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 If food and fuel subsides had really been withdrawn by April, as the IMF initially requested, this would have been an invitation to massive riots.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.