Work with the undercurrent for a new Indonesia

The United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR) is a unique UN project set up in 2000 to facilitate discussion among stakeholders in policy issues, in order to come up with policy recommendations through the "Jajaki" network. The Jakarta Post's Ati Nurbaiti recently spoke with UNSFIR head Satish C. Mishra. The following is an excerpt of that interview.

Question: Why is this project unique to Indonesia?

Answer: At the beginning of the crisis there was confusion of what this crisis was; many had thought it would be short lived. Soon it became obvious that it was a very complicated picture ... all the usual textbook models were there to get countries in economic crises out of crisis, not to deal with such "systemic transition".

You have suggested that all is not lost. Will you feel the same way if the next elections produce a similar political elite?

Absolutely, unless you have a violent revolution you're going to get candidates who don't look all that different.

If you keep seeing how far it is to go before having consolidated democracy and strong recovery, maybe you feel it's a long way to go. But if you see this as a systemic transition which may take 10 years to 15 years, then your pessimism or optimism doesn't change from month to month or from year to year.

The military has taken a setback in politics and there's no way back .... Even on the economic side the record is a lot better compared to that of some Eastern European economies .... Why didn't you have a Rwanda scenario or one like so many countries in Latin America?

The violent conflicts in some areas in Indonesia were shocking enough.

But you did not have the bloodshed of the 1960s; you could have had it where the economy collapsed and where political legitimacy disappeared, and you have such different ethnic compositions ... The idea that the country is coming apart is not true. It doesn't explain why after 30 years of dictatorship and extreme concentration of wealth, a country could change its entire political system without a much greater level of violence.

One major factor was that several years before (Soeharto stepped down) people were beginning to think about alternatives (to) a political system where the deal is that the government will give you growth and the people will remain very quiet.

The second is the large Islamic movements; these contributed tremendously to peaceful elections. Third, you had an enormous group of small businesses which were isolated from the banking system so the extent of the financial shock was not transmitted to them as it was to larger businesses.

And there was a whole series of parties who realized that if you don't create conditions of peaceful transition you'll have a repeat of the 1960s and give an excuse to a hardliner to return.

Despite some fighting there is that undercurrent at the individual, collective and institutional level. Indonesia does want to work out what to do next, to create an institutional structure to give more stability.

Is it this undercurrent that led to the UNSFIR initiative called the Jajaki network?

The drive has completely come from the Indonesian institutions (who have said) we're creating a new system, we're not used to talking to each other without suspicion, we need a facilitator...

This is a testimony to that undercurrent. People are not waiting for the government to do things.

From the perspective of Washington, London, Tokyo, it looks like a very slow process because the benchmark was set up for one-and-a-half years or two years. But the public here has always realized that when you're changing the entire political system, when you're trying to find jobs for millions of people, when you're dealing with age-old disputes and hatred ... even the youngest Indonesian realizes it is not going to happen tomorrow.

There's another change; people are not antigovernment, they may not trust it, but they feel they want to be involved in public policies.

The key challenge is how to launch this second wave (of reformasi). It's about giving Indonesia institutional stability, about getting people to accept differences of opinion.

What of the big experiment with regional autonomy?

Certainly the design has suffered from the fact that no serious assessment was done of all the things that can go wrong if you have a very hurried schedule for regional autonomy.

Decentralization is about winning hearts and minds, about having a common view of how to deconcentrate power, and because of the hurried way the whole thing was done there has really not been any serious discussion across the regions and provinces as to what decentralization means for them.

So the next stage for decentralization, which is as critical as improving the laws and introducing some new institutions, is this battle to construct a common vision of what decentralization is about. How do poorer districts and provinces see their existence in the nation compared to the richer ones?

Do you see a viable regional autonomy in a unitary state?

Decentralization is a political mechanism whereby people are able to contribute to the development of their own region ... but also they contribute to the nation and the contribution is genuine. Regional autonomy is a particular legal form of that.

The basic question is not Aceh and Papua, it is the other 400 or something districts. How do they contribute to nationhood?

That's where interaction and communication is important. The political parties and social movements have a major role to play.

We're promoting the idea of a social summit involving districts and provinces to discuss what Indonesian citizenship should look like. We're suggesting that all citizens have a number of rights, beginning with equal rights to the political process and equal rights to human security...

How do you see the frustration with corruption here?

Indonesia has not had an organized dissident movement, political parties were not allowed to function. You can't deal with corruption unless you have a cultural and institutional mechanism. Slavery in Rome lasted a thousand years ....

There are two aspects here: One is to build democratic institutions so corrupt decisions can be overturned and corrupt institutions can be brought to book.

Second, you need to give the individual person a weapon with which to fight corruption, (to enable) mass mobilization, mass awareness, the ability of the citizen to record their experiences. You need to have a way of every individual saying, I will not pay because this is illegitimate, and there are a thousand different ways by which my life is affected by corruption.

If every village in every town had a daily register, a little book which records the nature of corruption, and the media took it up, it would become a life force. It (corruption) won't go away with one election, it needs cultural change in the same way removing colonial rule needed cultural change.

When Ghandi was doing it (campaigning against colonial rule based on non-violence) people couldn't read and write.

We're not putting enough public pressure (on the corruption issue) as it still remains at the level of the elite.