Pancasila helps sustain unity in Indonesia

Pancasila helps sustain unity in Indonesia

Anthony Paul, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

Three cheers for the Indonesian nation-state?

No, not yet. But six years after Indonesians wrenched
themselves into a new era, it's an appropriate moment for one
muted, cautious hurrah.

The main reason: Despite Timor Leste's independence, there is
still, practically speaking, only one Indonesia. That's a
substantial result, considering the tumult there since 1998-1999.

In a column in Mainichi Daily News in 1999, then Malaysian
prime minister Mahathir Mohamad implied darkly that Australians
were helping East Timor because Australia would be "the main
beneficiary of a broken-up Indonesia". (He failed to explain
how.) Some voices were even predicting that three to five new
nations might emerge from the wreckage of president Soeharto's
regime.

That hasn't happened. And now economic recovery, though moving
slowly, seems within grasp. Last week, for example, Fitch
Ratings, the London-based international rating agency, noted the
Megawati Soekarnoputri administration's economic achievements.
The government, Fitch observed, had reduced public debt to 72
percent of GDP last year from a peak of 100 percent in 2000.

International interest rate increases, as well as the rupiah's
relative weakening and the imported inflation that would result,
are going to make that performance difficult -- though not
impossible -- to sustain. But if much-needed reforms succeed,
says the McKinsey Quarterly's latest issue, "the real economy,
the financial system and individual banks will be well-positioned
to drive sustained growth".

Meanwhile, let me suggest that Indonesia also benefits from a
political fundamental that gets insufficient attention -- the
national ideology, Pancasila.

In 1945, facing the need to pull together a nation of more
than 17,000 islands, at least six major religions, more than 200
ethnic groups and countless languages and dialects, the nation's
principal founding father, Sukarno, promulgated Pancasila as a
recipe for Indonesian patriotism. He attached to it a Sanskrit
word meaning "five virtues".

Under Pancasila, the newly independent nation's institutions
would conform to belief in one god, just and civilized humanity,
Indonesia's unity, democracy and social justice for all
Indonesians.

Indonesians have often failed to comply. Nevertheless,
Pancasila precepts taught from kindergarten have given their
nation remarkable resilience.

Western intellectuals have often scorned what one of them,
Hubert Luethy, called "this incomparable orgy of synthetic
emotions". In Encounter magazine in 1965, Luethy described
Sukarno's Indonesia as an "extreme case" of newly emerging
nations' "unique preoccupation" with "education in the service of
patriotism".

Wrote Luethy: "Insofar as a collective psychosis controlled by
a charismatic leader is accessible to reason, the case of
Indonesia deserves analysis."

Perhaps so. But his comments are also irrelevant. If this
pompous writer were still around, he'd be obliged to note that
such nation-building has prevailed over a wide range of enemies.

Many conservative Muslims objected to Pancasila on the grounds
that it threatened to place man-made precepts at a higher level
than the Quran. Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), the clandestine Islamist
terror group, is just the latest anti-Pancasila manifestation.

JI's progenitor was the Darul Islam (Abode of God) movement
which in 1948 challenged the new republic. The Islamist-versus-
secularist civil war that followed claimed some 27,000 lives.

In the 1950s and early 1960s it was America's turn. Suspicious
of president Sukarno's flirtations with communism, United States
policy factions tried to break up the nation. The Central
Intelligence Agency helped secessionist rebellions in Sulawesi,
West Java and Sumatra, but to no avail.

In the early 1960s, China, through the Indonesian Communist
Party, had a go at taking charge. Failure again -- amid massive
blood-letting. And by some accounts, Soeharto's exit followed his
failed efforts to change the system by implying that Pancasila
insisted on personal loyalty to him.

But what if there is no "morning in Indonesia" after next
month's presidential election?

Indonesia has strengths other than Pancasila. Though the
country recently became a net crude oil importer, it remains the
world's biggest natural gas exporter. So Indonesia will benefit
from a likely surge in energy prices.

Investors are taking note. Earlier this year, a US$1 billion
(S$1.7 billion) sovereign-bond offering was very well-received.
McKinsey and Company analysts also point to the government's sale
of 10 percent of Bank Mandiri, the country's largest bank in
terms of assets, for $333 million -- "more than it made a year
earlier from the sale of a stake twice as big".

The analysts offer an agenda for the country's next leader:
Transform sectors such as agriculture, energy and manufacturing
into "competitive and efficient drivers of growth, much as (the
present administration) has begun to do in the financial sector".

The message to him or her is clear: Succeed -- and listen to
all three very loud cheers from throughout the region. Fail --
and 238 million Indonesians (the equivalent of about 10
Singapores have been added to the population since Soeharto left
office) will drift once more into ever more dangerous waters.