Political pacts have yet to include the people

By Olle Tornquist

OSLO, Norway (JP): Time moves swiftly in Indonesia. Just two years ago, the Asian crisis put an end to authoritarian development and the hallelujah choir fell silent. The dominant West was as bewildered as the oppressed opposition was weak. Six months later, the students instead ensured that Soeharto was deposed and that most agreed that democracy was the only solution. The military was weakened. The monopolists were shaken. Ordinary people demanded those responsible to be held accountable. With the June elections this year, the world's largest democracy was born. But now the party is over and the day after is already here.

Soeharto's "new order" has been replaced by Abdurrahman Wahid's (Gus Dur's) "pact order." The people voted their protest and won the election, but the elite horse-traded their stakes and won the presidency. All the important groups -- including the military, the former ruling Golkar party and the conservative Muslims -- are part of the new government. The genuine democrats are essentially marginalized or else free to pursue their private projects in civil society. So who has the time and the inclination to develop political democracy? Even the West lost interest as soon as the election was over.

Certainly, Gus Dur is the charming and liberal Muslim that the world needs. But even if he is not, as people say, crazy about women like Sukarno, crazy about money like Soeharto or absolutely crazy like B.J. Habibie, he is instead driving everyone crazy with his capricious maneuvers. And so, democracy is no longer seen as a solution. The elite now worry instead about how to keep the country together if Aceh is given free rein, how to pay all the debts if the provinces are allowed to share revenues, and how to constrain the fury of the people when subsidies are withdrawn.

The civilian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has gone so far as to request a nearly doubled budget in exchange for keeping the military out of politics and the economy, and is threatening a coup if the politicians cannot create a "healthy and strong" political atmosphere. So while the media are sending warnings of a breakdown and neighboring countries are having nightmares about boat refugees and pirates, "realists", including in the West, are delicately refraining from "provoking" the military by pointing out their crimes against human rights.

This position is, of course, wrong on the facts. Embarrassingly enough, for instance, the same national commission on human rights that was considered by the West just a few months ago to be uncritical, is now indicating that the military is so politically, economically and organizationally weakened that no concessions are necessary. First and foremost, however, the position is a political catastrophe. For when Sudarsono is speaking up and others are mumbling about the weak capacity of democracy to uphold stability, they rely on the same justification as the West did when supporting Soeharto: that democracy is impossible before economic and social development controlled by the elite has created a strong middle class with a strong civil society. But not even 30 years of such modernization helped. Democracy did not emerge until the project broke down.

If we wish to learn from history, we must realize that the root of the present situation is not the absence of state control, but rather the lack of democratic institutions and people's capacity to use them. The first problem, then, is that the former powers have been given new legitimacy. Golkar is recovering quickly. The students' discovery of the falsified history has not brought new curricula and cultural transformation. The elite is avoiding the accounting of decades of state violence that could give common people the courage to build democracy and the country the chance to regain its former stature. Corruption is condemned and decentralization commended, but there is no policy to promote the social and political movements that could bring forward a society founded on the rule of law and counteract the power of local bosses.

The second problem is that there is only a political pact among the elite, no social pact with the people. Consequently, the prerequisites are lacking to handle social and economic setbacks through, for instance, negotiated agreements between the state, labor and capital rather than fighting in the streets. The Ministry of Labor is still unprioritised and is controlled by Golkar. The Ministry of Social Services has been disbanded (a feat unmatched by even Margaret Thatcher) with its duties dispatched to the districts, which have little administrative capacity, and the civil society, which mainly consists of competing religious groups that vulnerable people are now becoming even more dependent upon.

The third problem is that both unitarians who sing the praises of nationalism and federalists who call Indonesia a colonial construction seem to believe that the country will fall apart without stringent central control. Few are pausing to consider that Indonesia grew forth from the anti-colonial struggle for freedom and democracy. Few are taking note of the fact that today's problems are due to the steamrolling of democracy since the late 1950's. And few are discussing whether the problems and demands at the local level might be better resolved through a return to democratic element in the original national project rather than to despotic modernism in Jakarta or rivaling ethnic and religious communities in the provinces.

The vacillating between the thesis that elitist development is the only path to democracy and the idea that rapid democratization is possible through import of human rights, civil society, and free elections must come to an end! The first path ends with dictatorship and the second is inadequate. The historical compromise would rather be if the latter were used to create the prerequisites for democratic development with which the former has failed.

The writer is Professor of political science and development research, at the University of Oslo. The article was first published in Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm.