Sun, Apr 15, 2001 page9

• Unsettled Indonesia risks plunging entire region into anarchy

  • By W. Scott Thompson
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  The wearyingly familiar violence reported out of Indonesia this past year has taken on new dimensions: indeed it is coming in three significant and different forms and each challenges the survival of the archipelago as a coherent republic.

  And it goes without saying that anything threatening the survival of so large a country -- straddling most of oceanic Southeast Asia and as the world's fourth largest country -- affects all the rest of the region and certainly an economic powerhouse and democratic beacon like Taiwan.

  The central test in Indonesia, the multiplicity of ethnic revolts and secession movements, is well known.

  Aceh, in Sumatra to the northwest of Java, has a maturing independence party, the GAM, not at all unlike those spread across the third world a generation ago. Small wonder: it was the last major portion of the country to be brought under colonial rule, and it is the location of so much of the mineral resources on which the republic has depended.

  In the Moluccas though, the issue is Christians versus Muslims. And in Borneo, the most recent and in some ways the worst since Suharto's overthrow in 1998, it is the local -- and fierce -- Dayaks, against the Madurese brought in as part of an attempt at population dispersal over four decades ago during the Sukarno era. Forty years turns out to be not enough time to cool down, much less amalgamate, contrary ethnic groups who resent each other's presence.

  Violence as a means to an end

  The second threat indirectly derives from the old one -- the use of violence to advance political, even supposedly democratic, goals. The country's four lead players may be in conflict but for the most part they are reasonable people: the president, Abdurrahman Wahid or Gus Dur, as he is popularly known, Vice President Megawati the daughter of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, Amien Rais the head of the constituent assembly and leader of a Muslim party, and Akbar Tandjung the speaker of the house who leads the remnant Golkar, once Suharto's political vehicle but now a mainstream democratic party.

  This past week in Jakarta partisans of all the major parties and tendencies were not only using force, they were advocating the use of it. One group was stripping bare Golkar's offices.

  The president's radical Muslim advocates were threatening to kidnap and kill if the parliamentary censure of Gus Dur were not revoked. Meanwhile speaker Akbar, a Golkar leader, was arguing that one had to use force to resist force.

  In ordinary times the respective ambitions, vanities, and deserts of these leaders might be fungible and manageable. Even Gus Dur's literal and figurative blindness of statecraft would be manageable; competent secretariats and ministries can compensate for ineptitude at the top.

  The problem is that the centrifugal tendencies of the republic's great outer islands, a huge share of its territory -- and half the population -- beyond the densely populated heartland of Java permit the leaders no room for error.

  A third threat is the zero-sum mentality growing in all the major forces in the archipelago, most tellingly in the army. Gus Dur thought he had stripped the pretensions it developed in the Suharto years where it helped him rule the country, by appointing an admiral as chief of staff. But the army retains its guns. According to a highly informed political player in Jakarta, who had hitherto maintained optimism about the struggle, the army is wholly back to its old games. When the minister of defense told the army commanders that they couldn't have more than half their wish-list of new guns and materiel, they responded (according to this source) that they'd go along, but only if they could "have" Aceh. Meaning, of course, a free hand there to put the rebellion down -- by the old methods so vivid in our minds from the near-genocide they wreaked in East Timor.

  "Now I do not think Indonesia can survive. The violence has gone too far. It is in the interstices of the system," this highly regarded source said. "No one is willing to sacrifice his interests for any other group's."

  Traveling political scientists hear a lot of hyperbole in the third world, from both local and international wordsmiths anxious about a country's fate after the most recent round of revolution, elections, or economic collapse. One tends to discount. But in four visits in the three years since the Indonesian convulsions began in 1997, this writer has heard a rising crescendo of gloomy analyses and it is no longer possible altogether to discount the direst of them, such as that cited above.

  Kleptocracy to democracy

  Ironically, Indonesia's accomplishments in this period are extraordinary. The sprawling archipelago has gone from a military-buttressed dictatorial kleptocracy to a democracy, from an appalling reversal of economic growth in the first year of the crisis -- a 15 percent decline -- to a net gain this past year of a respectable 4 percent plus. NGOs pressing for constitutional reform or refinement, human rights activists trying to bring justice and environmentalists trying to protect the forests are everywhere.

  None of this counts for much without democracy's twin of tolerance. The Jakarta Post could editorialize, correctly, that "not a single one of the country's current political leaders has come out to condemn publicly the violent demonstrations" of the past month.

  If democracy is anything, it is explicit respect for the other guy's or gal's point of view, and a tacit willingness to work together. The fact that Gus Dur has no clue how to run a country is enough of a challenge in any society. But it is the least of Indonesia's problems right now. If he is impeached and replaced, neither the not-too-bright Megawati Sukarnoputri, who is allying herself with the military, nor anyone else now on the scene, can impose solutions on these problems. The will to work together has to come up from within the parties, the armed forces, and, of course, dissident provinces.

  And that is a tall order. Taiwanese remember well how that toleration among and between parties grew in spurts, but decisively in the early 1980s, with the end of martial law, and finally with the election of a DPP presidency. Throughout the past two decades there has been a growth in tolerance, a steady move forward. That is precisely what is missing in Indonesia. Small wonder editorialists could say "the country is now fast plunging into anarchy."

  W. Scott Thompson is professor of international politics and head of the Southeast Asia program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
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