should only be reduced step-by-step until
October in order to prevent major social and political unrest.
But less than an month later, on May 4, the regime and the IMF
agreed instead, quite unexpectedly, to increase the price of
petrol by as much as 70 percent and kerosene by 25 percent.

Soeharto went further than the IMF had sought -- and the IMF
applauded. I still cannot understand how even neoclassical
economists could make such a politically irrational decision.
Perhaps Soeharto had lost touch altogether, while politically
illiterate economists in Jakarta were short of money and wanted
to impress their equally naive IMF colleagues in Washington as
well as their critics in the U.S. Congress.

Predictably, anyway, the new prices generated immediate public
anger. This gave a new dimension to the student demonstrations
that had hitherto been rather isolated, though increasing in
number. In Medan, anti-Chinese riots and looting erupted and
spread to Jakarta, where, a week later, the situation got out of
hand. Demonstrating students were killed. Rioting and looting led
to the burning to death of hundreds of people in shopping centers
and to widespread acts of cruelty, including the rape of women of
Chinese descent.

Some of the excesses were aggravated by hard-liners in the
Armed Forces, who wanted an excuse for more forceful
intervention. But their provocations backfired. More and more
people turned against the regime. The students occupied the
legislature and no longer allowed themselves to be abused
downtown. Soeharto tried without success to win back the
initiative by promising various reforms. He saved his own skin
only by resigning early, as the rats (like the speaker of the
house and several cabinet ministers) began to abandon the sinking
ship.

The Indonesian lesson is, thus, about the inability of the
market, civil society and their proponents to prevent social and
economic disaster for Indonesia's more than 200 million citizens
by betting on political reform, popular representation and
democratization. Once again, the market and civil society
libertarians have been proven wrong.

But does not this breakdown create an opening for
democratization? The waters we sail into with this proposition
are both uncharted and rough. I see four major problems.

To begin with, most actors focus on how to alter Soeharto's
regime. Everybody is busy repositioning themselves, consolidating
their assets, and forming new parties and alliances. Civil and
military incumbents (and their business allies) are delaying
changes in order to be able to adapt, making whatever concessions
are necessary to be able to steer their course.

Established dissidents trade in their reputations and
sometimes existing popular following for reforms and important
positions. Radicals try to sustain popular protests to weaken
shameless incumbents who might otherwise be able to stay on. The
market and the West are interested in anything that looks stable
enough to permit the payback of loans and safe returns on
investments.

It is hard to predict the outcome -- except to say that as
ordinary people get hungry, the conflicts are likely to continue,
escalate, and, at worst, open up for more extensive military and
religious involvement.

Meanwhile, many donor agencies and students of society add
that a weak democratic culture and civil society are equally
problematic. Culture in terms of informal norms and patterns
certainly become more important when organized institutions and
rules of the game are weakened and even disintegrate.

Yet, I do not share the view that support for a civil society
is always the best way of building a democratic culture. In many
cases, such as the backing of free journalists, there are no
problems but all civil society organizations do not necessarily
promote democracy. And what is political culture but routinely
practiced remnants of yesterday's rules, institutions and
organized politics? Hence, it is on the latter level of formal
rules, institutions, and organized politics at which change and
improvements have to start.

Third, therefore, the fact that giving priority to the
organizing of constituencies based on shared interests and ideas
does not make much sense among leading political actors in
Indonesia and is a more serious problem than a weak democratic
culture. Even democrats go for shortcuts like charisma, populism,
religion, and patronage in order to swiftly incorporate rather
than gradually integrate people into politics.

There is a shortage of time, of course, and everybody is
afraid of losing out. But a common lesson learned from other
transitions away from authoritarian rule is that without well-
anchored politics and unionism, there will be no meaningful
democracy. And the conditions today are worse than they were
during Indonesia's period of parliamentary rule in the 1950s,
which ended in authoritarianism -- or in the Philippines after
Marcos, where populist bossism now prevails.

Finally, we also know from other cases that the few genuine
democrats who might be able to build such popular and well-rooted
parties and unions are in desperate need of supportive rules of
the game. Unfortunately, however, the progressive movements are
rarely interested in such constitutional and legal formalities,
until they later on have to fight uphill battles within
unfavorable political systems.

In conclusion, it is difficult for Indonesians to learn from
other experiences, given the current dynamics and the weakly
organized democracy movement. Moreover, successful betting on
popular organizing and more favorable rules would be possible
only if the West gave as much support to democratization as it
has to Indonesia's financial recovery.

This is unlikely, given the fact that the West has not, so
far, been able to break out of its vicious circle of recurrent
re-creation of the authoritarian Indonesian beast in order to
rather help awakening its potentially democratic beauty.

The more likely outcome, therefore, is rather a military
supported "bad-guy democracy"; a military supported "bad-guy
democracy" within which incumbent bosses on various levels are
able to survive, pull in military and business allies, co-opt
some dissidents, and mobilize mass support through Islamic
populism -- all well before genuine democratic activists and
ordinary people manage to organize themselves.

The writer is a professor of politics and development at the
University of Oslo.