Protests in Jakarta. Is Indonesia heading towards a one-party state?
After only four months into a five-year job, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto faces anger on the streets as he seeks a coalition to exclude parliamentary opposition. Duncan Graham reports.
This week, huge Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) protests erupted in Jakarta, with crowds claiming the government’s policies are not ”pro-people”, fearing a one-party state.
History has shown that if pro-democratic Indonesians can find the right leader, blood will flow should idealists clash with armed soldiers, as in 1998. Prabowo’s former father-in-law, second President Soeharto, had been running a one-party state for 32 years before an economic crisis and public fury forced him to quit. US-educated Moslem academic Dr Amien Rais, then 54, led the protests and could not be dismissed as an irresponsible rabble-rouser.
His front-rank role forced Soeharto and the world to take the revolution seriously.
Now, Prabowo wants a return to the Age of Autocracy. He’s taking a different road having discovered that greed is a better persuader than bayonets so offering pieces from the plunder if any is left. He already has the biggest and most unwieldy ministry in history – more than 100 ministers, vice ministers, and agency heads.
Indonesia’s frail democracy
Almost 90 per cent of the population in the world’s fourth-largest nation follows the teachings of the seventh-century prophet Muhammad. But Indonesia is not a theocracy like the Islamic kingdoms of the Middle East, it’s a constitutional democracy.
In 1945, founder and first President Soekarno insisted there should be no state religion. He wanted to ensure the Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other faiths felt safe in the new nation, though blasphemy laws dampen security.
In the debates about inclusion leading to the Republic being created from the former Dutch East Indies colony, the religious right demanded seven words be added to the preamble to ensure Islamic primacy:
“Dengan kewajiban menjalankan syariat Islam bagi pemeluknya” (with the obligation on Muslims to follow syari’ah (Islamic law).
At the last moment, the sentence was scrubbed. Soekarno, more pragmatic than pious, argued that the critical issue was unity. Ironically, Prabowo is pushing the same line to favour the nation being run by a monster political coalition that rules without repercussions and bans dissent.
Most nations in Southeast Asia are totalitarian or dynastic. None are democratic in the way the West thinks. Singapore and Malaysia are “flawed democracies”, as judged by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Echoes of Myanmar
The most worrying example of what could happen in Indonesia comes from Myanmar.
On 1 February 2021, the people woke to a new government, though not the one they’d chosen. The National League for Democracy, the party headed by Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi elected to run the nation of 55 million was no more and its leaders behind bars.
Three months earlier a general poll saw the NLD spectacularly win 396 seats out of 476. The military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party won 33 seats, a result that infuriated the generals who’d believed their own publicity about being loved.
A day before the winning politicians were sworn into office the Defence Commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing and his fellow officers decided the results were invalid and a year-long state of emergency was proclaimed.
Five years later, it’s still in place, proving the ancient truth that the minority with the weapons will triumph over a majority with the votes. It’s estimated that so far 76,000 have been killed and more than 3.4 million internally displaced.
These casualties are higher than those reported in the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet despite Naypyitaw’s proximity to Canberra (6,600 km compared to double the distance from Kyiv), the conflict gets far less coverage in the Australian media even though the generals are reportedly backed by Beijing.
No justice, and nowhere to go for the victims of Myanmar’s forgotten genocide
Simmering unrest?
It’s too early to say if the student protests in Jakarta are just the start or merely an aberration. In Indonesia, guns are rarely seen in civilian hands; should an insurrection erupt from Prabowo’s bid to become emperor, it will have to rely on burning tyres and unruly mobs of overwhelming size.
The nation has less than half a million soldiers spread across the archipelago and a similar number of police. The population is 280 million, with more than 12 million in Jakarta.
In 1998 second President Soeharto was overthrown after 32 years of autocracy. Former BBC Jakarta correspondent Jonathan Head recalled:
“… the euphoria of student protesters ousting a ruler who had dominated their lives and the lives of their parents. Those were heady days. Yet today, Indonesian politics is dominated by the same powerful, wealthy figures who prospered under Soeharto.”
Prabowo, cashiered for misinterpreting orders, was a key figure in the 1998 coup. He now knows first-hand that majorities have to be handled carefully and learned that seduction can be more effective than the Myanmar way.
His right-wing Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement) party has sucked in a shoal of minnows hungry to be in the winner’s feeding frenzy. They call themselves Koalisi Indonesia Maju (Advance Indonesia Coalition – or KIM for short). A curious acronym usually associated with North Korea, which also calls itself a democracy.
The ghost of Soekarno prevails
Till now, the major go-it-alone has been the populist Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle PDI-P) that won the most votes at last year’s election.
It’s run by matriarch Megawati Soekarnoputri, 78, whose claim to fame includes having Soekarno as her Dad. He died in 1971, but his middle-aged smile still graces her posters. It’s a reflection of how all Indonesian political parties are the fiefdoms of septuagenarians; any pretence to democracy is like the cigarette billboards telling how smokes help lads enjoy good wheezes with mates like scaling mountains when the reality is wheezing alone in a cancer ward.
The PDI-P leadership – minus Megawati, apparently on a pilgrimage to Mecca – has allegedly said it respects Prabowo’s idea to make KIM permanent. If not, at least till the next election in 2029, because it “accelerated development”.
The line is straight out of Soeharto’s platform last century and used to paste over mismanagement and corruption. It’s similar to the ‘drip down bonus’ line used in Australia when government help the corporates.
There is no comment on decelerating democracy and rising graft, but there is much to say about the sanctified Asian Way compared to Greek philosophy. This definition from Prabowo whose military career included allegations of human rights abuses so serious he was banned from the US and Australia for almost two decades.
Prabowo wants a polite democracy “where differences of opinion do not lead to hostility … where criticism is given without insults, hatred, or deceit … a form of democracy that’s cool-headed and peaceful, one that rejects violence, provocation and incitement.”
National University of Singapore political scholar Ratu Durotun Mafisah commented, “The ideal of a harmonious village often serves to maintain the existing power hierarchy.
The new administration’s … ‘polite democracy’, warrants caution because it can be easily abused to silence critics and suppress opposition.
“The appeal to civility can frame dissent as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘disrespectful’, diverting attention from legitimate criticism and impeding meaningful debate.”
The Javanese tend to be spiritual people. This is a personal observation so no links, that even the best educated and most travelled can harbour beliefs in black magic, ghosts and cyclical history, periods of peace followed by strife. This century started badly, but the last two decades have been relatively stable.
Lowy Institute polls of Australians have found respondents think Indonesia is a dangerous source of Islamic terrorism, essentially controlled by the military, and are right to worry about a military threat.
If fears of this week’s protests presaging another revolution, there’ll be no room for debate, polite, meaningful or otherwise. Expats would flee, and Bali would close. Then Canberra might start reappraising its diplomacy.
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Duncan Graham has a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He now lives in Indonesia.
