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.