RI future 'hinges' on handling of military

RI future 'hinges' on handling of military

JAKARTA (AFP): The future of post-Soeharto Indonesia hinges on
how the nation handles its military, according to a report by the
International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) released
Thursday.

In its annual report the London-based IISS said Indonesia's
two main problems now were safeguarding its drive towards full
democracy and cementing its territorial and national integrity.

"Yet, while the future and durability of Indonesian democracy
is less assured than the (1999) election results seemed to
promise, the country's integrity is less imperiled than some
pessimists believed," the institute said.

The IISS was referring to the country's freest and fairest
elections since 1955, which culminated in the election of Muslim
scholar Abdurrahman Wahid as the country's fourth president in
October.

The 1999 poll organizers, the government of former president
B.J. Habibie who was handpicked by Soeharto to succeed him after
more than three decades in power, had already begun the process
of reform and democratization picked up and amplified by
Abdurrahman.

One of the key reforms taken up by the new president has been
to wean the military away from Indonesia's political life and
return them to the barracks.

"The success that Wahid has achieved in his slow and careful
campaign to put the military back in the barracks needs to be
followed up before Indonesia can be certain that its transition
to electoral democracy has been completed," the IISS report said.

It warned that the military, which under Wahid has begun to
relinquish its long-held influential role in politics, could
still step in and reclaim its earlier position.

"At worst, it (Indonesia) could fall apart into mutually
hostile nation states, destabilizing the entire region, or to
prevent that outcome the army might reassert the dictatorship it
seemed to have relinquished so recently," the institute said.

But it also said that any such move by the military would
create a resistance by large numbers of Indonesians against such
"a retrograde lurch."

"At best, it could still become a vibrant pluralist country
with far more power devolved from the center in Java."

After Soeharto resigned in May 1998, separatism mounted in the
former Portuguese colony of East Timor, in the province of Aceh
and in Irian Jaya.

East Timor was relinquished to United Nations control in
October.

Violence between separatists and Indonesian security forces
continues to rock Aceh, while in Irian Jaya, Abdurrahman has had
time to begin to partly defuse separatism there, the institute
said.

Another rich province, Riau, in Sumatra, has also seen raising
calls for more independence from Java, especially on the
management and exploitation of its own natural resources,
including its abundant oil and gas.