Time for Indonesia to start second wave of `reformasi'

Time for Indonesia to start second wave of `reformasi'

Satish Mishra, Head, United Nations Support Facility
for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), Jakarta, satish.mishra@undp.org

For some reason we are all attracted to the idea of the five
yearly review. This year it is the turn of reformasi. Articles
and seminars abound. So do demonstrations. There is much blaming
and breast beating. There is also much reflection. May 1998 is
after all not that far away. Have we moved ahead or fallen
behind? Does the future look more secure or bleaker? Will
anything ever change?

All these questions are both frequent and widespread. But they
are not so much questions about reformasi -- reformasi was never
meant to define milestones in a journey. It was more an outbreak
of energy and emotion and pent-up frustration. Reformasi was a
mood rather than a program; more spirit than body.

The spirit of 1998 was indeed powerful. It was a great river
which could not be contained. It brought down a system of
government which looked, till the very end, unassailable. It was
a system built on blood and arms, on clever balancing of
different interest groups, on international anti-communist
support of the Cold War and on the organized pillage of the
state.

As time went on, its stature grew because of the myth of its
past economic successes. Political legitimacy and obedience was
bought by a long fiesta of bread and circuses. Most foreign
observers cheered. Most Indonesians submitted. A few protested.
But, guns and history and charisma held sway. May 1998 seemed
decades away from 1997.

The disappointment and the bewilderment behind reformasi lay
in how such power of feeling was not channeled into an agent for
repair and rebuilding. The spirit of reformasi promised a
liberated Indonesian Phoenix rising from the ashes of the New
Order. Reality was not so accommodating. The worshipers of
reformasi found more ash than phoenix. They saw the ghost of old
Indonesia still twisting in the wind.

Five years on, those who gave birth to reformasi talk openly
about its untimely demise. They see betrayal and disappointment
everywhere. The evidence, they argue is for everyone to see. It
goes something like this. The legislature is full of crooks and
cronies. The bureaucracy remains a den of thieves and ruthless
technocrats. The government is led by the nose by the moneyed
classes. The urban young are turning to vice and recklessness.
Religious tolerance is in headlong decline. Foreign governments
and foreign institutions run the country and harvest its economic
resources. The people remain bent and poor and helpless. There is
conspiracy everywhere. The military is poised for a take over.
The last breath of reformasi is being snuffed out.

Revolutions, even bloodless ones, are earthquakes of history.
They are momentary events of great import and even beauty. But
sooner or later the ground becomes still. The painstaking task of
reconstruction begins. The great spirit of the revolution hardly
ever lasts beyond a few initial gasps of the new world. The
spirit that can move mountains is strangely inept at building new
institutions, let alone clearing sewage and keeping transport
systems running. Spirit must give way to system. Why blame the
spirit for not doing what it could never have done?

Reformasi was a great success. It brought down an autocratic
state. To do more, the spirit would have had to evolve into an
agency with a program and a will and direction. That is the real
question. Why did the leaders of reformasi possess so few
concrete ideas about the steps which might be needed to turn a
mood and an idea into an instrument of regeneration?

The puzzle is not as difficult as it seems. To begin with,
reformasi was itself a reaction to years of political repression
and control. It was the living proof of the old adage that man
does not live by bread alone. Freedom matters. People can tell
between right and wrong. Notions of fairness and justice cannot
just be spirited away by slogans and sham rallies of support.

Turning liberation protests into practical policy needs a
political process, and political institutions, such as to
encourage debate and interaction. This requires both time and new
leadership. Long standing dissident movements or governments in
exile have at times succeeded in evolving a policy in waiting.

More frequently, it is the very political space afforded in
the early years of liberation which establishes the building
blocks of new national priorities and values. Indonesia benefited
neither from organized dissidence nor a government in exile. The
left had been physically liquidated. Islamic forces were either
divided or co-opted. The middle classes were counting cash.
Leaders of artificially consolidated political parties owed their
positions to government acquiescence and presidential writ.

Indonesia's economic collapse only served to muddy the waters.
On the one hand, it rapidly eroded the legitimacy of the New
Order regime. Not surprising, since economic growth through
political obedience was the great promise of Indonesian
autocracy. On the other, an unprecedented increase in its foreign
debt forced Indonesia to go to the IMF.

The stage was set for a primacy of economic over political
reform. Technocrats in government and external aid agencies
constituted a powerful combine. The former tried to win back lost
political legitimacy. The latter tried to make every dollar
count. Dollars, not democracy, soon became the litmus test of a
government's resolve and political will. The river of public
concern and debate was diverted into the narrow stagnant waters
of anti-IMF and anti-foreign sentiment.

Regional decentralization only contributed to the confusion.
The liberation rhetoric of reformasi permeated to the lowest rung
of the public administration. Indonesia chose a rather drastic
form of decentralization; from a highly centralized government to
a system devolving political power to over 400 districts. Issues
of ethnic expression and cultural identity were overridden by
concerns of control and efficiency. Provinces were left tame and
toothless.

All these factors combined to alter the underlying logic of
reformasi: From an ideology of freedom and quest for social
justice towards the utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits,
of the relative merits of democracy and economic growth. Problems
of cultural rigidity and habitual subservience to authority were
brought into the argument. Skillfully used they would be used to
drive home the message that democratization was alien to the
Indonesian soul.

This was a dangerous undercurrent to the reform agenda. The
economic collapse had been the most severe in recent history,
even greater than that which helped the birth of the New Order.
Its political institutions had crumbled as if under some
sorcerer's curse. Its social fabric, already transformed by three
decades of constant migration from its villages was showing signs
of deep stress. The politics of gross domestic product growth
left in limbo the task of healing deep rooted social divisions.
Violent social conflict rocked many parts of the country.

This state of affairs required urgent attention to the
creation of stable democratic institutions capable of peacefully
containing openly expressed disagreements. It needed the primacy
of democratic consolidation over an urgent return to pre-crisis
rates of economic growth.

Above all, it needed the construction of a new social contract
rooted in rights and entitlements for all Indonesian citizens.
Failure to do so would only lead to chronic policy paralysis and
increased vulnerability to future economic shocks.

Rather than lamenting the death of reformasi, it is time to
begin the second wave. Central to this second wave is the
creation of an Indonesian reform agenda and institutions based on
the very freedoms that have been won in reformasi's first flush.
More rather than less issues-based politics is the urgent order
of the day.

The views expressed in this article are strictly personal.