Indonesia's struggle: conquering a legacy of avarice and vice

By Ben Anderson
(The Age, 12 May 2001)

Indonesia is a strange country by any measure, and now one where, unlike Thailand or the Philippines, the potential opposition between nationalism and democracy is perfectly visible.

How easy it is to take the past for granted. Who in 1907 would have said that a nationalist movement would be in place in 20 years, whose vision would include an Aceh, a southern Bali, and a West New Guinea/Papua in the very process of colonial incorporation in that year?

Who in 1940 would have said that within five years the sedate, highly policed colony would experience a revolution, and be legally recognised as a new nation-state within 10?

Who in 1962 would have said that within four years somewhere between half and two million citizens would be massacred by the state?

Who in 1995 would have said that within three years its fabled economic miracle would lie in probably irreparable ruins, and its famously overpowering state would be a shambles? It is important to remember Sukarno. He was almost the only young nationalist in his generation who came from a mixed ethnic and religious background - his father an at least nominally Muslim Javanese and his mother a Hindu Balinese.

In his long career, he worked tirelessly and mostly successfully to propagate an inclusive, populist nationalism that was out of the reach of even Mahatma Gandhi. This is why, a generation after his death, he remains a living presence, without a rival in South-East Asia, except for the late Ho Chi Minh.

The hope Sukarno provided is quite visible in the huge popular support today for his otherwise wholly unremarkable daughter, Megawati.

Needless to say, he made many mistakes, as we all do. From today's perspective, the crucial one was the decision in 1950 to give strong backing to a partly popular movement to destroy the Federal Republic of Indonesia, which was the fruit of painful negotiations between the departing Dutch, his own republic (concentrated on Java and Sumatra), and the so-called federalists, mostly aristocratic groups in the outer islands who had collaborated with the Dutch during the revolution.

In its place came an unlikely unitary republic against which rebellions, all but one non-separatist, were quick to start. This decision gradually concentrated the struggle for political power in the capital city and at the national level, in what gradually became a zero-sum game, and eventually led to the violent death of the huge, legal Indonesian Communist Party in 1965-66.

One has only to look at independent India for comparison to see how bad the mistake was: there the federal structure permitted Indian legal communists to rule for long periods of time in Bengal and in Kerala, without a national-level cataclysm. And major ethno-linguistic groups also found room for a certain degree of local autonomy.

Sukarno's durable successor, General Suharto, an unusually wicked and determined man-who had served in the colonial military against which the nationalist movement had fought-for his own reasons followed the logic of unitaryness, but for quite different, and even more disastrous, reasons.

Sukarno had envisioned Indonesia as a unitary people; Suharto saw it as a unitary territory, of which the resources were to be appropriated and distributed for the benefit of his own regime.

Kalimantan's vast forests, Papua New Guinea's huge copper and other mineral deposits, and Aceh's enormous fields of natural gas were exploited by Sino-Indonesian cronies, loyal generals, and armies of obedient Javanese, Madurese and other migrants.

It can be of little surprise that, after the dictator's fall, we are faced with energetic independence movements in Aceh, which during the revolution was a stronghold of the nationalist republic, and in Papua New Guinea, and horrific ethnic violence in Kalimantan.

One of the biggest questions facing Indonesia today is whether a generally sensible federal political system can finally be created, or whether it is already too late.

There are plenty of self-interested, as well as disinterested, voices, in Jakarta right now that make one of two arguments.

One is that with the example of liberated East Timor fresh in people's minds, federalism will lead to the break-up of the nation; only a strong, coercive centre can hold the country together. The other is that it will create dozens of mini-Suhartos in different localities, controlling their federal fiefdoms through local mafias of corrupt officials, moonlighting military killers, professional gangsters and business monopolists.

In Sukarno's generation of nationalist leaders, very few died rich, and the president himself was no exception. There were even plenty of military leaders who lived quite simple lives. Suharto's astounding nepotistic avarice, to which Americans, Japanese, Europeans and Australians all pandered for their own greedy purposes, has no clear precedents in the country's history. But it has had devastating effects, even if we exclude the final crash of 1997.

Suharto's example and policies debauched the bureaucracy and the legal system, both of which have become almost irremediably corrupt and nepotistic, and created a suave qui peut middle class without courage or character, which the late lamented Frantz Fanon would have contemplated with gloomy satisfaction.

This middle class, which slept comfortably through the massive violence of the regime-whose physical victims over the years certainly exceed a million people-is now actually alarmed. Police stations are burned by angry crowds, drug dealers are murdered by neighborhood vigilantes, pedicab drivers have reappeared en masse on streets long reserved for the automobiles of the middle class, and they are no longer afraid to take violent collective action against speeding Mercedes-Benzes. In the middle class, there are already clear signs of nostalgia for the New Order-yes, above all, order-regime.

There is a famous Indonesian saying that goes: under the banyan-tree no healthy plants can grow. Perhaps Suharto remembered this saying with some malignant satisfaction when he gave his political machine Golkar the banyan-tree as its electoral symbol.

Indonesia's present quarrelsome leaders grew up under its shade, and there is not one who has escaped its corrupting, dwarfing influence. This is one reason why the ghost of Suharto's long-gone predecessor remains a presence, even a distant kind of promise. Of democracy? Perhaps not. But of popular nationalism, which may have democratic possibilities, yes.

In Indonesia, nationalism must come first, meaning a strong feeling of sharing a common fate and future. Countries where political leaders are unashamed to have dual citizenship or green cards in America, where dominant groups send their children abroad to be educated and quietly despise their own culture, where millions of citizens are left to rot in fetid slums or ransacked countrysides, are places where, even if they have democratic institutions, nothing good is to be expected.

The problem is not so much a democratic deficit, but a deficit of nationalism, especially among the well-to-do and the educated.

Patriotic and honest leaders can make a huge difference, both by their decisions and by their examples. East Timor is the most recent striking case in point.

For decades the Americans propped up Suharto. The British armed Suharto to the teeth. Successive Australian governments, to their eternal shame, colluded with Jakarta in the rape of East Timor.

What is needed now is less meddling, less arrogance, and less greed from powerful outsiders.