Returning to 'unity in diversity' after centralism legacy
Returning to 'unity in diversity' after centralism legacy
The new government had barely begun to tackle the current
crisis when provinces crying out for self-determination started
to run out of patience. Political scholar Herbert Feith, an
Australian and a visiting lecturer at Gadjah Mada University in
Yogyakarta who has studied Indonesia since the 1950s, talked to
The Jakarta Post about the issue.
Question:How do you view the calls for separatism in more
areas in Indonesia, especially in Aceh?
Answer: Maybe the best way to start is with the opportunities
the Gus Dur (President Abdurrahman Wahid) government has in Aceh.
Many people seem to be overwhelmed by the difficulty of the task
it faces in relation to Aceh and indeed they are great. The
government has a lot of cards to play. It can tell the Acehnese
that it is impossible to promise a referendum without the
approval of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). And it can
point to the importance the United Nations (UN) aspect has had in
relation to East Timor. Aceh's position in the eyes of the UN is
very different from that of East Timor.
In the case of East Timor, the UN did not recognize what the
Soeharto government called its integration. In December 1975, its
Security Council condemned Indonesia's invasion of East Timor and
called on it to withdraw its troops from there immediately. That
resolution remains on the books.
Aceh has never had that sort of international status. It is
true that there are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in
several countries, which are sympathetic to the Aceh Merdeka
Movement (GAM), but their sympathy is not for the military
activity of that movement or for the leadership of Abdullah
Syafei or Hasan Tiro. It is rather for the idea that the Acehnese
deserve a new deal and they should not continue to be oppressed
and exploited in antidemocratic ways. Many people in the outside
world express sympathy of that kind with Aceh, though few have
any sympathy for the military operations of GAM.
Are you saying that the world sees Aceh more as an issue of
human rights?
Yes, and as an issue of justice rather than one of
sovereignty. I don't see any significant group in the outside
world that supports those Acehnese who want to establish a new
state. So what can they do? They can proclaim an independent
state, of course. They can raise their flag outside the
governor's office or outside the provincial parliament in Banda
Aceh and the government of Libya may express sympathy with their
proclamation. But it is most unlikely that any government would
recognize them as a state.
They may get a bit of covert financial support from one or
other multinational companies that want to gain access to their
natural gas. But the established gas companies operating in Arun
are more unlikely to side with them against Jakarta.
Just look at what happened from February to March 1958. At
that time the United States government sympathized with the
proclamation of "the revolutionary government of the Republic of
Indonesia" (PRRI) seeing it as more firmly anticommunist than the
Soekarno government in Jakarta.
But, Caltex, the big American oil company operating in PRRI
territory (in Sumatra) refused to give them significant support.
Their priority was to maintain cooperation with the central
government. I think it would be similar to the foreign companies
that are operating in Aceh today.
Does that mean that the central government is in a stronger
position than GAM?
I think so. It has a lot of cards to play. GAM has a lot of
cards too of course, mainly that they have very wide public
support for their demands for a referendum. But support for a
referendum is not the same as support for separatism for
establishing a new state.
The Acehnese have long been proud of having made major
contributions to the struggle against the Dutch, in the late 19th
century, early 20th century and especially during the revolution
between 1945 and 1949. They often tell you that Aceh was the one
and only part of Indonesia that the Dutch did not manage to
conquer in those years. Most people who are proudly Acehnese are
also proudly Indonesian.
So, there is room for creative approaches. And Gus Dur has
always been an innovative leader. So he and his colleagues will
probably find a formula which gives both sides a measure of
satisfaction. The Acehnese will not get their independent state
but they may well get something that meets the most important of
their grievances, something that is compatible with the survival
of Indonesia in its present boundaries.
So what kind of settlement do you think it could be?
One aspect could be double flagging, letting the Acehnese fly
a flag of their own as long as they also allow the Red and White
to be flown. Having two flags has become increasingly widespread
in other parts of the world in the last decade. In Australia, for
example, the Aboriginal community has its own flag that flies in
prominent places in the national capital. Nobody seems to see
that as an insult to the national flag of Australia. If the
government says "yes, you may fly your Aceh flag as long as you
also fly the Indonesian national flag", that could be part of a
compromise settlement.
What else do you see as elements of feasible settlement?
Providing justice to the victims of human rights violations
will, I think, need to be an important component. Fortunately the
Indonesian Military leadership has already expressed willingness
to be more serious than before in bringing its officers charged
with human rights violations before the courts. That would do a
great deal to heal the wounds that the Acehnese have sustained in
the last 10 years.
Gus Dur's interest in the South African model of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission is encouraging too. I see that a
creative formula whereby horrible truths are allowed to be aired
and victims express their cries for justice, in a search for
reconciliation rather than revenge.
I also think it would be valuable if the Gus Dur government
established a high level commission in cooperation with the MPR
leadership to examine the whole question of how Indonesia might
be made into a state with a greater degree of federalism in its
structure. Such a commission should be given something like three
to six months to complete its task with the government committing
itself to considering its recommendations by the time of the
October 2000 meeting of the MPR. Moreover, it would be valuable
for the government to announce that the regulation to implement
the new (fiscal balance law) would be finalized within three to
six months.
Back to the idea of two flags, how do you explain such an idea
especially since Indonesia is not a federal state?
As I see it, one can have the substance of federalism without
the form. Indonesia had a bad experience with federalism back in
1946 and 1949. The Dutch established a highly artificial set of
federal states as part of a strategy to contain and defeat the
Soekarno-Hatta Republic. So, federalism got a very bad name.
But Mohammad Hatta, who played the central role in dissolving
that federal structure, was actually a federalist. He thought
Indonesia should have a federal basis but not the artificial
federal arrangements that the Dutch had hurriedly built up in the
areas of their military control before 1949.
I myself do not have any clear convictions on whether
federalism as such is a good idea for Indonesia. But I'm
convinced that the Gus Dur government will need to be far more
flexible than its predecessors in dealing with various regions
outside Java, especially with ethnic and fairly homogeneous
regions like Aceh and Irian.
It was useful, I think, to see the New Order's great hostility
to far-reaching provincial autonomy as the product of a
particular experience in 1958 that left a strong mark on Soeharto
and his generation of military leaders. They were furious about
the willingness of the PRRI and Permesta leaders to collude with
foreign countries, particularly America and Britain, in ways that
risked the unity of the country.
From that experience they concluded Sumatrans and Sulawesians
could not be trusted to have a serious commitment to Indonesian
unity. Christian Bataks and Christian Dayaks are likely to remain
loyal to Jakarta because they come from areas where Christians
are surrounded by Muslims. But with Outer Island Muslims, you can
never be sure that they won't be tempted to be subversive.
That bitter experience led Soeharto and his associates to
forget the idea of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (national motto of Unity
in Diversity). They saw diversity as dangerous because it
threatened the unity of the nation. But you could say they over-
learned the lesson of 1958.
They thought one needed to remain suspicious of groups
demanding more regional autonomy. What they lost sight of was
that over-centralization could become an even greater threat to
the maintenance of a united Indonesia.
What is important here is the unity of Indonesia, the lack of
territorial breakup, not the question of a unitary or federal
state. India, Malaysia and Australia are all federal states but
that doesn't mean that they're broken up. None of them have
disintegrated and none of them looks as if they are moving in
that direction.
Do you think the solution you are offering for Aceh would
aggravate pressures of separatism in other regions?
It very well might if the government does make major
concessions that will stimulate regionalist demands in other
regions, especially those which earn large quantities of foreign
exchange for the central government; areas like Riau, Irian and
East Kalimantan. But in the case of East Kalimantan and Riau, the
concessions Jakarta would have to make wouldn't need to be so
great because those two are ethnically heterogeneous areas.
In Riau, the pressure is coming mainly from a group of people
who are putra daerah (natives) and speakers of Malay. And those
Malays are no more than 20 percent of the Riau population. That's
very different from Aceh and Irian where the leaders of the
regional movements speak for a large majority.
Could you describe the experiences of the Indonesian political
elite that led to the federal state being dissolved in favor of a
unitary one?
It is worth remembering that Indonesia was a unitary and a
highly centralized state before 1942. Federalism was not an idea
the Dutch colonial authorities liked. They adopted it in 1946 for
a short-term argument because of essentially opportunistic
reasons, as part of a strategy of containing and isolating the
republic. Having occupied certain areas like Jakarta, Bandung,
Surabaya and Makassar, they built up little "states" around those
cities.
The State of East Indonesia was the one major exception to
that pattern of artificiality. It was not an artificial state.
Pasundan (in West Java) was a bit real too, at least less
artificial than most of the others. Indonesia has experienced a
unitary system of government ever since it emerged with a modern
state structure in the middle of the 19th century.
So one legacy of the colonial period is a highly centralized
government. And one legacy of the late 1950's transition from
parliamentary democracy is that many political leaders,
especially army leaders, see the ethnic Javanese as natural
leaders of a united Indonesia. The view is still widely held in
officer circles that people from the other main ethnic
communities are liable to the temptations of subversion, are
likely to be tempted by accession to Malaysia or the Philippines
or by a foreign backed scheme which promised them a new state
outside the Republic.
As I see it, that is a good example of an idea whose time has
gone. Fortunately, we are now returning to something like
Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, to the idea that Indonesia's unity is based
on balance and a complimentary condition between Java and the
Outer Islands.
During the Revolution, Dutch spokespeople often described the
Republic as a Soekarno enterprise with little or no appeal to the
non-Javanese. The Republic's response was that the Javanese
Soekarno and the Minangkabau Hatta (from Sumatra) were a
Dwitunggal, a unity of two. In fact the Republic had only
Sumatrans as Prime Ministers in its first five years: Syahrir,
Amir Syarifuddin, Hatta and Mohamad Natsir.
So you see the unity we had under Soeharto's rule as
artificial?
Yes. The centralization Soeharto imposed and maintained was
brittle because it was rigid. And its emphasis on standardization
and homogenization was in the end counterproductive. By the
middle 1990s it was generating more resistance than compliance.
We have seen the results of that in East Timor and now we are
seeing it in Aceh and to some extent in Irian.
And how do you see the interethnic violence in West Kalimantan
and the interreligious violence in Ambon?
I see those against another development for which the
designers of the Soeharto policies can be held responsible. The
anti-Madurese violence in West Kalimantan and the Christian-
Muslim violence in Ambon is similar in that a lot of it is based
on the grievances of local people against hard working immigrants
who have come to live among them in recent times.
What has happened in those two provinces raises the question
of whether governors should have real power to stand up to the
central government on issues which their people feel strongly,
especially whether they should have power to restrict migration
into their areas.
In Malaysia today, the chief ministers of Serawak and Sabah
have a lot of control over migration into their states. If West
Kalimantan and Maluku had elected governors in the last 30 years
(people whose election could not be vetoed by the central
government) they might well have insisted that the migration of
Maduranese into West Kalimantan and of South Sulawesians into
Maluku should be much slower than it had been.
How do you see the new Law on Regional Autonomy? Do you expect
that it will help lessen the pressure for referenda?
I'm not sure. That law's whole emphasis is on autonomy for
kabupaten (regions) and kotamadya (townships) whereas the
political challenge comes mainly from the provinces. What is
needed is a very high level of autonomy for provinces. The
central government can no longer afford to insist that every
province be treated in the same way as every other one.
It needs to concede that resource-rich provinces like Aceh and
Irian have much greater bargaining power than resource-poor ones
like East Nusa Tenggara. That doesn't mean it has to give in on
everything that Aceh or Irian asks for. But it needs to recognize
that no governor can run a province effectively unless he is in
tune with the local public mood.
As I see it, the central government should abjure all rights
to veto a province's choice of governor. And it should allow
provincial parliaments to have much greater power.
Unfortunately, Law 22 of 1999 -- the Law on Regional Autonomy
-- does not provide for that. That legislation has a lot of the
spirit of the New Order about it. New Order governments kept
insisting that they would increase the level of autonomy for
kabupaten and kotamadya. They were frightened of allowing
provincial level autonomy, because they had overlearned the
lesson of 1958.
One reason why I'm optimistic about the Gus Dur government's
ability to deconstruct the over centralized state machinery it
has inherited from its predecessors is that the outside world is
not interested in splitting Indonesia. In 1958 there were people
in high places in Western governments who were willing to see
Indonesia break up. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of
State, at the time toyed with that because he saw Soekarno's
Indonesia as veering to the left. If Java was about to go
communist, the U.S. should not hesitate, he thought, to use its
Seventh Fleet to contain and isolate it in the interest of the
Indonesians who wanted to form an anticommunist state outside of
Java.
There had been big arguments in America earlier in the 1950s
about what America did badly which had helped the Communists to
come to power in China in 1949. As Dulles and his friends had
argued, "We were stupid to allow China to become communist as a
whole country. We could have prevented that if we had had the
guts to back anticommunists in the parts of China where the
communists were weak."
As George and Audrey Kahin showed in their Subversion as
Foreign Policy, published (in 1995), the reconstruction of the
might-have-beens of China was an important part of the thinking
of the Eisenhower administration about Indonesia in the middle
1950s. In the present period the international context is
completely different.
It is true that some Western governments have expressed
support for the idea of a referendum on independence in East
Timor. Most of the overseas pressure has come from NGOs and
parliaments. But, by 1997, there was also support from
governments. But East Timor's position in international law was
very different from that of Aceh or Irian.
The rich countries that dominate global society today are
basically conservative about territorial boundaries. They support
status quos because they are afraid that disturbing them will
lead to wars. The logic is straightforward: wars are seen as
dangerous because they generate flows of refugees. In the eyes of
leaders in the U.S., Japan, Europe and Australia, uncontrollable
flows of poor refugees from Third World war zones is a threat to
stability in their own countries.
So the principal response of the rich country governments to
separatist pressures in poor countries is a dual one. On the one
hand they urge the poor country governments concerned to be
flexible rather than relying too much on repression. On the other
hand they refuse to support demands which are likely to upset
existing boundaries.
Do you agree that the government needs to take the Aceh crisis
very seriously?
Certainly. A movement that can bring over half a million
people onto the streets of Banda Aceh is no small thing. And now
the governor himself has signed a petition calling for a
referendum. Jakarta needs to respect the fact that there is vast
popular support in Aceh for some of the demands which the GAM has
spearheaded.
But the Gus Dur government is also aware that GAM is not a
particularly democratic organization. It speaks for a powerful
popular mood but it does not have a good name as regards
pluralism or tolerance. In that respect it is more like the
Bougainville Revolutionary Army in Papua New Guinea and Tamil
Tigers in Srilanka than the (proindependence organization) CNRT
in East Timor. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army used to be
highly popular too and the Tamil Tigers are said to still have a
lot of Tamil popular support.
They have managed for years to attract idealistic teenagers
for suicide missions for their cause but both are also
dictatorial, militaristic and intimidatory organizations. They
spend little effort on telling the outside world about the
democratic state that they would build if they won. Their
leaderships are like the leadership of the Shining Path
Guerrillas in Peru and the Kurdistan People's Party in Turkey
used to be before the recent increase in the power of its
moderates.
One needs to distinguish between popular movements and
military organizations, even where the popular movement owes much
of its origins to the bold example of the military organization
concerned.
Does that mean that the government need not worry about giving
the Acehnese the referendum they are demanding?
It certainly has to take that demand seriously and to
negotiate with the groups that are pushing for it. The referendum
proposal is one of a number of things the two sides will need to
negotiate and bargain about. They will no doubt bargain about
many other things as well.
But Jakarta does not need to concede that the Acehnese have
just as much right to a referendum on independence as the East
Timorese. The East Timorese started by demanding self-
determination. Later they changed that to demand a UN-supervised
referendum. Bishop (Carlos Felipe Ximenes) Belo wrote to the
Secretary General of the UN in 1989 calling for that. Later again
they said they wanted independence. And a lot of Acehnese see
themselves as walking a similar path. But East Timorese
nationalism has long been an impressively mature movement. There
has long been cooperation among its principal figures, not only
between Bishop Belo on the one hand and (Jose Alexandre) "Xanana"
Gusmao and (Jose Ramos) Horta on the other, but also between
those three and former governor Mario Carrascalao.
The Acehnese don't seem to me to have that sort of leadership
yet, though I may be out of date on that. I don't see any central
figure in their movement who unifies its radical and moderate
elements in the way Xanana has done in East Timor since about
1991.
But I guess a leader like that could emerge quite quickly. If
and when such a person emerges, I expect she or he will be
willing to negotiate with Jakarta about a lot things other than a
referendum on independence.
But Gus Dur has said he is in favor of a referendum.
Gus Dur said he favored one in principle. That is a good
starting point. But it is not the same as agreeing to hold a
referendum at a particular time, or agreeing to recommend that to
the next session of the MPR. And it is certainly not the same as
saying that a Special Session of the MPR needs to be called to
consider the case for a referendum in Aceh.
How do you see the initiative that Amien Rais took in going to
Aceh, in a trip he described as being in a personal capacity
rather than as Speaker of the MPR.
I think it is excellent that he went there. Granted his
central role in the formation of the Cabinet, it was a sign that
the government as such is taking the Aceh challenge seriously, as
was the sending of the ministerial delegation led by (State
Minister of Human Rights Affairs) Hasballah M. Saad. (Sri
Wahyuni)
Window: The Acehnese will not get their independent state but they may
well get something that meets the most important of their
grievances, something that is compatible with the survival of
Indonesia in its present boundaries.
...one legacy of the late 1950's transition from parliamentary
democracy is that many political leaders, especially army
leaders, see the ethnic Javanese as natural leaders of a united
Indonesia.
That law's whole emphasis is on autonomy for kabupaten
(regions) and kotamadya (townships) whereas the political
challenge comes mainly from the provinces. What is needed is a
very high level of autonomy for provinces.