It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

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Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

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Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

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A huge domestic market, favourable demographics and vast reserves of newly “critical” minerals mean the fundamentals are there for Indonesia to become one of the world’s five biggest economies by mid-century. Despite its enormous governance and development problems, there’s a sense that the facts of Indonesia’s economic and geopolitical importance are finally catching up with its elites’ pretensions about their status as leaders of a negara besar — a great, important country.

It’s in this feel-good atmosphere that Indonesia is set to choose a replacement for Jokowi, who’s constitutionally limited to two five-year terms, in presidential elections scheduled for February next year.

Spare a thought for the opposition’s candidate, the former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. Once a close ally of the president, Anies stoked Muslim grievances to win the 2017 gubernatorial polls in Jakarta after the Chinese-Christian incumbent was accused of blasphemy. Anies’s standing among religious minorities — about an eighth of the national electorate — has been at rock bottom ever since. That’s a big enough problem on its own without the strategic challenges involved in running as a repudiation of a president whose approval ratings are hovering in the high 70s.

Those numbers aren’t the only ones posing a problem for Anies. Indonesia’s electoral laws apply a “presidential threshold” that requires candidates to be nominated by a party or coalition of parties that won either 20 per cent of the popular vote or 25 per cent of seats at the previous legislative elections. Anies has secured the backing of three parties that together meet this threshold, but if he loses just one he’ll be off the ballot.

The one party for which the nominating threshold isn’t a problem is PDI-P, the nationalist party Jokowi is at least officially a member of. Having won just over 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2019, it’s unilaterally put forward its star cadre Ganjar Pranowo, the telegenic governor of Central Java province.

Ganjar has charted a Widodo-like path to national popularity, having used local politics as a platform to build a national profile based mostly on his personal charm, competent administration and avoidance of scandal. Not for nothing have Indonesian pundits been pre-emptively labelling a Ganjar presidency as Jokowi jilid dua — “Jokowi volume two.”

Just like Jokowi, PDI-P is also Ganjar’s biggest liability. The party’s chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, feels that Jokowi hasn’t repaid her with the obedience she considers to be her due given her role in making him president in 2014. Determined not to have another of her cadres assert their independence once in office, Megawati has tested Ganjar’s loyalties by forcing him into taking a high-profile stand against the government while publicly belittling him as a “party functionary.” Ganjar’s poll numbers have stagnated as many voters — not to mention Jokowi — have come to see him as a cipher for Megawati, who remains a polarising figure outside the PDI-P base.

This is all to the advantage of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the candidate polls suggest would be the favourite if the election were held now. Having fought and lost two brutal presidential campaigns against Jokowi before being co-opted into his second-term cabinet, Prabowo is in the unique position of being able to promise continuity while remaining the lesser of the two evils for Anies’s voters in the event their candidate doesn’t make it on to the ballot or is eliminated in the first round of Indonesia’s two-round voting system.

Eight months out from the election, in short, Jokowi has got all three likely candidates exactly where he wants them: Anies struggling while Ganjar and Prabowo compete for the aura of being the president’s natural successor. Which raises a question: with the opposition weakened and the contest likely to involve two government-linked candidates promising more of the same, is anything at all at stake in this election?

To say these elections are a “test of democracy” might be too much of a cliché, but it’s telling that twenty-five years after the fall of Soeharto every Indonesian national election is still routinely described in those terms. Certainly, despite the resilience of Indonesian democracy in the face of unfriendly odds, Jokowi leaves some of its foundations looking unsteady.

That 2024’s polls are even taking place as scheduled shouldn’t be taken for granted: Jokowi, despite public denials, lent behind-the-scenes support to an unsuccessful push in 2021–22 to extend his term in office via constitutional amendment. And if Anies Baswedan’s candidacy falls over before it can be officially registered in November 2023, it will be an open question whether it was because his coalition lost confidence in his ability to turn around his polling numbers or because his bid was sabotaged by the government sabotage. His nominating parties have been rocked by suspiciously timed corruption investigations and lawsuits, while Anies himself is a potential target of corruption charges relating to financial decisions he made as governor of Jakarta, despite dubious evidence of illegality.

Even if unsuccessful, a president’s efforts to evade term limits and his authorities’ harassing the opposition with legal threats aren’t exactly the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. But underhanded tactics like this are of a piece with Jokowi-era democratic backsliding, wherein the president’s “personal distaste for contentious politics” has dovetailed with the illiberal reflexes of the cops, soldiers, religious leaders and Soekarnoist ideologues who surround him.

One reason to doubt that Ganjar Pranowo would oversee a rehabilitation of democratic norms is that PDI-P looms large within this illiberal milieu. The party has demanded that Ganjar allow it to appoint its cadres to a suite of senior cabinet positions if he is elected. On his watch PDI-P would seek to entrench its influence at the commanding heights of the Indonesian state, continuing to push a “hyper-nationalism” it sees as the antidote to the increasing influence of conservative Islam in society.

Ganjar’s likely response to the threat of being dominated by PDI-P would be to do what Jokowi has done for nine years: counterbalance and dilute its power by co-opting as many parties as he can into his cabinet (with the implicit promise that they can siphon money out of the programs they administer) and cosying up to the police force and military — none of which spells good things for the quality of governance.

The disappointments of the Jokowi years and the dim prospects for democratic renewal under Ganjar provide the backdrop for relitigating the question of whether Prabowo Subianto still represents a unique menace to the system, and whether he ever did.

It helps the cause of Prabowo revisionism that he’s been on his best behaviour since being appointed defence minister. He’s moderated his angry-outsider pose and distanced himself from the Islamic radicals he previously courted, while getting sympathetic press for his efforts to boost Indonesia’s military capability. It might be intuitive to assume that his support is concentrated among older voters nostalgic for the Soeharto era, but Prabowo’s voter base in fact skews young. To many in a generation too young to remember his New Order incarnation, he looks like a worldly, straight-talking patriot beholden to nobody.

Those with longer memories know what lies below the surface: an explosive temper; a penchant for demagoguery, risk-taking and rule-breaking; and, as a former special forces officer in Soeharto’s army, a comfort with the use of violence as an instrument of politics. These features of his character could make Prabowo unpredictable in a domestic or international crisis.

But what Prabowo might do patiently and deliberately could be just as insidious. In the Jokowi years, corruption has become a central talking point for conservatives, who say that the immense cost of running for office in Indonesia encourages politicians to monetise their positions once elected — and for this reason direct elections for local executive positions (and, a few say, the presidency) ought to be limited or abolished.

It’s this context that had me in a suspicious frame of mind when I saw Prabowo say, in a recent interview, that “frankly, we have to study the democracy we’re implementing… the cost of doing politics is too expensive.” He agreed with his interviewer’s observation that this expense was incentivising corruption, saying that “instead, in the end, our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could wreck it.”

He went on to call for “political parties, social organisations, religious leaders [and] intellectuals” to come together to “study and [consider] what do we want to fix” about the political system. He compared such an effort to the BPUPK, a body set up in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to “prepare” Indonesia for independence, which became a central site for negotiating the constitutional underpinnings of the Indonesian republic proclaimed by Soekarno in 1945: not only between Islamists and secularists, but between democrats and their adversaries.

Prabowo’s offhanded invocation of this formative period in Indonesia’s political history could merely be pretentious — or it could be a hint of the scale of the political changes he imagines himself leading as president. At stake in February’s election, then, is the chance for Indonesia to find out. •

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As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

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The young woman’s body lay on an open tiled platform in the yard of Bali’s Sanglah hospital surrounded by piles of other corpses, many charred beyond recognition. A medical team in gumboots and rubber gloves moved slowly through, checking teeth and scraps of clothing that might help identify the victims. Scores more bodies filled the entrance foyer of the hospital and lined the walkways to wards crowded with the injured. Flies were swarming in the oppressive evening heat.

Ambulances weaved through the traffic, ferrying the most seriously injured to evacuation flights. Pickup trucks unloaded dozens of crude plywood coffins. The dead and wounded were mostly young, mostly Australian — many kids on their first trip to Bali.

I had woken in Singapore on the morning of 13 October 2002 to the shocking news of the massive bomb blasts that had destroyed the popular Sari Club and the neighbouring Paddy’s Bar in the heart of Kuta’s nightlife district. Within hours, I was reporting from the midst of the chaos.

The Bali bombings would soon be confirmed as the worst act of terrorism in Australian history. The ultimate toll would be 202 dead — eighty-eight of them Australians — and hundreds more seriously injured, many of them Australians.

As shocking as the moment was, it should not have come as the surprise it did to most Australians. A year earlier, the world had been numbed by the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York. It was clear that al Qaeda and its global affiliates had the means and the determination to continue striking their Western enemies at will — and anywhere.

Moments before the first suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Bar just after 11pm on Saturday 12 October and, seconds later, another detonated a massive car bomb in front of the Sari Club, a smaller bomb — crude calling card of al Qaeda’s Asian surrogate Jemaah Islamiyah — had exploded outside the United States consulate in Denpasar. But while the Americans undoubtedly remained the primary focus of the terrorists, the Australian toll in Bali was far from incidental.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had denounced Australia as a “crusader” country after it sent troops to join the invasion of Afghanistan and the failed hunt for him. And just a few weeks before the Bali bombings, twenty-one men, most of them Jemaah Islamiyah members, were detained in Singapore in connection with an alleged conspiracy to build seven truck bombs and attack Western military and diplomatic targets, including the Australian High Commission.

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the bombings, the media has once more been revisiting the events in Bali and their shocking fallout. Controversy has stirred around a four-part miniseries, Bali 2002, airing on Stan. As with the release last year of Nitram, the film based on the Port Arthur massacre, concerns have been expressed about the emotional impact on survivors and the families of those who died.

One Western Australian academic has accused the producers of Bali 2002 of “cashing in” while disregarding the grief of the victims and giving too much attention to the terrorists. Guardian film critic Luke Buckmaster has criticised the realism of the series and declared it to be “out of its depth” in the dramatisation: “Bali 2002 feels like a very loose simulation of historical events.”

In fact, Bali 2002 holds remarkably true to the actual events and is finely and fairly balanced in its depiction of the impact on the victims both foreign and Indonesian, the motivation of the terrorists, and the immense challenges faced by the emergency responders and the crime investigators. Its graphic recreation of the moments before and after the bombs exploded, and the carnage that unfolded in the minutes and hours that followed, is disturbing viewing even for those not personally affected by the massacre, but it is utterly authentic, mostly factual and not gratuitous in the least.

Buckmaster also derides for “too little realism” an opening sequence in which Balinese woman Ni Luh Erniati (played powerfully by Sri Ayu Jati Kartika), whose husband was one of the staff killed in the Sari Club blast, stares into the camera lens and pleads, “What did we do wrong to make the gods angry?” He dismisses this as “vague spiritual commentary, as if supposed to symbolise the soul of the country.”

In fact, the bombings were as traumatic for the deeply spiritual Balinese Hindus as they were for the foreign victims. For many, the disaster raised disturbing issues about the unchecked development and commercialisation of their idyll. A few days after the attacks, the professor of psychiatry at Bali’s Udayana University, Luh Ketut Suryani, described the bombings as divine retribution for the crass commercialisation that had upset the harmony of Bali’s culture. “Bali has lost its Hindi identity and there is no longer a balance between the spiritual and the material in our society,” she told me. “Everything now is about money. Balinese must ask why God has punished us. We must see this not only as a sign but as a punishment from God because we have taken a wrong direction in our society. This is a lesson for the Balinese.”

At one moment in the final episode of the series, though, the narrative does appear to divert from the historical record. Back home after leading the Australian Federal Police contingent that helped track down the bombers, assistant commissioner Graham Ashton (Richard Roxburgh), confronts an unnamed superior officer: “You lied to me. The government had intel that Bali was going to happen… The Office of National Assessments and ASIO briefed the government that Bali was a target.”

The day after the bombings, Ashton (who later become chief commissioner of Victoria Police) was appointed to head the Bali investigating team by AFP commissioner Mick Keelty on the strength of Ashton’s years as AFP liaison officer in Australia’s Jakarta embassy and his fluency in Bahasa Indonesia. There is no evidence that Ashton ever confronted Keelty over lying about intelligence warnings, or that Keelty was complicit in any such cover-up. But the case that the Australian government was well aware of the danger to Australians visiting Bali in October 2002 — and did nothing to warn them — gained substantial momentum after the bombings.

As early as December 2001, ASIO assessed Indonesia as being at high risk of terrorist attack. In the months that followed, evidence grew of the intensity of that threat and the capacity of al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah to realise it. In April 2002, Australian and US intelligence analysts simulated scenarios of such terrorist attacks — including one in which Bali was identified as an attractive al Qaeda target.

In June 2002, the Office of National Assessments was so concerned about the growing risk of regional attacks that it sought a face-to-face meeting with foreign minister Alexander Downer at which it identified Bali as a target for Jemaah Islamiyah — at a time when an average of 20,000 Australian tourists were visiting the island each month. The minister was told the extremists had the intent and ability to attack targets such as hotels, bars and airports. In July, ASIO warned Qantas that the threat across all Indonesia, including Bali, was high.

Despite the alarm bells, the Department of Foreign Affairs travel advice continued to claim that despite terrorist incidents in parts of Indonesia, tourism services elsewhere were “operating normally, including Bali.”

A Senate inquiry concluded in August 2004 that while there had been a general terrorism risk in Indonesia in late 2002 there had been no specific warning of the Bali attack. Labor’s Steve Hutchins, the committee’s chair, declared that while there had been failures of intelligence, there had not been “a culpable lapse by Australian government agencies or individual officials.”

In a dissenting report, Greens leader Bob Brown and Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja thought otherwise. In calling for a royal commission to fully assess the performance of agencies and government in the lead-up to the Bali bombings, they were scathing about the role of the foreign minister. “Mr Downer could have taken the evidence of the danger of an attack to cabinet,” they wrote. “He could have used his considerable influence to persuade the Indonesian authorities, who appeared unwilling to recognise the terrorist danger, to act. The minister’s inaction contributed to Australia’s unpreparedness for the attack in Bali.”

If Australian officials were unprepared for the Bali bombings, their performance after the event was outstanding, as Bali 2002 recounts. The RAAF’s biggest medical airlift since the Vietnam war and the heroic efforts of medical staff, including plastic surgeon Fiona Wood, undoubtedly saved scores of lives. And its part in identifying and tracking down the bombers and the bombmakers was probably the AFP’s finest hour.

The series rightly acknowledges Graham Ashton’s skill in deftly handling the cultural sensitivities and building a powerful partnership with Bali police chief General Made Pastika. But great credit is also due to Mick Keelty in negotiating an unprecedented agreement in which Australian police were able to work with great freedom within a foreign jurisdiction.

Within hours of the bombings, Keelty was on the phone to Indonesian National Police chief General Da’i Bachtiar. The two men had cemented an evolving friendship a year earlier during a visit to Australia by Bachtiar. After Keelty offered his sympathy and support, his friend replied, “Mick, I need all the help I can get.” Later that day, the first of more than one hundred AFP investigators and forensic specialists were on their way to Bali.

The partnership that grew from that collaboration would help build a broader strengthening in the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. At a memorial service in Bali to mark the first anniversary of the attacks, Indonesian security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would speak powerfully of the need for closer “brotherhood” between the two nations.

Nine years later, President Yudhoyono would describe the emotional event as one of the most poignant moments of his political career: “It was heart-wrenching to see those who had lost their loved ones among the gathering.” He said the attack had been a turning point in a bilateral relationship challenged by the confrontation over East Timor. It had produced “a compelling reason for Jakarta and Canberra to explore new ways of cooperation in a world haunted by new, unfamiliar threats.” •

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Even in power, the former army general had been a much blander, if more successful, dictator than his predecessor Sukarno or contemporaries like Burma’s Ne Win, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

So has David Jenkins’s long-awaited multi-volume biography missed its moment, at least for the wider reading public? This first volume suggests not. Written with Jenkins’s characteristic clarity and verve, and painstakingly sourced, it is an enthralling read. As the list of acknowledgements shows, he managed to speak with most of the key surviving figures from the Soeharto era before they died.

The knowledge Jenkins has garnered since he arrived in Jakarta in 1969 as correspondent for the old Melbourne Herald has been a long time brewing. The two scholars whose endorsements appear on the cover of Young Soeharto, Benedict Anderson and Jamie Mackie, both died some years ago. Rather than some Javanist feat of posthumous telepathy, their approval came from their close reading of the draft and their guidance as it proceeded.

There’s also a second question: does Soeharto deserve such a long and detailed study? This volume runs to some 500 pages and covers only the first twenty-four years of his life. Two more will follow, surpassing Herbert Bix’s Hirohito biography and equalling Ian Kershaw’s study of Adolf Hitler, though nowhere near Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (four 800-page volumes so far). Even then, Jenkins plans to take us only to 1966, when Soeharto pushed Sukarno aside.

The answer is yes. Soeharto ruled Indonesia for thirty-two of the seventy-six years since the republic was declared in 1945. Despite the subsequent shift to a popularly elected leadership, the country retains many important elements of the system he presided over: a military not entirely back in the barracks, powerful business conglomerates, and an ideology that stands in the way of a hard look at the violence of 1965–66 that enabled him to take power. Even now, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and present defence minister, ex-general Prabowo Subianto, could make a third try, perhaps this time successful, for the presidency.

The core of this volume is a highly readable narrative of some 300 pages, with debates and digressive detail pushed to the 200 pages of notes that most readers can skip. It shows how Soeharto overcame a troubled and impoverished childhood to become a “polite, clever and capable young man” at the forefront of Indonesia’s emerging military in 1945.

Dubbed “the smiling general” by one early hagiographer, Soeharto came out snarling in 1974 when a magazine called POP ran a cover article suggesting that, rather than being the simple anak desa (village boy) of the official story, he was the son of a member of the Yogyakarta royal family. His young mother, the story went, was married off to a village official when Soeharto, who accompanied her, was six.

Jenkins teases out this version, along with other speculation at the time about Soeharto’s origins, and even the improbable suggestion that he was the son of the Yogyakarta sultan himself. (The sultan was studying in Holland at the time, though some Javanese believed their semi-divine rulers capable of remote impregnation.)

The POP article appeared at a touchy time for the president. His ambitious internal security chief, General Soemitro, had allowed a clamour to build up about corruption and favouritism towards Japanese and local Chinese investors. Using the tried and tested method of pouring petrol on a fire, rival general Ali Moertopo’s Opsus (special operations) group pointed Islamic hotheads at a Toyota showroom. Neither general came out well in Soeharto’s eyes.

The article was Moertopo’s effort to regain favour through flattery. It failed miserably. Soeharto saw it as a slur on his mother that branded him illegitimate. As he had when students mocked his wife Tien as “Madame Ten Percent” in the belief she took a cut of government projects, he lost his cool, calling a press conference to denounce the story as unfactual and subversive.

The real story — long intriguing to psychopolitical analysts — is that Soeharto’s mother, aged sixteen, disappeared when he was six weeks old and was found hiding in the roof-space of a village house. She and his father split up, and the baby was placed with a village midwife. There followed a childhood during which the boy was shuffled between the households of father, mother and relatives.

Barefoot and sarong-clad, Soeharto gained a rudimentary secular education in Javanese-language primary schools, but also — while apprenticed to the noted faith healer Romo Daryatmo — a deep immersion in Javanese mysticism and, through the wayang (or shadow) theatre, a smattering of classical Hindu thought. Though nominally Muslim, Soeharto inclined to spiritualism until late in life, when the increasing piety that accompanied Indonesia’s growing prosperity impelled him to be more visibly Islamic.

This upbringing left the young Soeharto a cool, outwardly respectful but always distrustful person, observing traditional precepts to keep emotions in check and accepting the Mahabharata’s teaching that sometimes a prince has to kill in order to do the right thing.

His big chance came at nineteen, when Holland’s neutrality was swept aside by Hitler, and the Netherlands East Indies desperately boosted its defences against Japan. Accepted into the colonial army, he rose quickly over the next twenty-one months, completing a sergeant’s course just as the Dutch were surrendering in March 1942.

Discarding his uniform, he disappeared back to central Java, where a few months later he joined the Japanese-run police force. Again he excelled, winning the trust of his superiors. Then, towards the end of 1943, the adventurous intelligence officers of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Nakano school — partly inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s stirring up an Arab revolt against the Turks — set about raising a local military force, known as the Peta. Again, Soeharto advanced rapidly to become a company commander, with a rank equivalent to captain, by early 1945.

While many of the other volunteers saw the Peta as the nucleus of a future army for an independent Indonesia, Soeharto showed no sign of such feelings, though he was to claim otherwise later. He had signed up to the two armies keeping Indonesia under control for the pay, the food, the uniforms and a sense of belonging. When a Peta battalion revolted against its brutal and dissolute Japanese officers at Blitar in February 1945, the Japanese swept in, executed some of the Indonesian officers, and put Soeharto in charge of the disarmed troops. He stayed with them in a remote corner of East Java until Japan surrendered.

The disbanded Peta did indeed become the core of the Indonesian National Army that resisted the return of the Dutch. “Soeharto, blessed by luck and a born survivor, had had rather a good war,” Jenkins says. “He had served in two armies, first on one side, then on the other.” By August 1945, now aged twenty-four, he had “more military training by far, and more military experience, than perhaps 98 per cent of his fellow Peta officers, the men who would form the backbone of a new Indonesian army.”

Soeharto stood out from his contemporaries, most of whom were from the priyayi (gentrified) class, many of them educated in the Dutch language and European ways. Though his ability got him far, he was still an outsider, an aspect that Jenkins will no doubt show to be important later on.

This saunter through Soeharto’s childhood and its many settings, set against the last years of the Netherlands East Indies, is engaging. Most striking is its exposition of Japanese influence on the shape and doctrine of the Indonesian military. Jenkins was able to interview many of the Japanese officers involved in the Peta, including some who knew Soeharto personally, greatly illuminating a connection previously mapped by American and Japanese scholars.

The Japanese influence includes an emphasis on what they call seishin and Indonesians call semangat (spirit), and rigid obedience to compensate for any lack of firepower. It also, unfortunately, includes a lot of violence, by officers to their soldiers, and to civilians. As with Burma’s Tatmadaw and the South Korean army to some extent, the Imperial Army lessons live on.

David Jenkins’s second volume will cover the 1945–49 revolutionary war against the Dutch, with a third volume to deal with Soeharto’s career in the new Indonesia. Many will be looking forward to his account of the dramatic events of 30 September and 1 October 1965. On the pretext of an alleged plot against President Sukarno by an American-aligned “council of generals,” Lieutenant-Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri, one of Soeharto’s former underlings, led a pre-emptive coup by palace guards. The Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, endorsed Untung’s coup while Soeharto was in the process of quelling it, giving him an excuse to unleash the anti-communist purge that killed more than half a million PKI followers.

For more than fifty years, scholars have picked holes in Soeharto’s claim that the PKI made the first move. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey soon uncovered Untung’s former closeness to Soeharto and the role of a mysterious PKI agent called Kamaruzaman. More recently, the opening of the archives has revealed more detail. John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder showed how the army and the PKI were each waiting for the other to make the first move, at Sukarno’s feared imminent death if not before. In Beijing’s archives, Taomo Zhou found that PKI secretary D.N. Aidit had been telling Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai about plans to form a “military committee” to head off and confuse an army move. In The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, Jess Melvin showed how the army was primed to kill the PKI membership.

So, whodunnit? Did the PKI’s Aidit tell Untung to move? Or was Kamaruzaman a double agent for the army who convinced the suggestible Untung that a council of generals existed and was about to make a move? Did Moertopo’s Opsus light the fire as well as pour on the petrol? If so, did Soeharto, perhaps channelling Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata, see the six generals murdered by Untung’s troops as a necessary sacrifice? That they included the more worldly, more senior-ranking contemporaries from Peta days did leave the field much clearer for him.

We await Jenkins’s verdict. •

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Now comes this book by Tim Harper, a Cambridge historian who has also collaborated on books with Bayly. Underground Asia takes us down the burrows of resistance to the Asian empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and into the struggles over the carcass of the Chinese empire in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

In this earlier era of globalisation, revolutionaries made use of post, telegraph, steamship and loose border controls to advance their causes. As Harper writes, “Many of them — although not all of them and not all of the time — travelled as seamen, labourers, servants, entertainers, students and, most often, as exiles.” These revolutionaries — people like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, China’s Zhou Enlai and Indonesia’s Ibrahim Tan Malaka — travelled light, often under false names, “with banned literature, illicit currency or encoded messages hidden in their luggage”:

They experienced a world of connections, but also a world upside down: the underbelly of the great port cities of empire where they found they were able more freely to organise and act.

The sites of their struggles were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley. They made these places centres of global awareness, and their experience of a secret underworld of empire helped shape a spectrum of radical ideas — about class and national identity, the position of women, the function of art and literature, the history of the future.

Some of them hid in plain sight. “If you want to hide revolutionary connections,” as the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin remarked, “you had better travel first class.”

The strands of revolution and resistance were diverse. Some developed out of the anarchism portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s novels. “As a doctrine, anarchism was malleable to individual needs,” writes Harper. “[It] represented freedom from the state and feudal structures and a new moral purpose.” Less a system of thought than a “utopian horizon… it was not something passively received but elaborated on locally by men and women making sense of their alienation from the old order.”

Meiji Japan was an initial beacon, especially after its victory over Russia in 1904. “The remaking of the Japanese imperial order following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 exerted a fascination on restless minds across Asia,” Harper writes. “For Indian maharajahs, Malay sultans and Thai kings, Japan was a model for monarchical revival in the face of western encroachment. For critics of royal power, Japan was also an example of successful westernisation and liberal constitutional reform.” In 1896 just thirteen Chinese students were studying in Japan; by 1905 the figure was over 8000.

As soon as Kaiser Wilhelm II learnt of Russia’s mobilisation in July 1914, imperial Germany began trying to foment revolution in opposing empires. “Rapidly, German agents took advantage of the territory of neutral powers such as Spain, Siam, the United States and its colony in the Philippines to distribute calls to Muslims to resist the British and support the Ottoman Sultan and his ally ‘Hadji Guillaume.’”

The British countered with their Arab Bureau, run out of the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, whose tentacles reached across to Asia with the help of an expanding Intelligence Bureau in India and police special branches and MI5 posts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai’s foreign enclave. “All of this drew the British empire deeper into an unprecedented global counter-propaganda exercise as it asserted its claim to be the world’s largest Muslim power and a defender of the faith,” Harper says.

Imperial police struggled to comprehend the enemy. Some were obsessed with “those capable both of ‘visiting addresses at which Europeans rarely call’ and of haunting the exclusive cafes and luxury hotels that only whites could enter.” The conspiracies they unravelled “conjured up an ‘underside India’ of ‘every sort of half understood thing and people,’ dark with the threat of thuggee and steeped in ‘the pathos of underworlds.’ Into this bestiary of empire was now placed the bomb-parast, the ‘worshipper of bombs.’”

The contending conspiracies could baffle even the closest observers. In 1922, Britain’s new Bureau of Political Intelligence reported activity in Malaya “in various guises, whose objects are uncertain but yet give no cause for definite suspicion, and it is difficult to prevent the feeling that more is going on under the surface than we are actually aware of.”

The imperial powers responded with brutal power and increasingly efficient security services. Conspiracy trials in India sent dozens to the gallows or the harsh panopticon prison in the Andaman Islands. Unrest after the first world war saw police and soldiers fire on crowds in Tonkin and Shanghai. In Amritsar, Brigadier Reginald Dyer had his troops open fire on a peaceful gathering of Sikhs, killing at least 379 and wounding 1200. A little-known uprising by Muslims in South Malabar saw 2339 killed by British forces, the largest casualties since 1857.

In the meantime, Japan had lost its aura for the rest of Asia. It had its own bomb-throwing anarchists, dismayed by increasing “Prussianisation” and the power of the zaibatsu industrial oligarchs. And it, too, had succumbed to imperialism. Sun Yat-sen was expelled in 1907, and then used the Penang and Hong Kong underground to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Japan joined the victorious European powers in 1919 by taking over Germany’s footholds in China.

Now the beacon was Moscow, and rebels like Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, began to gather in the Soviet capital. The anarchists turned Marxist. The first Chinese translation of the full Communist Manifesto, from Japanese, came out in August 1920. A few months earlier, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, had been the first to take the communist name in Asia, followed in 1921 by the Chinese Communist Party, the latter initially orchestrated by Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch former trade unionist in Java. Borodin, in Canton, oversaw the creation of the Whampoa military academy, with Japanese-trained Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai as a political commissar.

But the communists were overconfident. The Indian communist M.N. Roy failed in his effort to use Tashkent as a launching pad for agents, as had Berlin’s wartime India Committee, even though his British opposition, the “Great Gamer” Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey, had his cover blown: “the band at the most fashionable café would break off and play ‘Tipperary’ when he and his companions entered.”

When Chiang Kai-shek took his new army north against the warlords, leftists including Zhou Enlai made an ill-judged seizure of territory near Wuhan and were forced to a long retreat to the coast. The communists kept their heads up in Shanghai when Chiang took control of its Chinese areas, allowing his Kuomintang and associated triad gangsters to massacre some 4000 members and some 20,000 others. In Java, the PKI launched an uprising in November 1926, with the Dutch waiting to crush it.

By the late 1920s, the revolutionaries were quelled. Mao Zedong took China’s communists on two long marches to mountains in the northwest. The Kuomintang had expelled the Comintern. The imperial powers worried more about global economic depression and rising Japanese power. In India, the British were facing a more sophisticated challenge than bomb-throwers: from minds trained in London’s Inns of Court, following either Gandhi’s non-violence path or, as “constitutionalists,” taking up London’s promise of “dominion” status as a step forward, even while realising India would not be embraced by London to the extent that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were.

Australia’s minor mentions in this book show us as willing assistants to imperial power in Asia. Sailors from HMAS Sydney helped Singapore police quell anti-Chinese protests in 1919. When prisoners escaped to Thursday Island from the Boven Digul prison camp in Dutch New Guinea, they were returned.

Eventually, of course, it was the Japanese strike into Southeast Asia that broke the imperial hold, though it imposed new forms of slavery. The British came to agree on Indian independence two years after a Japanese surrender. The French and Dutch tried to return, one power meeting its Dien Bien Phu, the other a growing international ostracism partly stirred up by the PKI prisoners it had transferred to Australia from Boven Digul in 1943.

The main strands of Harper’s story are fairly well known to readers of Asia’s national histories. His achievement is to draw them into a continuous narrative, kept alive by colourful vignettes of characters like the West Sumatran leftist Ibrahim Tan Malaka, summarily executed by an Indonesian army patrol in 1948, the Dutch communist Sneevliet, who perished in a Nazi camp, the women who took active roles in revolution, and the dozens sent to the Gulag or liquidated by Stalin.

It could look like a litany of failure, says Harper, but it helped break the imperial “hypnotism” of Asian populations. By carefully biding their time until opponents were exhausted by war, and by enlisting Soviet support, the revolutionaries did come to power in China, Vietnam and North Korea. Underground Asia is also a reminder of how subversive communities of thought were enabled across borders by the now-primitive communications of a century ago. What are social media and mass migration concealing today?

Later this year, the heirs of Mao Zedong and the small group that held its “first congress” in a Shanghai terrace house on 23 July 1921 will celebrate the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary. In 2018, when some Beijing students tried to apply Marxism and organise factory workers, they were arrested. Long after the revolutionary years, the descendants of Mao and his colleagues now rule a system locked into global capitalism. •

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As Australia’s relations with China turn sour, our ties with Indonesia, a country of 270 million surging up the ranks of the world’s largest economies, becomes ever more important.

So you might think that teaching Indonesian language would be a national priority. Doesn’t it make sense to demonstrate our respect for our biggest neighbour by learning its language? Doesn’t it stand to reason that we would train a cohort of Indonesia-literate citizens able to improve relations through careers in government, the private sector, technology, the arts and tourism?

Increasingly, alas, Australia seems to have decided the answer is no. The study of Indonesian language at Australian schools and universities is in steep decline. It may be approaching terminal crisis.

A generation ago, things were different. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hawke and Keating governments, viewing closer ties with Asia as critical to Australia’s future, adopted a multi-pronged approach to promoting Asia literacy, including a major program to teach Asian languages in schools. The message from the top was clear: Australia’s future prosperity lay in Asia, so Australians needed to invest in Asia knowledge.

With Australian educators, parents and students responding to these cues, Indonesian teaching in schools and universities expanded dramatically. I was one beneficiary, studying Indonesian at high school in South Australia and then, in the late 1980s, at Flinders University.

Times have changed. Earlier this year, Professor David Hill published a report for the Asian Studies Association of Australia detailing a dramatic decline. He found that the number of Australian universities teaching Indonesian had dropped from twenty-two in 1994 to fourteen in 2019. Student numbers were less than half what they had been in 1992, despite massive growth in Australia’s university sector.

During the last six months the situation has worsened. The Covid-19 pandemic is having a calamitous effect on Australian higher education. Everywhere, university managers are identifying low-enrolment courses to axe. Last month, La Trobe announced plans to close the Indonesian program it has run since 1989 (and also signalled it would no longer teach Hindi, despite being one of only two Australian universities teaching that language). This month, Murdoch University in Western Australia has announced it will do the same.

Others seem set to follow suit. My alma mater, Flinders University, “paused” teaching first-year Indonesian this year (my old high school has also dropped Indonesian). At several other universities Indonesian is hanging by a thread. It’s possible that in a year or so only a handful of Australian universities will teach the language, taking us back to the early 1970s, when Australia was just emerging from the White Australia policy.

How has this happened? The crisis of Indonesian is partly a product of broader trends in education, with languages and humanities in general under increasing pressure. Recently, for example, Swinburne University announced it plans to close its language programs, including Chinese and Japanese, because it wants to emphasise STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Commercialisation has also had an impact. As successive federal governments have reduced public funding per student, universities have increasingly relied on student fee income, elevating market demands in determining what courses they offer.

Classes were small when I studied Indonesian in the 1980s; these programs survived because Indonesian was considered a priority. Now, if numbers are small, programs are cut. Cash-strapped university managers feel they don’t have the luxury of taking into account things like national interest.

This points to a second problem: the mismatch between government rhetoric and action. Successive governments have touted Australia’s relationship with Indonesia — and Asia more broadly — without committing to sufficient long-term investment in its underpinnings. There hasn’t been significant national investment in teaching Asian languages at Australian schools for more than two decades. The stream of language students being supplied to universities through the school system is drying up.

The federal government needs to resume its leadership role and reinvest in the teaching of Indonesian and other strategic languages of the Indo-Pacific. Such a step would be easy, and need not be particularly costly.

If Indonesian disappears from Australia’s education landscape, we won’t only lose an opportunity to develop the Indonesia expertise we need to navigate the Asian century. Indonesians will also notice. Over decades visiting Indonesia, I’ve often been struck by how delighted both ordinary and elite Indonesians are when they realise I learned their language in Australia. Indonesians often encounter foreigners who pick up Indonesian in country; they rarely meet any who learned it at home. Teaching Indonesian sends a signal that Australia views our massive northern neighbour as a country deserving our respect. It is a way to demonstrate that Australia is special to Indonesia, rather than being just one more country lining up to benefit from Indonesia’s growth.

Remove this sort of cultural ballast, and all we have left is an instrumental recognition that our two countries share certain interests in trade, security and the like. As our recent travails with China demonstrate, that’s not a strong foundation for a lasting relationship. •

The post Turning away from Indonesia appeared first on Inside Story.

This time, the students were opposing parliament’s attempts to gut Indonesia’s anti-corruption commission and government actions they believed would endanger civil liberties. They were also protesting against a president who, just a few short years earlier, had been lauded by many Indonesians — perhaps even by many of the protesters — as Indonesia’s democratic saviour.

Joko Widodo, or Jokowi as he is more commonly known, was elected in 2014 bearing high hopes for a renewal of Indonesia’s democratic life. Part of the reason he attracted such expectations — and a large part of the appeal he offered to ordinary Indonesians — lay in his background and biography.

Unlike most national politicians in Indonesia, Jokowi’s origins are relatively humble. He came to national prominence not as a result of dynastic connections, wealth or bureaucratic networks but because he had built on his significant personal success as a furniture trader to become the popularly elected mayor of Surakarta (widely known as Solo), a mid-sized city in Central Java. He also had an appealing simplicity of personal style that distinguished him from most public officials, and he revelled in opportunities to interact with ordinary citizens.

It was these characteristics that swept him from provincial Java to the governorship of Jakarta and, finally, the presidency in the space of two short years in 2012–14.

Indonesia’s pro-democracy activists, for their part, were attracted to Jokowi not so much for his personal qualities — though many liked him — but because they were repelled by his opponent. Prabowo Subianto was a hot-tempered former military man (and one-time son-in-law of President Suharto) who had been expelled from the military straight after the collapse of authoritarian rule because troops under his command had kidnapped a number of activists, several of whom never reappeared. In 2014, Prabowo was offering Indonesia the iron hand of “strong leadership.” His fiery speeches were the opposite of Jokowi’s charmingly lackadaisical public events.

If Jokowi’s candidacy offered the promise of democratic renewal, or even deepening, Prabowo’s threatened a return to strongman rule. Many Indonesia specialists — myself among them — were relieved when Jokowi prevailed in the bitterly fought presidential election campaign of 2014.

Fast-forward five years and the student protests of 2019 made it clear that hopes in Jokowi’s democratic potential had been dashed. Most Indonesia specialists now agree that Indonesia is undergoing democratic regression, though there is debate about how far and how fast it is travelling.

The country is obviously not returning to full-blown authoritarianism à la Suharto: elections are free, fair and fiercely fought; the media is largely unburdened by the rigid controls that constrained it during the Suharto years. Overall, Indonesia is still far more democratic than it was under Suharto. Yet Jokowi is leaning increasingly heavily on the military to get things done, and harassment of anti-government activists has increased.

Those student protests? They quickly faded, partly because of what Marcus Mietzner, one of the leading analysts of contemporary Indonesia, describes as “systematic intimidation efforts by state agencies.” And Prabowo Subianto? He ran again as Jokowi’s opponent in the 2019 election, adding a heavy dose of Islamism to his authoritarian-populist appeal, and lost again, only to be invited into government within the space of a few months by Jokowi and put in charge of the defence ministry. Rather than drawing a line between himself and Indonesia’s would-be strongman, Jokowi has given him one of the most powerful posts in the country.

How do we understand this transformation? How is it that a man who a few years earlier had seemed to be at the forefront of Indonesia’s democratic renewal is now in charge of a government that is slowly chipping away at Indonesia’s democratic achievements?

One way of approaching this problem is suggested by the title of Ben Bland’s short and highly readable biography of Indonesia’s president: Man of Contradictions. According to Bland, Jokowi not only embodied Indonesia’s democratic hopes and then dashed them; he also combines all sorts of contradictory characteristics and features. He is an enthusiast for foreign investment, for example, but also strongly protectionist. He wants to rid Indonesia of corruption but believes harsh action can slow investment decisions. He was the ultimate political outsider but now runs the presidential palace like an “imperial court.” And so on.

There’s a long tradition of emphasising paradox and contradiction in analysing modern Indonesia. Writers frequently proclaim that Indonesia defies analysis, that the country is unique, or that analysts, as Bland puts it in his final chapter, “keep getting Indonesia wrong.” In the past, it was common to leaven such observations with clichés about the inscrutability of the Javanese, which, to its author’s credit, this book mostly avoids.

Instead, Bland, who was a Financial Times correspondent in Jakarta during the crucial years, draws not only on the latest academic analysis of Indonesia but also on a rich vein of his own reporting. He had the opportunity to observe Jokowi up close, and was able to interview him and many of the key players repeatedly, producing many gems of insight. (One such moment comes during an interview with Prabowo Subianto in which the former general and presidential candidate, explaining that he loves animals more than humans because the former never tell lies or engage in betrayal, offers a revealingly bleak insight into his own psychology.)

In fact, it’s doubtful that Indonesia is any more contradictory, or any harder to understand, than any large, complex country. (Who can claim truly to understand the United States these days?) The problem is more that outsiders rarely put much effort into trying to understand it, so its political system and dynamics remain largely mysterious even in a neighbouring country like Australia. In this regard, Bland is performing excellent service by introducing Indonesia to what, it’s to be hoped, is a new set of readers.

A more simple explanation of Jokowi and his evolution is suggested by Bland’s own analysis. Far from being a “man of contradictions,” the individual who emerges from this account is a remarkably straightforward character driven by a set of quite legible and overwhelmingly practical goals.

This man wants to improve the economy and raise living standards, and is willing to subordinate other purposes to that vision. He loves infrastructure. To the extent that he thinks about democracy — and the evidence Bland presents suggests that he generally doesn’t — he has a homespun vision that mainly involves leaders who are close to the people delivering what the people want, which is mostly improved living standards.

In a BBC interview earlier this year, a journalist asked Jokowi how often he thought about issues such as human rights, democracy and the environment. His response was that of a man of action: “If I work, I truly focus,” he said. “I don’t want to work on everything. This is a big country, so you need to focus, and prioritise, to focus above all. In my first term, I focused on infrastructure, in the second term we are focusing on human resource development. Maybe after that environment, innovation, and then human rights. Why not? I can’t work on everything, it’s not that I wouldn’t want to, but I like to focus my work, to work on priorities.”

Leaving aside the obvious objection (Indonesian presidents serve only two terms, so when exactly is he going to focus on these other issues?) the unreflective nature of the response is quite characteristic of a man who views governing as a technical exercise and, in Bland’s words, has “surprisingly little to say about the big questions of modern Indonesian history.”

As Bland explains, Jokowi’s outlook is quite comprehensible in the context of his background and life experiences as, first, a man of business and, later, a small-town mayor who fixed tangible problems of urban government. “What has struck me is how little he has changed from his days as mayor of Solo,” Bland writes. Jokowi is also a product, it might be added, of the education system of the late Suharto years — a system that discouraged critical thinking and tended to narrow rather than widen students’ perspectives on the world.

Thus, though Jokowi has “lurched back toward Indonesia’s authoritarian roots,” he has done so not because he has deeply authoritarian views (though Bland notes that he readily falls back on Suharto-era tropes about the incompatibility of political opposition with the cooperative nature of Indonesian culture) but because “he was reaching for any practical levers of power that might help him achieve his aims.” The parties that sit in Indonesia’s parliament and constitute Jokowi’s governing coalition are obstreperous and demanding; military officers offer a can-do approach that Jokowi finds appealing.

At one point, Bland refers to academic analyses that try to understand Indonesia’s political evolution as part of the wider global democratic recession, which most democracy specialists agree has been under way for more than a decade. Bland seems to dislike such efforts, because in Indonesia, as he puts it, “the direction of travel is overwhelmingly being driven by domestic factors.” This is obviously true, but much the same can be said of most countries where democracy is in decline.

In fact, the picture of Indonesian democracy — and of Indonesia’s leader — that emerges from Man of Contradictions is one that is rather typical of the current global moment. As Bland is at pains to point out, Indonesia’s democracy remains vibrant in some respects: elections in particular are competitive, even if the space for criticism has narrowed and authoritarian-era political players such as the military are moving back into the political game.

Such a mixture is not uncommon in the contemporary world; indeed, political scientists have coined numerous terms — electoral authoritarianism, hybrid regimes, illiberal democracy and the like — to try to come to grips with it. From Brazil to India, from the Philippines to Turkey, governing systems that combine electoral competition with illiberal political controls are increasingly the norm.

Jokowi the man is also a leader who seems made for this moment. He is not a fire-breathing populist like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, nor an extravagant narcissist like Donald Trump of the United States. But he does share some of those leaders’ inclinations, including their attraction to the military, their elevation of nationalism over other ideological commitments, and their belief that political obstacles to economic goals can be pushed aside without too much concern over liberal niceties.

In fact, many of the world’s leading democracies are ruled by leaders who are less than fully committed to democracy’s principles. In this respect, Indonesia may not be a land of contradiction after all, but a place remarkably in tune with our current zeitgeist. •

The post Zeitgeist’s man appeared first on Inside Story.

In finer grain, though, there is a flaw in this comforting picture. On the surface of what used to be an Ice Age land bridge are a string of Australian islands extending to less than five kilometres from the coast of Papua New Guinea, or a fifteen-minute journey in the outboard dinghies used by locals.

The Torres Strait Islands were annexed by Queensland in the 1870s just as European powers were starting to carve up the huge and largely unexplored island of New Guinea itself. The fears in Brisbane were soon allayed by the British–German decision to divide the eastern half, with the southern portion of that half becoming a British protectorate.

Queensland resisted proposals to move the border with British Papua to a more central line in the strait, and as late as 1972, under premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, it maintained that attitude when Canberra was trying to fix the border ahead of Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975. In that instance at least, the premier could say he was heeding the voices of Indigenous people. The villagers of the three islands just off the Papuan coast — Boigu, Dauan and Saibai — wanted to remain Australian citizens.

Too Close to Ignore explores the hybrid border that resulted, and looks at what has become of the peoples on either side. This collection of essays is the result of extensive on-the-ground research, and adds up to a fact-laden dossier that points to potential new dangers and offers suggestions for easing the tensions that create opportunities for malign forces.

As several of the book’s contributors point out, the widening gap in living standards is putting the arrangement under pressure. As contributor Peter Chaudhry observes, “There are few places in the world where such stark inequality exists between two places that are so close.”

Since 1975, the Torres Strait Islanders have been part of Australia’s welfare advances, getting Centrelink payments and access to financial services, world-class hospitals and schooling. Onshore in PNG, the inhabitants of fourteen recognised “treaty villages” can travel to the three nearby islands to engage in “traditional practices.” Largely, however, they and the other people of what is known as the South Fly region must rely on a collapsed PNG administration while coping with estuarine fisheries blighted by silt from the giant Ok Tedi mine far up the Fly River.

Local health clinics are either derelict or without medicines and instruments, primary school teachers are often absent, roads are few and mobile telephone coverage spotty, and fuel for outboard motors is three times the Australian price. The only hospital, secondary school and ATMs are on Daru Island, in the main town where some 16,500 people live mostly in crowded squatter settlements without much clean water and sanitation.

“Daru is an ideal environment for the diseases of poverty to flourish,” writes Geoffrey Miller. “Malaria, typhoid, leprosy and tuberculosis are endemic on the island, its TB rate, including rates of drug-resistant TB, rivalling those found anywhere in the world. Daru is a risky location for residents and visitors alike.”

The emergence of multidrug-resistant TB led Australia to start giving special assistance to the Daru hospital in 2012 lest the disease find its way across Torres Strait. Although that help largely succeeded in containing TB in the South Fly, the hospital had to shut down twice in 2018 for lack of operating funds.

Australian government and NGO schemes have now extended into the South Fly, while respecting PNG sovereignty. The authors think Canberra will have to help out much more on a wider front, especially as Australian efforts to “harden” the border against perceived human and biological threats make life more difficult and exacerbate the sense of unfairness.

People from the PNG treaty villages make about 27,000 crossings to the three nearby treaty islands each year. They have to wait in their boats until local officials call them in for identity checks before landing, and are then subject, sometimes whimsically, to rules about what constitutes traditional activity. To go further — say to Thursday Island, the biggest town in the strait — requires an invitation and two-week wait for approval.

Treaty villagers can go to the clinics on Saibai and Boigu, but only get treated “if we’re about to die,” as one put it. Others are referred back to local clinics or, in more serious cases, to Daru’s hospital, to which they must make their own way. Sometimes the delay is fatal. Commercial trade with Australia is effectively barred by biosecurity limits on sales of mud crabs.

Even love is regulated: when an Australian island woman has a relationship with a PNG man, for example, he can only get permission to stay two weeks at a time. To marry and settle, as other spouses of Australians can, he’d have to travel to Port Moresby for a passport and then pay several thousand dollars for the visa application. Even so, the treaty villagers are privileged compared with their neighbours further inland.

Increasingly, PNG coastal people are drawn into trade with the town of Merauke, across the Indonesian border in West Papua, to shop, get cheaper petrol and sell live crabs and sea cucumbers, which can be airlifted around Asia to Chinese restaurants. The trade is illegal and, by sweeping up undersized and female crabs, ecologically damaging.

With calls for some kind of trade zone in which these people could develop direct links to Australian consumers falling on deaf ears, implied threats have been made. Treaty villagers portray themselves as Australia’s border sentinels. “We pick up when strangers come through,” one said. But another warned that, with their own security falling away, “we’ll be forced to do things to survive.” So far there is a little smuggling of marijuana and cheaper PNG alcohol into Torres Strait, and would-be asylum seekers are still being turned in.

The writers see little prospect of raising incomes in South Fly without further cross-border connections, an end to the narrow “traditional” filter on trade, and help for treaty villagers to participate in Australia’s seasonal work scheme without having to go through Port Moresby.

Meanwhile, a movement among the Torres Strait Islanders wants to separate from Queensland and become a federal self-governing territory. They and their island homes, portrayed in the recent ABC TV series Blue Water Empire, are indeed too close to keep ignoring.

The giant crocodile lurking in the Torres Strait picture is the unhappy indigenous population just across the PNG border in West Papua, now more than fifty years after a manipulated “act of free choice” was interpreted by the United Nations as a willingness to join Indonesia.

In colonial times, the border was not a problem. When two political prisoners from the Tanah Merah camps, inland from Merauke, reached Thursday Island by canoe in 1930, Queensland authorities delivered them back to the Dutch. In 1943, Australia let the Dutch bring the Tanah Merah inmates to the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp, until Australian leftists got them released.

It’s more difficult now. When forty-three West Papuan dissidents made it by canoe to Cape York in 2006, the Howard government had little choice but to give them asylum, placating an enraged Jakarta with yet more assurances that we recognise Indonesian sovereignty in West Papua. When seven others got to Boigu Island after crossing by land from West Papua in 2013, the Abbott government deemed them PNG’s problem and sent them back there.

That’s unlikely to be the last attempt. Time, more funds locally allocated from the giant Freeport gold and copper mine, and political concessions have not swayed a restive population still inclined to fly the Morning Star independence flag and paint it on their faces, often at great personal risk.

A new flare-up started eighteen months ago in the mountainous Nduga region. Guerillas of the OPM, the Free Papua Movement, seized workers on the government’s grandiose trans-island highway project and executed fourteen of them. A large Indonesian army operation followed, with many civilian casualties.

Then, on Indonesia’s independence day in August last year, Papuan students in Surabaya hoisted the Morning Star flag on their dormitory and were heckled as “monkeys” by an Indonesian crowd. Anti-Indonesian protests broke out across West Papuan towns; scores of Papuans were shot or arrested; in some places settlers from elsewhere in Indonesia were attacked or driven out.

Indonesia continues to keep a tight fence around its Papuan provinces. A Polish tourist got a seven-year jail term for “treason” when spies reported independence coming up in his conversations with locals, as it is wont to do. But what’s different from previous upsurges is that ordinary Papuans have been greatly empowered by the spread of smartphones. Everyone has a video camera in his or her pocket or bilum.

John Martinkus has mined this new source for his book The Road, as did the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent recently. He portrays the trans-Papua highway as an especially powerful instrument of subjugation, providing some description of the Nduga clashes and the flight of population across fearsome terrain. As far as it goes, this is moving documentation.

But The Road goes little further than Martinkus’s newspaper articles about these developments last year. In particular, he doesn’t bolster his report that Indonesian forces used white phosphorus munitions in Nduga. He includes the detailed declaration by the Indonesian security minister at the time, Wiranto, that Indonesia had no such chemical weapons and was subject to international verification, but simply notes that this was a “strange departure” for Wiranto, citing an instance twenty-one years ago when the general dodged a reporter’s questions about Timor. Martinkus might have tried to check with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, of which Indonesia is a member. Still, the cover blurb accepts that “chemical weapons have been deployed.”

Martinkus forgivingly skirts the execution of at least nineteen civilian captives by the OPM, and makes much of its improving weaponry and tactics. But clearly the organisation is still greatly outgunned and capable of no more than minor ambushes and sniping. Its division into several widely dispersed autonomous bands is not discussed.

A resistance force is important for a liberation movement, as the Falintil guerillas were for East Timor. But also important is the battle of ideas and history, as Bishop Belo and José Ramos-Horta showed in that case. With West Papua, this side of the struggle is led by the Oxford-based Benny Wenda, who managed to collect 1.8 million West Papuan signatures on a petition calling on the United Nations to allow a new vote on independence. The bid was rejected by the UN’s decolonisation committee, stacked with postcolonial states, but has been accepted by its human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet.

Wenda’s diplomacy and the renewed protests and crackdowns inside West Papua have led to growing concern among the Melanesian states. Bougainville’s recent 98 per cent vote to separate from PNG is shaking up the postcolonial status quo. Again, Martinkus could have taken this a lot further by interviewing Wenda about the diplomatic–military interaction — he is available on the phone, and transited Australia to Vanuatu in January — rather than relying on published statements and secondhand reports.

It will take a lot to crack Indonesia’s conviction that West Papua belongs to it. The Indonesian state seems unable to move beyond the ready use of military force. The police commander, Tito Karnavian, has tried without success to edge the military out of its public-security role. Joko Widodo tried to open up West Papua when he became president in 2014, but was quickly countermanded by the military–security establishment and his party chief, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati.

Now Prabowo Subianto, whose military career included chasing OPM fighters into PNG and using a Red Cross helicopter as a Trojan Horse to set free hostages of the OPM, is Wiranto’s replacement as defence and security supremo. Routinely, the Indonesian state is being described as NKRI — NK standing for “Unitary State” and RI for “Indonesian Republic.” Less NK and more RI might offer a possible pathway to reconcile the Papuans, but no one seems likely to try. •

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The prime minister is correct: Indonesia’s success is indeed Australia’s success. Two-way trade between Australia and Indonesia is almost $12 billion a year. Each year, Indonesians pour almost $7 billion into Australia’s universities, mining companies and agricultural sector, and maintain another $1 billion worth of investment in Australia. It cuts both ways. Australian households and businesses have more than $10 billion invested in Indonesia. Australia’s prosperity and Indonesia’s have grown together.

The Indonesian story has been an amazing one. If it keeps doing well, it is on track to become the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2050. Since trade and investment are more about geography than anything else, the benefits to Australia from Indonesia’s rise will be massive. But if Indonesia does badly, the huge financial, economic and security costs will reverberate back onto Australia and around Asia.

Which way will it go? Australia will help decide. The Australian government will soon need to make a choice about whether or not it helps Indonesia. Emerging markets have seen the largest capital outflows in history during the Covid-19 pandemic — larger than those experienced during the global financial crisis — and Indonesia is at the front line in Asia. Indonesia’s exchange rate crashed almost 20 per cent from January to early April as investors fled its economy. Its international debt, more than US$410 billion, is denominated in foreign currencies, meaning that as its exchange rate falls the size of the debt increases. To make matters worse, the income it normally uses to finance these debts has evaporated as global trade, tourism, and oil and commodity prices have collapsed. Around US$44 billion of foreign-denominated debt needs to be refinanced in the next twelve months alone.

None of this is Indonesia’s fault. Indonesia has spent more than two decades substantially strengthening its economy and financial system. Its reliance on short-term foreign-denominated debt has fallen steadily in real terms. But it remains stuck in the catch-22 situation in which all developing countries find themselves: they need to borrow internationally to finance economic development, but borrowing internationally makes them more exposed to financial risks. Economies can hedge against these financial risks, but that costs money. Every dollar spent hedging is a dollar that isn’t spent alleviating poverty. The trade-off between poverty alleviation and financial stability is real, and brutal.

What can Australia do to help? Some might argue that Indonesia should fend for itself. After all, it isn’t helpless. Very wisely, it has spent the last few decades accumulating US$125 billion in foreign-exchange reserves to use for a rainy day. It can use its stock of US Treasury bonds to borrow US dollars thanks to a new facility provided by the New York Federal Reserve.

But these resources are finite, and the markets know it. They will buy Indonesia time, but not much else. Unless the underlying dynamics change, and there’s little prospect of that in the short run, Indonesia will remain in a vicious cycle that will only get worse. While it burns through its foreign-exchange reserves to allow its government and companies to service their foreign debts, its foreign income will remain blocked for as long as Covid-19 keeps tourists, buyers and investors at bay. A weak healthcare system means the impact of the virus will be particularly nasty, hurting Indonesian citizens and keeping investors and tourists away for even longer.

Indonesia needs a circuit-breaker, and Australia can provide one at virtually no cost. The Reserve Bank of Australia has what’s called a bilateral currency swap line with Bank Indonesia, Indonesia’s central bank. This allows Bank Indonesia to swap rupiah for Australian dollars at an agreed rate. The arrangement works like this: Bank Indonesia gets Australian dollars, which it can then use to pay its foreign debts, and Australia gets rupiah, which it holds as collateral until Indonesia repays the Australian dollars in the future. This stops a crisis in its tracks. It sends a crystal-clear signal to markets that Indonesia can access foreign currencies as needed and can thus keep repaying and refinancing its debts. It stops investors from creating a self-fulfilling prophecy — an Indonesian default — by withdrawing their money, which would push down the exchange rate, increase borrowing costs and bring on the very default they feared in the first place.

The existing swap line has two limitations. First, the Reserve Bank has said that it would not be open to Indonesia in a crisis. It would only be available in a situation where companies and banks were unable to exchange currencies for some other reason. The second problem is that, even if the swap line were available during a crisis, it’s too small. At $10 billion, it is less than a quarter of Indonesia’s foreign debt owed in the next twelve months, and less than 3 per cent of its total foreign debt.

With the backing of Treasury and parliament as necessary, the Reserve Bank should change its policy and make it clear that this swap line is available during a crisis. It should then double it. What’s the risk to Australia? In any realistic scenario, there is none. The absolute worst-case scenario is that the Indonesian economy and financial system completely collapse, and its currency loses all value. If this happened, the Reserve Bank would be temporarily stuck with worthless rupiah and would have temporarily lost the money it provided through the swap. This scenario is incredibly improbable. If the Indonesian economy were to collapse, Australia would have much bigger problems to contend with, and the last thing anyone would care about is a writedown on the Reserve Bank’s balance sheet. And even if it did occur, it would simply mean that Australia would be repaid later than expected once the Indonesian economy recovered.

The much more likely scenario is that this swap line sends a vital signal of reassurance to markets, helping to stabilise the Indonesian financial system, and never needs to be used. This is the historical experience: the swap line goes unused and Australia looks like a helpful neighbour. Either way the cost is zero. It’s rare to be able to strengthen bilateral relationships at zero cost.

Indonesia is in a bind and it needs help. Indonesia’s finance minister and central bank governor are already asking other countries for help, and soon they will ask Australia, if they haven’t already. If Australia were a true friend, they wouldn’t need to ask. •

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That fear of a democratic comeback for Prabowo — one of the most odious of Suharto’s henchmen — was palpable among Indonesian progressives in the last weeks of the 2014 campaign. It galvanised them in 2014, notwithstanding Jokowi’s own entanglements with the legatees of Suharto’s New Order era. When Prabowo stood again earlier this year, many stuck with Jokowi for the same reason, long after it was clear that their president was not the reformer many (including me) had hoped he would be.

You can only imagine, then, how those progressive voters felt this week when Prabowo gracefully accepted the offer of a senior position in Jokowi’s second-term cabinet. Amid a process which is already being panned in the Indonesian press for its accommodation of political parties and vested interests, his appointment as defence minister has dominated international attention. As one Australian academic quipped, “What was that election for again?”

Prabowo is a grossly inappropriate choice for the defence portfolio. After Suharto’s resignation he was dismissed from the military for organising the abduction and torture of anti-regime activists, and he faces serious questions over his role in atrocities during the occupation of East Timor. Not that Western governments are likely to care: Prabowo has recently expressed the right concerns about an “ever-expansive” China, and will be a reliable ally in the fight against terrorism, his own election-time alliances with Islamic hardliners having been sidelined in favour of reconciliation with the nationalist and moderate Islamic parties that dominate Jokowi’s coalition. But Prabowo is ambitious, and nobody knows whether he is joining the government in order to white-ant it, or to inherit it when Jokowi leaves office in 2024.

On the one hand, Prabowo’s appointment seems extraordinary — somewhat like Hillary Clinton being appointed to cabinet not by Barack Obama but by Donald Trump. At the same time, the circumstances of Prabowo’s return to public office are emblematic of some broader pathologies of post-Suharto politics. Democratic accountability, most people would think, rests upon the idea that the public votes leaders and parties out of office as much as into it. But in Indonesia, ideological and political economy factors encourage the formation of oversized ruling coalitions, of the kind Jokowi has pursued, that are designed to accommodate a broad swathe of elite factions and social groups — including the notional election “losers.”

Announcing the new cabinet, Jokowi exhorted his new ministers not to be corrupt, but he knows that opportunities for rorts are the whole point of these “fat” coalitions. Much of the viability and influence of parties and religious organisations is dependent on their delivering patronage — pork-barrel projects, jobs for the boys, government contracts, favourable regulatory decisions — to their clienteles. For parties, kickbacks collected in this process are an important source of operational funds. The prospect of controlling a ministry and its budget is one reason why, though parties compete vigorously with each other in elections, they then “enter power-sharing agreements that effectively void voters’ preferences.”

Even when viewed in light of these conventions, and judged by the standard Jokowi set in his first term, the new cabinet is qualitatively worse than those that preceded it. It hews less to the tradition of representational diversity that Indonesian presidents usually honour. At a time when Papuan grievances are driving civil unrest and observers worry that anti-Chinese prejudice is growing, there is no indigenous Papuan or ethnic Chinese Indonesian in the ministry, and only five out of thirty-four portfolios are held by women, a decrease from Jokowi’s first term.

And it’s not as if those ministers who did make the cut are an impressive bunch overall. The new health minister is a controversial army doctor who was sanctioned by Indonesia’s medical association over his promotion of an unproven “brain wash” therapy for stroke patients. The pro-Jokowi media tycoon Surya Paloh had a politician from his Nasdem Party installed as communications minister and now has the luxury of regulating his own media empire. Last month, tens of thousands of Indonesian students were protesting the weakening of anti-corruption laws, a draconian new criminal code, and the government’s persistent failure to discipline industry for its role in Indonesia’s forest-fire crisis. Yet forestry and environment minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, another Nasdem Party cadre, has been kept in her portfolio. The hapless justice minister, Yasonna Laoly — whose ministry co-authored the bills most forcefully rejected by the protesters — has likewise been kept in place.

After Jokowi was re-elected in June, he told the Associated Press that he no longer had a “political burden.” His cabinet just confirms the observation of one Indonesian academic that the “burden” he was thinking of wasn’t the demands of his elite coalition partners, but those of voters and civil society.

The abandonment of any pretence of institutional reform is not all that has changed after the election. This cabinet reflects much more clearly than in Jokowi’s first term a renewed atmosphere of ideological conflict between proponents of the religious pluralism that has long dominated the political mainstream and the Islamism that is ascendant in an increasingly pious society — and particularly among the urban middle classes who play an outsize role in cultural and political life.

The former national police chief Tito Karnavian, a political ally of the president, has been appointed as home minister, a position with wide powers over the civil service and regional government. In one of his more surprising appointments, Jokowi has chosen Fachrul Razi, a former army general, as minister for religion — the first time since the New Order that a military man has held this post. Presidential palace officials briefed the media this week that the two will spearhead a “deradicalisation” agenda within Indonesia’s civil and religious bureaucracy, which pluralist and moderate organisations have long worried is being colonised by sympathisers of radical groups like the now-banned Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia or the mainstream Islamist party PKS.

Indonesian pluralists and many westerners will be encouraged by the idea that the Islamic far right will no longer be indulged by the state, as it was under former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who saw conservative Muslims as an important part of his political coalition. But those who know what the rhetoric of “deradicalisation” signifies in the current political climate in Indonesia — and recall what it meant during the New Order — are wary of what such a crackdown on an ill-defined “radicalism” might mean in practice.

Indeed, what has (re)emerged under Jokowi is a strain of “nondemocratic pluralist” thinking, which sees the threat to Indonesian social cohesion and national identity posed by Islamism as so acute as to justify restrictions on freedom of association (such as the decree used to ban Hizbut Tahrir in 2017) and purges of Islamist sympathisers in the bureaucracy, something which anecdotal evidence suggests has been quietly under way for some time under Jokowi. One need only look to the experience of the Arab world, or even the New Order, to see how ineffective the promotion of an aggressive nationalism — combined with the delegitimisation of Islamist movements and discrimination against their followers — is likely to be as a remedy for the spread of Islamist ideals in society.

The new cabinet, then, embodies both what has been rotten about Indonesia’s post-Suharto politics since the beginning and the new problems being created and exacerbated by Jokowi’s leadership. It’s tempting to say that Indonesians had better hope they get lucky with their presidential candidates in the 2024 elections — yet if there’s one idea that Jokowi’s presidency has put to rest, it’s that Indonesian democracy needs a saviour. •

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The diplomatic jousting in New York symbolises the crisis facing the government of Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. In the 1990s, Jokowi’s predecessors lost the support of the generation of young Timorese who had grown up under Indonesian occupation and joined the campaign for independence. Today, a new generation of West Papuans is protesting in the streets of Jayapura, Wamena and other towns in the region Jakarta views as the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua.

Since the withdrawal of the Netherlands from its Melanesian colony half a century ago, West Papuans have only known Indonesian rule. The young people facing off against Indonesian soldiers are responding to a crisis generated by Indonesia’s failed development model in West Papua, which has brought in hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers from other parts of Indonesia, converted customary Melanesian land into freehold, and encouraged commercial extraction of gas, copper, gold and timber.

Human rights groups have long reported violations by Indonesian police and military, but concern escalated in December last year when the army extended its operations around Nduga district, following the shooting of construction workers on road-building operations. This year, West Papuan monitoring groups have reported more than 180 deaths in the district, and more than 40,000 people displaced. Healthcare facilities, churches and schools have been damaged, and families have fled into the bush with limited food and shelter.

A further upsurge in conflict began in Surabaya, East Java, in August, prompted by West Papuan student protests against Indonesian racism. Falsely accused of showing a lack of respect for the Indonesian flag and angered by taunts against Melanesian “monkeys” and pigs,” thousands of students across Indonesia launched mass demonstrations against racism, which soon expanded into street protests in West Papua.

Since September, protests have continued in towns across the western half of the island of New Guinea. Indonesian police and military have shot dead at least thirty West Papuan protesters, and many others have been injured in Jayapura and Wamena. In Wamena, killings and violence against non-Papuan migrants saw people fleeing to police barracks for protection.

Chanting “We are not white and red, we are Morning Star,” young Papuans have flourished the illegal West Papuan flag, first raised in December 1961 when West Papuan nationalists were seeking to create their own government under 1960 UN General Assembly resolutions on decolonisation. But US cold war support for Indonesia led to the 1962 New York agreement to introduce a UN transitional administration, opening the way for Indonesia’s military to move in. Then came August 1969’s widely criticised “Act of Free Choice,” when 1022 carefully selected Papuan leaders voted under pressure to accept Indonesian rule.

The current repression in West Papua rolls back the peaceful diplomacy Jokowi attempted during his first term of office. A regular visitor to West Papua, the Indonesian president won early plaudits by granting amnesty to key West Papuan prisoners and launching a series of development projects. Progress looked so promising that the leaders of the Melanesian Spearhead Group — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia — declared in 2015 that Jokowi “is someone whom the MSG can dialogue with.”

Five months into the president’s second term, Indonesian politics is more polarised. There are worrying signs of a regression towards authoritarianism: last year’s blasphemy charges against the mayor of Jakarta, for instance, and the appointment of the well-known former general, Wiranto, as coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, despite his role in human rights violations in East Timor during the 1990s. Recent attempts to weaken Indonesia’s anti-corruption institutions and last month’s legislation promoting fundamentalist rules on culture and sexuality highlight the ugly turn.

Contributing to the shift in Indonesia’s diplomacy on West Papua has been the death of former independence campaigner Franz Albert Joku in June this year. Over the past decade, the charismatic West Papuan — a prominent landowner who lived in exile for many years in Papua New Guinea — had joined fellow activist Nick Messet to advise and represent the Indonesian government.

When I met Joku and Messet at a Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Kiribati in 2000, both men were supporters of independence. Their organisation, the Papua Presidium, had emerged during a surge of West Papua nationalism after the collapse of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998, a period dubbed the Papuan Spring. A national congress in Jayapura had remobilised the independence movement and brought in a new generation of activists under the leadership of customary chief Theys Eluay.

The Papuan Spring was supported by Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s president at the time, who was seeking to chart a path to democracy and de-fang Indonesia’s military after decades of repression in Timor, Aceh and West Papua. But Wahid lost the presidency in 2001, and incoming president Megawati Sukarnoputri crushed the Papua Presidium. Indonesian special forces soldiers murdered Eluay.

Abandoning his support for independence, Joku returned to Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, in 2008. Jakarta’s 2001 Special Autonomy Law, he declared, provided a pathway to greater autonomy and peaceful development. In recent years, Joku and Messet served as frontmen for Indonesian diplomatic efforts, seeking to blunt growing international support for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

Joku was the garrulous and good-humoured voice that argued Indonesia’s case on the international stage: travelling in Indonesian delegations to the MSG and Pacific Islands Forum, lobbying in UN corridors, even briefing Indonesian student groups at universities in Australia and New Zealand. He put a human face on the ugly rhetoric of Indonesian military leaders who have long benefited from their business interests in the eastern provinces of Indonesia.

“I believe I am still working for the emancipation of my country,” he told me when we crossed paths in Wellington last year. “The Special Autonomy Law, however incomplete it may be, is an acceptable political compromise. We need to grab hold of it and make it serve our interests.”

Security minister Wiranto and defence minister Ryamizard Ryacudu are much less diplomatic when they push back against Pacific island governments and human rights advocates. Visiting Australia in November 2016, Ryamizard chastised island nations that had spoken at the United Nations in support of West Papuan rights. “Please tell Solomon Islands and those six nations never to interfere or encourage West Papua to join them,” he said. “Those countries better keep their mouths shut and mind their own business. It is better that Australia speaks to them gently. If it was left up to me, I would twist their ears.”

Indonesia has joined the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, alongside Fiji and Papua New Guinea, partly to block any move to have West Papua relisted as a non-self-governing territory by the United Nations. Indonesian diplomats, like their French counterparts, were horrified when Tuvalu, Nauru and Solomon Islands successfully moved a motion through the UN General Assembly in 2013 adding French Polynesia to the list.

In July this year, Indonesia hosted a trade and tourism conference in Auckland as part of its Pacific engagement effort. Looking beyond current trade negotiations with Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi said that Jakarta was seeking to extend its influence in even the smallest island nations: “We are connecting the dots between the 17,000 Indonesian islands and the thousands of Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. One of the steps that we are taking to connect is by opening diplomatic relationships with Cook Islands and Niue.”

But charm only goes so far. The Indonesian government is clearly hostile to any country that raises its voice in global institutions. When island nations promoted a resolution at the UN General Assembly in August on cooperation between the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum, it was adopted in a vote of 137–0, with Indonesia abstaining. Its UN representative regretted that “one member of the Pacific Islands Forum continued to interfere with Indonesia’s domestic affairs,” a not-so-subtle reference to Vanuatu.

No doubt mindful of possible repercussions in other parts of the region, Pacific Islands Forum leaders aren’t calling for independence for West Papua. At their most recent meeting in Tuvalu in August, they reaffirmed their recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty over the two provinces, but also acknowledged reports of escalating violence and human rights abuses and “agreed to re-emphasise and reinforce the Forum’s position of raising its concerns over the violence.”

In their final communiqué, they called on Jakarta to facilitate a long-mooted visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. They “strongly encouraged” Indonesia and the commission to agree on timing for a visit that Indonesia has stalled, calling for “an evidence-based, informed report on the situation” to be published before next year’s Forum leaders meeting in Vanuatu.

“This is the first time that Forum leaders have called for a United Nations human rights visit,” West Papuan leader Benny Wenda told me in Tuvalu. Wenda chairs the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, and was in Funafuti with spokesperson Jacob Rumbiak to lobby island leaders for support. “This is step by step,” he added. “This is the starting point and the fact is that the resolution is a really, really important step for us to go to another level.”

Efforts to extend support to West Papuans have often been stymied at the Forum by Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The two larger Melanesian nations have also defended Indonesia’s interests at the Melanesian Spearhead Group, backing associate membership for Jakarta. After rejecting a West Papuan bid for full MSG membership at their 2013 summit in Noumea, Melanesian leaders agreed to “invite all groups to form an inclusive and united umbrella group in consultation with Indonesia to work on submitting a fresh application.”

In December 2014, Vanuatu churches and customary leaders hosted a meeting in Port Vila aimed at transcending longstanding divisions between three key strands of the nationalist movement: the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, the Federal Republic of West Papua, and the National Parliament of West Papua (which includes the National Committee for West Papua that has mobilised most of the recent protests). The meeting was successful, and these groupings came together as the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

But there’s still a way to go in gaining stronger support from the largest countries in the regional organisations. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea border Indonesia and have a range of strategic reasons — from trade and investment to anxiety over the movement of refugees — for maintaining good relations with Jakarta. In recent years, their stand has been backed by Fiji under prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama, who led a coup in 2006 and then oversaw Fiji’s return to parliamentary rule in 2014.

Since the post-coup regime was suspended from the Forum and Commonwealth in 2009, Fiji’s international diplomacy has expanded beyond its traditional partners. In recent years, Indonesia has been a key ally in Fiji’s bid for leadership roles in bodies like the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77-plus-China group and the Asia-Pacific bloc within the United Nations.

“Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua cannot be questioned,” Bainimarama declared at the MSG’s 2015 summit. “The best hope for improving the lives of the people of West Papua is to work closely with the Indonesian government, one of the most vibrant democracies in the world.” Despite this, the 2015 summit gave observer status at the MSG to Wenda’s United Liberation Movement for West Papua, the first major diplomatic breakthrough.

In contrast to Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Vanuatu has long championed self-determination for West Papua. Lora Lini, daughter of Vanuatu’s first prime minister Walter Lini, has been appointed as special envoy on decolonisation of West Papua to the Pacific island states. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s foreign minister, is a key international champion of the West Papuan cause.

Vanuatu is supported within the MSG by the Kanak independence movement, FLNKS, which reaffirmed its longstanding support for its fellow liberation movement as the Indonesian repression mounted in September 2019. The Solomon Islands, under prime minister Mannaseh Sogavare, has also appointed a special envoy on West Papua.

With decisive action within the Forum and the MSG blocked by the larger powers, a separate Group of Seven has been taking initiatives in support of West Papua in international forums. Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands presented a joint statement on West Papua to the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Council of Ministers in Brussels in May 2017. Leaders of these island nations have spoken out at the UN General Assembly, and Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have lobbied this year at the UN Human Rights Council. Pacific church and community groups have ensured that West Papua remains on the Forum agenda, using their annual dialogue with island leaders to promote action on human rights.

Pacific nations, however, are facing a changed geopolitical context. As with other Asian powers — China, Taiwan, Korea and India — Indonesia is a new regional player, extending its diplomatic and political relationship with Forum members and providing new pathways for aid, trade and investment. Not surprisingly, Jakarta is seeking a diplomatic quid pro quo in the form of silence on human rights abuses and public acceptance of Indonesian sovereignty over the western half of the island of New Guinea. Jokowi’s administration is wooing or threatening those who speak out on the issue.

Next year, forty years after Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, the Melanesian nation will host the fifty-first Pacific Islands Forum. Foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu hopes that meeting will build on this year’s call for an urgent visit to West Papua by the UN human rights commissioner.

“In the last few years, the resolution has been about constructive engagement with Indonesia on the issue,” he says. “But I think the leaders realised that the open and constructive engagement had not necessarily achieved the improvements in human rights that are desired. I think the situation in Nduga over the last year has caused Forum leaders to elevate the tone of the resolution.”

The UN’s Michelle Bachelet could provide an “honest and frank account” before the next Forum leaders’ meeting, Regenvanu told me. The Forum secretariat and member states “need to make sure the commissioner gets to go,” he said. “Indonesia should see that there is a very clear concern and we hope this this statement will make them come to the table and work with the commissioner to make sure this mission does happen.”

But time is short. “The situation in West Papua is getting worse and worse,” says Benny Wenda. “This is the next East Timor — it’s beginning. Sixteen thousand additional Indonesian troops have now been deployed to bring violence to West Papua, working with the new nationalist militias. How long does the world need to watch my people being slaughtered like animals before they intervene? Fifty-seven years of this is enough.” •

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But seven out of eight Indonesians are Muslims. This time, the exit polls tell us, they divided almost evenly — 49 per cent for Jokowi and 51 per cent for Prabowo, a Trumpish former general who won overwhelming endorsement from Muslim conservatives, just as Trump’s support base is among Christian conservatives.

That 49–51 split hid deep divisions. The Javanese heartland in East and Central Java gave Jokowi a massive 71 per cent, after its dominant Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars), which promotes a pluralist “Indonesian” Islam, formed a de facto alliance with the president — a relationship cemented when Jokowi chose a veteran NU cleric, Ma’ruf Amin, as his vice-president.

Yet on the other side of the island, the Sundanese heartland of West Java, which more reflects the Saudi version of Islam, gave 60 per cent of its votes to Prabowo. The challenger — as implausible a role model for Islam as Trump is for Christianity — also won 57 per cent of votes on Indonesia’s second island, Sumatra. That figure rose to 86 per cent in the deeply conservative provinces of West Sumatra and Aceh.

A conference of Indonesia experts in Canberra last weekend heard that Indonesia is now more polarised — and its democracy weaker — than at any time in twenty years of democratic rule. And it’s not clear if Jokowi’s second five-year term will heal that polarisation, or see it grow even more confronting, forcing Indonesia’s leaders to redefine what kind of country it is.

The annual Indonesia Update at the Australian National University shone its spotlight on the social divisions left by the election, and by years of increasing tension between supporters of Indonesia’s traditional pluralism and those who want to impose conservative Islamic values. At the extreme, some conservatives would like to see sharia law enforced and Indonesia declared an Islamic country.

The conference also focused on what its organisers see as the “regression” of Indonesian democracy towards authoritarianism, after Islamic militants succeeded in having the former mayor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjohojo Purnama, a Chinese Christian known as Ahok, jailed on a charge of blasphemy against Islam. Speakers accused Jokowi of retaliating by using the powers of government to suppress opposition and conduct the election on a playing field sloping his way.

The past three years of social conflict have threatened hopes that Indonesia is becoming a “normal” middle-income democracy. The momentum is now with those who want it to be a less diverse, less tolerant, more authoritarian state reflecting traditional Islamic values.

If the conflict of values between Indonesia’s traditional religious pluralism and conservative Islam intensifies further in Jokowi’s second term, the tolerant, open Indonesia we know could become a very different country.

To Australians, Jokowi seems one of the most attractive leaders on the world stage: a smiling, politically skilful man of the people; an honest entrepreneur-turned-politician building the infrastructure Indonesia sorely needs. But Indonesia watchers in Australia’s universities have been concerned for some time that his government has slid towards authoritarianism in trying to suppress the rising conflict over Indonesia’s national identity.

The ANU’s Marcus Mietzner and Ed Aspinall opened the conference with a bleak overview: Mietzner declared that Indonesia’s democracy is now in its worst shape since 2000. The former army commander in East Timor, General Wiranto, has been put in charge of the government’s response to the rise of Islamic militancy, with results Mietzner summed up as “executive illiberalism.”

Rock star Ahmad Dhani, a prominent critic of the government, has been jailed for two and a half years for a series of inflammatory tweets. In all, eighty-two Prabowo supporters have been prosecuted for insulting Jokowi, although only sixteen have been convicted. The government leant on the TV channels during the election campaign to ensure that most supported Jokowi. Police and public servants were told to go out and sell the government’s achievements.

Along with the usual Indonesian custom of “envelope campaigning” — one government candidate was arrested with eight billion rupiah (about A$800,000) in envelopes intended for voters — the message went out to moderates: “They came for Ahok. Next they will come for us, unless we support Jokowi.”

Aspinall added that it was no better on the other side: Prabowo’s team told voters that Jokowi was not a true Muslim and would, if re-elected, ban prayers and legalise same-sex marriage. And it is no secret that, having forced Ahok from Jakarta’s mayoral office and into jail, the Islamic militants’ next target is Jokowi.

Conference co-convenor Eve Warburton argued that Jokowi himself used smears to try to polarise Indonesians; his supporters are now urging him to purge the civil service of Islamists. She cited surveys showing that the polarising campaign rhetoric was matched by “rising intolerance at grassroots level” towards anyone with different views.

But perhaps this needs to be seen in context. In his keynote speech, University of Michigan political scientist Allen Hicken, a pioneer of measuring the quality of democracies, emphasised that the tide of liberalisation has been receding the world over since about 2012, including in the West; Indonesia is no exception.

Hicken has to live in Trump’s United States, and specialises in the Philippines, the den of Duterte, and Thailand, the land of coups. Yes, Indonesia has lost some democratic ground, he said, but along with East Timor it remains streets ahead of the other countries in Southeast Asia — even Malaysia and Singapore — for the depth and spread of its democratic culture.

Indeed, on any reasonable measure, Indonesia is a stand-out success among the world’s newer democracies. It has seen election after election at which power has passed peacefully between elected rulers at all levels of government. The media is uncensored, political parties operate freely and the courts are independent, if at times corrupt.

Hicken argued that its recent experience reflects a global zeitgeist in which leaders and citizens are turning away from the liberal ideals of “being able to see others’ point of view, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable.”

This is exacerbated, he said, when elections lead to a winner-takes-all outcome, when candidates who might build bridges to unite the country are blocked from standing by extremists in their parties, and when governments use rule by law rather than the rule of law to punish groups opposed to them.

He did not speculate on what has made the world turn more authoritarian. In Indonesia’s case, “executive illiberalism” was clearly driven by the rise of militant Islam in the streets, and the fear of this fuelling a resurgence of the terrorist bombings of the previous decade. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country, and the most to lose if Islamic radicalism grows out of control.

Back to the election. The defining event of Jokowi’s first term was the toppling of Jakarta’s mayor, largely because Ahok was a Chinese Christian. And, in turn, Jokowi’s defensive response to this — forming a de facto alliance with the Islamic moderates of the Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU — was the decisive factor in his re-election.

NU’s Javanese heartland (East Java, Central Java and Yogyakarta) contains almost a third of Indonesia’s voters. In 2014, they gave Jokowi a healthy 59–41 victory over Prabowo, a majority of eight million votes. In the other two-thirds of Indonesia, by contrast, his margin over Prabowo was a slender 300,000 votes.

This time the rest of Indonesia, taken together, swung to the challenger: Prabowo won that two-thirds of the country by 3.6 million votes. But in the Javanese heartland, with almost fifty million voters, Jokowi won a stunning 12 per cent swing to win 71 per cent to Prabowo’s 29 per cent. This time, his majority there was more than twenty million votes. Sure, it’s his part of the country — his political career began as Mayor of Surakarta (Solo) — but what gave him such a massive swing there when West Java held firmly with Prabowo and the three other big islands — Sumatra, Sulawesi and Kalimantan (Borneo) — swung strongly towards the challenger?

The decisive factor was NU’s role. Nava Nuraniyah of Jakarta’s Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict gave the conference a fascinating account of how NU set about organising its millions of mostly moderate members and supporters to become militant campaigners defending Indonesia’s traditional pluralism.

As Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, NU largely focuses on welfare. It is best known in Australia for its former long-time leader Abdurrahman Wahid (aka Gus Dur), the courageous, almost-blind cleric who was a rare voice of opposition in the Suharto years. Gus Dur became president himself in 1999, but found day-to-day politics beyond him, and was dumped for PDIP leader Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Confronted with the rise of radical Islam on the streets, NU turned itself into the army of “militant pluralism,” Nuraniyah said. It trained its cadres to be campaigners armed with techniques and arguments, including martial arts training. And Jokowi returned the favour by choosing senior NU cleric Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate, despite the crucial role Amin had played in 2016 in issuing a fatwa against Ahok, one of Jokowi’s allies.

On the streets, NU’s young militants confronted the radical Islamists with similar tactics: burning opponents’ flags, holding big prayer rallies and trying to recruit those on the sidelines. There was no serious violence during the campaign, but Nuraniyah warns that violent clashes between the two groups could happen in the future.

Jokowi’s five-year term will finally start in October. What role will the NU and his new vice-president play in it? So far, their hand has not been visible in the issues he has nominated as his priorities: ensuring that “no one [is] left behind,” pushing through reforms to attract more business investment — including lower company tax and investment in infrastructure and education — and building a new capital city (of which, more in a moment).

But Jokowi has yet to announce his new ministry, and he is a pragmatist. If Islam’s influence in Indonesia continues to expand, his decisions are likely to reflect it. Moderate Islam saved him at this election; he now owes it some favours. What will the NU seek?

The role of Islam in society is not the only difficult issue facing Indonesia’s leaders. It is a land with both widespread corruption and a powerful, committed anti-corruption commission, the KPK. That’s a lethal cocktail. According to the Jakarta Post, the commission is currently investigating 255 MPs, six political party leaders, 130 regional leaders, and twenty-seven heads of departments and agencies under suspicion of graft. Not surprisingly, the MPs don’t like it, and they are fighting back.

The outgoing House of Representatives has unanimously put forward a draft law which would see it appoint a council to oversee the KPK’s operations, issue or deny approval for any use of telephone surveillance, and remove its freedom to hire. Anyone who has read Elizabeth Pisani’s wonderful analysis of Indonesia by travelogue, Indonesia Etc., will understand the MPs’ point of view. After all, our constituents expect us as MPs to keep handing them cash-filled envelopes and other goodies. How can we afford to do that if we don’t take bribes?

At issue, however, is Indonesia’s ability to progress to becoming a modern, high-income economy. Even in 2007, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Indonesia at a disappointing 143rd of 180 countries on corruption, with an average mark of just twenty-three out of one hundred. But by 2018, Indonesia’s ranking had jumped to eighty-ninth, and its average mark to thirty-eight — and few would dispute that that is largely due to the work of the KPK, which has already sent powerful figures such as former Golkar party chairman and speaker of the House, Setyo Novanto, to jail for fifteen years.

Jokowi, typically, has remained silent so far. But he has told party leaders he plans to appoint a non-politician as attorney-general, and have only a minority of politicians in his ministry. His finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, is one of Indonesia’s most highly regarded economists and has spearheaded a range of reforms, including measures to tackle corruption in the bureaucracy. One can imagine what advice she will give Jokowi on the House’s draft bill.

With the conference program decided long ago, there was only cursory reference to the recent riots in Papua, whose Melanesian people resent being an outlying province of a largely Javanese country. As they see it, they are viewed by other Indonesians through a prism of condescending racism; even in Papua, government and commercial activities are dominated by outsiders, and their land remains cut off from the world. (Even under Jokowi, foreign journalists are effectively banned from Papua.)

Ed Aspinall touched on the conflict only to warn that Papuan separatists have embarked on “an unwinnable war,” given Jakarta’s military muscle and determination to retain control. Some of us remember the same phrase being used a generation ago to dismiss the East Timorese resistance.

A different slant was put by Charlotte Setijadi of the National University of Singapore. While Jokowi has visited Papua more often and invested more in its development than any previous president — including building a trans-Papua highway — she said solving Papua’s complaints “needs more than a development approach. Papua must have political reform.”

The issue that has sprung out of left field since the election is Jokowi’s snap decision to build a new national capital — and not on Java, but in the sparsely populated jungle of East Kalimantan.

He timed it well, to chime with alarm over Jakarta’s toxic air pollution, and what is now seen as the inevitable sinking of northern Jakarta under the ocean as a result of the long, reckless depletion of its groundwater resources. Greater Jakarta now has roughly thirty million people, more than all of Australia. It has to be Indonesia’s commercial capital; it doesn’t have to be the national capital.

But as the ANU’s Paul Burke argued in a searing critique, a developing country with so many infrastructure needs could do without the added cost of building a new capital. He dismissed the official cost estimate of 466 trillion rupiah (roughly A$50 billion) as an underestimate that ignored the extra operating costs imposed by having a Brasilia-like capital far from where most people live.

“Indonesia has a long list of more compelling priorities than a new capital,” Burke said. “Jakarta is not going away. It will still be Indonesia’s biggest city… Investments and policies will be needed to tackle groundwater management and air pollution, to build an outer sea dike, and implement its own (A$60 billion) regeneration project.”

A new capital will inevitably be funded partly from the resources that would otherwise be deployed in meeting infrastructure needs in the cities and regions where Indonesians are already living, he said. The opportunity cost of giving the new city priority will be significant.

If a new capital were needed, it would be far cheaper to build it on Java, where almost half of Indonesia’s people live, and road, rail and air links are concentrated. But Burke said the reality is that Jakarta is already the hub to which all of Indonesia connects, and changing that will be expensive.

It does seem a premature decision, even for an economy that has done as well as Indonesia has. In its twenty years as a democracy, gross domestic product has almost trebled, averaging growth of 5.25 per cent a year. Indonesia’s GDP per head has more than doubled — and in the past decade has grown four times as fast as Australia’s.

Indonesia is now a middle-income country in real terms (using purchasing power parity to measure the volume of output rather than its price), making it the seventh-biggest economy in the world. In this decade it has overtaken Brazil, Britain and France. Within another decade, if it can sustain its current growth rate, it will overtake Russia, Germany and Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Its most serious economic weakness is that the gains from growth have gone disproportionately to those at the top. The ANU’s Christopher Hoy said reforms in Jokowi’s first term have gone some way towards reducing income disparities, but the richest 20 per cent of Indonesians hold 85 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 60 per cent hold just 5 per cent between them. Jokowi’s team has made some headway in reducing income disparities, but there is a long way to go.

Few Australians think of Indonesia as a success story. The Lowy Institute’s annual poll reveals that two-thirds of Australians don’t even realise that it’s a democracy. Nor have they grasped that Indonesia’s military and police have succeeded in more or less shutting down one of the world’s most lethal terrorist networks since the 2002 Bali bombing — and that, in the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Indonesia could have done a lot worse, on many fronts. As its neighbour, we should be grateful to have a thriving, democratic success story on our doorstep.

The question is whether it will remain that way. That’s one question the conference could not answer. •

The post The wrong kind of momentum in Indonesia? appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the official results still aren’t available, the early results and quick counts suggest that Jokowi’s support rose in the ethnic Javanese-majority heartland provinces of Central Java, Yogyakarta and East Java, and in “majority-minority” provinces (such as majority-Hindu Bali and majority-Christian North Sulawesi). His vote fell in most other parts of Indonesia, but especially in majority-Muslim regions beyond Java, from Sumatra in the west to Sulawesi in the east, which mostly swung hard against the president.

Peculiar local factors produced some of these trends. In Sumatra, for example, smallholders have experienced hardship in recent years because of moribund world prices for palm oil and other commodities. In Sulawesi, Jokowi’s vote suffered from the fact that he no longer had vice-president Jusuf Kalla — the most important national politician from that island — as his running mate.

Observers of Indonesian history, however, cannot fail to see echoes of deep historical patterns, and signs of underlying social cleavages. During the 1950s, as the 1955 election revealed, Indonesian politics were partly organised around a division that grouped syncretic and traditionalist Muslims in Java together with minorities in other islands against “Outer Islanders,” many of whom were modernist Muslims and supporters of the Masjumi party, the most ardent proponent of Islamist causes at that time. A socio-religious divide coincided with a regional divide and the distribution of party support, contributing to the social and political tensions of that era.

This pattern is being reproduced, at least partly, in contemporary Indonesia. Conflict over the political and social role of Islam has long been the major organising principle of Indonesia’s political map, but for much of the post-Suharto period this cleavage has been blurred by the pervasive fragmentation that has come to characterise political life and by the frequency of all-inclusive coalitions that span Indonesia’s socio-religious divides.

In recent years, however, Indonesians have sometimes appeared to be organising into two political blocs. Especially since the 2016–17 Islamist mobilisations that brought down Jakarta’s Christian mayor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), Islamists and their opponents have increasingly faced off — at least when it comes to national politics. This division was on display during the 2019 presidential election: as numerous observers have noted, many of the Islamist groups that opposed Ahok swung behind Prabowo, while groups and parties that uphold pluralism generally backed Jokowi. Indeed, my own and other researchers’ observations of the 2019 campaign point towards the coalescence of a powerful coalition facing down Islamism.

Of course, the picture is complicated, and there are plenty of caveats and exceptions on each side. But it was only necessary to attend campaign events to get a sense of the social gulf separating the two coalitions. At Prabowo’s final large gathering in Jakarta’s Bung Karno Stadium, for example, it was obvious that his campaign was disproportionately garnering backing from supporters of a more Islamic Indonesia. The rally had the feeling of a reunion of the so-called 212 movement that brought down Ahok. It was packed with people wearing symbols of Islamist groups such as the Islamic Defenders’ Front, or FPI, and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, and capped off with a video call from Habib Rizieq Shihab, the rabble-rousing head of FPI, who is in exile in Saudi Arabia. Among the several thousand people I encountered there, I saw only one or two women not wearing Islamic headscarves. The final Jokowi rally, by contrast, attracted Indonesians from all walks of life.

In the presidential election results, we see evidence that polarisation is not merely a social media phenomenon, nor an experience of a narrow band of urban Indonesians alone. It also resonates deeply in the Indonesian population and is connected to wide and slow-moving currents in Indonesian history.

The fact that Islamists would fall behind Prabowo and attempt to turf out Jokowi is not surprising. These groups supported Prabowo in 2014, and their opposition to Jokowi has been overt ever since. What was more noteworthy this year was the hardening of attitudes among the pluralists. Reports from eastern Indonesian provinces such as East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku show that pro-Jokowi campaigners mobilised the vote partly by suggesting that the Prabowo coalition posed a threat to Indonesian pluralism, and to Christians.

Arguably the most important part of this story — and of the election as a whole — was the campaign to mobilise supporters of the traditionalist Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, in favour of Jokowi. This sprawling organisation, steeped in the traditionalist Syafi’i school of Islamic learning and rooted in the pesantren, or religious boarding schools, of rural Java, is a massive potential vote base in Indonesia, especially in the heavily populated provinces of East and Central Java. It also leans toward pluralism, with NU leaders generally (there are exceptions) relatively tolerant of heterodox practices and religious minorities. Though it has a central organisation, NU is best thought of as a loosely coordinated web of networks built around a shared cultural core, and it rarely has the ability to act in unison during elections.

In the 2014 election, NU was split. Many of its prominent leaders supported Prabowo, and that fact contributed strongly to Prabowo’s solid showing in East Java. In the intervening years, especially since the Ahok affair, it has been a major beneficiary of Jokowi’s efforts to garner greater Islamic support. Leaders affiliated with NU and the major party associated with it, PKB (the National Awakening Party), have gained numerous government positions, and the NU network has been a major beneficiary of patronage, in the form of educational, development and other programs. Though he was not Jokowi’s initial choice, the president also appointed Ma’ruf Amin, the chair of NU’s governing council, as his running mate.

NU organised a campaign in favour of Jokowi that was much more unified and focused than any NU electoral effort since 1999. (Azis Anwar Fachrudin has written an excellent account of the NU campaign for New Mandala.) The organisation’s national leaders made it clear that their followers should support Jokowi, as did prominent kyai (religious scholars) and, with some exceptions, NU branch leaders in the provinces. The head of NU’s powerful East Java branch, for example, said NU people who did not vote for Jokowi were “goblok” (stupid). In Central Java, another NU leader suggested that those who did not vote for Jokowi and Amin would be “trampling on the head of NU.” During brief visits to Central and East Java in the weeks leading to the election, I saw signs and billboards proclaiming that it was “wajib” (obligatory) for NU supporters to vote for Jokowi. Everywhere, NU activists and kyai were organising last-minute socialisation events and prayer meetings to ensure that they got out the vote.

This effort paid off. Though we don’t yet have the final results, it is clear that Jokowi recorded strongly increased votes in core NU areas, especially in East and Central Java (as well as in majority-minority provinces). According to an exit poll conducted by Indikator Politik Indonesia, people claiming affiliation to NU broke in favour of Jokowi 56 per cent to 44 per cent; in 2014 they slightly favoured Prabowo by a margin of 43 per cent to 42 per cent). As more results become available, it should be feasible to trace this electoral shift in greater detail. At the moment, it seems likely that swings in East and Central Java alone were enough to offset Jokowi’s losses in majority-Muslim areas outside Java, and may have been the key to saving his presidency (together, these two provinces provide 61.5 million of the 193 million registered voters).

What struck me most when I spoke to local NU leaders in Central and East Java was the language they used to explain why NU was mobilising so strongly in favour of Jokowi. I was expecting to hear defences of engagement in government: NU has a well-established tradition of pragmatism, and previous encounters with NU leaders had prepared me for frank discussions of the material benefits and other advantages NU had derived from cooperation with government.

While my interlocutors acknowledged that such factors had a bearing, they all began with a different set of arguments, saying they were mobilising for Jokowi in order to defend NU’s vision of pluralism and moderation, and its traditional religious practices, and to oppose the forces — which they variously described as the “Islamic right” (Islam kanan), “Islamic hardliners” (Islam garis keras) and supporters of a universal caliphate (khilafah) — mobilising behind Prabowo.

In short, they framed their mobilisation in ideological rather than pragmatic or strategic terms, and as part of a wider struggle to defend the Pancasila (Indonesia’s state philosophy, which recognises the centrality of religion in Indonesia’s political life but does so in pluralistic form) and NKRI (the Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia, or Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia — a term for describing Indonesia that has become a catchphrase to highlight threats to Indonesian unity allegedly posed by separatists, Islamists or other subversive groups). NU leaders were just as adamant about whom and what they were opposing as they were about what they were defending, and they spoke as if NU and Indonesia were facing an existential threat.

It might be objected that such ideological arguments are self-serving. Obviously, they are. But in my view that is the least remarkable part of this story. Instead, it was the consistency of the ideological message I found most noteworthy. Among the dozen or so NU informants I spoke to, the message was uniform, suggesting a concerted effort had been made through NU structures and networks to promote, popularise and standardise this vision.

Indeed, it has been obvious that an ideological campaign has been under way in the NU community for several years now — at least since the formalisation of efforts to promote “Islam Nusantara” (Archipelagic Islam) was launched at the 2015 NU congress. Many of the NU leaders I spoke to said they had become increasingly conscious of the threats posed by preaching by salafi and other hardline groups in NU communities, and by the activities of these groups’ charitable and educational institutions, since the rise of the anti-Ahok movement.

The trend apparent in NU is significant in that it reflects a wider hardening of views among pluralists. Over the last couple of decades, it has sometimes seemed as if the social and political tides in Indonesia were flowing inexorably in favour of Islamism. Politically, the tendency towards all-inclusive coalitions provided Islamist groups leeway to participate in power-sharing arrangements and establish footholds in the government. Mainstream politicians’ desires to appeal to median voters and placate powerful interest groups gave them incentives to promote conservative Islamic causes.

Slow-moving trends of urbanisation and economic growth, meanwhile, were generating increasingly puritanical strains of Islamic thought and practice among the middle classes of Indonesia’s cities and towns, enabling Islamists to expand their influence through universities, the civil service and the private sector. Pluralists were hampered in their attempts to resist these trends by the fact that religion in general, and religious authority in particular, are both highly legitimate in Indonesia. When someone openly resists Islamist influence, they run the risk of being accused of insulting religion itself. (Ahok fell precisely into this trap.)

But the pluralist worm may finally have turned. The pluralists have found their rallying cry (“defend NKRI”) and their Other (handily, though frequently misleadingly, summed up as supporters of the “caliphate”). And they have begun to mobilise, and not just through elections. Jokowi’s government has become increasingly willing over recent years to resort to authoritarian tactics against its critics, including Islamists (for example, it banned Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia), a phenomenon Marcus Mietzner has described as “fighting illiberalism with illiberalism.” In recent months, there has been accumulating, albeit largely anecdotal, evidence of something akin to a purge of supporters of groups like Hizbut Tahrir and even PKS (the Prosperous Justice Party, Indonesia’s most important — and legal — Islamist party) beginning in some higher education institutions, government departments, state enterprises, and even in parts of the private sector.

Before concluding, two very big caveats are in order. One is that the ideological game is being played out at two levels, involving co-option as well as contestation. As numerous observers have pointed out, ever since the anti-Ahok mobilisations, Jokowi has made many concessions to Islamic groups — with NU being only the most obvious beneficiary. It is possible that political opposition to Islamists will be compatible with the continuation of a slow drift towards conservative religious cultural and social policies. Moreover, the slow-moving social processes turning Indonesia’s urban centres into engines of Islamisation are still in train. Social pluralism might still slowly erode as political pluralism triumphs.

The second caveat is that there are still serious doubts about whether the political polarisation sketched in this article penetrates to the grassroots of society and even to core institutions of political life, or if it is an epiphenomenon that coheres fleetingly during presidential elections and other major national events, thereafter to fade once more.

The party system is still fragmented rather than polarised, with parties differentiated on the Islamist–pluralist spectrum but not much on other issues. When parties form electoral coalitions in provincial and district contests, the cleavages on display in this year’s presidential election matter little, with all-inclusive coalitions remaining the order of the day. Yet it is difficult to imagine political polarisation being sustained in a democracy without being meaningfully expressed through the party system.

Meanwhile, most of the pro-Prabowo legislative candidates I encountered during my time in East and Central Java saw little benefit in promoting Prabowo’s candidacy while running their own campaigns. A campaigner for a PAN (National Mandate Party) candidate running in the rural hinterland of Yogyakarta, for example, said he only promoted Prabowo’s presidential bid when campaigning among the relatively small group of supporters of Muhammadiyah (Indonesia’s largest modernist Islamic organisation) in his constituency. To win the support of NU and abangan (syncretic) communities, he provided them with small-scale infrastructure and village improvement projects and, when necessary, with money. In these communities he did not talk about Prabowo at all. “That would not be realistic,” he explained.

A PKS candidate running in Surabaya, the capital of East Java, did something similar. Entering communities as an ustadzah (female preacher) and supporter of micro-enterprises, she would first get a sense of the sympathies of the communities where she was campaigning when it came time to take the obligatory group photos after an event: when posing, she would hold up her thumb and forefinger — the symbol used by supporters of the Prabowo camp to signify their candidate’s number 2 position on the ballot. If people followed suit, she would then talk about the Prabowo campaign. If they did not respond, or held up one finger (Jokowi’s symbol), she kept away from the topic altogether.

These candidates and many others like them, in short, saw little point in pursuing polarising political practices when the rubber hit the road on their own campaigns. They knew that the foundations of Indonesian politics are personal networks and patronage politics. Presumably, their equivalents — candidates running for pro-Jokowi parties in largely pro-Prabowo regions — felt and acted the same way.

What sense can we make of these contradictory trends? On the one hand, it seems clear that Indonesian politics has definitively entered a new phase. Over the last five years, the country has — at least in part — moved beyond the politics that shaped the immediate post-Suharto period, when pragmatism, patronage and accommodation ruled unchallenged. Ideological mobilisation, polarisation, online hate campaigns, and all the rest are becoming increasingly influential in national politics.

On the other hand, this new phase is marked heavily by what has come before. The new trends are emerging in a structural context still heavily weighted towards the pursuit of patronage and accommodation. Even as Prabowo fires up his core supporters with fanciful claims that he was the true winner of the presidential race, it is likely that many of those same supporters are preparing to reposition themselves for a mutually beneficial peace with a re-elected Jokowi. Yet further rounds of polarising politics — not least in the national elections in five years’ time — seem equally possible. A new political order is emerging within the structure of the old, posing challenges to analysts trying to map and understand contradictory trends. •

An earlier version of this article appeared in New Mandala.

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Then, his claims of unfairness came only after the Electoral Commission had announced the official result. This time, his team have floated accusations of dodgy voter lists and plans to rig the vote count weeks before polling day.

All reputable opinion polls suggest the electoral outlook for Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno is grim. Incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin have maintained a double-digit lead in even the closest of polls, consistently polling in the low to mid 50s. At the same time, a March Indikator poll showed each of Prabowo’s coalition partners at or below their 2014 vote count, with the National Mandate Party polling well below the electoral threshold of 4 per cent.

Predictably, Prabowo has questioned the reliability of these polls, asking attendees at his massive Jakarta rally on 6 April, “Do you want to be continually cheated? Do you believe the surveys?” Further muddying the waters, his camp has claimed that their own internal polling shows the former general ahead by 62 to 38 per cent. Dubious pollsters such as Puskaptis, an organisation that falsely claimed in 2014 that Prabowo had won the election, have also released results showing him in front.

More prominent, though, in Prabowo’s recent campaign rhetoric have been efforts to discredit the work of the electoral commission ahead of polling day. Such efforts fall into two categories: allegations floated directly by members of Prabowo’s campaign team and social media hoaxes.

His campaign team has claimed, for example, that the voter list contains 17.5 million dubious voters sharing just a few different birthdays, and that Jokowi will be installed as president even though Prabowo will win the popular vote. Prominent Prabowo supporters such as his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo and former National Mandate Party chair Amien Rais have also sought to intimidate Indonesia’s election commission by threatening mass protests, a legal challenge at the Constitutional Court and even a complaint to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, social media hoaxes have claimed that seven containers of pre-filled ballot papers favouring Jokowi were stacked at Jakarta’s port and that Electoral Commission servers had been preset for a Jokowi victory. In another online campaign, social media influencers supporting the Prabowo camp sent out an SOS to international observers to supervise the 2019 election in order to guarantee its integrity.

Indonesia’s election campaign has certainly not been entirely free of irregularities or controversies. Recently, reports about stray ballots marked in favour of Jokowi emerged from Malaysia — where around 600,000 registered voters live — but the ballots’ authenticity remained unclear at the time of writing. The National Mandate Party had already admitted problems with the voter list prior to this, but denies the allegations of systematic fraud. Rather, it has pledged to work continuously on updating the voter list until election day. The Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) has backed the party and made it clear that while minor irregularities have indeed occurred in the preparation of the voter list, there is no evidence for systematic fraud on Jokowi’s behalf.

The polls available have also shown little sign that voters believe the claims of unfairness. Recent surveys by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting and Indikator — albeit conducted prior to reports of the Malaysia case — revealed an overwhelming majority of voters have confidence in the Electoral Commission’s ability to conduct the election professionally. Disaggregated results from the Indikator poll demonstrate strong confidence in the Commission and Bawaslu even among Prabowo voters.

So what are the main goals of the Prabowo camp in raising these allegations? There are at least three potential reasons for the strategy.

First, Prabowo might hope to sway undecided voters by building an overall narrative that the Jokowi administration is dishonest and will do anything to be re-elected. This narrative is tied to earlier accusations that the government was unfairly targeting and prosecuting opposition figures, mobilising village heads and bureaucrats for the campaign, and using misleading statistics to make its performance in government look more impressive.

Second, the spread of fabricated polls could lay the groundwork for a potential legal challenge after the election, either from Prabowo himself — in case the final result in the presidential election is narrower than most polls are currently predicting — or from one of the parties in Prabowo’s coalition that are at risk of failing to clear the 4 per cent threshold.

Third, Prabowo might be hoping to build up his threat potential in order to pressure Jokowi into protecting his interests if he loses the election by a margin so large that a legal challenge is futile. Despite the polarising effects of the campaign, Indonesia’s long tradition of promiscuous powersharing makes it entirely possible that the two men will seek to collaborate after the election if Jokowi wins a second term. For Prabowo, such collaboration is likely to be more appealing if he can negotiate from a position of relative strength — hence his provocative actions towards the end of the campaign.

Whether Prabowo’s efforts will have the desired effect remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that after an initially subdued campaign, the last few weeks once again revealed Prabowo’s true colours. Election day therefore shapes up as another important fork in the road for Indonesian democracy. •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

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On the other hand, many Indonesians describe the political climate as deeply polarised. Subianto’s running-mate Sandiaga Uno recently declared that “we need to unite the country” and expressed a hope that a “great disconnect” will be “amended” after the election. The General Elections Commission, or KPU, said it would form a “peace committee” for the third televised debate. And when one university invited me to give a guest lecture I was asked not to talk about the election because it was a “sensitive topic.” A lecturer there told me that the current discourse of politics, in which students “cannot agree to disagree,” is “bad for Indonesia and cannot be controlled,” and a student asked my advice about how political “peace” could be achieved.

What drives this disconnect between a largely tame election campaign and the way many people feel about it? One way to answer this is to think about how online lives are distorting offline realities. Rather than Indonesia experiencing a “polarising” election campaign, perhaps social media discourse is making Indonesians perceive that polarisation is greater than it really is — and perhaps politicians are encouraging that perception.

Of course, the previous two high-profile elections — the last presidential election and Jakarta’s mayoral election — could be defined as highly polarising, and in both cases the division was driven by social media. In 2014 Jokowi (as Widodo is usually known) and Prabowo led a highly charged presidential campaign in which the two were often portrayed as starkly different in campaign material and in the media. Jokowi followers changed their Facebook page to “I stand on the right side,” the “right side” being a corruption-free meritocratic leadership. They contrasted Jokowi, who had worked his way from local mayor to governor of Jakarta to presidential candidate, with Prabowo, a former military general and New Order figure who spoke of family ties as key to his leadership credentials. The campaign caused serious friction in many families.

One example of how the 2014 election was defined was a Jakarta Post editorial that endorsed Jokowi because “there is no such thing as being neutral when the stakes are so high… Rarely in an election has the choice been so definitive.” The Post argued that Jokowi was “determined to reject the collusion of power and business” while Prabowo was “embedded in a New Order-style of transactional politics that betrays the spirit of reformasi.” Many human rights activists saw Jokowi’s defeat of Prabowo as a victory for democracy over authoritarianism. Jokowi may have disappointed these activists (and many others) in his first term, but the polarising campaign messages were clear in the lead-up to his win.

Then came the undoubtedly polarising Jakarta election of 2017. Official and unofficial campaign material promoted Islam as its focal point, and the term pribumi, which distinguishes Indonesians whose ancestral roots lie mainly in the archipelago from more recent arrivals, was rejuvenated. Digital media had become an increasingly important space for Indonesians to debate and discuss these issues, both in private WhatsApp conversations and more publicly on Facebook and Twitter. As the media scholar Merlyna Lim described it, the social media election discourse in 2017 was characterised by the “freedom to hate.” Add to that the rise of hoax news, “black” campaigning, and paid trolls, or “buzzers,” and Indonesian politicians, parties and supporters helped create a highly aggressive discourse. Middle-class Indonesians recall incredulously how if someone disagreed with someone else in family or work WhatsApp groups they left the group! Others explained about how it was unwise to talk openly about whom you would vote for because it would lead to segregation in religious communities.

Not surprisingly, having survived two polarising elections, many Indonesians were both wary and weary of elections. As Prabowo once said, “democracy makes us tired.” So, is Indonesian democracy having a power nap before the campaign begins in earnest, or is it sleepwalking into something completely different?

Both Prabowo and Jokowi have clearly had buzzer teams working to shape online discourse, as well as to counter, and even create, “black campaign” material. The language of war is often used to describe the digital sphere, with a “weaponisation” of “online armies” and “cyber warriors” seen to be taking place. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that some Indonesians describe the situation as a “hoax emergency.” As Jokowi observed about this Russian-style propaganda, “They don’t care whether it would cause divisiveness in society, whether it would disturb peace, whether it would worry the public.” It was, he added, a systematic drive to “produce non-stop slander, lies and hoaxes that confuse the people.”

Citing some extraordinary cases, local experts have warned that social media can easily cause conflict because of Indonesia’s low literacy levels. In the words of academic Adi Prayitno, “many Indonesians are still irrational and tend to be emotional when it comes to different opinions in politics,” leading them to think politics is a “one-way-to-heaven issue or a fight between good and evil.” The social media discourse in Indonesia colloquially describes Jokowi’s online supporters as cebong (tadpoles) and Prabowo’s online followers as kampret (bats).

At the heart of the idea of social media polarisation is the example of the United States. Former presidential candidate Agus Yudhoyono, for example, argued in a recent speech that Indonesia’s political divisions were caused by rampant misinformation and hoaxes on social media. “If this situation continues,” he said, “it will put an end to the country’s multiparty system and will lead the country to a two-party system like in the United States.” A dual-party system was not suitable for Indonesia’s history and diverse society, he added.

National Police deputy chief Ari Dono Sukmanto agrees, saying recently that perhaps the disruption that occurred in the United States “could happen to us, too.” One political campaigner on the Jokowi side told me the US election was crucial to their response to “black campaign” material: “Michelle Obama said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ But it didn’t work. Trump won. So here, when they go low, we go lower.”

Despite all the concerns about division, disinformation and hoax news, though, the polls haven’t changed. Jokowi still leads on around 57 per cent to Prabowo’s 32 per cent. Rather than creating a “hoax emergency,” the two online armies seem largely to be fighting each other, while younger Indonesians increasingly move away from the tense political discourse on Twitter and Facebook towards the more apolitical Instagram. “The Nurhadi-Aldo golput phenomenon isn’t because people want a better candidate,” my Indonesian colleague tells me. “It’s because people don’t want a contest. They’d rather joke about politics on social media than get into serious debates about it.”

This slide from Ismail Fahmi’s social media analytics company, Drone Emprit, shows the “polarisation” of supporters that occurred on Twitter during the second televised debate. The “01” cluster represents Jokowi’s supporters and the “02” Prabowo’s. I would interpret this data as showing that the polarised online discourse is created largely by partisan buzzer teams.

But rather than acknowledging this, Indonesian politicians are more likely to argue that these partisan discussions online are the result of the election itself and the way Indonesians are engaging with politics.

The atmosphere of disinformation and division is having an effect, however, on how Indonesian elites and ordinary citizens feel about democracy. Direct and open contestation, a key feature of any democracy, is clearly a problem for many Indonesian politicians and even some members of the public.

Yet despite the re-match of presidential candidates from five years ago, there is no clear ideological contestation in the 2019 election. The 2014 contestation of Jokowi as democrat versus Prabowo as New Order figure no longer fits. Jokowi is no longer the face of a reformist democrat, as Tom Power has argued in New Mandala. Furthermore, Jokowi has built consensus and is increasingly strict about opposing voices. He has managed to get the majority of political parties on his side, has the support of most mainstream media companies (including those who were critical of him in 2014), and has pursued a more aggressive crackdown on opposition figures through the Electronic Transactions Law.

Is religion still a polarising factor, as it was in the 2017 Jakarta election? Vedi Hadiz sensibly argued in the aftermath of Jakarta’s 2017 election that Indonesia was seeing the emergence of two contestations among conservative forces: the conservative Islam adopted by Prabowo and his Islamist party allies, and the nationalist conservatism pushed by Jokowi and the military.

But I’m not sure it’s possible to distinguish Prabowo and Jokowi even on these conservatisms anymore. As Jokowi has shown by appointing the Islamic scholar Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate (and in many other facets of his politics), incorporating opposition forces is preferred to making a stand against them. Ridwan Kamil, who made a similar choice for vice-governor in the West Java election, described this process to me in this way: “In Indonesia, perception about politics is always divided in Islamic image and nationalist image. So if the combination comes from both, people consider it as a balance. People consider me more as nationalist, which means I have to find a vice-candidate that has an image which is more from Islam.”

Those from Prabowo’s Gerindra party, meanwhile, privately tell me that everyone would be invited to join their coalition should they win. Their most popular social media hashtag so far — simply #gantipresiden (“change the president”) — encapsulates the ideological drought of the opposing camp.

So social media is creating an artificial atmosphere of polarisation, which in turn gives politicians the excuse to avoid having a serious policy or ideological contest in the name of avoiding fuelling that supposed polarisation. Perhaps scarred by the elections of 2014 and 2017, many politicians and Indonesian citizens are quite happy to see a stable — even boring — election at which the incumbent president is re-elected easily. But if the political contest is confined to social media, things aren’t so great either.

Of course, there is still a month to go. But so far this campaign is missing something essential to a democracy — presidential candidates pitching clear ideological and policy differences. The emergence of social media disinformation and hoax news seems to have meant that many Indonesian politicians and citizens see a highly contested election campaign, ironically, as the biggest threat to Indonesian democracy. •

An earlier version of this article appeared in New Mandala.

The post Indonesia’s polarisation paradox appeared first on Inside Story.

When you add this democratic transition to Indonesia’s longstanding tradition of religious tolerance — in the world’s largest Muslim country — and a solid pace of economic growth that has doubled real incomes in twenty years, it has been a remarkable success among developing democracies, even if few Australians seem to grasp that.

But now clouds are gathering, and its future is uncertain. Last Friday a conference of Indonesia experts at the Australian National University heard that under the man who seemed to epitomise its democratic transition, president Joko Widodo (Jokowi), Indonesia is lurching towards a more authoritarian style of government. Conservative Islam is growing increasingly powerful, the army and police are being used for politically partisan ends, and dissidents and those seen by Muslim clerics as deviants are experiencing rising repression.

Jokowi was a successful furniture manufacturer before entering politics, and his main policy priorities as president had been to build infrastructure, cut red tape, and run a sound economic and fiscal policy. That has been a stunning success. Jakarta today is a city of infrastructure projects under construction everywhere you look — a metro railway, tramlines, exclusive bus routes — and every part of this country has its own projects under way.

But those priorities have changed in the wake of the defining event of his presidency: the dramatic fall from power last year of his former deputy and successor as mayor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a clever, some say arrogant, Chinese Christian known as Ahok, who is now in jail for blasphemy after accusing his enemies of distorting the Qur’an.

With Ahok behind bars, some of his enemies turned their sights on Jokowi. Yes, he is a Javanese Muslim, which puts him in a very different category. (Some Muslims do not accept the idea that non-Muslims should be able to rule over them.) But enemies have questioned even that, or alleged that he is not a real Muslim. The local elections in June went badly for his party, the PDI-P, headed by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, which won just three of the sixteen posts contested for provincial governors (premiers).

Jokowi has never lost an election, and he is bending over backwards to make sure he doesn’t lose this one.

Next Sunday sees the official start of Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election campaign, even though election day is not until 17 April. Restrictive rules have ensured that there are only two candidates, making it a rematch between Jokowi and the man he defeated in 2014, the Trumpish retired general Prabowo Subianto. The polls show Jokowi well ahead of his rival by a two-to-one majority. But then, the polls were similar at this stage in 2014, and that ended up as a very close race.

As Tom Power of the ANU explained at the conference, Jokowi’s strategy is to head off the risk that the Muslim campaign that brought down Ahok will be used against him. And hence, with vice-president Jusuf Kalla ineligible to seek another term, he has chosen as his running mate Ma’ruf Amin, the seventy-five-year-old conservative chairman of Indonesia’s clerical body, the Indonesian Ulama Council, or MUI, and president of the mass Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU.

It was a stunning embrace of the enemy. Amin played a crucial part in the campaign against Ahok, issuing a “religious opinion” in November 2016 that Ahok’s comments amounted to blasphemy. That ruling triggered the massive street protests that shook Jakarta in the following month, followed by Ahok’s defeat at the polls and his sentence to eighteen months in jail.

In what Dr Power calls “the post-Ahok landscape,” Jokowi chose to seek accommodation with Amin. “NU has become a target of patronage,” Power said, quoting an official of the group as saying: “Whatever Kyai Ma’ruf asked, Jokowi gave him. This way, Kyai Ma’ruf is comfortable, and Jokowi is comfortable. They have become closer and closer, and now NU is always at the side of the government.”

The choice of Ma’ruf may have neutralised the threat of an organised Muslim campaign against Jokowi, but it could have a cost. Jokowi had already chosen the progressive chief justice of the Constitutional Court, Mahfud MD, as his running mate, which would have been a more plausible pairing. But that choice ran into opposition from the parties in his alliance, who feared that it would make Mahfud the heir apparent, and from the NU, which wanted one of its own. So the president gave way.

“Jokowi was made to look weak and beholden to party bosses,” Power concluded. “He disappointed many of his own non-religious supporters, who remembered [Ma’ruf’s] role in the Ahok case.

“The question is, to what extent will he [Ma’ruf] exert influence? Will he sway Jokowi’s administration to be less tolerant? If he said (as he has in the past) that homosexuals should be in prison, what would Jokowi do? It could be very damaging.”

The conference focused on the rights of minorities in Indonesia, including LGBTI communities, religious minorities seen by the MUI as deviant (such as Shi’ite and Ahmadiyya Muslims) and ethnic minorities such as the Chinese. While there have been some steps forward for human rights in the courts — and for the disabled, in the legislature — many of those decisions remain unimplemented. The steps backwards are far more visible.

Take the case of Meiliana, a forty-four-year-old Chinese Buddhist living in North Sumatra. In 2016 she complained about the excessive noise from the loudspeakers of the mosque close to her home. The faithful were outraged. Someone quickly organised a mob of Islamic extremists, which ransacked and set fire to fourteen Buddhist temples. The courts then acted: not against the arsonists, but against Meiliana. Like Ahok, she was sentenced to eighteen months’ jail on a charge of blasphemy — just for making a complaint.

This is not the Indonesia of old. Historian Robert Cribb, also of the ANU, interpreted it as the “pious Muslims” taking back the social dominance they lost when Indonesia was set up under a constitution enshrining Sukarno’s philosophy of Pancasila (five principles). Pancasila prescribed religious tolerance, recognised five religions (now six), and gave the Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant and now Confucian minorities equal rights with the Muslim majority.

“They want it to be clear who is in control,” Professor Cribb said. “It is as if they are saying collectively, ‘We will decide the meaning of Islamic law in this country, and the terms in which it is introduced.’ Tolerance has been seriously eroded. It worries me that something very special about Indonesia is under threat.”

It is not just under threat in Indonesia. Professor Cribb drew parallels with the fatwa issued by the Murdoch press here against Yassmin Abdel-Magied for “civic blasphemy” in suggesting that Anzac Day should also be a time for remembering the injustices committed by Australians — and the excoriation of senator Fraser Anning by some because he used the phrase “final solution” in a speech, unaware that uttering those words is a form of blasphemy to some.

It is not only diminishing tolerance that worries Tom Power and Murdoch University’s Jacqui Baker. Baker cited Jokowi’s regular calls for police and army officers to promote his goåvernment’s achievements in their villages and kampungs, and the growing number of Duterte-style extrajudicial killings of drug sellers and petty criminals. “It sounds the alarm for further democratic backsliding,” she said.

Power noted that the conservative Islam embodied by Ma’ruf and the MUI has little in common with the radical Islam of the terrorists. Indeed, during this period Jokowi has given the green light to increasing repression of “anti-Pancasila” groups, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global movement to establish a single Islamic caliphate to rule the world.

Indonesia has adopted an electoral system that restricts the number of candidates for high office by requiring presidential candidates, for example, to be supported by parties holding at least 20 per cent of the seats in parliament. Increasingly, Power pointed out, this is coming to mean no election at all, as there is little ideological difference between most of Indonesia’s parties, and everyone wants to be on the winning side.

In this year’s regional elections, he said, more than 10 per cent of the mayors and bupatis (heads of regions) standing faced no competition, either because no one else nominated or because courts ruled out rival candidates. Voters could vote either for the single candidate or for the empty column where a challenger was meant to be.

In Makassar, a city the size of Brisbane, the courts blocked the mayor from standing again after the parties decided to unite behind one of their own, Munafri Arifuddin. Faced with the choice of Munafri or the empty column, the city’s voters elected the empty column, creating a new first in Indonesia’s unusual democracy.

It nearly happened in the election for president. At one time even Prabowo faced trouble getting enough party support to be on the ballot. As Power recounted, Prabowo then went to Luhut Pandjaitan, one of Jokowi’s key ministers, and asked if Jokowi would allow him to join the ticket as his running mate — removing any need for an election. Negotiations began, but failed, Power said: “the stumbling block was reportedly disagreement over the distribution of cabinet spoils.”

Indonesian democracy is still standing. But, Power concluded, its quality is in decline.

Some commentators say Jokowi has focused on the wrong threat. As a Javanese Muslim, he is a much less vulnerable target for Islamists than Ahok was. Rather, the main threat to his re-election could come from economic problems.

That might seem extraordinary, given Indonesia’s record. Susan Olivia of the University of Waikato told the conference it has achieved consistent economic growth of 5 per cent or more. The budget is in relatively healthy shape — a deficit of 2.5 per cent of GDP, including all that infrastructure spending — and net debt is just 25 per cent of GDP, the second-lowest of the world’s ten biggest economies.

Jokowi’s infrastructure program has been widely popular. On Transparency International’s measure, corruption is no longer as bad as it was, partly because the online revolution promotes payment systems that cut out the middleman. And his award-winning finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, has spearheaded a program of serious deregulation to cut red tape and make Indonesia more business-friendly.

But what is happening in the United States is creating waves through the developing world. The ANU’s Ross McLeod pointed out that rising US interest rates mean Indonesia too has to raise its interest rates to maintain the capital inflow that finances much of its investment. The Fed’s rate rises have led the dollar to appreciate in value, and the rupiah to depreciate. And with a big trade in exporting components for Chinese factories to assemble into finished goods, Indonesia too is vulnerable to Donald Trump’s expanding tariff hikes on Chinese exports.

Australia faces similar issues. But we have political bipartisanship in these areas, so they can be handled sensibly. The Reserve Bank has not only allowed the Australian dollar to decline, it has welcomed it, because that makes Australian exports more competitive. (We have also been lucky so far with mineral prices rising to offset the dollar’s fall.)

That is not the case in Indonesia. Prabowo keeps attacking Jokowi in what we treat as no-go areas, and policy-making is suffering as a result. The rupiah this year has fallen by 8 to 9 per cent against the US dollar, in line with the Australian dollar’s falls. But Prabowo argues that this is making Indonesians poorer, and the government should intervene to maintain its value.

And intervene it has. McLeod pointed out with regret that, to prop up the rupiah and keep capital inflow coming, Bank Indonesia has sold off US$4 billion of its reserves, and lifted its interest rates by 1.25 per cent — equivalent to five Australian rate rises. To try to hold down the increase in the current account deficit, the government has hiked tariffs on imported vacuum cleaners and other goods.

And as Prabowo is also banging on about rising oil prices, Jokowi has increased the petrol subsidies he had earlier cut, and slowed infrastructure spending to pay for them. All of this will slow Indonesia’s growth, McLeod argued, compared to an Australian-style policy response that lets nature take its course and relies on the automatic stabilisers to keep the economy upright.

Indonesia’s previous president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had two terms in office. The first saw an impressive five years of reform combined with reassurance; he was comfortably re-elected. In his second term, however, SBY dropped the oars and stopped rowing; he no longer wanted to make hard decisions, he just wanted to stay popular. Indonesia drifted off course. Islamist groups and economic nationalists became more assertive, infrastructure was left to become even more backward, and the crisis of Indonesia’s low education standards grew even worse.

For all his faults, Jokowi’s first term has been a successful one. Like SBY, he will probably be re-elected, and comfortably. But what will his second term deliver to Indonesians? Will it continue the progress of his first term, or see it regress into a less tolerant, more backward country? Will the president keep rowing — or will he too drop the oars, avoid the hard decisions, and gradually let his country drift off course? •

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“Okay, okay, finish,” said the cleaner knocking on the door. “Finish, finish.”

He had called his wife, Sultana, to tell her he’d arrived. She sounded groggy on the phone, and when he asked why, she told him it was the middle of the night where she was, in the Yemeni port city of Aden. Only then did he realise he was in a time zone several hours ahead of the Middle East.

He had spent US$50 on the room and had just $20 left in his pocket. His plan was to visit the local office of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, where he hoped to find support and accommodation. Then, with any luck, he’d be leaving Jakarta to find a new home for him and his family.

This is the story of Mohammad Abdul Aziz Osman, a Somali refugee who has lived on his wits on the streets of Jakarta for nearly four years. Like thousands of other refugees in transit countries like Indonesia, he is stuck in limbo and cut off from family and support.

This story could equally have started in a village near Mogadishu, where Aziz was pursued by Al-Shabaab militants, or on an overcrowded boat crossing the Gulf of Aden, or in a refugee camp in Southern Yemen. But let’s start about twenty-four hours before his encounter with the Jakarta hotel cleaner, when Aziz left his wife and their three children in Aden.

It was 26 September 2013. Aziz had been driven to the airport by a people smuggler, who dropped him at the terminal, handed him fake documents and pointed him towards the check-in counter. He remembers the man coaching him to be calm. “Just be slowly,” the smuggler advised. But Aziz was confused. He had never been on a plane before. Which counter should he go to? Which door should he walk through? He paid an airport cleaner 2000 rials (about A$10) to guide him through customs.

Minutes before his flight, he realised he was waiting for the wrong plane. As he recalls it, he slapped his forehead. “Better I wash cars,” he thought, thinking of the job that had sustained him during the years he and his family had lived in Yemen. But he ran through the airport terminal until he found his plane. He remembers the feeling of relief.

After he left the hotel on his first morning in Jakarta and set out for the UNHCR office, Aziz heard the call to prayer. It was Friday, the day when all Muslims are called to worship, so he crossed the road and joined the men praying on the street outside the mosque.

As the prayers ended and he was about to go in search of UNHCR, he noticed a motorbike key on the ground. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and then started walking through the crowd leaving the mosque. He stopped people to ask in Arabic or broken English whether the key belonged to them. As the numbers were starting to thin, a man glanced at it, and then looked again. Aziz saw his growing realisation that his key, which he thought he’d left safely at home, was in the hand of this foreigner.

This was Rojak Gunnaldi, a small, thin man with a gentle manner whom Aziz now describes as “better than a brother” and “a man I would die for.” Although he speaks neither English nor Arabic, Rojak soon understood that Aziz was desperate. He took him to a cafe where a colleague spoke enough English for Aziz to explain that he needed to register as an asylum seeker.

Rojak took him on his motorbike across the city to UNHCR, where they were told the office had closed for the day and he needed to return on Monday. So Rojak offered to put him up for the weekend. In his small room, he fed Aziz and looked after him, even as the Somali fell ill from heat exhaustion.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that Aziz was well enough to go back to UNHCR. As they soon discovered, though, the agency was barely coping with the number of people seeking help. The two men waited in a long queue to see an official, who noted Aziz’s details and registered him on a long list of people seeking asylum. Afterwards, Aziz remembers Rojak saying, “Okay, now you can go.” But Aziz replied that he had nowhere to go and no way to support himself.

“Okay,” Rojak said. “You can stay with me.” For the next seven months they slept on the same mattress on the floor of Rojak’s one-room house.

“That man,” says Aziz, “he very good. He say you stay with me, no problem. I say, Rojak, God bring me.”

To repay him, Aziz fetched water each day and cleaned the room. He also carried water for the neighbours, and cleaned the corridors and picked up rubbish. He never asked for payment. The community warmed to him. People smiled as he passed and took the time to talk to him. They offered him food and sometimes small amounts of money.

But one day Rojak told him he had to leave. He was getting married, he told Aziz in tears, and there was no room for him in the tiny house. Rojak apologised and they wept together.

This was when I first met Aziz. It was June 2014 and he was sitting on a mat outside the UNHCR building in the Menteng area of downtown Jakarta. Behind him, a cardboard sign read, “UNHCR Kita perlu bantu dan fasilitas” (We need help and facilities). There was something about the way he sat there with his legs folded, motionless, staring into the street. I stopped and said hello.

I was making a program for Radio National about the treatment of asylum seekers and focusing on Afghan and Pakistani Hazaras, who were arriving in large numbers, lured by smugglers offering trips on boats from southern Java to Christmas Island. Tony Abbott was in power and the boats had stopped, but young men were still pouring into Indonesia. I had met and interviewed a group of eight people — the youngest aged sixteen — who explained that they had paid smugglers US$64,500 between them to get to Jakarta, with no prospect of onward travel and no way of returning to their own countries.

He asked me to sit down on the mat. He wore a neat blue shirt over his thin frame, and his refugee papers were folded in his pocket. He told me he had been sleeping on the verandah of a nearby hotel and used the showers at a mosque not far away.

“I have problem in my country,” he said. “Me, no mother. Me come here. UN no give eat, drink. Al-Shabaab — but me I no like.”

He had picked up bits of English and Indonesian and his story came out in bursts. He was angry that UNHCR could give him nothing. He was fearful for his wife and children in Yemen. He was defiant about the religious zealots and militants who had harassed and tried to recruit him in his village near Mogadishu. He was frightened by a future in which he saw no resettlement and no security, at least not any time soon.

Within minutes he was stammering in a high pitch in both languages, punctuated by sobs. “Anak anak [children],” he said. “Me I have wife. Me I want future, good. Me I like work. Me I like future… nothing mother, father. Me I want future, me.”

When I asked him what UNHCR was doing to help, he showed me a letter he’d been given inviting him back for an interview the following April, more than ten months away.

I heard his words over and over when I was editing the program back in Melbourne, but they didn’t lose their power. In the months afterwards, I wondered how he was getting along on the streets of Jakarta.

So, in April 2015, I went back to the same spot and asked around. I showed a few people his picture. They all knew him and the word quickly filtered out. Soon he appeared, smiling and dressed in a t-shirt, old jeans and a pair of thongs. Yes, he was okay, he said. His English had improved, and so had his Indonesian.

UNHCR had eventually brought his interview forward by a month. Rojak had kept in touch and dropped by from time to time with small amounts of money. He had escorted Aziz to the interview because he wanted to tell UNHCR what life was like for his friend on the street. Now Aziz was waiting for the agency to grant him refugee status, a vital step on the way to resettlement in another country.

He showed me the little alleyways where he swept and picked up rubbish. A woman who owns a cafe near UNHCR and is known to everyone as Ibu Deni saw us talking and vouched for him. She told me he works hard and asks for nothing. She also said that I should tell the Australian government to look after him. On a wall just thirty metres away, an Australian poster declared, “NO WAY: You Will Not Make Australia Home.” Anyone who had registered with UNHCR after 1 July 2014, it warned, would be denied entry to Australia.

Aziz’s quest for safety really began in 2009 when he paid smugglers US$100 for a boat trip from Bosaso in northern Somalia across the Gulf of Aden. He remembers there were forty-three people on board, among them twenty women, some with children. He and the single men sat at the bow.

“I had no luggage. No bags. No anything. Just t-shirt,” he told me. The waves washed over the gunwales. Many people were sick. He was burnt by the sun and seared by the salt. By the third day they had run out of water and people were finding it hard to swallow.

“Never go by boat again. Very dangerous,” he said. “First thing I do [in Yemen] was cancel this. I said to them [his wife and children], ‘Don’t come.’”

On the night of the third day, the boat landed on a beach on the southwest coast of Yemen, near where the Gulf of Aden narrows before becoming the Red Sea. The police bussed them to Ma’afa, where they were given food. The next morning, they were taken to Al Kharaz refugee camp in the desert.

A few days later, Aziz decided to make his way to Aden. Work was available at a market near the entrance to the city, he’d heard, where many Somalis and Ethiopians wash cars to survive. Despite his fears, he cleaned cars all day so that his wife Sultana and their three children could make the same boat journey. When they finally embarked, he waited anxiously for five days before the family was reunited.

Yemen hasn’t exactly been a safe haven for his wife and children. When we talked, the Saudi air force had been bombing Houthi rebels in Sana’a for a week and Aziz hadn’t heard from his family for twenty-five days. “Sometimes I have signal, sometimes I do not,” he told me. “It’s very difficult.” He said his wife can’t go out. “People are not working. She can’t do cleaning, she doesn’t feel safe.” As he spoke, he began to cry.

Normally, Sultana would leave their three children, then aged between two and five, in her one-room apartment between 7am and 4pm while she cleaned houses.

“One time my child spilled hot water,” said Aziz. He was using his t-shirt to wipe away his tears. He raised his arm to show how Soada had scalded herself on her forearm and ankle. After five months, he said, the burns peeled away. He pinched his skin to show the effect.

Aziz on the hotel rooftop where he sleeps in exchange for doing odd jobs. Andrew Dodd

“Many times Soada asks me, ‘Papa, when you come?’” said Aziz. “My wife, too, asks, ‘What are you doing? You are there. I am here.’ I say, ‘Wait, wait.’”

“Maybe next time I meeting you, I have two babies, maybe one,” his wife has said, warning him of the risks their children are exposed to.

“Wait, wait,” replied Aziz. “Maybe next time life is good.”

He can’t admit to her that he has no idea when, or if, life will get better, but he has invested too much to consider returning to the Middle East.

For now, as Aziz told me, “I sleep on the roof.”

I asked him to show me where, so he led me up the hotel’s narrow stairs onto the roof, where his bedding was rolled up neatly in the corner. The hotel owner let him sleep there if Aziz tidied the corridors and swept the stairs. He explained with pride how he had removed several loads of rubbish. He lay down to show where he slept. The UNHCR building was framed in perfect silhouette behind him.

By the time of my next visit, in February this year, Aziz’s options had narrowed. Donald Trump had stopped immigration from seven Muslim countries; as a Somali who had lived in Yemen, Aziz was banned twice over. He told me he was getting at least one meal a day by helping a man called Doli pack up his warung each night at 1.30am. He had briefly found a room to sleep in, but it hadn’t worked out and now he was back on the roof of the hotel.

It had been raining the night before, so we stepped around his pile of damp bedding and clothes in the stairwell, where he had sat for a couple of hours to wait out the storm. By mid-morning the roof was hot again and he collected his washing, which had been hanging on a string near the air-conditioning units.

Later he told me he was thinking of going to one of the country’s immigration camps, where refugees can get a bed and regular meals. But it would mean being locked up twenty-four hours a day in awful conditions. “I’m not ready yet,” he said. “But life difficult here, brother.”

Aziz wanted me to meet Rojak. He wanted me to talk to the person who had saved him. So that afternoon we went to the upmarket restaurant where Rojak works. It was a Sunday afternoon and well-dressed families were sitting at rows of tables on a pier, facing the water. Jetskis raced around circuits a hundred metres offshore. Across the water was a building shaped like a cruise ship, with four residential towers, each forty storeys high, designed to look like the ship’s funnels.

Rojak and Aziz were delighted to see each other. In proficient Indonesian, Aziz complimented Rojak on his red bandana, which signified he had reached the most senior waiter’s rank. Between serving customers, Rojak came back and the two of them continued talking about their wives and families and Aziz’s hopes for resettlement. Aziz had decided not to tell Rojak that he had moved back onto the roof. “I not want him to feel heavy,” he told me. He hadn’t mentioned it to his wife either.

Rojak ordered plates of food for us and insisted on paying. He told me that he helped Aziz “as anyone would, because he is a fellow Muslim, a brother and a friend.” He’s an engaging figure, cccasionally pausing to stare at me with a look that’s stern and comic at the same time.

The next day, Aziz and I were standing on a bus heading across town when the doors opened at one of the transit stops. People scrambled on as others tried to get off. Aziz noticed that a blind man was still on the platform. He jumped off the bus, took the man’s arm and gently steered him back on board to a safe place to sit. As the bus took off, he stood by the man, watching over him, steadying him with his arm as the bus jolted and braked. Three stops later, he escorted him off again.

Later, I said goodbye and got off too. I used the footbridge to cross the four busy lanes of traffic and started walking along the footpath. It soon started spitting rain and just as I was thinking I might need to find cover, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Aziz standing behind me. He was holding an umbrella, the one he’d been carrying all morning. He pushed it into my hand and said something I couldn’t hear above the cars.

He turned quickly and walked back across the road, threading his way through the same traffic I’d avoided by taking the bridge. I stood watching as he disappeared behind a bus and climbed to the transit platform. •

The post A generous man caught in the system appeared first on Inside Story.

The global asbestos industry’s stratagem to conceal the reality of Siti’s situation – and obscure the fact that asbestos causes disease – was on show as the meeting in Geneva unfolded. Once a hazardous material is listed under the Rotterdam Convention, a member country must grant formal consent before the material is imported into its territory. Listing asbestos would be a small but significant step in reducing the harm it causes, but would stop well short of bringing the deadly global industry to a halt. And yet a small rump of countries succeeded in resisting even this moderate measure.

Exploiting the fact that unanimity is required for changes under the convention, three asbestos-mining countries – Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – stubbornly held out. As if to emphasise the nature of their opposition, they were joined this year by the government of Syria. It is hard to find any reasonable basis for their stance. Attempts to foster doubt about whether chrysotile, or white asbestos, is as dangerous as other types were dealt with categorically by a World Health Organization expert, who testified that “all forms of asbestos, including chrysotile, are carcinogenic to humans, and cause mesothelioma and cancer of the lung, larynx and ovary. The evidence that chrysotile is carcinogenic is conclusive and overwhelming, and it has continued to strengthen over time.” Even an effort by a group of African countries to remove the asbestos-mining countries’ veto over the listing process was deferred until the next biennial conference of parties.

“Failure to list chrysotile asbestos on Annex III once again is an absolute disgrace,” said Andrew Dettmer, national president of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and an NGO delegate at the Geneva conference. His emotional response was surely apt in the circumstances. “While they dither, hundreds of thousands of people will die from asbestos-related diseases.” And yet, as correct as Dettmer is, the outcome in Geneva didn’t occur in isolation. It reflects the fact that the extraction, manufacture and consumption of asbestos continues to be commonplace throughout the Global South.

I met Siti Kristina not far from the asbestos textile factory in southern Jakarta where she worked for more than two decades. Production of asbestos-containing products occurs on a massive scale in Indonesia. Each year, the country imports over 100,000 tons of raw asbestos from mines in Russia, Brazil and China, without placing so much as a tariff in the way. Factories dotted throughout Java and Sumatra use the carcinogenic fibres in wall and ceiling boards, insulation, rope, gaskets, brakes and clutches. But mostly, Indonesia uses asbestos in cement roofing.

As her grandson climbed over her and we ate fried rice, Bu Siti described her job. Her employer, Jeil Fajar, had moved from Japan to South Korea in the eighties in pursuit of lower wages and lighter regulation; in the nineties it left Korea for China and Indonesia, where Bu Siti joined the company in 1991. In the factory, sacks of raw asbestos would be mixed with polyester to create asbestos thread, which was twisted and woven into cloth for industrial insulation. At each stage of the process, deadly asbestos fibres permeated the room, and found their way into each breath of air Siti and her co-workers inhaled.

After a decade working in the Jeil Fajar factory, Siti started to experience the dry, heavy coughing fits known so well by asbestos victims. Usually these episodes would last around a week. Medication prescribed by doctors sometimes helped her recover temporarily but a few days later the coughing would start again. Siti told me how she experienced a bout of dry coughing that endured for more than a month. She lost her appetite entirely and her weight dropped dramatically.

In 2008, a joint research team from Japan, South Korea and Indonesia came to the Jeil Fajar factory to conduct medical examinations on the workers. Siti – disconcerted by her deteriorating health – volunteered to take part. When the result of the CT scan eventually came back, she discovered she had been diagnosed with early onset asbestosis. Asbestosis results from fibres inserting themselves into the lining of the lungs, causing inflammation and scarring that retards our capacity to breathe. Sufferers of asbestosis are at increased risk of developing multiple forms of cancer. 

The local doctors – who happened to be associated with Jeil Fajar – disagreed. They told her she was just experiencing minor irregularities, gave her pills and sent her away. She was suffering from asbestosis according to doctors in Japan and Korea, but not according to her local medics. Dr Anna Suraya is the head of the Scientific Development Unit of the Occupational Doctors Association of Indonesia. “Mostly doctors here, if they see a lung problem, their focus is on tuberculosis,” she told me. “The first thing they look for is tuberculosis.” The resulting tendency, in Suraya’s view, is for doctors to wonder why cases of tuberculosis have an unusual appearance in scans and turn out to be drug-resistant, when in fact they’re dealing with asbestosis. 

Reorientation needed: Anna Suraya from the Occupational Doctors Association. Tom Greenwell

This is the nub of the problem. Officially, Indonesia has never had a case of asbestos-related disease. Accordingly, there has been no successful claim for workers’ compensation that acknowledges the link between asbestos-related disease and occupational exposure to asbestos.

Wira Ginting heads up an NGO, the Local Initiative for Occupational Health and Safety Network, or LION, that supports asbestos workers and victims in Indonesia. LION is part of a network of organisations campaigning for a ban on asbestos in Indonesia, and supported Siti Kristina’s travel to Geneva. For Ginting and his colleagues, Indonesia’s relationship to asbestos is a bit like the addict’s to his habit: the problem needs to be acknowledged before it can be solved. Ginting told me that the absence of any diagnosis of asbestos-related disease in Indonesia is “the gap” in dealing with the problem. “There is huge, massive consumption of asbestos,” he says. “But on the ground, there is no case of asbestos-related disease. For some people, it provides proof in support of the asbestos lobby’s position.” Asbestos is strong, flexible, heat-resistant and, above all, cheap. Why tighten regulation – let alone consider a ban – if nobody is getting sick? 

Ginting took me to meet Subono in Karawang, seventy kilometres east of Jakarta, where the factories making everything from semiconductors to sanitary items meet the rice paddies of subsistence agriculture. Subono worked with asbestos for fifteen years before he found out it could kill him. At a factory that made fibro roof sheets, he operated a machine that ground scrap material into powder, pumping out plumes of dust containing long, curly asbestos fibres. With little in the way of protective equipment and no ventilation, he was constantly exposed. Even on breaks, he would join other workers in a room near the factory floor, where they ate, drank coffee and napped as asbestos fibres floated through the air. He would take his uniform home to wash it, carrying the poisonous particles with him. 

That factory is owned by a company called Siam-Indo. The Siam half of the operation, back in Thailand, has already replaced asbestos with substitute materials. They might be more expensive, but only very marginally, and certainly less than the value of a human life. It’s hard to argue with Subono when he says, “It’s a double standard for the company. Why do they stop using asbestos in their home country but not here? It’s clear it’s possible.”Like Siti Kristina, Subono started experiencing acute coughing fits after years of working with asbestos. It was the same kind of cough, one that never really went away. When he lay down to sleep, he experienced tightness around his chest. And then his skin started to itch intensely. Subono told me that many of his friends experienced similar problems. But they lacked access to a medical explanation that connected their symptoms with asbestos.

Double standard: former asbestos worker Subono (right) with colleagues at the manufacturing union SERBUK. Tom Greenwell

Subono first learnt about asbestos-related disease when LION extended its work into Karawang in 2013. At a meeting organised for workers in his factory, it was explained that the hazard from asbestos occurs when the fibres are dispersed into the air and breathed in. They stick in the lining of the lung, and our bodies are unable to remove them. Sustained exposure to intense concentrations of asbestos dust places a person at acute risk. For Subono, who had been handling, drilling and grinding the material his whole working life, his symptoms suddenly made sense – and his blood began to boil. When he first confronted his manager, he was given the standard industry lines about how asbestos can be used safely. Then he was told that “chicken shit” isn’t pleasant either; that’s why chicken farmers don’t hold it up to their nose. In a follow-up to LION’s information seminar, Subono undertook a medical assessment. He was diagnosed with lung abnormalities.

Then his sister-in-law, who lived close to the factory like many residents of Karawang, died of lung disease. Reeling from the death and his own diagnosis, Subono felt distressed every time he walked through the factory gates. One day he pointed out all the asbestos dust lying around to his manager. The retort came back that there was nothing to worry about. Furious, Subono swept up fistfuls of the stuff from the floor and shook them in his boss’s face, demanding to know if he really believed it was harmless. As his boss backed away, Subono saw clearly that the manager knew the dangers Subono and his co-workers were being exposed to.

Not long after, Subono resigned.

Over coffee in the two-century-old Bogor botanical gardens, Wira Ginting stepped me through the strategy to establish, in official terms, that Indonesians are suffering from asbestosis, mesothelioma and lung cancer as a direct consequence of the country’s asbestos industry. As we talked, president Joko Widodo’s convoy left the adjacent presidential palace and passed by. It was election day in Jakarta and Ahok, Widodo’s successor as governor of Jakarta, would lose a contest mired in religious and ethnic tension.

Ginting described to me how LION had organised an independent medical examination of twenty workers in asbestos factories in 2015. “This time,” he said, “Indonesian doctors were the ones who did the diagnosis.” Anna Suraya, the occupational diseases specialist, supervised the project, ensuring that the doctors and hospitals involved would place the study’s results beyond question. Nine of the twenty workers tested were found to have asbestos-related disease.

The next step was to submit a workers’ compensation claim to the state social security agency, BPJS Employment. Ginting explains that “the BPJS decision will determine their position on asbestos-related disease. If they grant compensation, whatever the value actually, it will recognise asbestos-related disease and then it will become the responsibility of the workers’ compensation system to cover victims.” Its value as a test case is not just the precedent for other workers’ compensation claims. A successful claim would constitute an official recognition of the danger of asbestos, which would in turn form the basis for pushing for comprehensive and vigorously enforced regulation – and, ultimately, a ban. Prior to the state social security agency’s assessment of the compensation claim, it had to be endorsed by the Ministry of Manpower. That endorsement was granted in March.

In 2014, Subono left the factory where he had worked his whole life. At first, he tried his hand selling birds in Jakarta. But he was soon lured back to Karawang to work for SERBUK, the local union representing workers in the manufacturing sector, including his old comrades at the Siam-Indo factory. He told me about the improvements the union has won: warning signs, quarantined areas and a rest room outside the factory proper. The company provides proper masks, although only for workers in high-risk areas. It says it’s too expensive to provide masks for all employees.

Before I Ieft Karawang, Subono showed me a photo of himself and seven friends from the factory in 1999. They are on a holiday and the photo is taken in front of a waterfall. Subono would have been eighteen at the time. A guitar sits in his lap. He points to three men in the photo, standing behind him. Like him, they have been diagnosed with lung disease. Then he gestures to the man sitting beside him. He died last year. 

Siti Kristina ended up losing her job at Jeil Fajar. As an export-oriented company, its asbestos products increasingly fell out of favour and Siti and her friends were laid off. She opened a small store selling fried snacks but now faces the medical legacy of working with asbestos, combined with a lower income. Yet she continues to speak out about what she and others are going through. As she told the delegates in Geneva, “In Indonesia, many people still do not know about the dangers of asbestos. There are many of my friends that do not have the opportunity to participate in a medical examination. It is very possible that they have asbestos-related disease too.”

After I left Jakarta, Anna Suraya emailed me. News had come through that BJPS Employment had approved the workers’ compensation claim that followed from the 2015 study. It is a huge breakthrough, an official recognition of the reality of asbestos-related disease. It will be difficult to disown and will likely lead to a further reckoning with the true costs of asbestos in Indonesia. I sent a message to Wira Ginting, who has been working towards this moment for years. His matter-of-fact reply reflects his sober determination, a resolve at least equal to those who succeeded in blocking progress in Geneva: “Yup, one step at a time.” •

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While it’s not unusual for members of ethnic and religious minorities to win local elections in Indonesia, Ahok’s campaign is testing the limits of Indonesian tolerance. He is a member of the ethnic Chinese community, a group that has been subject to a long history of formal and informal discrimination. And he is also a Christian in a city that is 85 per cent Muslim, and it is in this respect that he is most vulnerable.

Islamist activists and grassroots preachers campaigned against Ahok by appealing to a Qur’anic verse that, they say, prohibits rule by non-believers over the faithful. In response, Ahok told an audience last September that voters were being “fooled” using the verse. His comments were recorded and quickly went viral online. His opponents accused him of insulting the Qur’an, and massive street protests followed. Islamist organisations like the Islamic Defenders Front showed that they have phenomenal mobilising power.

The protests and associated outcry placed enormous pressure on the national government, and Ahok was charged with blasphemy. His trial is continuing. Predictably, his approval rating plunged. Although he eked out a first-round victory in February, he has consistently lagged in the polls leading to this week’s second round. This is despite the fact that – having taken over as Jakarta’s governor when Joko Widodo, his then superior, was elected as Indonesia’s president in 2014 – he was previously favoured to win. He is widely admired in Jakarta for various government policies, especially improvements in healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure and welfare programs. He is also admired for his tongue-lashing of bureaucrats and legislators he accuses of corruption or incompetence.

Yet numerous surveys have shown that religious solidarity is trumping government performance in this election. A poll conducted last month found that 66 per cent of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with Ahok’s performance as governor. Yet only 41 per cent said they would vote for him, with 49 per cent favouring his opponent. For 21.6 per cent of respondents, religion was the main factor determining their choice of candidate, whereas only 16.3 per cent cited a record of achievement. The obvious conclusion is that a significant proportion of the city’s Muslim voters, despite being satisfied with the work of their governor, will not vote for him for religious reasons.

When Indonesian electoral candidates make ethnic or religious appeals, they mostly adopt a benign approach: they emphasise their membership of a particular ethnic or religious group without denigrating others. By contrast, the campaign against Ahok has been relentlessly negative.

At the grassroots, a legion of preachers and activists have striven to convince Muslim voters not only that Ahok insulted their religion, but also that it is forbidden to vote for a kafir – an unbeliever. Friday sermons at the city’s mosques have become important campaign arenas. Fevered rumours about floods of Chinese nationals illegally planning to vote for Ahok have swept through social media, fanned by Anies Baswedan’s backers. There has been a resurgence of racist denigration of ethnic Chinese of a sort not seen for years.

Though Anies – a Muslim intellectual who previously had cultivated a reputation as a pluralist – has not personally engaged in crude attacks on Ahok, he has instead run a dog-whistle campaign signalling his Muslim credentials and reaching out to extremist groups like the Islamic Defenders Front. An army of proxies is mobilising religious and ethnic opinion against Ahok on his behalf.

This tide of ethnic and religious mobilisation will likely push Ahok from power. The unanswered question is the extent to which the election represents a marker of broader social and political transformation. On the one hand, the election is an unusual test case for Indonesian pluralism, given Ahok’s double-minority status and the blasphemy case’s contribution to his vulnerability. On the other hand, observers have long noted growing pietism in Indonesia’s Muslim population as well as increasing assertiveness in those espousing intolerant religious ideas.

Jakarta sets the pace for national politics, and politicians may see this election as a toolkit that can be used in other contests, including the 2019 presidential race. If ethnic and religious sectarian politics push Ahok’s opponent over the line, it would bode poorly for the future of Indonesia’s pluralistic democracy. •

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Central to Duterte’s message was his depiction of the Philippines as a “narco state.” As his spokesman Martin Andanar told me last month, “A narco state is where your politicians, your mayors, your councilmen, your barangay captains [the lowest level of elected official], your policemen, your judges are part of the value chain of selling drugs.” In the words of another government staffer, Pompee La Vina, speaking on CNN, “If we don’t control it or stop it, we’ll be controlled by drug lords… All the other things [we do as a government] won’t matter.” Without Duterte, according to another official, “all of society’s undertakings will have been under the influence of illegal drugs.”

In government, the narco state has become Duterte’s catchcry, justifying around 7000 extra-judicial killings, the targeting of public figures and the threat of martial law. Yet a 2015 UN report shows that while amphetamine use in the Philippines is high, the most recent available figures show rates of use roughly matching those in Australia and New Zealand – and consumption of cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy in the Philippines was far lower than in those two countries.

Calls to make drugs a health issue rather than a problem explicitly linked to crime have been drowned out by pro-Duterte messages, most persistently and frequently in the country’s evolving online environment. Philippine citizens with internet access average eighty-nine hours online each week, the second-highest figure in the world. (Australians, French and German citizens spend around forty-six hours online each week, and among Japanese the figure is forty hours.) In 2014, the typical Filipino Facebook member spent two hours and twenty-five minutes on the social media platform every day, helping earn the country the nickname, the “Facebook nation.”

Social media now plays a crucial role in winning the hearts and minds of voters, and in the Philippines, as elsewhere, truth has been stretched to breaking point online. In the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, news site Rappler uncovered what it described as a “machine” of “paid trolls, fallacious reasoning and propaganda techniques” that had helped shift attitudes towards the candidates. Duterte’s “narco state” message had been reinforced again and again by official statements, by social media commentators and by the “machine” itself.

Central to this new media ecosystem were prominent pro-Duterte bloggers. Mocha Uson, a popular singer and model, campaigned strongly online for Duterte through her blog, which has attracted four million likes and records around 1.2 million “engagements” each week. Writer R.J. Nieto, with his blog Thinking Pinoy and with the high engagement of his 470,000 Facebook followers, claims to have been “kicking mainstream media’s arse for the past year” in terms of engagement with readers. “The tables have turned,” he wrote, “[and] social media has taken over the task of shaping public discourse.” Much like alternative news sites in the US, these and other high-profile online commentators consistently argue that the mainstream media is biased and unfair in its coverage of Duterte.

Duterte seems to agree. He has engaged in several “boycotts” of the mainstream media so far in his presidency. Uson was given a place on the government’s Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, and a number of other pro-Duterte bloggers, including Nieto, have been given approval to cover palace events and follow the president, including on overseas trips.

The support seems to be working. Despite the controversies and the killings, Duterte has largely remained popular among Filipinos. “You can now walk the streets of metro Manila and feel safe,” Martin Andanar says. “If you came here a year ago you wouldn’t be able to. You wouldn’t be able to use your cellphone inside the bus, because it would get snatched.” Anecdotes like this circulate online and offline, with many Filipinos believing that the criminal justice system was slow, bureaucratic and prone to corruption, and reporting that they now feel safer.

Where the Philippines is headed is unclear. Like Trump, Duterte is notoriously sensitive to criticism, and many fear that the post-truth creation of the “narco state” has led to a culture of impunity that will only worsen as his presidency continues.

“Post-truth” – the Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year – has been used increasingly frequently to describe the evolving political landscape since Britain voted to leave the European Union and Americans elected Donald Trump as president. The term describes a febrile environment, supercharged by online media, in which emotions overwhelm facts. The conditions are ripe. Millions of people are creating and sharing their own content online, and many readers and viewers have lost trust in mainstream media and migrated to online communities – effectively echo chambers – that support their views of the world and how it works.

Duterte’s election in the Philippines shows that “post-truth” media and politics aren’t confined to the West. Anyone interested in the health of democracy needs to take a closer look at Southeast Asia’s quickly evolving information society and its impact on political and social change.

“Post-truth” politics was on display again in the run-up to this week’s election for governor in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The incumbent, who was seeking another term in office, was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as “Ahok,” who had enjoyed high approval ratings for much of his first term as governor but ran into trouble during the campaign.

A Chinese-Indonesian Christian, Ahok came under fire for warning a small audience not to be “fooled” by those who say a verse in the Qur’an states that Muslims should not elect a non-Muslim leader. His opponents, who were trailing badly in the polls, pounced. After an excerpt of his speech was uploaded on YouTube, the campaign to use his religion and race to bring down Ahok’s popularity began. Ahok was charged with blasphemy after an initial demonstration in Jakarta in November, and a larger rally on 2 December, involving an estimated 500,000 protesters, kept the issue on the boil. Indonesia’s foremost political magazine, Tempo, described the situation as a “mobocracy.” Hundreds of thousands of Muslims (mostly men) turned out on the streets of Jakarta again just last week.

While traditional media-based campaigning still matters, what is increasingly resonating in the “post-truth” era is information spread via social media and messenger applications. Whatsapp, an internet messenger service owned by Facebook, is a common way for Indonesians to share information. Most people are in numerous Whatsapp groups – extended family, immediate family, high school friends, university friends, even work meetings – and it was via this service that a brief extract from Ahok’s speech was widely circulated.

As Ahok told Al Jazeera, “What was spread on Whatsapp groups was only thirteen seconds. Of course the information on those thirteen seconds was different than what I said in 6000 seconds.” And it seems that many protesters hadn’t necessarily seen even that small portion of the speech. As one survey revealed, of the 45 per cent of respondents who thought Ahok was guilty of blasphemy, only 13 per cent reported having watched the excerpt.

Thus, crucial to the anti-Ahok campaign were memes, conspiracy theories, jokes and fake news, all circulated via Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. A large amount of material has been anti-Chinese and anti-communist in character, much of it explicitly or implicitly linked to Ahok. Central to the campaign has been the so-called Muslim 212 Cyber Army, which defends Islam against pluralist views online, and other online campaigners such as Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok).

At the same time, trust in professional journalism has been in decline in Indonesia, with politically motivated media owners encouraging highly partisan reports. On the night of the closely fought 2014 presidential election, for example, TVOne treated the losing candidate (Prabowo Subianto, whom the network’s owner had supported) as if he had won, and produced fake polls to back its claims. Skewed coverage like this has led to a general belief that all mainstream media (and polling institutes) are partisan, when in fact credible ones do exist. At the recent anti-Ahok prayer demonstrations in Jakarta, attendees set upon mainstream journalists and camera crew covering the event.

While there are many justifiable reasons for not voting to re-elect Ahok, including his forced evictions of poorer communities, the most common cards being played by his opponents are broader issues of race and religion. As Ahok’s political opponents prayed in Jakarta’s main mosque last week, signs and speeches outside portrayed anti-Chinese, anti-communist, anti-pluralist and pro-Palestine messages, and much more. A plethora of causes was represented in the one rally, and was also reflected in the diverse array of outrage against Ahok spreading online.

As Indonesia’s foremost author, Goenawan Mohamad, wrote, “In Indonesia, and specifically in groups that call themselves Islam, there are people constantly plagued by anxiety, and therefore put up barricades everywhere. These segregations seem to be terrified of joining some dynamic of chaos that makes everything, including identity, mixed.” The suspicion, envy and paranoia that Goenawan writes about often finds a welcome home among social media communities encouraged to defend Islam against various forces.

In response, the Ahok campaign chose to focus on winning over the rational voter. The rivers are cleaner, flooding has been reduced, a mass-transit system is being built, parks are under construction, corruptors are being challenged. All these are policy-driven solutions to the city’s specific problems. The pro-Ahok campaign didn’t “argue” online with anti-Chinese sentiment, or drive an emotive campaign around the future of pluralism in Indonesia, even if commentators are defining the election on these terms.

Considering the campaign against him, Ahok’s first-round vote of 43 per cent was a commendable effort. Yet it shows that millions of Jakartans who think he has done a reasonable job as a governor didn’t vote for him, many on the grounds of race or religion. The election will now go to a run-off between Ahok and Anies Baswedan, who received 40 per cent of the vote.

The second round of Jakarta elections may also help us better define current “post-truth” trends. Which matters more: the straight-talking, action-oriented leader with saturated media coverage, even if it’s negative, or emotive campaigns pushing divisiveness and sectarianism?

For as long as there has been information, there has been misinformation. Politicians lie, “false news” spreads, rumours circulate, conspiracy theories perpetuate inner fears. Emotions drive our response to news, whether real or fake. Nor is scepticism about government information new to the “post-truth” era. What is new is the digital revolution and the way we access and share information. Much of the contemporary writing on this issue adopts the language of war – social media has been “weaponised” by “armies” of “attack dogs,” “online warriors” or “cybertroopers” – but perhaps that means we overlook the complexity of our evolving information societies.

In a 1994 article on the role of rumours during Indonesia’s New Order military dictatorship (1965–98), James Siegel wrote that “rumour is subversive in the New Order not when its content is directed against the government, but when the source is believed not to be the government.” The practice of passing on information, rumours and gossip is a central part of being a citizen, particularly when authoritarian regimes provide only part of the story. A non-government source, particularly if it’s someone you trust, is more believable.

In many ways this practice has continued in democratic Indonesia and the Philippines, simply moving online. The passing on of information via personalised social media and chat groups is now a central part of Southeast Asia’s shifting information society. While the common belief is that young people are central to these new trends, often it is younger people who complain that it is their parents, many of whom have few digital skills and only use Whatsapp and Facebook, who are passing on rumours and misinformation most energetically.

Is there a solution? The Indonesian government has set up an anti-hoax coordinating body inside the presidential palace, and is asking the police to trace people who create slanderous fake news. It even organised an “anti-hoax” day to try to raise public awareness of the issue. News sites have “hoax or not” tabs on their pages in the hope that citizens care enough to check. Indonesia’s press council is creating a tool to enable readers to verify that news has been professionally gathered. Internationally, Facebook has promised to change the way it filters news sources.

But there is a sense that the conditions defining this “post-truth” world will not change quickly or easily. Perhaps it should be no surprise that George Orwell’s 1984 recently became the bestselling book on Amazon. As our media habits change drastically, it seems age-old questions are urgent again. What makes us believe what we believe? What shapes how we see the world and our place in it? Any attempts to reverse the decline in trust in Southeast Asia’s democratic institutions will need to find a greater space for truth amid anxieties about drugs, crime, religion and identity. In a time of Trumpian, Twitter-driven hyperbole, it is no overstatement to say that the future of democracy is at stake. •

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The Pearl Button returns there, to the vast field of lifted telescopes, but not so much now to peer into the far recesses of time; it is rather to juxtapose the reach of human aspiration with the depth of human cruelty – and to that, a line of Guzmán’s commentary reminds us, there’s no end, no limit. From the desert, he surveys the length of Chile’s 5000-kilometre coastline: forests, mountains, waterfalls, cliffs and caverns of blue ice, matched to memories of the five indigenous tribes who lived and worked in these coasts. There are still twenty people living who can speak the language of the Kawesqar; of those, a few face the camera now and speak of dispossession, and remember their lives paddling the fjords. They believe that the water is a living entity; they believe it knows; they connect it with the cosmos and the stars. Woven in with their memories, we get the story of young Jemmy Button, the property in 1830 of settlers who taught him English, dressed him up and took him to London, then returned him to western Patagonia, permanently disoriented and homeless. Australians might shudder at this: it’s the Bennelong story, and there’s a jarring moment when Guzmán talks of Jemmy’s journey “from the stone age to the industrial age.” Then, moving as it were through water, the film brings us back to Pinochet’s Chile.

There has been criticism of Guzmán’s strategies, an argument that they don’t work as well here as in Nostalgia for the Light. The charge is that the film becomes incoherent as it shifts from the colonial domination of the Patagonian tribes, their loss of culture and language, to the Pinochet tyranny and then to the refined forms of murder practised on certain resisters: they were bound to slabs of iron from railtracks and dropped, some still living, into the sea. In the present of the film, those stories are recalled by young people, investigators intent on ensuring that the Pinochet chapter is not to be forgotten. A diver swings from a helicopter, goes down into the sea, and with great difficulty retrieves a large slab of iron, encrusted by weeds and shells. Human remains are gone, but in the enclosing conglomerate, a pearl button is found, one like that on the clothing given to Jemmy Button.

The criticism is that the film, with these disparate components, doesn’t hang together. What’s forgotten here is the foundational insight of Eisenstein, that the stunning potential of cinema is exactly that: the power to put together elements that are totally unlike, but which in juxtaposition yield up meanings not to be gained from any image taken on its own. (They called it montage; as you might say, one and one make three.) What’s also forgotten is the necessary work of the viewer. With The Pearl Button, we have a wild ride through a gallery: heaving waves, telescopes, mountains and stars; the faces of witnesses from radically different cultures. We are invited to make for ourselves the connections between the imperialism of two centuries ago, with all its certainties and unwitting cruelty, and this chapter in twentieth-century fascism.

Some won’t want to make them; we are told that Chilean society in the present is pervaded by the will to forget, or else by a kind of inertia in the shadow of recent history, and the work of resistance today is precisely “the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But there is too much to remember. After the Pinochet coup, some 30,000 dissidents were arrested, and many of them tortured; almost 3000 were disappeared – those whose remains the women were seeking in the Atacama desert; some thousands were sent into exile, but were then pursued across the globe by the nefarious Operation Condor, an intelligence network allegedly upheld by the CIA. Guzmán lets the connections hang, unspoken but crucially operative; his lyricism is exercised not merely to make extremely beautiful cinema – though, ironically, it does – but also to wake up areas of memory always threatened by sleep, recover the central trauma and name it. At the film’s heart, there is anger and a challenge: forget the Pinochets of your world, and you may well be inviting them back.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, also screened at this year’s festival, engages a kindred project. It follows The Act of Killing, shown in last year’s program, which opened a history long shrouded in too much discretion, the massacre of suspected communists, more than a million of them, in Indonesia in the mid 1960s. That earlier film surrounded investigation with elements of parade and performance, the one-time killers performing their own past roles with apparent glee; in the glare of nightmarish comedy, the threads of real history were almost lost. This film doesn’t have that kind of bravura, and some critics have seen it as a lesser work for being more conventional. But it goes deeper, more clearly and directly into the centre of that long-obscured chapter, part of the workings of the cold war in our region. But what did Australia know? Very little; for audiences here, this film is the more significant.

In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer was his own interrogator; in The Look of Silence, Adi is a gentle, open-eyed surrogate, seemingly young at forty-four; he is at once horrified and spellbound in the process of this enquiry that he himself, with the director, is driving. The film is about blindness; Adi is a travelling optometrist, checking eyesight for a few very old men while he asks them what they remember about the killing times of fifty years ago. Before he was born, his own much older brother Ramli was one of the victims; their father, now aged 103, can’t or won’t remember; their mother remembers only too well. She has had to go on living among the unabashed killers, seeing them daily in the village; it’s horrible, she tells Adi, she hates them. Not only avowed communists but also suspected fellow-travellers and ethnic Chinese were targeted by the death squads; the rivers were filled with bodies, to the point that villagers couldn’t use them for washing. In some memories, it was that circumstance that brought the spate of murder to an end.

Repeatedly, the surviving perpetrators tell him they can’t remember. Or if they do, it’s about the value of drinking their victims’ blood, supposedly to ward off madness; or to recall the way the flesh of a woman’s breast, hacked off her body, looked like a coconut milk filter. There is no sign of remorse. If someone was merely a prison guard, did that make him complicit in the killings? The interviews are staged, calmly, in benign afternoon light inside houses, sometimes outside in green and gold light among the banana trees; people are seen where they belong. The director’s gaze, like Adi’s own, is steady, and the impact is the greater for it. It becomes clear that for the Indonesian people through all the decades since, the official history has been that the actions of the death squads were necessary; they were killing the young nation’s enemies, and that was that.

But now, in a country with a lively press and active intellectual life, is there no significant dissent from that version? Caution is still in order; this film’s credit list is telling. The project attracted funding from within Indonesia, and from four other international sources; Errol Morris and Werner Herzog came on board as executive producers; and now The Look of Silence has just won the audience award for a feature-length work at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. But here, as in The Act of Killing, many of the production team are named as Anonymous.

Those were two particularly rewarding films among the 250-odd on the 62nd Sydney Film Festival program. Each happened to count in the International Documentary category, but the categorical boundaries didn’t matter much as we sifted our responses; and “documentary,” as I’ve argued earlier in this column, means less and less. Film performance crosses the boundaries between the work of actors and that of witnesses to history, and the cinema’s storytellers find the conventions they need to deal with what seems urgent. In many of this year’s gatherings, the pressure of necessity came through: here were stories needing to be told.

I’ll comment next week on some of the others, on the essential work of such festivals, and on where we might go from here. Meanwhile, it is excellent news that the Sydney festival’s major retrospective, ten of Ingmar Bergman’s works, will be screened at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra from next Thursday 25 June. Worth the trip, believe me. •

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The extent to which this seems like a positive development depends on what we ignore. Offshore detention clearly comes at a staggering human and financial cost, and the ongoing needs of the asylum seekers and refugees who remain in Indonesia are far from resolved. Indonesia now faces the challenge of responding to the long-term presence of asylum seekers and refugees, rather than merely responding to their transit through the archipelago. Given the degree of internal displacement and economic and social pressures within Indonesia, the plight of asylum seekers and refugees may not be a high priority. Government minister Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno’s recent threat to release “a human tsunami” of “illegal immigrants” into Australia nevertheless suggests a willingness to exploit the issue (and Australia’s sensitivity about it) for strategic gain. There are good reasons, in other words, to doubt that the “stop the boats” policy has been a success.

At the end of 2014, 4270 refugees and 6916 asylum seekers were registered with the Jakarta office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an organisation whose resources have been stretched, worldwide, by the largest number of people in refugee-like situations since relevant data started being collected. UNHCR’s Jakarta office is chronically underfunded and Australia’s policy changes have added to the pressure by reducing the exit options for refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia either by boat or via resettlement. According to the UNHCR, the waiting period between initial registration as an asylum seeker and a first-round interview ranges from eight to eighteen months. Further interviews are usually required to determine refugee status. For people found to be refugees, the wait then continues until a country willing to offer resettlement is found. The longest wait-time we are aware of is eleven years in total.

During that period, asylum seekers and refugees are expected to find and pay for their own accommodation using their own savings or remittances from family and friends. They are not permitted to work in Indonesia. The latest figures show that 1123 children registered with the UNHCR were either unaccompanied or separated from their parents during the journey, an increase of 40 per cent from the previous year. The UNHCR can offer shelter to just eighty of them. More broadly, the organisation’s budget can provide direct financial support to only 340 people (equivalent to 3 per cent of the total number of registered asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia). Recipients are chosen according to criteria of vulnerability, with preference given to unaccompanied minors and women at risk. The UNHCR is well aware of the inadequacy of its budget: with dozens of asylum seekers and refugees sleeping in the alleyway in front of the entrance to their workplace, staff of the Jakarta office are reminded every day. Boys as young as fourteen can be found sleeping in the street and in mosques at night.

Daily reminder: asylum seekers waiting in an alleyway next to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Jakarta, where some of them spend the night sleeping on cardboard.

Although some refugees and asylum seekers are able to pay to enter the private rental market, landlords are either reluctant to rent to outsiders or do so at inflated prices. In Puncak, an hour’s drive from Jakarta, we met asylum seekers who were fearful of leaving their houses at night. In the past, they had been beaten and robbed by locals on the street, or extorted by others posing as authorities. Similar stories have been reported in the Indonesian press. In August 2014, for instance, an elderly Afghan man accompanied by his wife and children had his nose broken by a group of youngsters in the nearby town of Cisarua. The asylum seekers with whom we spoke felt powerless to report incidents to police, whom they suspected of extorting asylum seekers in general. “We cannot punch back; we cannot do anything,” they told us. “We have to let them do whatever they want to us.”

The only other avenue of assistance for asylum seekers and refugees is through the International Organization for Migration. Since 2001, the IOM has provided various forms of “care” to refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia under the terms of a tripartite agreement with the Australian and Indonesian governments, funded largely by Australia. The organisation funds community housing projects for recognised refugees and vulnerable asylum seekers in several locations, and provides a stipend of RP1,200,000 per month to those under its care (just under half of the average income in Jakarta). As of 31 January 2015, the IOM was assisting 7678 people. Of these, 2874 were based in community housing projects and 2237 in temporary interception sites; the remaining 2567 were immigration detainees whose food and essentials were billed to the IOM by Indonesia and for whom the IOM provided occasional language classes, sports activities and other forms of distraction. The cost of food alone for the current cohort of detainees amounts to approximately A$11,500 per day.

Eligibility for IOM assistance is not automatic. The necessary referral from Indonesian immigration authorities normally occurs only once a person has been detained or has been released from detention. Officially, registered asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia are only detained if they are found in areas designated as off-limits (ports, beaches or transport hubs, for instance) or if they fail to comply with specific reporting conditions. In reality, they have been subject to the threat of arbitrary detention by corrupt officials who see an opportunity to extort money from them.

Previously, asylum seekers and refugees paid bribes to avoid detention. Since late 2013, though, destitute asylum seekers and refugees have begun to arrive at detention centres, or approach immigration officers, seeking to be detained. With private resources exhausted, this is the only way to obtain basic food and shelter and a referral to the IOM. Immigration officials in Balikpapan, Kalimantan, for instance, have reported that they receive a handful of people every week who ask to be admitted to the immigration detention centre.

Most of the detention centres are terribly overcrowded. Indonesia has a total capacity of 1300, but in March 2015, according to immigration authorities, the number of detainees reached 2552. Conditions in some centres are worse than others, dependent largely on the resources available and the discretion of the officer in charge of each centre. Their reputations have spread quickly and asylum seekers opting for detention appear to make well-informed decisions about which centre to choose. In some cases, detainees sleep in the corridors, while those who can afford to pay a little extra might gain a spot in an overcrowded room. Both IOM staff and the Indonesian Human Rights Commission have at times been denied entry to certain detention centres. In others, detainees are free to receive visitors, use mobile phones and even make trips to the ATM or the supermarket.

In some cases, local immigration authorities have sent away asylum seekers attempting to self-report for detention. As a consequence, a perverse market in brokerage and bribes has evolved. According to those we interviewed, it can now cost as much as US$500 to be “accepted” into detention. Other fees change hands for information about better and worse detention centres, to facilitate domestic travel to more favourable centres, or, once an asylum seeker is in detention, to transfer to a less crowded facility. Immigration authorities bill the IOM for the costs of transfers.

For asylum seekers in detention, a referral into the “care” of the IOM is at the discretion of immigration authorities. Single male asylum seekers are unlikely to be released into the hands of the IOM before they have been recognised as refugees. Female asylum seekers, and those with families, may be released earlier. In January 2015, eight births took place in detention. For those released into the IOM’s community housing projects, conditions are usually much better, but not without difficulties. In 2012, for example, community housing in Puncak prompted complaints from local residents, fuelled by concerns about cultural differences, alcohol consumption and allegedly predatory sexual behaviour. When locals heard nothing from the central government in response to their complaints, vigilantes threatened to raid the housing area themselves. The threats prompted many asylum seekers to leave of their own accord; others were relocated by the IOM to temporary accommodation on the outskirts of Jakarta. Given these tensions, Indonesian authorities are increasingly concerned to organise housing for asylum seekers that allows for minimal contact with Indonesian locals.

The acute shortage of accommodation has caught the attention of industrious insiders. Anecdotal reports suggest that among those building private accommodation and renting it to the IOM are former immigration officers and local heads of police. When we visited one such custom-built two-storey shelter two hours from Medan, Sumatra, it appeared from the outside to be in good condition. On the inside, it was unbearably hot, with only sporadic ventilation and no air-conditioning. A malfunctioning generator caused frequent blackouts and an open sewerage system offered a fertile breeding ground for mosquitoes. Nevertheless, a room for two people earned the property owner RP100,000 a night, a little less than the cost of a cheap backpacker hotel. With seventy residents, the owner could earn over A$10,000 a month in rent. Partly in response to the difficulties of the private rental market, and partly as a means of maintaining greater control, immigration authorities have started to use empty state-owned dormitories and shelters as temporary accommodation.

Industrious insiders: custom-built shelters rented by the International Organization for Migration near the city of Medan, Sumatra.

None of the available options for accommodation – detention centres, private rentals or state owned dormitories – is likely to be sufficient for demand. Three national ministers recently resurrected a mothballed plan to house asylum seekers and refugees on an uninhabited island in the eastern part of the archipelago while they wait to be processed by the UNHCR. The plan reflects a degree of nostalgia for the former detention island of Galang, near Singapore, which served as a transit point for Indochinese refugees awaiting resettlement from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. The idea of a “new Galang” was first circulated some years ago, but was set aside twice for funding reasons and a lack of support from Canberra. According to Indonesian sources, the regional immigration authorities in the province of East Nusa Tenggara have already acquired 5000 square metres of land on the island of Sumba for potential development. Sumba is one of the poorest and most isolated areas in Indonesia. It is also less than 700 kilometres from the Australian coast. The Australian government feared that a shelter on the island would attract people smugglers and preferred an island on the western side of the archipelago. In either case, the relocation of asylum seekers to a remote island for an indefinite period is unlikely to yield an effective system of protection.

Indonesian authorities are attempting to grapple with what has become a permanent or semi-permanent condition of transit for asylum seekers and refugees. Those who can’t return to their home countries for fear of persecution are also unable to secure any kind of dignified life as they wait indefinitely for potential resettlement. Stuck in cycles of bureaucracy, corruption and destitution, their plight reveals one of the unseen impacts of the focus on “stopping the boats.” The larger challenge of establishing a sustainable regional mechanism for refugee protection remains. •

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The media executive’s response – that these pleas from foreign governments are an unwelcome intervention in Indonesian affairs – matches the line pushed by many Indonesian officials and citizens in recent months. Their sensitivity about national sovereignty originates in the hundreds of years of colonial rule Indonesia experienced, first under the Dutch and then briefly under the Japanese, and in memories of the fight for independence against Dutch and British forces after the second world war. In 1958, as major powers pressured the new country to form cold war allegiances, the Sydney Morning Herald’s James Mossman reported the words of one Indonesian official: “We have suffered too much. All we want is to be left alone, but foreign powers use us as pawns in their game.”

Since January I’ve been spending time in Indonesia’s main newsrooms as part of a larger research project, and my visit happened to coincide with another bad moment for Australia–Indonesia relations. Indonesia’s media is largely very free, and since the country’s transition to democracy began in 1998 journalists have been able to comment on and criticise government policies. Yet there were very few newsroom staff critical of the Indonesian government’s new hardline approach to executing drug traffickers. There was also only mild interest in uncovering stories of the individuals due to be executed, including the Indonesian nationals among them. While Australia’s media saw the looming deaths as a major news story, Indonesian media organisations have generally ranked the story well down on their list of priorities, or treated it as a contest between “national sovereignty” and the calls for the executions to be abandoned.

The issue certainly gained traction once foreign countries publicly opposed the punishment. But the big story was the hyper-nationalist posturing on both sides, and especially any incidents that supported the view that this was yet another Australia–Indonesia flashpoint. Tony Abbott’s unnecessary and unhelpful reminder of Australian aid during the 2004 tsunami played a key role in shifting the conversation away from the death penalty and led to a highly defensive response in Indonesia. His comments were considered emotive and unnecessary – a point made to me by everyone from university professors to ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers who had never finished high school.

Further fuelled by the social media–driven “Coins for Australia” campaign, Indonesia’s media jumped on Abbott’s comments. There was even a collection box at the entrance to the press room in Indonesia’s parliament. Local media reported that a protest outside the Indonesian consulate in Sydney had “terrorised” its occupants, and asked experts whether Indonesians in Australia were safe. Many Indonesians began defining the campaign against the death penalty as “the Australian position,” rather than more accurately attributing it to the United Nations and many other countries around the world.

While some reports provided information about the individuals on death row, there was little investigation of the effectiveness of the death penalty. The dubious but much-quoted figure of fifty Indonesian drug-related deaths each day (later reduced to thirty-three) was largely unscrutinised. When I asked one television reporter why there was not more discussion about the death penalty policy in the news, she responded, “We are just waiting to see whether Jokowi can really commit to what he said [executing the people on death row].” As Jokowi – as president Joko Widodo is popularly called – knows all too well, a leader who changes his mind about a previously declared policy is considered “weak” (and it is usually his, highlighting the stereotypically masculine content of what is considered “strong leadership”). In the eyes of many, a “strong” leader follows through with his decisions even if they are misguided. Should Jokowi halt the executions, much of the Indonesian media will report: “President backs down due to pressure from other countries.”

But not all Indonesian media outlets would take this line. Executives from Indonesia’s most widely circulated newspaper, Kompas, have been lobbying the government to hold off on the second round of executions. “It’s not related to sovereignty, it’s about humanity,” Kompas chief editor Rikard Bagun told me. The widely respected writer Goenawan Mohamad told Jokowi during a private meeting that he is against the death penalty. In 1946, when Goenawan was only six years old, his father was taken from his home by the Dutch and shot as a suspected member of the guerilla movement. “It leaves a trauma that only those who have had that experience know,” says Goenawan. “You are edgy, particularly about guns, blood and violence.”

Rikard Bagun and many others have little faith in the Indonesian legal system. “If we execute we cannot correct errors,” he says. “We are trying to oppose this [the death penalty]. We give a space for criticism, but we don’t want to exploit the victims.” Goenawan says it is understandable that many news organisations don’t cover the issue at any great length, and that many Indonesians don’t oppose the death penalty. “We see so many deaths in our lives,” he says. “Disease. Famine. Natural disasters. Terrorism. Even death by traffic accidents is very common here. Death is nothing unusual here, nor is violence. When the police shoot a terrorist suspect without a trial there is usually applauding, even in the media. In contrast, Australia is less exposed to death.”

A select few Indonesian scholars, journalists and activists advance other reasons for Indonesia to rethink the policy of the death penalty. Shouldn’t those who have reformed while on death row be granted clemency? Is there really a drug “emergency”? Even if there is, does executing mules solve the problem? All deserve more weight in the mainstream media in Indonesia. But media coverage, particularly content encouraging interaction via social media, is often based on what will raise emotions. And national pride is at heart, irrational: as George Bernard Shaw once said, it is fundamentally “a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”

In the Australian media, the story largely revolved around the circumstances of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran – their lives in the prison system, their stories of reform and what they and their families were going through. Few Australians would have been left unsure about the transformation these two individuals had undergone. (One documentary was entitled “The Painter and the Pastor.”) In Indonesia, meanwhile, Chan and Sukumaran were often described as “kingpins,” “masterminds” and “ringleaders.”

In the contemporary news media, events are subject to instantaneous, rolling coverage, and Australians have certainly been avid viewers and readers of the unfolding courtroom dramas of Schapelle Corby, Michelle Leslie and the Bali Nine. If news is supposed to be the “what, why, where, when and how,” the salient feature of the rolling coverage of Chan and Sukumaran has been the “when.” When are they on the list for executions? When would they be transferred from Bali? When would they be given seventy-two hours’ notice? When are they likely to be shot? Others on death row in Indonesia, particularly the African nationals, have not had their story told. Was this another form of nationalist posturing through the media, with only Australian lives seen to matter?

In the eyes of many Indonesians, yes. “You have your hypocrisy,” Goenawan says. “When the Bali bombers were on death row many Australian people wanted them to be executed.” But the views of other non-Australian journalists varied. While many commented that the Australian media was reporting only on Chan and Sukumaran, they also pointed out that the Australian journalists’ job is “to report what’s valuable to your local audience, and you can’t fault them for that.” While the Australian coverage of the death penalty may have assisted in turning the story into a bilateral relations rift, it also seems to have encouraged more coverage of the issue in the newsrooms of Indonesia.

While nothing compares precisely to the extremity and finality of state-sanctioned murder, Australian governments have not been above introducing extreme laws to counter what is presented in the media or by politicians as “extreme” problems: terrorism, metadata and bikie laws, for example, or offshore detention camps. Indonesians are not as hyper-sensitive about drugs as Australians are about irregular migration, but many support the death penalty, partly because information about its effectiveness tends to be one-sided. In fact, a fair number of Indonesians see the death penalty, as punishment and deterrent, as a possible solution to rampant corruption.

Australia’s “stop the boats” policy and Indonesia’s executions are similar because they are unilateral, tough-yet-effective answers to a problem (asylum seeker deaths at sea, or deaths caused by drugs), even if they ignore larger, longer-term regional and humanitarian issues and are criticised by the United Nations and neighbouring countries. In “stopping the boats” or executing drug mules, politicians tap into nationalist rhetoric and fears about a loss of “sovereignty.” The Australian government made this abundantly clear by naming the policy Operation Sovereign Borders. Abbott’s recent declaration that Australians “are sick of being lectured to by the UN” echoed exactly how many Indonesian politicians feel about foreign “interventions” regarding the death penalty. It would not have been surprising to hear Indonesian officials, adapting former prime minister John Howard’s infamous line, declaring, “We will decide who is executed in this country, and the circumstances in which this is done.”

That Indonesia has prioritised the execution of foreigners (fourteen among the sixteen prisoners already executed or due to be executed) while lobbying for its own citizens on death row in other countries shows just how nationalistic this policy has become. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Jokowi said he didn’t see the two parts of the policy as contradictory: “As a head of state, of course I’m going to try to save my citizens from execution.” What kind of system have we invented, where national leaders (not only Indonesia) feel it perfectly natural to execute citizens in their country while trying to save their own nationals from a similar fate overseas?

The hardline approach to executions is a victory for nationalist chest-beating over human compassion. The proposed executions will understandably leave many disappointed with the Indonesian government, and unlikely to seek out information about the country’s culture and politics. In Australia in particular, surveys show a poor understanding of Indonesia and its democracy. Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was right when he told the Australian parliament in 2010, “There are Australians who still see Indonesia as an authoritarian country or a military dictatorship or as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, or even as an expansionist power.” The disagreement over the death penalty will reinforce the stereotypes.

Indonesia’s military-style transfer of Chan and Sukumaran to Nusakambangan made a bad situation worse. When the Indonesian police chief was revealed to have taken a photo of Chan with a planeload full of commandos, it didn’t take long for racism and bigotry in Australia to spread online and via social media. In the short term at least, while Australians are unlikely to “boycott” cheap holidays to Bali, it will certainly be harder to convince parents in Australia that their children should learn Indonesian or convince principals that their school should undertake a study tour of Indonesia. The stereotypes will persist.

Jokowi’s victory last year was reported by many as a dramatic vanquishing of former general Prabowo Subianto, who had used his campaign speeches to whip up the crowd with ultra-nationalist lines such as “Indonesia cannot be bought!” and “Beware all you foreign stooges!” Jokowi’s campaign was supported by Indonesian human rights activists, idealistic young volunteers and hip musical groups. In these early days of his presidency, he’s already losing supporters domestically, largely because of his inability to pull the police force into line in its battle with the anti-corruption commission. In just a few short months, many of the same human rights activists, musicians and volunteers have jumped ship.

In his political career to date, Jokowi seemed to represent what foreigners who have spent time in Indonesia recognise as its most endearing traits – openness, warmth, humour, humility and placidity. These traits could have opened a window for outsiders into these aspects of Indonesian culture and society. But as Jakarta Post editor Endy Bayuni writes:

Gone is the humble, all-ears and soft-spoken Javanese man who captured the imagination of voters at last year’s elections. In his place, we have a president who is projecting a tough and uncompromising image, and one that has little or no compassion so that he readily signs the death warrants of dozens of people on death row, without looking at their individual cases.

Should the executions go ahead, the death penalty will create negative headlines about Indonesia, overshadowing the vibrancy and warmth that the country offers Australians and others around the world. Disappointingly, judging by comments reported in the media, many Indonesian government officials seem to prefer insularity. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s foreign policy of “1000 friends, 0 enemies” seems a distant memory. Once again, it will be left to Indonesia’s civil society to represent optimism and change in this magnificent, diverse and resilient archipelago. Otherwise, Mossman’s official will just get his wish, and Indonesia will be increasingly “left alone.” •

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But Indonesia is also a slippery beast. Just as you think things are going along swimmingly for your small “l” liberal sell (Democracy is consolidated! Minority rights are protected! Indonesian Islam is syncretic and tolerant!), the country slaps you in the face with a communal riot or a political regression. The stereotypes rub up uncomfortably against the soundbites. Between jihadi terrorism and Bali hedonism, Indonesia is a mash-up of contradictory signifiers that defy easy categorisation.

Elizabeth Pisani and Hamish McDonald attempt to rectify the country’s global invisibility with books released on the eve of Indonesia’s four-month electoral marathon earlier this year. For Pisani, Indonesia is a “bad boyfriend.” He doesn’t call, he dates other girls, he says one thing but means another; and yet, inexplicably you find yourself back in his arms, hang the stubble rash on your chin. Indonesia can be the kind of crappy date that makes you look like a liar or, worse, an idiot in front of your friends. It’s hard to extol his virtues when he’s sulking in the corner or marauding through the town attacking minorities or caning women for the length of their skirts. That’s Indonesia: prone to flip the bird to any synthetic attempts to pin him down. You know you love it.

To navigate Indonesia’s thorny politics of representation, Pisani and McDonald resolve to take another course, committing to a more sophisticated project of showcasing Indonesia’s extraordinary diversity and complexity. If Indonesia resists attempts to make him cuddly to Western audiences then what about fuelling interest in the mad improbability of his existence as a single entity?

Pisani is no stranger to the country, having served thereas a Reuters journalist back in the 1980s. After retraining as an epidemiologist, she returned as a consultant on health and HIV issues in post-Suharto Indonesia. The need to keep returning to his chaos and possibility itches at her, the way it does all of us sitting on orderly shores. At the heart of Indonesia Etc. is the question: what is Indonesia and what holds it together?

Demokrasi also kicks off with a narrative of exile and return. McDonald, an old Asia-Pacific hand, spent the late 1970s in Jakarta as a foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Here, he found a second mother (in the form of his housekeeper) and a second home in Kediri (her home and his field-site), which produced his first book, Suharto’s Indonesia. McDonald is not boasting when he says it became something of a primer in Indonesian politics. The book was well-regarded by pretty much everyone except the New Order government, which promptly banned him for nine years, during precisely the period when Pisani was cutting her Jakarta teeth. Like Pisani, McDonald feels a pull to return. Amid the hyper-exclamations of the Asian Century, he wonders whether this emerging economic and political powerhouse will fulfil his potential as a “great but gentle” nation.

Newly returned, the two authors embark on quests of understanding. Both open their books on familiar ruminative ground, mulling over the curiosity of these crooked islands strung together in a vast national project called Indonesia. Sukarno declared them unified in the Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945, after mutual animosity for the Dutch flowered into a sudden nationalism. The islands that become the republic had only a recent, patchwork history of scattered Dutch rule to bind them. Trade and travel routes had never integrated the archipelago’s eastern and western flanks, which remained separate poles of economic orbit. At the centres of colonial rule in Java and Sumatra, the indigenous intelligentsia had just lobbed their last insults of ethnic, linguistic and religious superiority. And yet, despite all of this, across islands that had never truly known each other, an underfinanced, ragtag guerilla army of communists, Islamists, nationalists, street urchins and professional hard men was cobbled together, fighting locally but imagining nationally.

Pisani brilliantly observes the power and the fragility of the Indonesian dream of unity, fraternity and solidarity in Sukarno’s declaration of independence: “Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon possible.” It’s that diligent, impossible “Etc.” that is referenced in Pisani’s title, and it’s the search for the stuff of that “etc.” that pushes her out on a sea voyage that starts in the east, traverses Sumba, Flores, southwest Maluku and the tiny islands south of Papua that sprinkle the Arafura sea, steers resolutely past Java, then takes a northern arc back through Indonesia’s western islands. Pisani has included maps throughout the text to guide her readers, and the glossy trifold map of the archipelago that spills out on the third page smacks of old-world exploration and the promise of exotic discovery.

Travel writing as a genre has acquired something of dirty name. Mix orientalism and its handmaiden colonialism with a few generations of shoddy writing (D.H. Lawrence’s insufferable moaning about Italy, for instance, or endless navel-gazing en route – yes, I’m looking at you Paul Theroux). Add cheap flights, eternal connectivity and reddit travel, and you get a genre in decline. Even William Dalrymple, whose In Xanadu marked him as fresh travel talent in the late 1980s, today refers to himself as a historian. But Pisani breathes new life into the brand by eschewing any indulgent parallels between the journey and her own interior states (aside from the odd comment about the condition of her underwear) and keeping our eyes firmly fixed on Indonesia’s political and social landscape.

Pisani’s vividly peopled route is rich with humour and sharp observation, like the smell of Christmas that wafts off Ambon’s shore or the Acehnese election campaign with its rent-a-poet, loafing his way through recitals, too lazy even to change the names of the running candidates. Her writing is often so vivid and visceral that it was hard for me to separate my own mental pictures from her descriptions, as if my own memories of Indonesia had suddenly resurfaced. I saw the scaly peel of Sumatran salak curled on the shaky bus floor and the beads of sweat gathered on the powdered upper lips of the pompous civil servant wives settled in their green plastic seats.

This is precisely what good travel writing does. It makes the mind’s eye part of the labour of writing and interlaces the writer and reader in a landscape at once exotic and deeply familiar. To Geertzian “thick description”, Pisani adds an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country (serving up everything from the price of garlic to the TV ads that ran during the 1980s) and even the odd journal citation in the footnotes to shape the contours of a travel writing for the contemporary, connected age.

Hamish McDonald’s exploration of the “etc.” starts in a likely place: Taman Mini Indonesia – the Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature theme park – east of the capital. As the name suggests, Taman Mini allows its visitors to tour the country in a neat line of island-themed pavilions, from its northwestern-most tip in Aceh’s Sabang island to the southeastern-most city of Papua Merauke. To be honest, I don’t actually know many Indonesians who visit Taman Mini, but certainly it has something of a side trade in academics (myself included) going there to ruminate publicly on the brittle nature of the Indonesia project.

McDonald gives serious and detailed attention to the problems of the “etc.,” so serious in fact that despite his promise of examining Indonesia of the twenty-first century, McDonald starts his exploration of “Indonesia” in AD 683 with the Sriwijaya empire. From there, for around one hundred pages, we hump through the major events in the archipelago’s history – from Portuguese colonisation and Raffles’ Java to the 2004 tsunami in Aceh. The section comes in a hot rush of names, dates and places but, unlike Pisani, who’s something of a scholarly bowerbird, picking out everything from Francis Drake to current anthropological findings, McDonald presents a historical survey that is mainly a synthesis of the major scholarly works in the study of Indonesia. All the academic greats are here, and McDonald manages them expertly.

For an informed audience, McDonald’s overview of the literature will add depth and weight to residual knowledge and serve, as the back cover promises, as an “essential overview.” But for many, me included, the events, facts and names come so hard and fast that they begin to blur. McDonald is skilled and comprehensive, but to what end? Without an overarching narrative or a central question to guide the historical inquiry, Demokrasi’s opening courses are heavy on the digestion, like the dozen curried platters of a West Sumatran padang breakfast.

As Demokrasi moves into the present day, the pace changes. McDonald structures his observations thematically, and this generally proves less unwieldy than Pisani’s geographically bound musings, which often jump awkwardly through space and time. Dealing in this way with the military, money, oil, Islam, corruption, Papua and the environment gives McDonald sufficient space to explore deeply and broadly.

In the chapter on “Capital,” for instance, McDonald interweaves a historical overview of ethnic Chinese domination of the private sector, cronyism under Suharto and the financial crisis with an account of the rise of the new indigenous moneyed elite in the post-authoritarian age. He observes the new money washing through the regions after Indonesia’s big bang decentralisation in 2000 and gives us the curious spectacle of rickety bridges in Banjarmasin groaning under the weight of the gleaming Hummers that traverse them.

In “The Burning Question,” he looks at Indonesia’s rapidly degrading physical environment. Agricultural megaprojects, fire and palm oil plantations have depleted the country’s rainforests, our global “lungs” and home to over a fifth of the world’s biodiversity. Dealing with cross-sectoral environmental problems is hampered by Indonesia’s stagnant and territorial bureaucracy and the country’s rampant corruption. McDonald expresses hope for re-wilding as Indonesia’s working age population abandons the countryside and flocks to the cities, but even there ground water is contaminated, children have lead in their bloodstreams and poor air quality kills thousands a year.

Pisani and McDonald both traffic in a kind of detail that will thrill audiences who already know the country. And yet there is something about the ambition of these two books that troubles me. This less a criticism of the authors than a sign that they have fallen into an established way of writing about the country – the addiction to scrupulous documentation that implies the country can’t possibly be condensed further. It’s a practice that comes with many annoying quirks: the insistence on confusing the audience by using Indonesian words, often without translation. The compulsion to use the bureaucratic terms and explanatory structures peddled by Indonesia’s mystifying bureaucracy. And don’t even start me on the acronyms. All of this is part of an incessant squirrelling of knowledge that grows and grows in size but doesn’t sharpen the analysis.

Cast a comparative view, and you’ll find that this is not the case in the contemporary literature on equally complex Asian tigers like China or India. Which raises the question: why, even in the moment of Indonesia’s revelation, do the people who know him best simultaneously render him uniquely untranslatable? If the country is invisible on the global stage, then we have to share in that blame. Perhaps it’s ultimately a case of bad boyfriends being too thrilling to be shared.

Nonetheless, despite the commonalities in ambition, Demokrasi and Indonesia Etc. are vastly different enterprises, and those differences can’t just be chalked up to the contrasts in Pisani’s conversational sprawl and McDonald’s spare and considered style. They chart different geographies at different tempos, with different ideas about the nature and meaning of evidence. McDonald, ever the newsman, has written something of a summary of the headlines for the past decade, making his book a useful guide to contemporary Indonesia. For all of its fascination with names and dates and big-man politics, Demokrasi is sparsely peopled. McDonald has reduced the chatter of 250 million people to one or two select voices, the best and the brightest in contemporary Indonesia thought. He’s also a shy author. It’s not until he laments his heavily curtailed travel pass to Papua, with just a sliver of the book to go, that it becomes evident that his observations are born of his personal travels through the country. McDonald’s reticence lends an emotional distance to the book that, for me, detracted from some of its authority, but will likely, for others, amplify it.

With such different approaches, it would be no surprise if the authors ultimately came up with two different Indonesias. But the country’s chaos and contradictions ultimately overpower the authors’ different methodologies to stand stark on the pages. McDonald and Pisani reveal an overwhelmingly diverse Indonesia filled with dreamers, scammers and survivors, held tenuously together by the ragged, accommodating forces of a bloated civil service, proyek (dodgy projects), central government infusions and the sheer romantic strength of a ‘unified’ ideal.

Pisani is sometimes eye-wincingly forthright in her sociological observations about a nation that loves rubbish, that retches queasily into its own seas, a country held together by a kind of unseemly patronage that Westerners would call corruption. But she also gives us an Indonesia of possibilities: the wide-eyed eastern teenager who dreamed of “Java” and who forged a life there, the lawyer cum environmental activist working to save the lives and livelihoods of the Rimba people, even the fishermen who fish for days on a little saucer and haul tuna to sell across the seas. Will Indonesia be great? It kind of is already. •

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Since 2009, these campaigns have been given a slightly different twist in Indonesia. Rather than targeting asylum seekers directly, they are pitched at potential crew members on asylum-seeker vessels. Fishermen from poor coastal areas are frequently recruited by middlemen for boats carrying asylum seekers to Australian territory. As small-fry in the smuggling trade, they are offered a relatively large amount of money for a few days’ work – enough to clear outstanding debts or to supplement their regular incomes, which are rarely sufficient to live on. If they’re caught, however, they risk being prosecuted as people smugglers under Australian and Indonesian law. In both countries the minimum sentence for people smuggling is five years’ jail.

People smuggling, defined very broadly, became a criminal offence in Indonesia in May 2011. The definition includes such things as providing accommodation or transport within Indonesia to people without a visa. To bolster enforcement, the Indonesian Anti–People Smuggling Taskforce, with fourteen local chapters across the archipelago, receives generous funding from Australia. From 2012 to 2013, Indonesian police made 219 arrests on suspicion of people smuggling (199 Indonesians and twenty foreigners). Arrests continued at a lower level in 2014, the year Indonesia suspended bilateral cooperation on anti–people smuggling measures following the spying scandal in November 2013. Although the number of boats departing for Australia has dropped since the introduction of the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, the arrests continue. Among them are crew members of at least twelve vessels that have been returned to Indonesia.

In Oelaba, a village of around 7000 people on the island of Rote, more than fifty locals have spent time in Australian jails for people-smuggling offences. Four local youngsters have disappeared without a trace and may well have died at sea alongside their passengers. Oelaba was one of the villages targeted via public information campaigns in a pilot phase in 2009–10. In this village, as elsewhere, workshops were held with local police, and religious and community leaders to gain their “buy-in” to the campaign message: “I know people smuggling is wrong.” Printed on stickers, banners, mugs and t-shirts, the message was delivered at larger community events, combined with family activities, competitions, quizzes, prizes and films.

According to the agency funded by Australia to design and implement the campaigns, the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, the material has been resoundingly successful. The IOM claims to have reached tens of thousands of people in fishing communities across the Indonesian archipelago and to have achieved “a radical shift in public opinion regarding the social and economic impact of people smuggling.” In the target communities, people are said to have moved from “general acceptance/tolerance or ignorance” to “virtually unanimous rejection of people smuggling.” After the initial Indonesian pilot, Australian Customs and Border Protection invested a further $5 million in a second phase of the campaign to run to the end of 2014.

The IOM developed the campaign in close coordination with the Indonesian Directorate General of Immigration and the Indonesian National Police. It used market research, conducted by a Jakarta-based firm, which recommended a more “positive” and “values based” approach, linked both to the influence of local authority figures and to villagers’ sense of identity and self-worth. In this respect the campaign messages are seen as an advance on the negative messaging directed at asylum seekers in source countries.

We recently visited communities in West Java and Rote Island in Eastern Indonesia, where small numbers of fishermen were serving sentences for people-smuggling offences committed in the last twelve to eighteen months. What we saw in villages and jails suggests there are good reasons to question the Australian-funded campaigns.

One of the striking features of the material developed by the IOM is that it ignores the broader asylum-seeker issue. In fact, no mention is made of asylum seekers in the educational films screened at community events that purport to explain the background to the campaign message. The people in question are referred to instead as imigran gelap (illegal immigrants) by the Indonesian narrator and as “irregular migrants” in the English subtitles. Nor do the films discuss why these imigran gelap have come to Indonesia, what their circumstances might be, or why they might wish to reach Australia.

Instead, they focus on three core messages, developed by the market-research firm contracted by the IOM. The first message is that transporting imigran gelap constitutes people smuggling and is a criminal offence. The second message is that those who engage in people smuggling harm their reputation and negatively impact their self-esteem (harga diri). The films introduce Indonesian fishermen who have served time in Australian prisons for smuggling offences; they explain why they regret their actions in an effort to convince the audience that it is better to be a poor but honest fisherman than to profit through crime and end up in jail. The third message is religious – that people smuggling is a sin (dosa).

In order to give weight to the religious dimension of the message, one of the films includes a Christian pastor and a Muslim cleric having their say. Not only is people smuggling identified as sinful, but so too is any other assistance provided to imigran gelap, including accommodation, transport, information or other forms of help. “From a religious perspective,” says the Christian pastor at one point, “it is strictly forbidden to provide assistance or help to those who make journeys without complete documents, those who are also referred to as illegal immigrants… If we provide assistance, we ourselves will be damaged.”

“I know people smuggling is wrong”: Campaign material in Pelabuhan Ratu in West Java. Anne McNevin

As well as the films, special sermon booklets (buku khotbah) have been produced for both Christian and Muslim audiences. The sermons use biblical analogies and Koranic verses to explain why people smuggling is sinful. The authority and influence of religious leaders over local communities has been harnessed by the IOM to ensure the sustainability of the message. When market researchers initially proposed the sermons, they provided samples for religious leaders to use or adapt. Excerpts from the proposed sermons were included in documents we gained access to under Freedom of Information laws. The sample Christian sermon explained why the parable of the Good Samaritan should not be interpreted as a justification for assisting imigran gelap. An excerpt from the sample Muslim sermon reads as follows:

The blessed people of Allah, many among you are fishermen and others who work in the coastal industry. There has been news circulating recently of many irregular migrants trying to reach Australia through our borders, through this area. The way they can reach Australia is by using our boats, our people, our knowledge. They ask for help but blessed people of Allah, I tell you that this is not the help that is talked about in the Al Qur’an. Bringing irregular migrants to Australia is illegal. And it is a sin. If you agree to help house irregular migrants before they leave for Australia, if you have anything to do with smuggling these irregular migrants to Australia, it is a sin. You are not helping them, you are doing something wrong in the eyes of Allah.

Using religion to convey political messages is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia.Religious networks are used to promote the state-driven family planning program “two children are enough” (dua anak cukup), for instance. Nevertheless, religion can be a volatile factor in Indonesian politics. Any attempt to cultivate religious messages for political objectives that originate outside Indonesia (in this case, Australia’s determination to deter asylum seekers) runs the risk of inciting sentiments that may well outrun the original intent of the message. There’s also a broader question: how happy will Australians (Christian, Muslim or otherwise) be to learn that religious messages are constructed and deployed in this way as part of Australia’s border-policing activities? Recent statements of concern about asylum policies from Australian Anglican church leaders suggest that the Indonesian information campaigns may warrant more debate than they have prompted so far.

Whatever the moral rights and wrongs of assisting asylum seekers, a fisherman’s decision to crew a boat en route to Australia is likely to be determined more by economic than by religious concerns. By any measure, fishing communities struggle to maintain livelihoods. As nearby reefs decline from over-fishing and environmental damage, deeper-sea fishing expeditions – which are costly in fuel, food, equipment and time – are often beyond the means of ordinary villagers. Many fishermen accumulate debts to boat owners that can’t be repaid after disappointing catches. In an attempt to break a cycle of debt, they often abandon their trade, and fishing boats lie unused and deteriorating. Some have turned to seagrass farming as an alternative, and modest local government schemes exist to encourage this fledgling industry. But the income is modest at best and rarely enough to make ends meet. The sum promised for crewing a boat (from A$2000 to A$3500), by contrast, is enough to break the cycle of poverty.

The religious messages in the anti-smuggling campaign ignore these structural and developmental factors in favour of a stress on individual moral fibre. For fishing families, the question of whether people smuggling is illegal, sinful or destructive of self-worth will always be secondary to more immediate concerns about putting food on the table. And those who understandably prioritise basic necessities may well be duped into dangerous schemes by organisers and middlemen who remain distant from the risks of the boat trip and the law.

Once the small fry are caught, however, the religious messages only serve to compound their anguish and humiliation. In the short term, these campaigns may alert vulnerable fishing communities to the risks, but by obscuring the larger issues they are unlikely to assist those communities to fully inform themselves about what is happening, why they are at risk, and what can be done in the longer term to generate viable alternatives for everyone concerned.

Even the short-term goal of raising awareness of risks comes with complications. Two West Javanese fishermen we spoke to had attended campaign events and were aware of the penalties for people smuggling, and both had encountered emergencies involving “immigrants” (as they called asylum seekers) at sea. They were aware that Australian authorities would intercept and destroy vessels found to be carrying these “immigrants” in or nearby Australian waters, and that the crew of those vessels could be perceived as smugglers. As a consequence, they were faced with an additional moral and economic dilemma.

As fishermen, they knew their own safety was tied to the maritime culture of rescue at sea; at any point in the future it could be their own vessel in distress. Yet they could not risk the destruction of their fishing boats – which they didn’t own and couldn’t afford to pay for – if Australian authorities intercepted them with rescued people on board. No matter how close to Australian territory they might be, their only option, as they saw it, would be to return rescued “immigrants” to Indonesia. But the costs involved, including extra fuel and the loss of several days’ work to police investigations, represent a genuine incentive not to rescue. The reality of this dilemma is supported by accounts from two asylum-seekers we interviewed who survived when their vessels sunk at sea (one having spent three days in the water) and reported that fishing boats had passed by without assisting.

This dilemma may be an unintended side effect of the campaigns directed at Indonesian fishermen in conjunction with the deterrence approach of Operation Sovereign Borders. But incentives to rescue were also jeopardised by the earlier refusal in 2001 to allow the MV Tampa to dock at Christmas Island. The legal disputes following the Tampa incident doubtless caused commercial operators, large and small, to reflect on what is at stake in rescuing asylum seekers at sea in Australia’s region. The contradiction with the humanitarian goal of saving lives at sea (voiced on both sides of parliament) is clear, and it will persist for as long as Australia’s policies and initiatives ignore economic and developmental pressures that shape our regional border-policing environment. •

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Indonesia’s media is often seen to be among the freest in Southeast Asia. Yet Indonesia’s leading news magazine Tempo last month called on the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission to revoke the licences of the country’s twenty-four-hour news stations, MetroTV and TVOne.

Tempo, a beacon of daring journalism during Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order regime, was banned by President Suharto in 1994. For this consistent advocate of media freedom to call for more stringent government control over the media indicates the depth of the problems revealed during the recent election campaigns. How did it come to this?

In any electoral democracy, media companies often advocate overtly for a particular candidate or party, especially when their own interests are at stake. Australians need look back no further than last September’s federal election, which saw the Murdoch media – spearheaded by the now infamous Sydney Daily Telegraph headline, “Kick This Mob Out” – attacking the Labor government.

What distinguishes Indonesia’s media scene is the fact that the owners of the largest outlets have direct affiliations with political parties and have themselves been presidential candidates. MetroTV is owned by Surya Paloh, chief of the Nasional Democrat Party, and TVOne is owned by Aburizal Bakrie, chief of the Golkar party. Their influence over their outlets dates back to well before Indonesia’s election year. In 2008, as Bakrie and Paloh vied to chair Golkar, both networks flagrantly pushed their owner’s interests, with Bakrie eventually winning out.

Surveys suggest 90 per cent of Indonesians watch television in a given week, with one survey showing four in every five Indonesians “receive information” predominantly from television. With MetroTV and TVOne offering twenty-four-hour news, mainly election coverage, the focus has been on these two stations and their overt bias. But the problem extends more broadly.

My interviews with journalists on a range of publications reveal that ownership considerations cause self-censorship in the newsroom of many of Indonesia’s newspapers. After Aburizal Bakrie purchased the Surabaya Post in 2008, for example, journalists were unable to report critically on his role in the Lapindo mudflow disaster and the lack of compensation to victims. Even the outgoing president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono felt the need to establish his own newspaper. According to its inaugural chief editor, SBY set up Jurnal Nasional in 2006 because he needed a newspaper “which explained the good news as well.” Journalists have become fearful that if they reported critically on stories which involved their owner’s interests, they would be reprimanded, moved to the night editor’s desk or, in extreme cases, fired.

The problem has been exacerbated by the increased concentration of media industry through conglomeration and, more recently, platform convergence, with proprietors who previously only owned one platform (such as print, radio or television) now building large, powerful multiplatform oligopolies.

At the same time, media owners are becoming increasingly involved in politics. Hary Tanoesoedibjo, whose media interests include television stations RCTI, GlobalTV, MNC, Sindonews and OkeZone, first became involved in party politics when he joined Surya Paloh’s NasDem in 2011, before switching to Hanura Party in early 2013. Dahlan Iskan, owner of the powerful JawaPos group – which has over 140 newspapers all around the archipelago – became a minister in SBY’s government in its second term. Chairul Tanjung, owner of TransTV, Trans7 and Detik.com, who had long claimed he wasn’t interested in politics despite suggestions he was close to President SBY, became spokesperson for SBY’s Democratic Party this year, and was soon appointed chief economic minister.

Put simply: Indonesia’s big media is getting bigger in the digital era, and media moguls’ importance has been heightened as their companies dominate the media landscape.

Against that backdrop, media coverage of this year’s legislative and presidential elections was bound to be controversial.

As early as January this year, protesters gathered in front of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission were calling for crackdowns on television stations whose reporting was biased towards their owner’s interests. In the lead-up to the April legislative elections, two television programs broadcast by Hary Tanoesoedibjo’s MNC were pulled off the air by the commission for blatantly pushing Hary’s party, Hanura.

Interestingly, neither of the leading presidential candidates, Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, owned media companies. Yet Widodo, universally known as Jokowi, still managed to become a media phenomenon. Aburizal Bakrie, Surya Paloh, Dahlan Iskan, Chairul Tanjung and Hary Tanoesoedibjo, meanwhile, performed poorly as presidential or vice-presidential candidates in the opinion polls. This led many to suggest that the old-school elite-media owner was having only a minor effect on politics, and was failing, in particular, to influence the popularity of presidential candidates.

But as Jokowi became a more likely candidate for the presidency – he led all the polls even before he was nominated – media companies with owners linked to political parties toughened up. Their coverage of his media-friendly events thinned out, and in the lead-up to the April elections, politically connected media companies – including MetroTV – began to attack him. In April, Jokowi reportedly met with MetroTV’s Surya Paloh to ask him for fairer treatment.

Once the legislative elections were over, the only question was whether these media companies would support Prabowo or Jokowi. Prabowo enlisted Bakrie and Tanoesoedibjo into his coalition, and each played a prominent role in his campaign. At one campaign event I attended in Jakarta, the two moguls were the only people to address the audience apart from Prabowo, with television cameras from their respective stations fixed on them as they spoke. Together, Prabowo’s TV supporters covered around 40 per cent of the viewing audience, far more than Jokowi supporter MetroTV’s 2 per cent. Partly as a result, Jokowi’s poll numbers plummeted.

Yet Jokowi did have supporters in the media. Throughout the campaign MetroTV explicitly supported his campaign, following him wherever he went and attacking Prabowo and his Gerindra party. Other media owners allied with Jokowi for different reasons. Jawa Pos Group’s Dahlan Iskan signed up, and paid for the printing of a response to the “black campaigning” of the tabloid newspaper Obor Rakyat, which ran libellous anti-Jokowi material. The response, Pelayan Rakyat, outlined Jokowi’s Islamic credentials and his beliefs and, for good measure, included a picture of Dahlan, Jokowi and his running mate Jusuf Kalla as the Three Musketeers.

The Jakarta Post covered Jokowi positively, running a staunch headline after the first presidential debate, “Jokowi 1, Prabowo 0,” declaring that “the Jokowi–Jusuf Kalla ticket swept all five segments of the live TV debate.” A week before the election, it ran an editorial endorsing Jokowi – the first time it has endorsed a candidate – on the grounds that Prabowo was dangerous for Indonesian democracy. This is all very well, but these statements would have been far more compelling had the newspaper’s owner, Sofyan Wanandi, not been on Jokowi’s campaign team.

James Riady’s Lippo Group, owner of BeritaSatu and the Jakarta Globe, also supported Jokowi’s campaign. So too did Kompas Group, with owner Jacob Utama lobbying Jokowi’s party leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, to nominate Jokowi for the presidency earlier in the year. No doubt both media organisations believe they supported Jokowi because he promises a brighter future for Indonesia and more closely supports the religious pluralism advocated by both papers, which have ethnic-Chinese Christians as owners. For these organisations, Prabowo’s alliances with hard-line Islamic organisations are of great concern.

So this was a media landscape in which companies clearly supported one candidate or the other – although how, and how professionally, varied enormously. TVOne and MetroTV, for example, felt there was no shame in focusing their coverage on their favoured candidates, while other companies – including TransTV news reports and Kompas newspaper – were far more balanced in their coverage.

The partisan coverage reached its pitch on the night of the presidential election. Among the examples of how media companies rejected the notion of “fair and balanced” journalism, TVOne’s coverage stands out.

The network’s viewers represented 14.1 per cent of audience share – the largest of any television station that evening. For Prabowo to claim victory on the basis of a dubious “quick count” and have that claim supported and encouraged by the network was a new low. This wasn’t just favourable coverage, this was manipulation of the democratic process to confuse voters. The coverage seemed to have been planned long before election night, with guests supporting Prabowo’s claims already in the studio primed for comment.

Prabowo’s victory claims were supported by the Bakrie-owned ANTV, which ranked second with 13.1 per cent of the audience on the night, and Hary Tanosoedibyo’s RCTI, ranked third with an audience share of 12.7 per cent.

MetroTV’s audience share, meanwhile, was 6.9 per cent, making it a poorly placed seventh on election night. The next day, Prabowo refused to be interviewed by network, or by two others sceptical of his victory claim, KompasTV and BeritaSatu TV, alleging that their reporting was “not fair and not just.”

Even the respected magazine, Tempo, whose reporting this year has largely been exemplary, has struggled in recent days to convince many Indonesians that it was indeed fair and balanced. After the election, its journalists placed Jokowi on their shoulders as he crowd-surfed throughout newsroom.

Indonesia is not alone in suffering the effects of concentrated media ownership. There is no easy solution to the problem, but the lack of balance and non-partisan media reporting in this election year should be enough to convince authorities and media-freedom activists that something must be done.

The often-repeated line from media companies – that they should be free to run whatever agenda they like and “let the consumer decide” which media they trust  – doesn’t suffice here. It implies that everyone has access to all platforms (Indonesia’s internet penetration is only around 25 per cent), can identify and critique media ownership bias, and have some access to fair and balanced reporting to reduce confusion. That TVOne had the largest audience on election night is further evidence that viewers don’t switch off unreliable reporting.

Would a crackdown by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission reduce the influence of politically aligned owners? Or would it pressure journalists to report in a way that suits the Indonesian government? Such is the legacy of the old Ministry of Information licensing regime under Suharto’s New Order that many hardened press freedom activists are sceptical of any tightening of controls, especially if various media moguls end up as ministers. Tempo had best be careful what they wish for.

Yet the situation in Indonesia is likely to get worse. In the convergence era, media owners are vying for digital television licenses, internet service providers and communications infrastructure such as satellites and fibre-optic cables. Social media may not be immune to ownership pressures either, as evidenced by Hary Tanoesoedibjo’s investment in WeChat and Bakrie company’s investment in Path, both of which are highly popular in Indonesia.

Unless there are greater thought put into existing media regulations to limit the influence of media owners, the reporting we’ve seen in this election could only be the beginning. •

The post Fear and favour appeared first on Inside Story.

Indonesia’s presidential election is being fought hard, except in one crucial realm: that of ideas. The frontrunner is Prabowo Subianto, a former military man with a bad human rights record, whose program and public pronouncements contain many hints – and more than hints – that he wants to take country back toward at least a semi-authoritarian form of rule. The campaign of his rival, Joko Widodo, the governor of Jakarta, has run light on virtually everything except the attractive personality of its candidate. In particular, Jokowi and his supporters have scrupulously sought to avoid anything that might leave them open to accusations of running a “black campaign” against Prabowo. As a result, what Prabowo wants to do with the political system if he is elected, and the threat he represents of authoritarian regression, hasn’t been made clear to voters.

This has begun to change over the last few days, with some public discussion of Prabowo’s plans for reforming Indonesia’s political system getting under way. While this discussion has still not gone mainstream, it constitutes one of the first serious attempts to question Prabowo about what exactly he wants to do with the presidency if he is victorious on 9 July. In particular, attention has focused on Prabowo’s vaguely stated – but increasingly clear – desire to get rid of direct presidential elections should he win, and thus avoid having to face another popular vote.

On 28 June at the Taman Ismail Marzuki cultural centre in Jakarta, Prabowo said that he viewed Indonesia’s political system as being unduly influenced by Western values. For him, direct elections (presumably both at the national and local level) were not in line with Indonesian culture, but had been adopted and perpetuated like a bad habit (he mentioned smoking as an example). What was needed, he continued, was a new consensus among Indonesia’s key social and political groups. He left open what this new political consensus should or could look like, but given his trenchant criticism of direct elections, it is fair to assume that Prabowo would try to work towards an alternative system in which top executive leaders are indirectly rather than popularly elected.

Back to the 1945 constitution

In fact, Prabowo has in rudimentary form laid out his plans for a radical restructuring of the political landscape many months ago. In the Manifesto Perjuangan Partai Gerindra, or Struggle Manifesto of the Gerindra Party, Prabowo’s party alleged that the amended constitution that been in place since 2002 has been a failure. As a consequence of that failure, Gerindra proposed to return to the original constitution “as declared on 18 August 1945.” This very brief constitution, written hurriedly in the weeks prior to the declaration of independence, is an autocrat’s dream: it leaves fundamental issues unregulated, allowing presidents to tailor the political system to their tastes and preferences, and served both Sukarno and Suharto well in creating their respective authoritarian regimes between 1959 and 1998. As the 1945 constitution doesn’t even require parliament to be elected, for instance, Sukarno appointed his own in 1960.

Most importantly, however, the 1945 constitution stipulates that the president is not directly elected by the people but by the MPR (People’s Consultative Assembly). In turn, the exact composition of the MPR is left unregulated – a loophole that allowed Suharto to appoint most of the delegates himself. The president was elected for the last time by the MPR in 1999, after which fresh constitutional amendments led to the first direct presidential polls in 2004.

Against this background, Prabowo’s attack on direct elections at Taman Ismail Marzuki should not (and cannot) be read as a harmless off-the-cuff statement in response to a non-political question, as his supporters later claimed. Nor was he taken out of context, as Prabowo himself complained. His words were simply an explicit statement of what is already implicit in Gerindra’s demand for a return to the original 1945 constitution: annulling all post-1998 amendments would automatically revoke direct elections and return presidential “elections” to the MPR.

Prabowo’s clarification


On 30 June, ANU academic Ross Tapsell had the chance to ask Prabowo directly about his intentions. At an event largely attended by foreign diplomats and held entirely in English, Tapsell asked Prabowo to respond to the Taman Ismail Marzuki controversy and his views on democracy more broadly. Prabowo’s answer gives us greater insight into his thinking and should lead to more, not less, concern about what he has in mind for Indonesia after 9 July.

In what has now become Prabowo’s standard approach to such questions, he expressed dismay at the media for portraying him as non-democratic, and generally described himself as “a democrat.” Judging from the loud applause greeting his protestations, and given that even hard-nosed foreign journalists found him “believable,” his strategy seem to have worked. Many foreign diplomats, it seems, leaned back in their seats and breathed a sigh of – misplaced – relief.

Far from denying that he wanted to get rid of direct elections, he delivered more justifications for this idea. At Taman Ismail Marzuki he had focused on how direct elections violated the values of “our ancestors”; in front of his foreign audience, he attacked these elections as being too expensive and as breeding corruption. “Our version of democracy is very expensive,” he said, and he proposed to search for ways “to carry out democracy that is consistent with our economic means.” This has been the argument advanced by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Home Affairs, who have called for the return of local executive elections to the legislature for many years. Clearly, Prabowo is tapping into a widespread sentiment about high-costs elections to prepare the ground for a major revamp of the electoral system.

And while the examples Prabowo mentioned related mostly to local polls, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he was talking about the national level as well. Interestingly, he avoided explicitly providing a guarantee that he would face the voters again in five years time in order to be held accountable by the electorate. Instead, he said, in an uncharacteristically garbled sentence, “If I become elected I get elected by direction [sic] elections, that I agree, that I accept.” This was followed by references to the demand for a “new consensus,” repeating the Taman Ismail Marzuki speech when he had taken a strong stance against direct elections.

In contrast to that speech, however, Prabowo indicated that he had already raised the issue with his coalition partners – further undermining suggestions that the remarks were off the cuff and didn’t represent deep thinking or concrete plans. According to Prabowo, “I told our friends in the Coalition, the Indonesian leaders must gather together and look for a new consensus, how to devise a system that is still democratic, that still represents the will of the people, but that is affordable.” The conclusion seems inescapable: Prabowo is intent on building a low-cost political system that fulfills the minimum requirements of democracy but that avoids direct elections.

Modeled on Westminster?

Prabowo’s rhetoric evokes memories of Suharto’s Pancasila Democracy – a system that upheld elections as a source of legitimacy but reduced them to a five-yearly, predictable ritual. But in his quest to restore the political framework that was practiced under the original 1945 constitution, Prabowo also made references to the Westminster systems of Western Europe: “He who wins the legislative election, will, you can get majority rule in parliament, you are automatically chief of the executive. In our opinion it could be cheaper.” This statement removes all doubt that Prabowo is thinking about abolishing direct elections not only at the regional level, as some supporters have suggested, but also for the presidency. Indeed, what Prabowo says here is, in theory at least, exactly what the original 1945 constitution envisaged – a party that wins a parliamentary election can have its candidate elected as president by the MPR. Suharto was re-elected six times in this way.

However, it would be naive to interpret Prabowo’s sudden reference to the Westminster system as an invitation to society to discuss Indonesia’s possible shift to a parliamentary system. Nothing in Prabowo’s previous statements, speeches or published platforms suggest that he has any sympathy for parliamentary democracy. Instead, Gerindra’s manifesto has called for the reestablishment of a “pure presidential system,” which it claims has been watered down by the post-1998 constitutional amendments. Prabowo’s speeches during the campaign have also focused on the need to restore presidential authority and provide “decisive leadership.”

The idea of introducing a Westminster democracy, in which prime ministers depend on having a majority in their unruly party rooms, could therefore not be further from what Prabowo has publicly announced as his main political goal – a strong, centralised presidential system. The only element of Westminster democracy that interests him, it appears, is the element of indirect election of the chief executive by the legislature. Prabowo himself strongly hinted at this in his 30 June remarks, in which he claimed that “our original [1945] constitution actually is more in line with Westminster parliamentary democracy.” The similarities are limited to a single aspect: the absence of popular ballots for top government leaders.

Implications of change


There can thus be little doubt that Prabowo wants to abolish direct elections for the presidency, as well as at the regional level. Does it matter? After all, as Prabowo says, some countries elect their heads of government indirectly through parliament. Doesn’t Prabowo’s proposal suggest simply a reformulation of Indonesian democracy rather than a diminution of it?

There are reasons to be pessimistic on this score. The history of the Suharto regime itself is an obvious reminder of how readily elections by the MPR can be manipulated, especially in the context of a constitution that places almost no constraints on the executive. The first years of Indonesia’s reformasi period, when local government heads were elected by local parliaments, also show us that indirect elections are more open to manipulation and graft than direct elections. In many districts and provinces, candidates for local government who would have been unable to win public office through a popular vote came to power simply by paying the biggest bribes to the members of their local parliament. Direct elections, though undoubtedly costly for candidates, have generally produced much better outcomes.

We can expect the same at the national level. A powerful and determined president will find it much easier to manipulate the few hundred MPR members to secure re-election than to manipulate the entire population in an open poll. He would be able to use any number of measures to entice or bully MPR members to support his re-election: co-opting party leaders by offering them ministerial posts or other deals, buying off parties by providing them with patronage resources, bribing individual MPs with corrupt payments, threatening  opponents with prosecution for corruption or other misdemeanours, and so on.

In short, indirect elections through the MPR offer a far more promising path to permanent entrenchment in power. And in that context it is worth remembering one other provision that will be lost should Indonesia return to the original 1945 Constitution: the article limiting presidents to a maximum of two terms in office. •

The post Prabowo versus democracy in Indonesia appeared first on Inside Story.

Now, the country faces a stark choice that could determine not only the health of Indonesian democracy, but perhaps even whether it survives. The two candidates running in this election embody very different aspects of Indonesia’s recent political history, and they promise to take the country in very different directions.

The choice

The leading candidate is Joko Widodo (usually known as Jokowi). Politically, he is purely a product of the new democratic era. A political nobody at the beginning of Indonesia’s democratic transformation, he came to prominence by being elected twice as the mayor of the Central Java city of Solo and then once as governor of Jakarta – a pathway to national power that would have been impossible under the old authoritarian system. Known for a low-key, meet-the-people style of interacting with constituents, he comes from a humble background, though he achieved success as a furniture exporter prior to entering politics. His style of governing emphasises bureaucratic reform, improved service delivery, expanded social welfare services and a consensus-based approach to resolving social conflict.

Though we don’t really know Jokowi’s views on many critical issues (such as how to resolve the conflict in Papua), he would be the first president without firsthand experience of official politics in the authoritarian period and, arguably, the most reformist president yet. While we would not expect dramatic change under his leadership, he would pay patient attention to strengthening Indonesia’s democratic institutions and getting the wheels of Indonesia’s massive bureaucracy turning more smoothly, and more cleanly.

Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi’s only rival in a two-candidate race, has promised to respect Indonesia’s democracy. But there is much in his personal history, his rhetoric, and his political style to suggest that a Prabowo presidency would pose a significant threat of authoritarian reversal. In contrast to Jokowi, Prabowo is one of the purest imaginable products of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966–98) of President Suharto. One of a handful of leading military generals by the time of Suharto’s fall from office, he was the son of an important early New Order economics minister and was married to Suharto’s daughter, Titiek. Prabowo’s younger brother, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, like many of the children of former New Order officials, went into business, while Prabowo was groomed for a career in the army. Hashim is now one of Indonesia’s richest men, as well the chief bankroller of Prabowo’s presidential ambitions. Prabowo himself is also extremely wealthy, living on a luxurious private ranch where, among other things, he keeps a stable of expensive horses. The brothers, it should be noted, have primarily become rich in rent-seeking parts of the economy, such as timber and other natural resources.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Prabowo enjoyed an unusually rapid rise through the ranks of the army under the patronage of his father-in-law. In the mid to late 1990s, when the New Order began to fray and civilian reformers tried to work out who in the army might be sympathetic to democratic change, nobody counted Prabowo among the potential reformers. Instead, he was a leader of the palace guard and, in the final months of the regime, was in charge of a dirty war–style campaign to abduct anti-government activists, several of whom remain missing to this day. President Habibie dismissed Prabowo as commander of the Army’s Strategic Reserves the day after Suharto resigned, 22 May 1998, when it was reported to him that Prabowo was moving his troops close to the presidential palace without the approval of the Armed Forces Commander. Prabowo was discharged from the military for his role in the kidnapping of the activists and for other transgressions.

Since the early 2000s, after a period abroad, Prabowo has worked hard to build a political career. From the start he focused on the goal of winning the presidency. He first tried to win the nomination of Golkar (the electoral vehicle of the old New Order regime) as its presidential candidate in 2004. When this plan failed, he decided to form his own personal vehicle, the Gerindra (Greater Indonesia Movement) party, an organisation with the sole goal of taking its leader to the presidential palace. In 2009, he ran as a vice-presidential candidate alongside Megawati Sukarnoputri, but at that time, too, he made it clear that his ultimate goal was the presidency. Although Gerindra achieved just 11.8 per cent of the popular vote in this year’s legislative election, Prabowo was the only other potential presidential candidate who came even close to Jokowi in the public opinion polls. He was eventually able to pull together a coalition of five major parties to nominate him as its presidential candidate.

A year ago, it seemed that Jokowi would win the presidency without serious challenge. He was a media sensation, and his popularity ratings far outstripped other potential candidates. In the last six months, however, Prabowo’s campaign has surged. Though Jokowi still maintains a lead it has narrowed dramatically, and is now in single figures. Nobody now takes a Jokowi victory for granted. In such a context, we need to think seriously about what underpins Prabowo’s growing appeal, and what a Prabowo presidency might mean for Indonesia.

The Prabowo challenge

How can we explain the rapid rise in support for Prabowo? One explanation is that Jokowi’s campaign has been poorly organised, as has been argued persuasively by ANU academic Marcus Mietzner. Prabowo’s effort, by contrast, has been single-minded and massively funded from the start. His brother Hashim has pumped in untold millions and, since his polling has improved, Prabowo has also been able to extract major funds from other Indonesian oligarchs and political allies. He has also gained the support of two of Indonesia’s main media tycoons, whose television channels have flagrantly campaigned in favour of him: Prabowo even appeared at the final of Indonesian Idol to award the prize to the winner. (To be fair, the news channel owned by another tycoon, Surya Paloh, has been almost equally biased in favour of Jokowi.) An army of paid social media workers floods the cyberworld with pro-Prabowo material and counter negative stories about him; the electronic media has for many months been similarly flooded with advertisements extolling his virtues.

It is also increasingly obvious that elements of Prabowo’s styling and message appeal strongly to a part of the Indonesian population. Prabowo has presented himself in a way that distinguishes him starkly from other members of Indonesia’s political elite. Part of this is visual: Prabowo’s campaign rallies involve a large element of pageantry, with marching bands and military-style parades; he dresses himself in uniforms that evoke Sukarno and other nationalist heroes from the 1940s and 1950s; he even uses old-fashioned microphones that look like those used decades ago by Sukarno. In addition to these stylistic elements, however, there are at least three features that distinguish Prabowo from other mainstream Indonesian politicians.

First is the nature of his message. Prabowo promotes an amalgam of nationalist and populist themes reminiscent of demagogic politicians the world over. In all his campaign speeches he stresses, first and foremost, nationalism, saying that Indonesia is a country of great natural riches that has for too long been exploited – even enslaved – by foreigners. Indonesia’s riches are being sucked out to benefit outsiders and it is time, he says, for the country to stand on its own feet and reclaim its dignity and self-respect. He also talks at length about the plight of the poor, and how they suffer as a result of corruption, neoliberalism, neocapitalism, foreign interference and various other ills. Indonesia’s riches are stolen from the Indonesian people; it is time for them to be reclaimed and enjoyed by all Indonesian.

Nothing in this so far is particularly unusual: economic nationalism, concern for the plight of the “little people” and condemnation of corruption are all standard tropes of Indonesian political discourse. But Prabowo’s language is far more dramatic – even militant – than that used by most politicians. What is even more unusual is that he presents these critiques along with fiery condemnation of Indonesia’s entire political class, which he depicts as irredeemably corrupt and self-serving. As he told a crowd of workers at a rally last May Day: “The Indonesian elite has lied for too long… lied to the people, lied to the nation, lied to itself!” Later in the same speech, he added, “All are corrupted! All are bribed! All our leaders are willing to be bought and willing to be bribed!” Depicting himself as the anti-political politician he explained:

We cannot hope for too much from our leaders. They are clever talkers, so clever, so clever that they end up as clever liars! I went into politics because I was forced! I was forced, brothers and sisters! Politics… God help us! Of fifteen people I meet in politics, fourteen of them are total liars….

Or, as he put it more recently, on a visit to Aceh province: “How easy it is to control Indonesia. All you need to do is buy the political parties!” Of course there is a deep irony here: Prabowo is himself a product of the very highest level of Indonesia’s political elite, and a major oligarch in his own right. Yet there’s no denying the consistency, and the force, of his message.

This leads us to a second part of Prabowo’s appeal: the passion, even sometimes fury, with which he delivers his message. This also distinguishes him from most mainstream politicians – especially the current president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is so careful and measured in his statements that he is often criticised for indecisiveness, but also Jokowi, whose personal style is unusually casual and low-key. At a recent campaign speech in the North Sumatran city of Medan, the subject of much scrutiny, Prabowo worked himself into a frenzy condemning various unnamed foreign stooges and people who steal the people’s money, commit fraud, engage in slander and so on. As Liam Gammon argues, “it says something about his frame of mind that the only time he gets so worked up as to lose his composure is when he’s talking about some devious clique of unnamed ‘others’ who conspire to exploit the national wealth and cheat the Indonesian people.” Indeed, Prabowo’s passion doesn’t look concocted on such occasions; he appears as if seized by deep personal emotions. It looks, in fact, as if he is thinking about his personal enemies.

This particular strength is potentially also a weak point. Prabowo is known to have a combustible, even unstable, personality. He is prone to outbursts of rage that sometimes involve physical violence, and reports of him throwing punches, mobile telephones and ashtrays when angered by his associates or underlings have circulated widely. Former factional rivals from within the military have described his personality flaws quite openly, and one, A.M. Hendropriyono (himself a man with a bad human rights record), has denounced him as a “psychopath.” Prabowo’s emotion-laden public speeches could thus be a double-edged sword, and may turn off some voters, especially women. Even so, there’s no doubt that many Indonesians – especially poorer ones – enjoy the unusual spectacle of a prominent figure getting so exercised, apparently on their behalf, in condemning the very politicians and elites they themselves abhor.

The third element of Prabowo’s appeal is the promised antidote to all these ills: leadership that is “firm” or “strong.” Indeed, we might think of the promise of strong leadership as not merely the central, but as virtually the only significant plank of Prabowo’s political program and his strategy for government. In a recent analysis, University of British Columbia historian John Roosa has compellingly argued that “in Prabowo’s mind, everything about a country – the quality of its economic system, culture, and standing – depends on the ‘leadership factor.’ The solution for all of Indonesia’s ills is a ‘strong national leadership.’” Accordingly, Prabowo’s speeches are self-referential and self-regarding to an extent that is unusual in Indonesian politics, and he often teasingly asks his audience whether he is being “too tough” or “too hard” in his denunciations.

In many casual conversations I have had with ordinary Indonesians over recent months, almost all those who say they will support Prabowo repeat the same refrain: Indonesia needs a leader who is tough, who will stamp down on corruption, who will stand up to foreign countries, who will prevent the repeat of “losses” such as East Timor, and so on. Public opinion polling also shows that voters who value firm leadership as a factor in making their choice overwhelming favour Prabowo. The irony, of course, is that for all his talk of leadership, Prabowo has actually not led anything in the last sixteen years, except for a political party that was concocted simply to provide him with a platform. When he did last hold a senior leadership position in a state body, he was fired from it.

A threat to democracy?

Prabowo is directing his campaign for the presidency through democratic channels. Recently, he has taken pains to state that he accepts Indonesia’s democratic system, and that he intends to preserve it. If he takes power, he will do so with the support of a coalition of political parties that have an interest in preserving democratic participation. He will also be operating in a system that includes robust checks and balances, as well as a strong media and civil society. Why, then, should we be concerned about the implications of a Prabowo presidency for Indonesian democracy?

The obvious reason is Prabowo’s authoritarian past and his personal record of responsibility for human rights violations. Much of the criticism from Indonesian civil society groups has focused on this aspect, and Prabowo became angry in last week’s televised debate when Jokowi’s running mate, Jusuf Kalla, tried to goad him on the issue.

Another source of concern is the hints at explicitly anti-democratic elements in Prabowo’s program. He has repeatedly stated, for instance, that he wants to return Indonesia to the “original” 1945 Constitution, as it was signed in 18 August 1945. In other words, he wants to return to a version of the Constitution that places concentrated power in the hands of the president and removes virtually all the key democratic procedures and controls found in contemporary Indonesian democracy, most of which have been introduced by a series of constitutional amendments since 1998.

Prabowo frequently drops hints, too, that democracy itself, or at least the version that is practised in Indonesia, is a chief source of corruption and various other ills. In last week’s televised debate he talked about “destructive” democracy and stated he wanted to create a “constructive” democracy instead. He told one gathering of retired military officers last month that democracy “exhausts us.”

The real danger, however, lies in the combination of Prabowo’s emphasis on the leadership principle and what we know about his personality. It’s clear that he views himself as embodying the solution to Indonesia’s many problems and believes that imposing his will is the key to achieving national renaissance. At the same time, his public statements invoke unnamed enemies, and contain implied threats against them or others. (Confronted by journalists, for example, he often doesn’t answer their questions but instead asks what outlet they represent, as if he is compiling a private list of those who treat him disrespectfully.) Add to this already combustible mixture his propensity for flying into violent rages when he does not get his way, and we have every reason to predict that Prabowo could be a president who would be unusually impatient with democratic procedures, and punitive towards political foes.

The first year or two of a Prabowo presidency might go smoothly enough. But after a while, once he started to run into the normal frustrations and compromises that come with democratic life – when he hits a roadblock erected by the parliament, the Constitutional Court, the media, or some other checking institution – it’s all too easy to imagine a President Prabowo invoking emergency powers or using some other extraordinary method to sweep such obstacles aside. Already there have been reports of active military officers campaigning for him, and it would be relatively simple for him as president to reactivate the army’s “territorial structure” and bring the security forces back into politics.

Of course, a Prabowo government would not be a carbon copy of Suharto’s New Order; Indonesia has changed a great deal since those days and there would be much resistance to any authoritarian reversal. But one important global trend over the last couple of decades has been the emergence of what are sometimes known as electoral authoritarian regimes: systems where elections persist but civil liberties and democratic participation are manipulated to allow the ruling group to entrench itself. Think of a place like Putin’s Russia, and we might have a picture of what Prabowo’s Indonesia will eventually look like.

How did this happen?

Of course, it’s not unusual for there to be nostalgia for the authoritarian past, or even a full-fledged authoritarian reversal, a decade or so after a country makes a transition to democracy. Political scientists have for years been speculating that Indonesia was ripe for the emergence of a populist challenger to the existing system. Even so, many analysts of contemporary Indonesian politics – me included – have in recent times adopted a positive take on Indonesia’s democratic achievements. Many things seemed to be going right: the media is robust, civil society is strong, and attempts to wind back democratic space have almost always been defeated by public resistance. Indonesian democracy seemed to be consolidating.

At the same time, deep problems have long been visible and have been the topic of extensive scholarly analysis. Now, some of these problems may be coming home to roost. Even if he doesn’t win in July, the fact that Prabowo is within arm’s reach of the presidency should warn us that Indonesian democracy is more fragile than many of us were prepared to concede. Shortcomings in three areas seem especially important for explaining Prabowo’s rise.

First is “transitional justice” – the task of investigating and punishing officials responsible for past human rights abuses. Indonesia’s failure on this score has been all but total. After Suharto fell, there were numerous investigations and even some trials, but in the end no senior military officer or other official was found guilty and punished for any of the well-documented human rights abuses that occurred under the New Order. Indeed, one might say that the price the army extracted for getting out of politics was an informal guarantee that none of its leaders would be punished for past misdeeds. The fact that someone like Prabowo, who a decade and a half ago was so discredited that he had to leave the country, is now able to launch a strong presidential bid is testimony to the consequences of this failing.

Some of those who are now Prabowo’s opponents have themselves to blame for this situation: in 2009 Megawati Sukarnoputri chose Prabowo as her vice-presidential candidate, making it clear that for her and her party, a poor human rights record was politically inconsequential. This year, Prabowo’s supporters ask, with some justification, if Jokowi’s party didn’t worry about Prabowo’s human rights record back then, why should it be making an issue of it now?

Second is the breadth and the depth of political corruption. For years now, on almost any day you can open the pages of any major Indonesian newspaper and be assaulted by stories of corruption in haj funds, beef import scandals, land scams, oil smuggling, medical equipment scams, textbook scams, mark-ups in the building of hospitals or sports stadiums – you name it. Those involved include everyone from the highest ministers in the land down to the lowliest town councillors and civil servants. To be sure, much of the media exposure is itself a sign of progress in the fight against graft. Even so, Indonesians would be forgiven for believing that democracy has produced a political system in which virtually everything and everyone is indeed for sale, as Prabowo has repeatedly been saying.

The April legislative elections, which were accompanied by a veritable orgy of vote-buying and electoral manipulation, themselves form an important part of the backdrop to Prabowo’s rise in the polls. No wonder so many Indonesians – especially poor ones – take delight in Prabowo’s denunciations of the political elite and his promises to eradicate corruption through strong leadership, despite his own entanglement in New Order business and patronage networks.

Third, and closely related, is the transactional style of politics that has become central to Indonesia’s democracy. More so than in many countries, official politics in Indonesia has been characterised by what American political scientist Dan Slater calls “promiscuous power sharing”: the propensity of parties with widely differing ideological outlooks or social bases to put aside their differences for the sake of shared access to the patronage resources offered by government. In Indonesian politics, it often seems as if no political alliance is principled or based on policy affinity; instead, everything is up for negotiation and ripe for a deal. Most of the cabinets formed by post-Suharto presidents have thus been broad “rainbow coalitions” in which virtually every major party is represented. This system has itself helped to generate the public disillusionment on which the Prabowo challenge feeds, but it has also helped Prabowo build his political coalition. As well as his own Gerindra, four other major parties have fallen in behind his presidential bid: Golkar, PAN, PKS and PPP (the final three are all Islamic-based). There is an authoritarian strain in each of these parties, but one would think that at least some of their leaders would be reluctant to support a leader who threatens a revival of New Order–style politics, partly because some of their leaders (especially those of PAN and PKS) were themselves directly involved in the movement to topple Suharto.

More to the point, Prabowo might ultimately threaten the democratic system that has benefited these parties so much. He has successfully wooed them, of course, by offering ministries and other positions of power. (Bakrie for instance, boasted that Prabowo had offered him the previously unheard-of post of “chief minister.”) In short, Prabowo has built his coalition by engaging in the very horse-trading and deal-making that he condemns. In contrast, Jokowi refused to cut such deals with potential coalition partners, losing out on support from PAN and Golkar.

This is just one of the deep ironies – some would say, hypocrisies – of the Prabowo challenge. Prabowo has managed to mobilise a large coalition that includes many political forces that have benefited greatly from democratic reform and from the climate of deal-making and corruption that he himself so vigorously denounces. For example, a close look at Gerindra party candidates and campaigners in the regions quickly reveals that most of them are not at all hard-edged populists or ideologues committed to Prabowo’s professed vision of a strong and clean Indonesia. For most, Gerindra is just the latest stopping point in long political careers that have led them through other parties, and they are just as well-versed in the techniques of “money politics” as other politicians. (In one Central Java electoral constituency where I conducted research earlier this year it was the local Gerindra candidates who engaged most massively in vote-buying.) If Prabowo is a modern version of the Fuehrer or Il Duce – as some of the memes circulating on social media among Indonesian liberals only half-jokingly assert – he is one who is coming to power without the strongly ideological political party that carried along those earlier demagogues.

This is a major contradiction at the heart of the Prabowo challenge. His campaign is stridently populist, anti-system and anti-elite in its oratorical style. But it is a campaign that has emerged from the very heart of that system and its elite. That contradiction is currently his Achilles’ heel. When he condemns the “political elite” at election rallies, lined up behind him on the stage are party leaders who themselves personify that elite – including some of its most unpopular representatives, such as Golkar’s Aburizal Bakrie. When Prabowo condemns corruption, politically informed Indonesians know that many of the parties and party leaders who now back him are themselves deeply implicated in some of Indonesia’s most notorious corruption cases. In last week’s TV debate, Prabowo said the Indonesian economy had been “wrongly managed”: standing next to him as his running mate was Hatta Rajasa, President Yudhoyono’s coordinating minister for economic affairs. Jokowi’s supporters have been quick to seize on such contradictions, distributing through social media witty postings and images satirising Prabowo and his new alliances.

It is thus far from clear that Prabowo will win. For every voter who finds Prabowo’s angry rhetoric and his promise of strength appealing, there is still at least one more who prefers Jokowi’s low-key affability. Even so, the race is open, and it is momentous. Phrases like “turning point” get overused in discussions of politics. In Indonesia in 2014, the term is apt. Whatever choice Indonesian voters make, it will be highly consequential. A Jokowi victory will likely allow for continued slow consolidation of Indonesia’s developing democratic system, and it might in fact lead to significant improvement in the quality of the democratic institutions. A victory by Prabowo carries major risks of serious authoritarian regression. The outside world should be worried by this prospect, but the biggest losers will be Indonesia’s own people. •

In two places in the above article I suggest that Prabowo’s appeal is likely to be strongest among the poor. Since writing the piece, polling has become available that suggests that it is fact more urban, educated and wealthier Indonesians – in other words, the middle classes – who have shifted earliest and most strongly toward Prabowo. This fact points us toward a reopening of the scholarly debate that occurred in the late New Order regarding the conservative and authoritarian tendencies in Indonesia’s middle classes. — Ed Aspinall, 25 June 2014

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LAST WEEK Indonesians voted in their fourth free and fair national election since the fall of President Suharto in 1998 ended four decades of authoritarianism. A win for the main opposition party – the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P – was widely predicted, largely because of the enthusiasm surrounding its popular presidential candidate, Jakarta’s governor Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi.

In a highly fragmented party system where twelve parties competed for 560 seats in the House of Representatives, some polls suggested the PDI-P could take close to 30 per cent of the popular vote. Quick counts on Wednesday suggested that the party fell far short of such predictions, earning the trust of only around 19 per cent of Indonesian voters.

The dominant reaction to the election so far has been one of surprise and disappointment that the PDI-P did not earn a stronger mandate for what many hoped could be a reformist Jokowi-led government. At the same time, concerns were aired that despite predictions of declining influence, Islamic parties appear to have increased their combined vote from 29 per cent in 2009 to around 32 per cent.

But there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. It is likely that the coalition taking shape over the coming weeks will produce a moderate government that could reverse the recent trend of hostility towards religious minorities.

Now that the votes are counted, and parties know exactly what they have to bargain with, party elites are busy cementing coalitions. To nominate a president/vice-president pair for the presidential election on 9 July, a party, or a coalition of parties, must reach 25 per cent of the popular vote or 20 per cent of lower house seats. Polls had suggested that the PDI-P would get close to reaching this threshold on its own, but it now seems that it could fall just short.

But while the coalitions for presidential elections are important, within weeks parties will also form a governing coalition that can command a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. It is almost certain now that the PDI-P will hold the highest number of seats in the house. In addition, despite the PDI-P’s failure to capitalise on Jokowi’s popularity in the legislative election, it remains highly unlikely that he will be defeated by former general Prabowo Subianto in the presidential elections in July. While the low result for the PDI-P makes it more reliant on coalition partners, eventually the parties will have to either cooperate with a Jokowi-led government or assume a more oppositional stance.

There are several reasons why the next PDI-P–led coalition is likely to be more moderate on the question of minority rights than the current government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his Democrat Party.

The PDI-P regards itself as a legatee of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, and is a staunch defender of his Pancasila philosophy – a set of ideas that enjoins belief in God but also entails the virtues of diversity and tolerance. In the Indonesian context these leanings are often described as “secular-nationalist,” in contrast to parties that champion a more explicitly Islamic agenda. In opposition the PDI-P opposed several conservative pieces of legislation and criticised the government’s inaction in the face of violent attacks against Shia Muslims, the Ahmadiyah and other religious minorities. It is likely to continue drawing on this pluralist ideological legacy when in government.

In addition to its own pluralist track record, according to Indonesian media reports the PDI-P is strongly inclined to work with the National Awakening Party and the National Mandate Party, who surpassed pollsters’ expectations by gaining about 9.2 per cent and 7.5 per cent of the national vote respectively. Both are linked to Indonesia’s two oldest and largest Islamic organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, whose membership bases, in the tens of millions, make up the vast majority of Indonesia’s Muslim community. A coalition with these two parties would anchor the “secular-nationalist” PDI-P firmly in the pluralist Muslim centre.

While the probable coalition between these three parties is in itself a centrist force, the likely exclusion of two other Islamic parties further indicates that the next government will be more moderate.

The Prosperous Justice Party and the United Development Party have both been part of President Yudhoyono’s governing coalition, holding key ministries. To varying degrees, both played a role in Indonesia’s losing its reputation as home to a moderate and tolerant Islam. Importantly, in contrast to the gains made by the moderate Islamic parties, the combined vote for these two parties in 2014 stagnated relative to 2009. The PDI-P is unlikely to take either of them on board in a new government.

But a coalition of the PDI-P with only the two moderate Islamic parties would not be enough to form a stable majority government. The PDI-P will need the support of one of the medium-sized parties – Gerindra, Prabowo’s party; Golkar, Suharto’s former electoral vehicle; or the Democrat Party, incumbent president Yudhoyono’s party.

It seems unlikely that PDI-P and Gerindra can work together for a number of reasons. First, Prabowo recently accused PDI-P’s chair, Megawati Sukarnoputri, of betraying an agreement dating from 2009 between the PDI-P and Gerindra, according to which Megawati was to support Prabowo for the presidency in 2014 after he ran as her vice-president in 2009. Second, Jokowi is likely to shatter Prabowo’s ambition of becoming president in July, after Gerindra helped to deliver Jokowi onto the national scene by supporting his successful run for governor of Jakarta in 2012. Last, and most importantly, with the presidential race pitting Jokowi against Prabowo, PDI-P and Gerindra are likely to throw more dirt at each other over the coming three months.

As to a deal between the PDI-P and the Democrat Party, the well-known personal animosity between PDI-P’s Megawati and Democrat Party patron Yudhoyono means that the Democrat Party is also an unlikely coalition partner for the PDI-P. The Democrat Party also dropped from 20 per cent of the vote in 2009 to 9 per cent in 2014, following the arrest on corruption charges of several senior board members.

That leaves Golkar as the only party that can offer enough supportive House of Representatives seats to the PDI-P when it comes to passing legislation. And what better party to govern with than the party that is yet to spend a single day in opposition in over four decades of its existence. Despite expressing coy ambiguity over Golkar’s prospects of joining a PDI-P-led coalition on election night, Golkar chair and presidential candidate Aburizal Bakrie has previously indicated that Golkar is a “government party.”

While Golkar has a mixed record in standing up for minority rights, the absence of the Prosperous Justice Party and the United Development Party from government is bound to drag the government down a much more tolerant path. The starkest illustration of the next government’s likely approach to minorities is the removal of the conservative religious affairs minister, United Development Party chair Suryadharma Ali, who is facing a backlash from his own party board for, unbeknownst to them, appearing on stage with Prabowo at a Gerindra rally last week. He will soon be replaced with a more moderate figure, almost certainly from the National Awakening Party.

In sum, under this possible scenario of a new governing coalition, the conservative slice of Islamic parties is relegated to opposition benches. Instead, the most consistent defender of pluralist values, the PDI-P, together with the moderate Islamic parties, takes the levers of government.

While a coalition that includes Golkar is not what many hoped for, the realities of election day leave little hope for a more limited reformist coalition. But a PDI-P–led government, in which its two partners represent the moderate Islamic voice and Golkar makes sure the machine putters along, would at least allow for the increasingly tight space for religious minorities to widen again. •

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IF REPUTABLE polls are to be believed, Indonesia’s Islamic parties are headed for their worst result ever in this week’s national elections, with four of the five Islamic parties predicted to lose support. According to the final pre-election surveys of Indikator and Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting, the total Islamic-party vote is 21 per cent and 24 per cent respectively, well down on the 29 per cent gained in 2009 and much lower than the 43 per cent in Indonesia’s first democratic election in 1955. Compared to their 2009 results, four of the five Islamic parties have shown falls of between 10 and 70 per cent in polls over the past eighteen months.

The one exception to this trend is the National Awakening Party, or PKB, which was founded in 1998 by Abdurrahman Wahid (“Gur Dur”), the then chair of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, and later the nation’s fourth president (1999–2001). In the first post-Soeharto election in 1999, PKB gained about thirteen million votes, but this fell to just five million in 2009. Both surveys suggest PKB is likely to lift its vote to between 7.2 per cent and 8.5 per cent this week, almost double the 4.8 per cent it gained at the 2009 election. If these forecasts hold true, PKB will once again be Indonesia’s largest Islamic party – a title it hasn’t held since the 1999 election – and will be the fifth-biggest party overall.

A number of factors explain PKB’s resurgence. To begin with, for the first time in a decade the party enjoys close relations with NU. The NU chair, K.H. Said Agil Siraj, has been appearing in PKB advertisements, as have many other previously hostile NU leaders. This is a boon for the party, which draws nearly all of its support from NU’s vast membership, estimated to exceed forty million. A major part of the party’s strategy for 2014 has been to secure a much larger percentage of the NU vote, especially in NU’s populous East and Central Java heartlands. For this reason, the renewed warmth in PKB–NU relations is likely to be a major reason for the party’s rising stocks.

PKB has also been a relatively stable party over the past few years, without major graft scandals and the factional infighting that marred its preparation for the two previous election campaigns. Many of the previously disaffected ulama (Islamic scholars and leaders) who joined other parties have returned to PKB’s fold, providing a long-absent sense of unity.

The media has also made much of PKB’s recruitment of popular entertainers to its cause. Most prominent among them is Indonesia’s best-known dangdut performer, Rhoma Irama, an unlikely PKB presidential candidate whose son is a legislative candidate for the party. Another high-profile supporter is the rock singer Ahmad Dhani. While these artists have drawn big crowds to PKB campaign rallies, it is doubtful that they will swing the votes of many NU members.

But the most intriguing factor in the party’s turnaround has been the involvement of Rusdi Kirana, a Chinese non-Muslim and the boss of Indonesia’s fastest-growing airline, Lion Air. Rusdi joined the party with great fanfare in January 2014, claiming that he was a friend of the late Gus Dur and an admirer of PKB’s brand of religious pluralism. He was immediately appointed deputy chairman of the party and set about using his substantial wealth and connections to the party’s electoral advantage.

In February, Rusdi established NU–Lion, a program to direct financial assistance and economic opportunities to NU members. In the initial phase, the equivalent of several hundred thousand Australian dollars has been made available to young NU entrepreneurs, with much more ambitious disbursements and projects promised for future years. Rusdi claimed that the NU–Lion collaboration is part of his broader plan to empower and economically develop NU’s relatively deprived membership, but the hasty launch of the scheme just prior to the election suggested that it was at least partly aimed at further tightening PKB’s political ties with NU.

Rusdi appears to have poured far larger sums into direct electoral activities. He has employed Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting, which is one of Indonesia’s most highly regarded political consultancy firms, to advise PKB on its campaign, and is bankrolling a sizeable portion of the party’s advertising and on-the-ground election machinery, especially in East and Central Java. The impact of this on PKB’s campaigning has been considerable. In the previous two elections, the party ran modest and unexceptional campaigns, lacking the resources for extensive media promotion. With Rusdi’s funds, it now has high-profile marketing, with abundant billboards, electronic media advertisements, brochures and well-organised rallies and meetings. These activities have enlivened PKB’s campaign and brought renewed optimism to the party’s cadre.

Rusdi’s sudden involvement and largesse have drawn mixed responses from within the party and NU. On the one hand, in an increasingly monetised electoral environment such as Indonesia’s, having large campaign funds can be critical to increasing a party’s vote. This is especially true when, as is the case for PKB, a party lacks charismatic or highly regarded figures who might capture the public’s imagination. Proponents of a more plural and “moderate” Islamic political agenda also welcome Rusdi’s involvement on the grounds that such an intervention will help to reverse what they see as an increasingly conservative and religiously intolerant trend in Indonesian Islam in recent years, particularly during Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s presidency.

But many wonder about Rusdi’s motives. Despite his professed closeness to Gus Dur, most NU people admit to having never seen him in the former president’s company, though they accept his pro-pluralism stance as genuine. Rusdi appears also to be using PKB as a means to gain bragging rights over one of his rivals, the media magnate Hary Tanoesoedibjo, who joined ex-general Wiranto’s Hanura Party and quickly became its vice-presidential candidate. Rusdi has made no secret in PKB circles of his determination to see PKB win more votes than Hanura, something the polls suggest will be easily achieved.

There is also much speculation about Rusdi’s own commercial or political plans. In business circles, rumours are circulating that Rusdi may want to use his PKB connections to expand the number of routes flown by Lion Air. To gain access to more remote areas, he would require the approval of the Minister for Development of Disadvantaged Areas, a position currently held by PKB’s Helmy Faishal Zaini. Perhaps more fanciful are rumours that PKB would nominate Rusdi as transport minister in the next government, an all-too-glaring conflict of interest given that he owns a major airline. More likely is that Rusdi, like a number of other leading business people, finds it financially expedient to tie himself to one party rather than be unaligned and open to pressure from many parties for large donations. Although his PKB role obliges him to funnel money to the party, this may well be a much smaller sum than he would need to spend to keep favourable relations with the other major parties.

Last of all, some PKB and NU activists are uneasy about how Rusdi has been “parachuted” into such a senior party position. They smile wryly at his avowed desire to develop NU’s economic life and reduce poverty, asking why he had not previously shown any interest in these issues. Media reports indicate that in recent years he sought to join other parties – including Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle and President Yudhoyono’s Democrat Party – but was rebuffed. Rusdi has admitted to PKB members that one reason he chose their party was because his contributions could have a big impact in NU’s needy community, which was unlikely to be the case if he joined a bigger party with many donors.

Rusdi’s role in this election also raises deeper questions about the nature of Indonesian democracy and Islamic politics. Is it a good thing for a multimillionaire to step into a middling party in which he or she has exhibited no previous interest and become one of its senior executives and major financiers? Magnates are playing an increasing role in Indonesian political parties, often shifting from one to another depending on their interests. As parties suffer growing marginalisation in the political system, their response has usually been to seek access to the financial resources they need either by holding strategic government positions or by attracting wealthy benefactors, or both. They give little attention to building membership, reforming internal structures or developing policies to deepen the party’s roots in the community and offer a clearer identity. This is particularly so for Islamic parties based, to varying degrees, on quite well-defined constituencies and sets of Islamic principles.

It is hard to avoid the impression that Rusdi’s joining with PKB is as much about ego and self-interest as it is about the admirable pursuit of pluralism and economic empowerment of poorer Indonesian Muslims. Whether this is a good or bad thing for PKB depends on how both Rusdi and the party manage the relationship. If Rusdi fails to deliver on his promises to PKB and NU, then he will have done no more than help the party secure a bigger vote at this election – a small achievement given his wealth, managerial expertise and rhetoric. If PKB and NU also fail to make good use of the resources and skills that Rusdi has provided then they will repeat the errors of other parties by just using their benefactors largely for short-term gain. •

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IN THE grand, white, pillared building facing Indonesia’s National Monument in Jakarta is the office of Indonesia’s most talked-about figure, city governor Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. Although he has yet to nominate as a candidate for the Indonesian presidency, Jokowi is leading in all the major polls, some of which see him attracting as much as 45 per cent of the vote, with his nearest rival at around 12 per cent. Just last week, the Indonesia-based magazine Globe Asia named him Man of the Year. “Jakarta’s governor has redefined politics with his down to earth, get-your-hands-dirty style,” the magazine said. “The next stage – the presidency.”

On the afternoon I arrive to interview Jokowi, three mothers with babies born with dangerously oversized heads (a condition known as hydrocephalus) are waiting on the front porch, a space frequented by members of Jakarta’s large population of urban poor. An assistant from the governor’s office listens to their story, registers them and gives them some money. But they don’t leave. By four o’clock the crowd has grown and journalists are beginning to position themselves for a brief interview opportunity. Jokowi appears through the large doors, dressed in a crisp white shirt and black pants. Indonesians often comment that he looks like a “common person,” and he was once depicted by Tempo, Indonesia’s highest-selling magazine, as a becak (pedicab) driver. But today, perhaps because of the grandeur of the surroundings and the way the crowd reacts, he seems somewhat regal.

Having politely answered questions from the journalists, Jokowi moves closer to the car. The mothers approach, intent on telling their story. He listens, interrupting only to say “go on” a few times. “Why then do you want to talk with me if you have already received money from us?” he asks once they’ve finished. “We wanted to see you in person,” says one of the mothers, “and see if you are as handsome as you are on TV.” Everyone laughs, but clearly these mothers haven’t just come for the money. They have embraced the Jokowi phenomenon.

JOKO Widodo, a little-known furniture retailer, became mayor of the central Javanese city of Solo in 2005. He won again, in a landslide, in 2010, only to resign in 2012 to run for governor of Indonesia’s capital. He came to Jakarta with a reputation for incorruptibility, and had recently been ranked third in the annual World Mayor Prize. Jokowi’s running mate was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Sumatran-born Christian of Chinese descent, popularly known as Ahok, who had a reputation as a clean straight-shooter who got things done.

While most Indonesian politicians still use television advertisements and posters in their campaigning, the Jokowi–Ahok ticket used campaign tools that were still unusual in Indonesia – including BlackBerry messaging, kooky YouTube videos, and matching t-shirts for the candidates – to promote its brand of “new” politics. The pair won the October 2012 election with 53.8 per cent of the vote. But their distinctive approach, and their momentum, didn’t stop there.

A large part of Jokowi’s success can be attributed to his blusukans, or “unscheduled visits.” He arrives, unannounced, in different parts of Jakarta to talk with local people about the issues affecting them. His skill lies in being interested in the details: where the bus stops, how the rubbish is collected, where the drains are blocked. As he showed the mothers outside city hall, he has a seemingly rare ability for a politician – he listens. Jokowi and Ahok also turn up at government offices, followed closely by television cameras, and have often caught public servants resting on their laurels. In a city crippled by traffic chaos, frequent floods and a debilitating bureaucracy, these visits helped create the hope that the two men would find solutions to some of Jakarta’s biggest problems.

Back in his office after a long day of visits to different parts of the city, surveying flood damage and talking to journalists, Jokowi sits comfortably in his chair. A naturally warm character, he seems relaxed despite his hectic schedule. As we begin our interview, he puts away the notes prepared for him by his staff, and talks off-the-cuff about the importance of the media, and in particular television, in his transformation from Solo mayor to the most popular candidate for president. “I learnt in Solo how to manage the media and to differentiate from other candidates,” he tells me. “We go to the problem locations. We go to the poor people, to the riverbank for example, and this is sexy for the media. If you interview in the office or shoot television footage in the office it is not sexy…” Jokowi has a talent for responding to questions spontaneously, and often jokes with journalists and fans. Before our interview, Indonesian actors starring in a new film had arrived to take photos with him to help promote the film. Many in the media describe his style as the “antithesis” of the way previous Indonesian leaders, including the current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, behave in public.

Like Jokowi, deputy governor Ahok is a “different” kind of politician, and not only because of his ethnicity and religion. When I arrive at his office to interview him, he immediately invites me to lunch with his staff. All issues are open for discussion, and during the hour-long meal it’s rare for more than twenty seconds to go by without Ahok contributing in his rapid-fire Indonesian. In contrast to the more softly spoken Jokowi, he has a quick, direct manner. He jokes, he points, he interrupts. It’s led the Indonesian media to describe them as a good-cop, bad-cop combination.

“This is a rebellious generation,” Ahok tells me. “People have seen the same type of politician and they are bored. They want someone different.” And there is little doubt it’s working, not only in the polls, but also on the ground. A monorail and a mass rapid transit network are being built to address the city’s enormous traffic problems. More public buses are on the roads. Plans have been developed to restore Jakarta’s historic Old Town, rundown for decades. Rivers are being widened and reservoirs developed to prepare for the imminent flood season.

One of Jokowi and Ahok’s most successful ventures has been to move street vendors from beside the road to create more traffic lanes in the notorious preman (local thugs) area of Tanah Abang. “Tanah Abang was a symbol of unmanageability,” says Indonesia’s foremost author, Jakarta resident Goenawan Mohamad. “It was chaos. Jokowi was seen as a chaos-crasher.” Jokowi told the Jakarta Post that the move was successful because “there was a process that we went through. We approached them, prepared a concept and organised the strategy. We involved the locals, talked to the street vendors. We aimed to demonstrate the process to the public.” The scheme made headlines all over Indonesia. “Jakarta is a testing ground,” says Goenawan. “If you can get things done here in Jakarta you can get things done nationally.”

Jokowi’s popularity soon extended across Indonesia. In early 2013, when pollsters started to include him among potential candidates for president, they found he was already leading the race by a slim margin. By December, he had reached the low to mid 40s. One recent poll showed that he could run with any candidate as vice-president, no matter how unpopular, and still win. And he hasn’t even nominated yet.

WITH residents of the other Indonesian islands often complaining about Jakarta-centric politics and pushing for greater decentralisation, how has the governor of the capital gathered so much support? One way to approach this question is to examine the role of Indonesia’s media. Jokowi’s blusukans are not only about the people he meets in person: they have become major media events, making for great television in particular. People hug him, they smile and cheer, some even cry. “We are 80 to 85 per cent certain that TV can change the mindset of the people, and if TV can give positive information it can change perceptions,” says Jokowi. “If I stay in the office do you think they will cover me?”

According to market research company Roy Morgan Indonesia, over 98 per cent of Indonesians surveyed watch television in any given week. Even before the Jokowi phenomenon, around 70 per cent of stories on national TV news stations were from Jakarta. Indonesians from all around the archipelago were watching this politician with a new style of talking directly with the people. Internal data from twenty-four-hour national news stations MetroTV and TVOne shows that when Jokowi is on the news, the ratings surge, while other political stories, especially corruption stories, cause viewers to switch channels.

When kompas.com reported that senior politician Amien Rais had criticised Jokowi, more than 11,000 readers commented, the highest number for a single story since the site was established in 2008. Politicians naturally became wary of criticising him. Just last week, seven out of the top eight most-read stories on kompas.com had Jokowi in the title (and the eighth featured Ahok). Kompas.com is largely read by urban, middle-class office workers, so clearly Jokowi’s popularity is not only among less well-off voters who might relate to Jokowi’s becak driver image. Chief editors of media companies say that the Indonesian media has never seen a phenomenon like Jokowi before.

As Kompas chief editor Rikard Bagun says, “He is the people’s darling, not the media’s darling. They feel he is close to the people. The media is just amplifying the people’s views.” Outside Jokowi’s home island of Java, stories circulate. In Maluku, 2700 kilometres from Jakarta, I was told by a local that Jokowi is great because he trusts his people and thus “never travels with a bodyguard.” Even further east in Papua, a local told me he would vote for Jokowi because “everywhere he goes, he travels with four Papuan bodyguards.” According to one letter to a daily newspaper, “Jokowi is so accustomed to feeding his people first, he eats only whatever is left over. That’s why he’s so thin.” Another explained that Jokowi was appealing because he is “a commoner, the type riding on ojek, metro mini or angkot, lost in the daily traffic to work.” Ahok agrees, saying, “People want the same as them. They see him as from the same village as them, as a simple man with similar protocols to them.” Above all, Jokowi seems to give people hope that Indonesian politics is changing for the better.

“Because I go out of the office, the media will follow,” says Jokowi, pictured here talking to journalists in Jakarta last October.
Eduardo M.C./ Flickr

What makes the Jokowi phenomenon all the more absorbing is that Indonesia’s presidential candidates usually own national media companies. Golkar candidate Aburizal Bakrie, who owns TVOne and Viva News, has made it clear that his outlets will operate in a similar way to Fox News in the United States. Hary Tanoesoedibjo, whose MNC Group television stations command around 42 per cent of the audience in Indonesia, is vice-presidential candidate for the Hanura Party; the party’s polling has improved since Tanoesoedibjo became involved and his media started to push its interests. Surya Paloh, who owns MetroTV and the newspaper Media Indonesia, is founder and presidential candidate for the Nasional Democrats. Potential Partai Democrat candidate Dahlan Iskan owns Jawa Pos Group, which has over 140 Indonesian-language newspapers nationwide, the largest print media group in the country. Even the current president owns a newspaper, Jurnal Nasional.

Jokowi and Ahok have bucked this trend, achieving tremendous success without playing the game of media ownership or paying journalists for regular coverage, which is also a common feature of local politics in the archipelago. “Since Solo, for nine years I have kept this policy,” Jokowi says. “It has not been difficult. Because I go out of the office, the media will follow.” Media moguls with political ambitions were originally very happy to see the Jokowi phenomenon increase their audience and readership, but now that he is the clear presidential favourite they are toughening up their coverage. Journalists from Bakrie’s and Tanoesoedibyo’s media companies have been told to avoid reporting Jokowi, or to focus on criticising his policies. Surya Paloh’s outlets were issued a similar directive last year, although last month he seemed to have a change of heart – the result of internal pressure from editors or poor ratings, perhaps, or because Surya might be holding out hopes for a coalition with the party of which Jokowi is a member, the Democratic Party of Struggle.

In any case, Indonesians can prepare for a media war in the lead-up to the first round of legislative elections in April. “People sometimes tell me, ‘You are not on TV because you don’t have a newspaper or a TV station,’” says Jokowi, “but the people are smart, they know why. People know, and they will switch channels. For me it’s not a problem if they don’t cover me.” On 16 January a rally was held to pressure the Indonesian Broadcasting Corporation to punish media stations which push their political party interests. Jokowi says he is not interested in owning media – “there is more than enough media in Indonesia” – and believes that media “should be independent,” although he stops short of saying media owners should not be allowed to run for political positions. “It’s okay as long as their companies give accurate information and are independent,” he says. Ahok points to the fact that they have used new media to great effect previously, and can put out content on YouTube. “I don’t care if they slander us. That’s why I put up my own content.”

But if nationwide television news stations are partly responsible for Jokowi’s popularity in an archipelago of thirty-four provinces and 17,000 islands, would a blackout or constant criticism mean a reduction in his popularity? “You have to trust the people,” says Goenawan Mohamad, “Look at the other alternatives. There was a vacuum and Jokowi stepped in. They vote for him because there is a need for a guy like Jokowi in Indonesia.” Try as they might, the old-school elite political candidate–media mogul might never be able to compete with Jokowi’s new brand of politics. Kompas’s Rikard Bagun agrees, “Jokowi is an antithesis to other candidates because he invites the people to discuss issues. There is a collective expectation that we need somebody to change things and they found it in Jokowi. He’s part of our destiny.”

FRIDAY 10 January is the Democratic Party of Struggle’s forty-first anniversary. Jokowi’s media caravan leaves early for South Jakarta, where he attends a ceremony beside the party’s founder, the former Indonesian president (2001–04), Megawati Sukarnoputri. Megawati is the most important person in Indonesian politics at present because it is she who will decide whether Jokowi will be the party’s presidential candidate. To do so, she will have to decide whether to run herself. Despite her clear unpopularity – she has lost in the last two elections to current President Yudhoyono and is currently only polling in the single digits – she still harbours a desire to remain as the party’s presidential candidate. As George Orwell once wrote, no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Jokowi doesn’t speak, and Megawati briefly announces that she will make a decision on the party’s presidential nomination once the legislative elections are completed in April. They leave the stage and enter the party’s headquarters, and the media temporarily relaxes. Suddenly Jokowi returns from the room and heads to his car, his long legs fully stretched at fast walking pace to avoid the crush of people following. Journalists scramble into cars packed with television cameras. “Only Jokowi and God know where we are headed next,” one journalist tells me. If God did happen to show up, I wonder, which of the two would the media caravan follow?

Our car is involved in numerous close shaves trying to keep up with the convoy. Soon we are at Halim Air Field in South Jakarta, where Jokowi is checking on the progress of the former military airport that will soon become commercial. He is continuing his practice of dropping in unexpectedly to check on the development of government projects. After the airport we stop suddenly beside the road, where Jokowi holds an impromptu press conference explaining that the road will need to change from four lanes to six to meet the traffic demands to the airport. Journalists again scramble for positions, and he takes detailed questions on the spot without any notes or assistance from his staff. He is distracted only by a passing angkot (local public transport), from which a group of young girls squeal, “It’s Jokowi!”

Then it is back to the cars, fighting through Jakarta’s traffic, to check on another location, this time in North Jakarta. We’ve visited four locations and it’s not even lunchtime. Jokowi rarely spends more than a few hours each day in his office, though he visits Megawati regularly. Such is the balancing act between trying to be an effective governor of Indonesia’s capital and pleasing the woman who holds the key to his nomination for president. Yet polling shows that even if he switched parties, he would probably still win.

A RUN for president will raise fresh questions about whether the Jokowi phenomenon can continue its push for a more transparent, action-oriented political sphere. Even if he does win, some fear that the diminishing powers of the presidency mean that he would lack the capacity to make significant changes. And, as Barack Obama found, when you run on a campaign of hope you are only ever going to disappoint people.

Jokowi is remaining tight-lipped about his presidential hopes, telling the media to ask Megawati if they want to know about the party’s candidate, and when I ask how he sees his future he only says, “All we can do is keep working hard.” But all that matters for now is whether he will have the opportunity to run for president and, in this relatively new democracy, whether the majority of Indonesians will get the chance to vote for the person they most want in that role. As for how long this media phenomenon will last, only time will tell. In the meantime, Indonesians are embracing an approach that could change the nature of politics in the country, and gives many of them the hope that things can change for the better. •

The post The Jokowi phenomenon appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN the news broke that Australia had tapped the mobile phones of the president of Indonesia, his wife, and senior officials, Indonesia’s foreign minister Marty Natalegawa seemed convinced that our intelligence service had acted illegally. “The Australian intelligence community has run amok,” he was quoted as saying. “It has conducted activities that are illegal in Indonesia, illegal in Australia, and certainly in contravention of international law and humanitarian rights practices as well.”

Was Dr Natalegawa right? The short answer is “partly”: the phone-tapping certainly violated Indonesian law, and possibly international law, but not Australian law.

In Indonesia, as in most countries, the unauthorised interception of telecommunications is prohibited under domestic law (see, for example, article 31 of Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transaction Law 2008 and the Telecommunications Act 1999). Assuming they were not authorised by the Indonesian government, the phone taps were therefore illegal under Indonesian law.

Unlawful intercepts may also breach a right to privacy. Indonesian law includes no general, all-encompassing right of this kind; instead, a variety of legislative provisions protect particular kinds of personal information and the national constitution provides a rather vague guarantee of the “right to protection of his/herself, family, honour, dignity, and property.” It is at least arguable, therefore, that the phone-tapping violated the right to privacy of the individuals concerned under Indonesian law. Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 also prohibits unauthorised phone-tapping, but this prohibition, not surprisingly, only applies to telecommunications networks within Australia.

The phone-tapping has also been described in the media as “spying” or “espionage.” Exact definitions of espionage will vary, but it is broadly understood to involve the gathering of information about a state – usually its security or defence – by or on behalf of another state or a foreign organisation. Most countries have laws prohibiting espionage within their own borders: in Australia’s case, it is prohibited in the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), section 91.1; in Indonesia’s case, in the Penal Code of Indonesia, articles 113–15; in Indonesian law, stealing documents and information – old-fashioned spying – is prohibited. Whether listening to and recording the telephone conversations of the wife of the Indonesian president amounts to espionage is doubtful, but it is clear that no Australian espionage law was broken.

Beyond domestic laws, the potential sources of an international law against espionage would either be treaties or customary international law. But there are no multilateral treaties that prohibit espionage, and it is hard to believe there ever will be, given that every state in the world today either engages in espionage or similar activities, or would do so if it had the capacity and opportunity. Indeed, some regard spying as a sovereign duty of government, part of its obligation to protect its citizens and their interests. If it ever comes into existence, the mooted “no-spy” agreement between the United States and Germany will be very interesting to read.

For the same reasons, espionage is unlikely to be prohibited by customary international law any time soon. Customary law evolves gradually, usually over a lengthy period, as states act consistently in a way that comes to acquire a sense of legal obligation. At present, states are acting in precisely the opposite way, and there is little prospect that they will suddenly change direction and abandon espionage and related activities.

OTHER areas of international law might be relevant, however. The first is the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of another state, a longstanding principle of customary international law. But it is generally accepted that to be unlawful, such intervention must be somehow coercive – there must be an element of one state trying to pressure another to act or not act in a certain way. So it is doubtful that the principle would be violated by foreign phone-tapping alone. Whether espionage violated the principle would depend on the circumstances, but it is certainly possible – if, for example, the activities went beyond the mere gathering of information to include more active interference in the target state’s affairs.

Customary international law prohibits a state from exercising its authority, or undertaking state activities, in another state’s territory without the latter’s permission. It is arguable that phone-tapping, espionage and similar activities violate this principle: they are certainly state activities, carried out with (in this case) Australian government authority, in the territory of another state (Indonesia), without that state’s permission. This assumes, as media reports suggest, that the activities took place in Indonesia. If they took place elsewhere – in Australia, for example, by intercepting satellite communications to and from Indonesia – then the principle would not be violated. In that situation, however, the principle of non-intervention could still be violated.

A third aspect of international law that might be relevant is the right to privacy, enshrined in several international human rights instruments, including the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (article 17), to which both Australia and Indonesia are parties. Still to be settled, however, is the extent to which a state is obliged to respect this right in the case of an individual outside the state. The current position (in cases before the European Court of Human Rights, such as Al-Skeini v United Kingdom, for example) seems to be that such rights extend only to those within a state’s territory or jurisdiction. None of the targets of the recent phone-tapping – nor of espionage more generally, in most cases – was within Australia’s territory or jurisdiction. But the right to digital privacy gained considerable political weight this week with a UN General Assembly committee condemning the possible “negative impact” on human rights of mass surveillance and interception of communications. The original draft resolution, prepared by Germany and Brazil, stated that surveillance of communications could be a human rights violation, but this was watered down after lobbying by the United States and Australia, among others. The resolution will go to the full General Assembly next month.

A final possibility arises if the espionage or phone-tapping is conducted by or from the Australian embassy in Indonesia. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1969, to which both Australia and Indonesia are parties, requires the state that sends a diplomatic mission (Australia, in this case) to respect the laws of the receiving state (Indonesia), and not to interfere in its internal affairs (article 41). It also forbids the use of the embassy premises “in any manner incompatible with the functions of the mission,” as set out in the Convention. One of these functions – in article 3(1)(d) – is “ascertaining by all lawful means conditions and developments in the receiving State, and reporting thereon to the Government of the sending State” (emphasis added). Use of the embassy to glean that information by unlawful means – as described above – would seem to be “incompatible” with this function, and therefore, if it has occurred, a contravention of article 41.

ULTIMATELY, any remedies for Indonesia are likely to be political rather than legal. If it were able to identify and apprehend the individuals responsible for the phone-tapping with a view to prosecuting them under Indonesian domestic criminal law, Australia would immediately claim state immunity for them. As a matter of international law, Indonesia would be bound to respect that immunity. Diplomatic immunity would also apply to any individuals of diplomatic rank.

Indonesia could complain through diplomatic channels of any violation of international law by Australia, but it couldn’t bring a claim in the International Court of Justice unless Australia expressly agreed: Indonesia has not submitted to the jurisdiction of the court under article 36(2) of its statute, and Australia’s own article 36(2) declaration only applies reciprocally.

Diplomatic remedies range from withdrawal of cooperation, as we are seeing presently in various fields, to the ultimate, draconian – and, for that reason, rarely taken – step of breaking off diplomatic relations. In between is the option of declaring a particular diplomat persona non grata, or recalling the Indonesian ambassador from Canberra for “consultations.”

But, as we saw in recent days, the lack of a legal remedy does not seem to have hindered Indonesia’s ability to embarrass and put significant diplomatic and political pressure on the Australian government. •

The post Australia’s Jakarta phone-tapping: was it illegal? appeared first on Inside Story.

As Victoria Glendinning points out in her perceptive and engaging new biography, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity, this is all rather a shame. Raffles was more complicated – and more interesting – than the cardboard caricatures invoked by devotees and detractors alike. He was a man beset by contradictions, torn between his ideals and his loyalty to the Empire. He made great friends and bitter enemies. He endured personal tragedy yet maintained an air of mischief. Most of all, nothing in his life was ever carved in stone. He lived in an age when anything seemed possible, when illness and death lurked in foetid water, and when the fortunes of men and nations might turn on the shot of a cannon or the length of a red carpet.

The name of Raffles has acquired an aristocratic ring, but Thomas Stamford Raffles (Tom to his friends) was a working-class boy from the village of Walworth just south of London, son of a sea captain who would later fall victim to some sort of scandal (no one seems to have figured out exactly what). Money was tight in the Raffles family – his mother once scolded him for the extravagant sin of reading by candlelight. Despite scant formal schooling, Tom was clearly a bright lad, and his uncle managed to get him a job in the city with the East India Company as an “extra clerk,” the lowest possible rung on the bureaucratic ladder, at a salary of fifty pounds a year.

So, at the age of fourteen, Raffles went to work in the inner recesses of the labyrinthine India House, the nerve centre of the sprawling, multi-tentacled Company. Originally a trading venture by London merchants determined to break the Dutch stranglehold on Indian spices, the Company became a commercial behemoth dealing not only in spices but also in tea, opium, silk, porcelain and ivory. It built its own ships, manned by crews flying its flag and wearing its uniform. It had its own army and its own settlements. By the time Raffles arrived in 1795, the Company was already 200 years old and the largest single employer in the country; some 30,000 people in Britain depended on it for their livelihood. In truth, the nerves had acquired more than a touch of sclerosis; India House was a sunless maze of departments, offices, cubicles and passages where thousands of anonymous clerks struggled to keep afloat on the tidal wave of correspondence that the Company generated. Amid the gloom and must and the rustling of quills, Raffles copied and recopied letters, abstracts, narratives and dispatches for its far-flung operations – and there he learned the subtleties of bureaucratic infighting.

The Company maintained two small settlements on the Malay peninsula, Malacca and Penang. Their primary value lay in their proximity to the sea route to China, which ran through the Strait of Malacca. Anxious to guard the route from the French and the Dutch (not to mention numerous local bandits), the Company decided to upgrade Penang. This involved establishing a dockyard, building up the fortifications, and expanding its complement of quill-pushers, which meant there was now a need for a bright young clerk. In 1805 Raffles married a beautiful widow, Olivia Mariamne Fancourt, and took her with him on the adventure of a lifetime – the six-month sea voyage to Malaya.

In Penang, Raffles fell in love a second time – with the East. He quickly mastered the Malay language and gained a thoroughgoing appreciation for local history, culture and customs. Meanwhile, he was becoming indispensable to the Company in Malaya, where the situation was growing complicated. Initially, the Company planned to pay for the upgrading of Penang by downgrading Malacca, which it had seized from the Dutch in 1795. The Company’s ruling body, the Court of Directors, decreed that Malacca should be abandoned, its ancient Portuguese fortifications demolished, and its population transferred to Penang. Predictably, this decision did not sit well with Malacca’s inhabitants, who lodged immediate protests. The governor of Penang, Philip Dundas, found himself in the middle of this mess, and sent a message back to India House asking the directors to reconsider.

In an era when a dispatch required six months to travel from sender to recipient, official orders from London often had a surreal flavour. “All stories were back-stories, all responses retrospective,” Glendinning writes. “Out East, one lived in the present, waiting for the past to catch up. The resulting psychological dislocation contributed to the often irrational behaviours of the servants of early Empire.”

After much roundabout correspondence, the directors finally changed their minds, although not until after giant chunks of the Portuguese fort were blown up. By this time, Governor Dundas was dead (a casualty of foetid water) and Raffles was secretary of Penang. Unfortunately, the colony’s growth seemed to stall. The naval yard failed to materialise and the ships were never built. Raffles, his antennae attuned to the wavelengths of politics, was among the first to sense that Penang had lost momentum. With his ambitious streak, he cast about for a new opportunity and saw it beckoning from the south.

Java, with its massive population, ancient civilisation, and fertile fields of rice, coffee, pepper, cotton, tobacco and indigo, was a tempting prize. For centuries it had been occupied by the Dutch, who had been conquered by the French, who were at war with the British. By invading Java, Raffles argued, the Company could safeguard its trade route to China and pry a jewel from Napoleon’s clutches at the same time. In 1811, a massive British fleet sailed from Malacca carrying 12,000 troops, and anchored in the bay of Batavia (Jakarta). Within weeks the Dutch position collapsed, and Raffles, barely thirty years old, found himself lieutenant-governor of Java. As he wrote to a friend:

I am here alone, without any advice, in a new country with a large native population of six or seven millions of people, a great proportion of foreign European and a standing army of not less than seven thousand men… I can hardly say what change has taken place in me since we parted. I feel I am somewhat older, and, in many points of a worldly nature, I am apt to view men and things in a somewhat different light, but it is my belief that I am intrinsically the same.

It was in Java that Raffles’s ideals collided head-on with the stark realities of empire. He wanted to liberate the island from Dutch oppression, abolish slavery, restructure the economy, promote free trade and usher in a golden age of prosperity. Back in London, however, Java was seen as little more than a poker chip in the great rivalry with France. The Company did not want liberation, it wanted profit, and Raffles’s schemes sounded like meddling extravagances. Nonetheless, he took advantage of the ponderous delays and rushed ahead without waiting for official approval.

For all his knowledge of the East and his skill at bureaucratic intrigue, Raffles was a novice at governing. He outlawed the slave trade and doggedly dismantled the system of regents, local middlemen who ruled their villages as virtual dictators, deciding who would grow which crops and at what price they would be paid. Raffles wanted farmers to choose the crops they grew and to settle prices on the open market, but for various reasons his reforms did not work very well. The island economy was chronically short of cash and exports slumped. Meanwhile, Raffles appointed his friends to government posts, bought some land at a rather attractive price, and quarrelled with rival colonial officials. The harrumphing in London grew louder. In 1815 came the stunning news that Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo. The war with France was over. Britain had signed a treaty with Holland and was giving Java back to the Dutch. Raffles, in other words, was out of a job.

By all rights, his story should have ended there. His wife Olivia had died in Batavia (foetid water again), his own health was ravaged by the tropical climate, and his reputation was distinctly tarnished. As he arrived in Falmouth, “thin and sallow, with a jaundiced eye and shapeless leg,” toting thirty tons of Javanese booty (including 450 puppets and two stone Buddha heads from Borobudur), one can imagine him retreating into a country estate and whiling away the days cataloguing his collection. But Raffles was not one to give up. He had, as Glendinning writes, “unquenchable drive and optimism.” In London he made some important friends, including chemist Humphrey Davy and naturalist Joseph Banks. He managed to clear away the cloud of official disapproval of his conduct as lieutenant-governor. He remarried, wrote a book, History of Java, which further enhanced his fame, and was even knighted by the Prince Regent (later George IV). Raffles was becoming respectable – despite himself.

Within a couple of years, the Company dispatched the rebranded Raffles to its settlement of Bencoolen, an isolated port on a desolate stretch of Sumatra. He was not impressed.

This is, without exception, the most wretched place I ever beheld. I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the state of ruin and dilapidation which surrounds me… The roads are impassable; the highways in the town overrun with rank grass; the Government-house a den of ravenous dogs and polecats… In truth, I never could have conceived any thing half so bad. We will try and make it better; and if I am well supported from home, the West coast may yet be turned to account.

Raffles refused to moulder. He freed slaves, banned cockfighting, engaged in skilful diplomatic manoeuvring with the local sultans, and spent months tramping around the interior, exploring the ancient kingdom of Menangkabau, which had once ruled all Sumatra from an island fortress known as Singapura. The story of Singapura resonated with Raffles on many levels. Intellectually, he was fascinated by Malay history and its pre-Islamic culture. But there was an ambitious angle, too. Raffles dreamed of a united Sumatra, resurgent under British rule, reclaiming its destiny as a great civilisation. Somehow the legend lent his dream credibility.

Meanwhile, London was coming around to the idea that Raffles might have been right about the trade route after all. It was too late to think of retaking Java, but there was a growing sense of urgency about establishing a viable port roughly halfway between India and China. Raffles and the former Company boss of Malacca, Major William Farquhar, were ordered to survey the Strait of Malacca for a suitable location. In 1819, Raffles and Farquhar sailed from Penang to the Carimon Islands and finally arrived at the island of Singapore, whose favourable harbour caught their attention.

If Raffles was dreaming of the ancient splendour of Singapura, he had a rude awakening. Glendinning describes the scene like this:

There were about one hundred and fifty people living on the island of Singapore; a few Chinese settlements in the forest and, on the shore, the Malay sea-gypsies who subsisted on fishing and piracy and whose activities were evident from the human skulls bobbing around in the shallow waters. A larger dwelling, back from the river which debouched into the bay, was that of the local governor, Temenggong Abdul Rahman of Johore. The ground beyond the sandy beach was partially cleared. All the rest was smothered in jungle.

Nonetheless, Raffles approached the inhabitants with exquisite tact. He knew that failure to secure a claim to the island would be fatal to his reputation. After sniffing out the local political situation, he struck a deal with the Temenggong and his nominal overlord, the Sultan of Johore. The British would get permission to build a settlement; in return, the Sultan and the Temenggong would get 5000 Spanish dollars per year and protection from their rivals. On 6 February 1819, Raffles rolled out fully 100 feet of red carpet, and signed a treaty to the boom of cannon salute and the giving of gifts – opium, guns and wool. With the Union Jack hoisted, Raffles sailed back to Penang the very next day, leaving Farquhar in charge. Although he had accomplished the deal with consummate diplomatic skill, he was in a hurry to return to Penang and his pregnant wife.

Singapore’s growth was nothing short of breathtaking. In three years, the population swelled to 10,000. Raffles laid down a grid of streets, dividing the island into zones for the Chinese, the Malays, the Europeans, and so on. “Here all is life and activity,” Raffles exulted. “It would be difficult to name a place on the face of the globe, with brighter prospects or more present satisfaction.” The port was teeming with ships, trade was thriving, swamps were filled in. Markets, police stations, a marine yard – the city was born in a hurry and grew up that way.

Yet it is difficult to know how much credit Raffles should receive for this runaway success. While he set down fundamental principles, such as banning slavery and making Singapore a free port, open to ships of all nations, he spent remarkably little time there, barely a year altogether. Most of the day-to-day work was delegated to others, particularly Major Farquhar, with whom Raffles eventually had a disastrous falling-out; Glendinning includes delicious quotes from their increasingly testy letters, penned in florid Georgian prose. In 1823, Raffles, now suffering from chronic headaches, sacked the major in a rather humiliating fashion.

If Raffles and the Golden Opportunity has any shortcoming, it is that Glendinning, a prizewinning author who has written biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Anthony Trollope and Leonard Woolf, gives short shrift to the factors behind Singapore’s long-running success and pays scant attention to its future geopolitical significance (see review below). On the other hand, she reaps copious insights from letters sent to and from various members of Raffles’s family, many of which had not been available to earlier biographers. This rich harvest allows her to construct a nuanced portrait of a complex personality.

Raffles brimmed with confidence before the invasion of Java, for example, but struggled with doubt once he was in charge of it. He deplored slavery but summarily executed a Malay who had stabbed a colonial official, and had the corpse drummed around town on a buffalo cart. He venerated Malay civilisation but would never have entertained the idea of Malay equality. A lesser biographer might have been tempted to downplay these contradictions; Glendinning treats them not as documentary inconsistencies relegated to footnotes but rather as fundamental tensions inherent both in Raffles’s psychology and indeed in the psychology of empire itself.

Raffles never saw Singapore again. Three years after firing Farquhar he died of what was described as a “bilious attack,” but which seems to have been a massive bloodclot in the brain. He would surely be amazed to look out over the banks of the Singapore River to the skyscrapers rising above Boat Quay and the massive container ships crowding the harbour beyond. But one can’t help thinking that seeing his own statue would prompt a chuckle of disbelief. •

Baby or bathwater?

Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore
By Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh | Hong Kong University Press | US$25

Ten years ago, two Singaporean twenty-somethings set off to spend a month bicycling around the Malay peninsula on a budget of RM10 (US$3) a day. They pedalled through forests, high into mountains, and along lonely stretches of coastline. For many travellers, an excursion like this would produce little more than colourful photos, mosquito bites and sturdy calves. But Vadaketh is hardly your average traveller. An editor with the Economist Intelligence Unit, he is a powerful writer with an eye for compelling detail. The book is filled with memorable encounters, beginning with the little old lady selling roadside trinkets, who had spent most of her life as a communist insurgent in the jungle.

More important, however, Floating on a Malayan Breeze explores the peculiar relationship between Singapore and Malaysia. After a traumatic separation in 1965 (imagine Manhattan being amputated from New York City or Miami winkled out of Florida), the two nations pursued starkly different paths. Malaysia followed a policy favouring the ethnic Malays (also known as the bumiputeras, or sons of the soil) and enshrined Islam as the state religion, while Singapore adopted a colourblind policy towards its ethnic groups and promoted a governing ideology of “society above self.”

Almost fifty years later, the two nations’ paths have continued to diverge. Singapore is richer, cleaner and blander. But, as Vadaketh discovered, many Malaysians think they have the better end of the deal. “It was a shock to discover that we were not Malaysia’s prized baby, but just the bathwater,” he writes. In truth, both countries suffer from inequality, but of different kinds. In Malaysia, Malays (who were traditionally disadvantaged under British rule) enjoy certain preferences, which seems manifestly unfair. In Singapore, however, the gap between rich and poor – as measured by the Gini coefficient – is higher than that of China or the United States.

Despite flat tyres and aching muscles, Vadaketh pursues these themes in crowded coffeeshops and lonely beachside shacks, with fishermen, doll makers, cab drivers, police officers, politicians and businesspeople. The lively travelogue is interspersed with insightful accounts of the contentious political squabbles that make the Singapore–Malaysia relationship so colourful, from water rights to journalistic freedom to who boasts the cleanest toilets. Overall it provides a vivid demonstration that while the two nations have trod – or pedalled – different paths, their destinies are inextricably linked. •

The post The lion and the Lion City appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the brevity of the visit and the fact that Cooper and Main were not able to travel outside the provincial capital of Jayapura, their report gave an insight into not only how the Indonesian security forces have been able to maintain their physical control, but also why the government has not been able to resolve the conflict. Indeed, the means by which Indonesia sustains its control in Papua are among the major factors that help explain why successive Indonesian governments have failed to find a viable solution. The criminalisation of peaceful political activity, state violence against pro-independence activists, and human rights abuses not only sustain Indonesian control but also fuel Papuan antagonism.

Cooper and Main’s assertion that members of an Australian and US–trained and funded Indonesian police anti-terrorism unit, Detachment 88, were involved in the murder of pro-independence leader Mako Tabuni once again made Papua an issue in Australia’s relations with Indonesia. Foreign minister Bob Carr told the ABC that Australia had made representations to Indonesia about Mako Tabuni’s death and requested that an investigation be held. Carr added that since becoming foreign minister he had not hesitated to raise the issue of human rights abuses in Papua with the Indonesian authorities, including his counterpart, Marty Natalegawa.

After Carr’s first meeting with Marty Natalegawa in March this year, Greens senator Richard Di Natale, whose portfolio includes West Papua, had questioned Carr about Papua. Carr told the Senate that the first thing he had done when they met was to assure his counterpart that both sides of Australian politics recognised Indonesian sovereignty in Papua, as had been reaffirmed in the 2006 Lombok Treaty. In keeping with Indonesian aspirations for the treaty, Carr added, perhaps with the questioner in mind, “It would be a reckless Australian indeed who wanted to associate himself with a small separatist group which threatens the territorial integrity of Indonesia and that would produce a reaction among Indonesians towards this country. It would be reckless indeed.” Carr went on to repeat this argument, adding, “That is reckless and it is not in Australia’s interests.”

According to Carr, Marty Natalegawa volunteered that Indonesia had “a clear responsibility to see that their sovereignty is upheld in respect of human rights standards.” Carr interpreted this as an indication that Indonesia listened to Australian representations. But statements like these have lost their credibility with each act of state violence and abuse of human rights in Papua. As Carr himself noted, previous Labor foreign ministers had made representations to Indonesia about these acts — as, he presumed, had his Coalition predecessors.

In August, the Indonesian vice-president’s adviser on matters relating to Papua, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, lamented that whenever something “negative” happens in Papua it becomes an issue in Australia. The difficulty for both governments is that “negative” things happen frequently in Papua and Indonesian government attempts to quarantine Papua from international scrutiny are not always effective, as Hayden Cooper and Lisa Main’s report demonstrates.

Mobile technologies in particular have made the strategy increasingly redundant, if not counterproductive. The video of Indonesian security forces’ violent disbanding of the peaceful Papuan People’s Congress in October 2011 was easily accessible on the internet within days of the event and broadcast by Al Jazeera to an international audience. Indonesian soldiers’ “trophy” videos of colleagues torturing Papuan villagers, posted on the internet in 2010, belied their government’s representation of Indonesia’s policy in Papua and the security forces’ behaviour.

IN HIS statements in the media and in parliament, Bob Carr was doing no more than restating a position that all Australian governments have held on Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua for half a century. In January 1962, the external affairs minister, Garfield Barwick, convinced his cabinet colleagues that it was not in Australia’s interests to support the emergence of a small and, in Barwick’s view, unviable state in West Papua. Barwick reversed the twelve-year-old Menzies government policy in support of the Dutch in West Papua and withdrew Australian support for Dutch promises of self-determination for Papuans and decolonisation separately from Indonesia.

Barwick argued that supporting the emergence of an independent West Papua was incompatible with Australia’s strategic imperative to develop close cooperative relations with a preferably non-communist Indonesia. Australia accepted the New York Agreement of 1962, under which Papua passed from Dutch to Indonesian control. But the government didn’t anticipate that the resolution of the Indonesia–Netherlands dispute would sow the seeds of a seemingly intractable conflict between the Indonesian government and many of its Papuan citizens. Barwick expected that the young Dutch-educated Papuan politicians who had demanded the right to form an independent state in the early 1960s would be accommodated within Indonesia.

The 2006 Lombok Treaty, to which Carr referred, not only restated Australian support for Indonesian sovereignty in Papua, but also went further. The “Papua” clause committed the Australian government to “not in any manner support or participate in activities by any person or entity which constitutes a threat to the stability, sovereignty or territorial integrity of the other Party, including by those who seek to use its territory for encouraging or committing such activities, including separatism, in the territory of the other Party…” Indonesia hoped, naively, that this provision would oblige the Australian government to limit the pro-independence activities of exiled Papuans and their supporters.

The treaty has not restrained the criticisms of Indonesian policy and the campaigning of Papuans and their supporters in Australia. But the Australian government, caught between its desire not to offend Indonesian sensitivities and the flow of reports of ongoing violence and human rights abuses in Papua, has been rendered mute. Conflict and human rights abuses in Papua are not part of the story the Australian government is keen to tell a sceptical public about Indonesia; it wants Australians to believe that this neighbour is no longer a military dictatorship and has grown into a vibrant democracy with a rapidly developing economy. It wants to convince Australians that the relationship with Indonesia is of the greatest importance, as is reflected in the fact that the embassy in Jakarta is Australia’s largest and the aid program in Indonesia is Australia’s most generous.

The Lombok Treaty was negotiated after the shockwaves generated by the arrival of forty-three independence-flag-waving Papuan asylum seekers on Cape York in January 2006. Australia’s decision to accept the Papuans as asylum seekers and grant protection visas led to the recall of the Indonesian ambassador. In the often turbulent history of Australia’s relations with Indonesia, this is the only time an Indonesian government has acted in this way.

Although the treaty codified cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in counterterrorism, intelligence, maritime security, law enforcement and defence, it is Australia’s commitments in relation to Papua that are most important for Indonesia. When president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono spoke to the Indonesian media after his discussions with Julia Gillard in Darwin in early July this year, the first issue he discussed was Papua, telling the Indonesian press that Gillard fully supported Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua. In turn, he assured Gillard that his government was raising the level of welfare and standards of justice for Papua.

In contrast to Yudhoyono’s emphasis on Papua in his comments to Indonesian journalists after the meeting, Gillard was silent on the issue. Instead, she highlighted the areas of cooperation important to the Australian government, including defence, people smuggling, economic development and trade, as well as cooperation in the multilateral fora like the G20 and APEC.

Indonesian leaders seem to feel that they need to remind Australia of its commitment to Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua at every opportunity, which suggests that the serial repetition of that commitment by Carr and his predecessors is not taken on its face value. As Dewi Fortuna Anwar noted, “There is still a strong belief in some Indonesian circles the separation of East Timor from Indonesia resulted partly from Australian pressures… We know there are people in Australia who support the Free Papua Movement.” The subtext: “For twenty years you said that East Timor was Indonesia’s, then you changed your mind when the crunch came.” Australian opinions and activities in relation to Papua, within both the government and civil society, are viewed in Jakarta through the prism of the separation of East Timor.

Responding to Carr’s interview, Mahfudz Siddiq, the head of the Indonesian parliament’s Commission for Foreign Affairs and Security, suggested that Carr’s call for an investigation into Mako Tabuni’s murder reflected double standards. Mahfudz had never heard an Australian politician complaining about the security forces killing Muslim terror suspects. He considered that the Detachment 88 was doing its job in Papua, combating terrorism.

THIS criticism of Bob Carr highlights some of the complexities of the bilateral relationship and the different security priorities of the Australian and Indonesian governments. Detachment 88 was established after the 2002 Bali bombing, with US and Australian support, to combat terrorism. The military and police skills developed within the unit can be used for pursuing Islamist terrorists, as desired by the United States and Australia, and equally for repressing Papuan separatists, who many Indonesians regard as terrorists too. There have been reports that Detachment 88 was involved in the killing of Kelly Kwalik, another pro-independence leader, in December 2010, and in the violent breakup of the peaceful Papua Congress of October 2011, which reportedly left three dead. Richard Di Natale reminded Carr about the differences between Indonesian and Australian security priorities when he referred to a bipartisan recommendation of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties to “increase transparency in defence cooperation agreements to provide assurance that Australian resources do not directly or indirectly support human rights abuses in Indonesia.”

Like many Indonesian politicians, Mahfudz Siddiq is sensitive about any foreign interest in Papua. But he and the deputy head of the commission, T.B. Hasanuddin, have been calling for change in the Indonesian government’s Papua policies. Their concerns about Papua became more acute with the spate of shootings in May and June around Jayapura, which included the murder of Mako Tabuni. The commission visited Papua during the violence and became aware of the atmosphere of fear that the shootings had created. Mahfudz and Hasanuddin realised that foreign interest in the conflict was partly a result of the failure of government policies to resolve it. Since the June visit, they have advocated for government to take a comprehensive and peaceful approach using dialogue. They recognised that Papuans had little trust in the authorities and that the history of Papua’s integration into Indonesia during the 1960s had become a political issue.

Three months of advocacy brought no progress with the government. As a result, the commission had established a working committee on Papua. “If all these problems are allowed to go round and round and become a tangled web…” Mahfudz argued, “it will become a time bomb for this Republic.”

Mahfudz’s frustration is understandable. Towards the end of 2011 and at the beginning of this year there were signs that the Yudhoyono government was rethinking its approach to Papua. In November, the president announced that he was prepared to conduct a dialogue with Papuan leaders to resolve the conflict peacefully. He appointed retired general Bambang Darmono and Farid Hussain (who was involved in the peace negotiations in Aceh) as special representatives with briefs to promote dialogue. In December and February, the president and key ministers met with two groups of Papuan church leaders. To an extent this initiative reflected two years of advocacy and lobbying for dialogue by the Papua Peace Network, led by Papuan Catholic Theologian Neles Tebay, and Indonesian Institute of Sciences researchers under Muridan Widjoyo. Together, they had developed a systematic process to mobilise support for dialogue as the best means to resolve the conflicts in Papua.

There seems to have been little progress since the February meeting, however. Indeed, at the end of June, after a month of violence in Papua, President Yudhoyono told officer cadets in Bandung that he was not prepared to enter into a dialogue about issues related to national unity or a referendum on independence. He disparaged Papuan interest in re-examining the history of Papua’s integration into Indonesia. He emphasised that the United Nations and the international community recognised Papua as part of Indonesia, and said that it was the government’s responsibility to secure Papua and act firmly against any separatist movement. He requested the security forces not to be excessive or abuse human rights.

While President Yudhoyono did not dismiss the possibility of a dialogue entirely, he rejected any discussion about those issues that most concern Papuans. It is difficult to imagine a lasting resolution of the conflict that does not involve a frank dialogue about human rights abuses and the history of integration, among other sensitive issues. If the Papua conflict had been easy to resolve it would have happened decades ago. The president’s comments to the officer cadets identified core nationalist reasons why any Indonesian government will be reluctant to have a dialogue with Papuans. Many Papuans assume that dialogue means a discussion of a referendum, while the government in Jakarta can only countenance a discussion about the resolution of Papua’s problems within the Unity Republic of Indonesia.

Although the pattern of violence and human rights abuses in Papua has created an awareness in the media and among academics and some politicians in Jakarta that government policies are not working, there is no significant Indonesian political constituency for an accommodation of Papuan interests and values. The national consensus that Papua is an integral part of Indonesia, constructed by President Sukarno during the struggle against the Dutch in the 1950s and early 1960s, remains strong today. Indonesians, who have a strong sense that Papua is Indonesian, find it difficult to appreciate and accept that many Papuans do not share this national identity. Sukarno made Papua the object of a unifying nation-building campaign within which Papuans saw no place for themselves.

The policy impasse in Jakarta and the conflict in Papua place the Australian government in a difficult position. Like all its predecessors since 1962, the Gillard government doesn’t question Indonesian sovereignty in Papua. It shares the assessment that close and cooperative relations with Indonesia are a strategic imperative. Nevertheless, it has a strong interest in a resolution of the decades-old conflict that accommodates Papuan interests and values, not least because it is aware of the long shadow that the separation of East Timor cast over the bilateral relationship. The crisis over the asylum seekers in 2006 remains a reminder of the Papuan conflict’s capacity to destabilise Australia’s relations with Indonesia.

Bob Carr supports President Yudhoyono’s “commitment to raise the living standards of the people of Papua and reinvigorating special autonomy.” He says that “Australia believes that this is the best path – the best means – to achieving a safe and prosperous future for the Papuan people.” Unfortunately, it is unlikely that such anodyne support will encourage the president to make the difficult policy changes that might make resolution possible. •

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DESPITE the ordeal after their boat sank off the coast of Java on Saturday, some of the surviving asylum seekers have told journalists that they will board another boat – most likely just as overcrowded and unseaworthy as the one that sank – and try again to reach Australia. Why would they take this kind of risk yet again?

Between 2007 and 2009, Sandra Gifford and I led a research project that included interviews with asylum seekers and refugees living in Indonesia, the last country of departure for most people arriving here by boat. We discovered that asylum seekers and refugees don’t necessarily want to make Australia their home. They just want to have a home: a place where they can live in safety, support themselves with dignity, give their children a future through education, and belong. The knowledge that they had a realistic prospect of being resettled in a country that could fulfil these needs would have been enough to enable them to bear short-term insecurity. In fact, if these basic human needs could be fulfilled in Indonesia, they would have been happy to settle there. Unfortunately, neither a home in its true meaning nor the hope of one in the future can be found in Indonesia, or in most other countries in our region. Australia is one of the few exceptions to that rule.

The survivors of Saturday’s tragedy are nationals of Afghanistan and Iran. In all likelihood, they are refugees within the definition set out in the Refugee Convention and its Protocol. Under existing Australian law, if they do eventually manage to make it here by boat they will be able to seek and receive the protection Australia has promised under those treaties. Because the prospect of receiving protection in Australia is seen as a major reason why asylum seekers make the risky sea voyage, the federal government and the opposition would have us believe that the responsible thing to do is to persuade these people that they will not be given protection here.

The government’s preferred means of sending this deterrent message is the arrangement it struck with the Malaysian government on 25 July, which provided for the transfer to Malaysia of up to 800 people arriving irregularly in Australia by boat. Transferees would be given the opportunity to have asylum claims considered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, in Malaysia and, if found to be refugees, would have access to resettlement “pursuant to UNHCR’s normal processes.” In keeping with the “stop the boats” rationale, the two governments agreed to ensure that transferees would not receive any processing advantage over other asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia.

According to the latest figures, 95,300 refugees and asylum seekers were registered with UNHCR in Malaysia at the end of October 2011. The vast majority of all refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia are members of Burmese minority groups and are therefore unlikely to have the option of repatriating at any time in the foreseeable future. Equally unlikely is repatriation of members of three other sizeable refugee groups in Malaysia: Afghans, Iraqis and Somalis. Because the Malaysian government refuses to contemplate local integration as a durable solution for the refugees it hosts, resettlement is the only option for most. Even at a projected rate of between 9000 and 10,000 resettlement departures per year from Malaysia, though, transferees will typically face a wait of many years for resettlement.

It may well be the case that a credible threat of being consigned to a hellish limbo in Malaysia would lead to a significant reduction of irregular boat arrivals to Australia. But that hypothesis cannot be tested unless and until the government manages to procure passage of the Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011, overturning the High Court decision that currently prevents the implementation of the Malaysian Arrangement.

What the Malaysian Arrangement – or the Pacific Solution, to which the Coalition wishes to return, or any other extraterritorial processing arrangement – cannot resolve is the insecurity in the countries asylum seekers flee from and in most of the countries they flee through. For as long as this insecurity remains, any asylum seekers we manage to dissuade from travelling by boat to Australia will simply be diverted into equally irregular, equally risky routes to other more distant places where protection can still be found, or they will suffer and die in the “transit” countries in which we have ensured they remain trapped.

It is beyond the capacity of Australia or any other single country to solve that underlying problem. What is needed is regional cooperation or perhaps even global cooperation.

The good news is that there has been real progress made towards refugee protection cooperation in our region through an intergovernmental process called the Bali Process. As explained in a previous article, the Final Co-Chairs’ Statement of the Fourth Bali Regional Ministerial Conference, adopted on 30 March this year, sets out a non-binding Regional Cooperation Framework, or RCF, covering four main areas. First, people-smuggling syndicates should be eliminated and governments should promote and support opportunities for orderly migration. Second, wherever possible, asylum seekers should have access to consistent processes for assessing their claims, whether through common arrangements across the region or through regional assessment arrangements. Third, people found to be refugees should be offered durable solutions. Fourth, people found not to be in need of protection should be returned home, preferably on a voluntary basis, in safety and with dignity. The statement also gives regional officials the task of implementing the RCF “in conjunction with UNHCR and IOM” – the International Organization for Migration – “as appropriate through bilateral and multilateral arrangements.” Although the RCF is primarily a framework for border control cooperation, the incorporation of protection-related principles into the framework was a step forward for our region in which very few states have become parties to the Refugee Convention or Protocol.

Both the Australian and the Malaysian governments portrayed the Malaysian Arrangement as a practical implementation of the RCF. But the plan disregarded the protection-related principles of the RCF, which did not encourage the hope that the RCF would lead to improved refugee protection in the region. Notwithstanding the bad precedent set by the Malaysian Arrangement, though, it may still be possible to improve refugee protection in the region by building on the RCF. At a meeting in June, the Bali Process Steering Group considered a discussion note prepared by UNHCR and decided to recommend the creation of a Regional Support Office, located somewhere in South East Asia, operating under the direction of Australia and Indonesia in consultation with UNHCR and IOM. The purpose of the proposed office is “to facilitate the operationalisation of the [RCF].” The steering group also decided to recommend the creation of a working group “to further discuss and provide advice on the operationalisation of the [RCF] including the pilot-testing of joint activities in areas such as: processing and case management; resettlement and burden sharing; and return to countries of origin with respect to selected caseloads.”

In October, senior officials from the Bali Process countries decided to proceed with the establishment of a Regional Support Office, subject to the agreement of the process’s co-chair ministers. The officials also welcomed two proposals from Australia for projects that the office could take on: “a regional data harmonisation initiative” to “promote further harmonisation of information management between States and international organisations with a view to enhancing data collection, supporting further analysis and reporting, and facilitating information sharing and dialogue,” and a “voluntary repatriation capacity building and support project.” Unfortunately, neither of the Australian proposals necessarily have much to do with refugee protection. On the other hand, if UNHCR is able to nudge the Regional Support Office towards projects designed to put the refugee protection elements of the RCF into operation, then the region may yet start moving in the right direction. •

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THE twenty-sixth Southeast Asian Games kick off tomorrow night with what promises to be an impressive opening ceremony in the Indonesian city of Palembang, which is co-hosting the event with Jakarta. As the auspicious opening date (11/11/11) was chosen to imply, the games – involving Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia – are designed to tell an uplifting story of national progress and regional friendship. Indonesia also sees the event as a unique opportunity to reassert its traditional leadership of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – a hope reflected in the games’ slogan, bersatu & bangkit (united and rising) and in the opening ceremony’s evocation of the ancient maritime kingdom of Srivijaya, which was centred in the vicinity of modern-day Palembang.

But in the lead-up to the games – just like in the lead-up to the previous games, two years ago in Laos – these claims of past and future greatness were overwhelmed by tales of woe. As preparations entered their final month, the Hong Kong–based Asia Sentinel summed up the controversies that threatened to derail the event under the unambiguous title “Indonesia’s Games Mess.” “Instead of a source of national pride,” the website reported, “the games have become a national embarrassment riddled with corruption, delays and mismanagement that has nearly wrecked President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party and brought down a host of other officials and politicians.”

At the centre of the controversy has been the Democratic Party treasurer, Muhammad Nazaruddin, who is accused of accepting US$3 million in bribes on tenders for the construction of the athlete’s village in Palembang. Other senior officials, including the secretary of the Ministry of Sports, have also been suspended or arrested. The first prosecutions have already taken place, resulting in prison terms for two business figures. The corruption, alleged and proven, has provoked much anger and embarrassment; but what has made the whole affair so gripping, and so devastating for Indonesians and the games, has been the dramatic and public way in which it has played out.

Nazaruddin not only absconded the day before a travel ban was to come into effect, but during seventy-five days on the run proceeded to make accusations of his own, via Skype and Twitter, against the Corruption Eradication Commission and senior figures in his own party. Then, after being tracked down and arrested in Colombia, he was flown back to Indonesia, at considerable taxpayer expense, by private charter and, predictably perhaps, seemed to lose his memory and stopped talking all together. Having taken flak for giving Nazaruddin preferential treatment, the commission says his case will go to trial soon, and has flagged the possibility of charging another high-profile politician.

The result has been political soap opera of the highest order. The mainstream press, to say nothing of the online world, has loved it. If ordinary people had paid little attention to the SEA Games prior to Nazaruddin’s global jaunt, they certainly knew about them afterwards. Since then, the games have stayed in the news as the preliminary prosecutions in relation to the athlete’s village deal and the drama surrounding Nazaruddin have played out.

Added to this have been more routine problems concerning government funding and the completion of venues. Games funding promised by the central government failed to materialise until it was almost too late, leading to a last-minute dash to finish venues, roads and beautification work in Palembang. Ironically, given the problems associated with the village, the lack of accommodation in Palembang, particularly for athletes, has caused further embarrassment. According to reports, athletes were to bed down in many of Palembang’s hotels, leaving little space for visiting spectators. Last-minute plans to use cruise ships to plug the gap were ridiculed at home and elsewhere in the region.

What does all this mean? Certainly the lead-up to the games has been a mess, but there is also much more to the dramas than this. Just as in Laos two years ago, the controversies reflect the big political issues of the day. In Laos, latent misgivings about booming Chinese investment were brought to life in opposition to a secretive government land deal with Chinese developers building a new national stadium. In Indonesia, the dramas reflect the anxieties and controversies of the post-Suharto political landscape.

Within Indonesia itself, the country is often considered, for reasons of size and history, the “true leader of ASEAN.” These games – the first hosted by Indonesia since 1997, when Suharto was still in charge, and coinciding with Indonesia in the chair of ASEAN – were designed to put Indonesia back on the map as regional leader. With early plans to share the venues among many provinces, this was to be a truly national celebration of the country’s return to form – to use a sporting metaphor – after the calamities of the Asian financial crisis and the upheaval of the transition to democracy.

Instead, the games were restricted to just two cities, inevitably raising the question of why Palembang and Jakarta were chosen over other possible hosts, and the lead-up has been dogged by the athlete’s village imbroglio and delays. Far from rejoicing, Indonesians I have spoken to question the “ability” and “integrity” of the government to host the games successfully. More than simply embarrassed, they are proprietarily concerned that their government will “fail” – not only in the eyes of the region but also in the eyes of Indonesians themselves.

Like the Olympic Games, the SEA Games, particularly the opening and closing ceremonies, are above all an exercise in spectacle – and especially political spectacle. From their conspicuous place in the VIP grandstand, the host country’s national leaders watch over the grand ceremonies and the sporting events that follow. All going to plan – even if the reality is always more complicated – the splendour of spectacle and athleticism reflects back onto them, displaying and augmenting their symbolic power.

Given the scandal, the voracious mainstream media and the booming social media, the theatre of this year’s SEA Games has so far projected a very different political reality: the fragmentary political culture of the post-Suharto era.

Since 1998, as the country has pursued neoliberal economic policies, relations between “patrons” and “clients” – in other words, the key players in government and business – have fragmented and intensified. As ANU political scientist Ed Aspinall argues, one of the key ways in which these “two seemingly irreconcilable forces” come together is in “the proyek” (project), a self-contained, collaborative activity with designated outcomes and, officially at least, a competitive tendering process. As the proyek has become ubiquitous in political and economic life, mencari proyek (hunting projects) has become a chief means of seeking patronage. Corruption scandals have become rife, and the Corruption Eradication Commission has become one of the country’s highest-profile institutions. The SEA Games are one such project, albeit one that is particularly large, unwieldy and riddled with controversy.

The fragmentation of political life, a natural and expected consequence of the transition to democracy, has undermined the leadership and even the moral authority of national leaders. Asia Sentinel quotes a poll by the Indonesia Survey Circle which found that only 12 per cent of voters believe today’s politicians are doing better than those who ran the country under Suharto. For many Indonesians, the problem is one of strength. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, or SBY as he’s known, is regarded as “weak and indecisive” and accused of “thinking too much,” which in turn creates nostalgia for Suharto and his predecessor, Sukarno, the “strong” leaders of the past. According to this view, the former leaders would never have allowed corruption to proliferate in the first place, or at least not as publicly and embarrassingly. For a country seeking to reassert its leadership on the regional stage, this view of national leadership is clearly a problem.

Still, a couple of caveats are in order. First, perceptions in Indonesia and elsewhere in the region may differ significantly. Apart from the Asia Sentinel report, reproduced in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy, the games scandals do not appear to have been prominent in reporting in the Southeast Asian media outside Indonesia. The most important thing for competing countries is simply that the games take place so that their teams can compete and win medals, particularly against erstwhile rivals. The leadership issue appears principally to be a domestic one.

Second, it is too early to judge the success of these games. Football matches began last week in Jakarta, in front of disappointing crowds, but the games open officially only tomorrow night. Two years ago (as in the lead-up to various other Olympic, Commonwealth and Asian games) the Laos games had largely been written off before they began, yet the event came to be widely hailed as a success for the organisers, the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, and the country as a whole. Time will tell, but there may still be a similar turnaround in Indonesia.

Early impressions, based on my first twenty-four hours in Palembang, suggest a different mood from that evoked by the Jakarta-based press coverage. Not surprisingly, given the city’s central role in the event, it is clear that anger over the SEA Games scandals was felt especially acutely here. These emotions have been mixed with criticism of central authorities, particularly over the slow release of games funds. Yet this anger seems recently to have given way to resignation and even, in the final days before the games, a guarded optimism that the SEA Games might just work.

In Palembang, a successful SEA Games would be felt as a success for the city, just as the games’ failure would be construed as the city’s failure. There is little choice, residents admit, other than to do everything possible to ensure a trouble-free event. More fundamentally, however, the lift in the mood reflects the upside of the fragmentation of political life, and especially the impact of decentralisation policies, since the fall of Suharto.

Starting with its hosting of the 2004 National Games, known by their Indonesian acronym of PON (Pekan Olahraga Nasional), Palembang’s post-1998 development has been closely tied to major sports events. It is true that sport is often associated with development, particularly in the postcolonial world. The athlete’s body represents national strength and a modern sensibility, while sporting success is easily construed as representative of national progress. Yet the links between sport and development in Palembang are especially concrete – literally and metaphorically.

Much infrastructure was completed for the Palembang PON, including the Jakabaring Sports Complex (or Sports City as it is now known), new roads, and even an upgraded international airport. That infrastructure was matched by – and also symbolises – a vision of Palembang’s growing role in Indonesian political, cultural and economic life. For officials, the National Games attracted investment, drew tourists, and generally pushed Palembang and South Sumatra up the pecking order of Indonesia’s cities and regions. It is a source of considerable pride that Palembang, once “the most grubby city in Indonesia,” according to an official publication, has now won the country’s award for cleanest city four times.

These images of progress have been ratcheted up several notches in the official rhetoric surrounding Palembang’s role in hosting the SEA Games. Some venues, such as the Jakabaring Aquatic Stadium, are architecturally striking, and the governor, Alex Noerdin, talks about the Jakabaring precinct becoming “the largest sports city in the world.”

Pre-games controversies have obviously threatened to derail Palembang’s grand plans – if they were ever realistic to begin with – just as they have undermined the national narrative of “united and rising.” Some beautification work, such as in the grounds around venues, has not been completed in time for the games (or at least when I visited late this week). Ultimately, though, the key venues and infrastructure have been completed in the last few weeks, and even days, leading up to the opening. For the Palembang residents I’ve spoken to, at least, the concreteness of completed roads, buildings and venues has proved reassuring where the actions of individuals, especially politicians, have proved anything but.

Although it seems unlikely that SBY will turn the messy preparations for the SEA Games into a fillip for his leadership, the event may still prove a success for the people and officials of Palembang. •

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OVER four days earlier this year, the Goethe Institute in Jakarta hosted a remarkable series of events on the theme of “Indonesia and the World in 1965.” These events, and the responses they provoked, showed that the taboo on discussion about the events of 1965–66 lives on despite Indonesia’s era of reformasi.

On the opening evening, guests of the institute arrived at the GoetheHaus in central Jakarta to find the main gate blocked by a crowd of Islamist demonstrators and rows of harried police. The demonstrators carried banners proclaiming that “the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] was the perpetrator and the mastermind of 1965, not the victim” and “the communist Satan is dead,” along with others decrying “the sullying of Indonesian history by communists and liberals.” As security staff admitted guests, the event’s organisers argued with a delegation from the demonstration’s organisers, the Islamic Youth Movement and Laskar Empati Pembela Bangsa, and tried to deal with harassment from police. Earlier that day the series organisers had received threats from the Islamic Defenders Front and the less well-known Islamic Youth Movement. Police headquarters had conceded there was nothing out of order about the planned events but that didn’t stop the police at the GoetheHaus from demanding (unsuccessfully) the passports of foreign participants.

The source of the controversy was the Goethe Institute’s intention to bring into public discussion the domestic and context of the events surrounding the toppling of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, by Major-General Suharto in a coup involving junior army officers and key communist leaders on the night of 30 September–1 October 1965. The organisers wanted to trigger wider discussion of the events in the year that followed the coup, which included the murder of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists or communist sympathisers and the detention without trial of many more for upwards of a decade. More than half a century later, much about the events of 1965–66 remains out of bounds in democratic Indonesia. For many of the people who came to the Goethe Institute events, especially the many younger people, it was a first chance to see and hear, through performance, art and speeches, pluralist and critical views of the constitutive terror that formed the foundation of Suharto’s rule.

As the organisers put it, “Without this all-out embracing rift between East and West, Suharto’s fast and successful gain of power and parallel to that the systematic burying in oblivion of the violent facts of ’65 would have been unthinkable. Until today the repercussions of the imposed taboo are obvious.”

Inside the GoetheHaus, the four-day event began with the opening of an exhibition of photographs, murals, installations, cartoons and videos mounted by the Tempo Institute. Opening the exhibition, Lieutenant-General Agus Wijoyo talked about his own very direct relationship to the events of the period. Not only is Wijoyo a retired officer of an institution that played a central role, but he is also the son of one of the senior officers murdered on the morning of 1 October 1965. Wijoyo’s theme was the consequences for the country today of a failure to come to terms with its past and face up to the events of 1965 with a sense of proportion. He was speaking as a member of the group, Forum for the Friendship of the Children of the Nation (Forum Silaturahmi Anak Bangsa), which includes not only children of other generals murdered on 1 October but also the son of the executed Darul Islam leader, Kartosoewirjo, and the children of murdered Communist Party leader D.N. Aidit.

Speaking as much to those outside the GoetheHaus as those in front of him, Wijoyo set the tone for much of the next three days, making clear that for him the question of reconciliation is personal and difficult:

We are failing to settle the task of dealing with our history, and we will leave it behind for our grandchildren… Putting the events of the past into proportion indeed requires sacrifice from all the sides of those involved. Reconciliation is not a process of producing a zero-sum game, because, as we will see in this exhibition, there is not one side that could claim itself as merely the victim, and the other side as wholly the oppressor…What I want to say here is that readiness to enter the process of reconciliation requires the destruction of the myth that victims were the monopoly of one side and the perpetrators of the violence were the other side.

By this stage of the evening, the GoetheHaus’s large auditorium was overflowing with a predominantly young audience that had come to see Mwarthirika – About the Lost History and a History of the Lost, a production from Papermoon Puppet Theatre by Maria Tri Sulistyani and Iwan Effendi. Using almost life-sized puppet figures and masked performers (pictured below), the performance recounted a parable of children in a village on which events in the world outside were impinging. The puppeteers supporting the child-figures generated the sense of an inexplicable violation of order, which worked powerfully to generate a strong and enthusiastic response in the packed audience. Whatever else was to happen in the following days, it was clear that the Goethe Institute had already succeeded in opening questions of culture and memory.

Above: Mwarthirika – About the Lost History and a History of the Lost, a production from Papermoon Puppet Theatre by Maria Tri Sulistyani and Iwan Effendi

The academic workshop that began the next day was the result of collaboration between the Goethe Institute Indonesia, the Indonesia office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Centre for History and Political Ethics at Sanata Dharma University in Jogjakarta.

Franz-Xaver Augustin, the Goethe Institute’s Indonesia director, had faced criticism from conservative political figures before the conference: why, they asked, is a German cultural organisation tackling the most sensitive political question in Indonesia? Augustin tackled that issue head-on. Memory, he argued, is a central component of history and culture, especially through the capacity for collective memory and remembrance. And that, he noted self-critically, is something that Germany knows something about. The Jakarta Post had earlier quoted Augustin as saying:

“I’m very happy that Germany has found a way only through this very thorough dealing with the past,” he said. “We don’t like to stand up as teachers and say ‘look how good we are and how good we did it’, but it is an offer. I think it is necessary for a society to deal with its traumas; if not, they will come back to haunt you. When there are skeletons in the cupboard, you can close the cupboard but they will still be there,” he added. “I think there will never be a real new beginning as long as they haven’t really looked into the agonies of past. In Indonesia, it’s also necessary.”

Erwin Schweisshelm from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung noted that the organisation’s office in Jakarta, which was established in 1967, was itself implicated in the problem as a Cold War player. When Schweisshelm took up his post in Jakarta, he went back to the early office archives and found clear evidence that the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung staff of the time had full knowledge of the events of 1965–66, fully supported the Suharto regime and did not raise the issue of human rights violations.

The decision to place the conference and public discussions in a Cold War context was a key to its success. Two of the formateurs of the conference, Bernd Schaefer from the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center and Baskara Wardaya from Sanata Dharma University, set the and domestic scenes with a review of the Cold War in the late 1950s and 1960s and its saturation of the politics of Indonesia. Other papers by Brad Simpson (following on from his book Economists With Guns), Ragna Boden and Jovan Cavoski dealt with the relationships of the United States, the Soviet Union and China with Indonesia up to 1966. Schaefer and Boden also elaborated on the consequences for Indonesia, and the PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia), of the competitive manoeuvring of the two Germanies.

Memory was a recurring theme for a number of speakers at the conference. Heinz Schutte and I examined the press coverage of the 1965–66 period in France and Australia respectively, finding remarkably similar patterns. As Schutte concluded:

Reading through the articles and reports for several weeks in the French national library, one may easily give in to their almost narcotic suggestion. This is even true for the contributions of L’Humanité [the communist daily], which does not undertake a critical analysis of the material at hand but keeps operating with its habitual linguistic stereotypes, fitting the Indonesian events into the preordained ideological framework. The automatic solidarity of the Cold War determined “viewpoint” guided the perception of reality. From the bourgeois press one must therefore conclude that Indonesians are different from Europeans, that the regime under Sukarno was a grotesque dictatorship, that Suharto would set things right and that the monstrous massacre whose victims were anyway more or less resigned to accept the inevitable, i.e. to cleanse society and to build a better future, need to be accepted, albeit to our regret – the unavoidable collateral damage in pursuit of an ultimately good cause.

In a keynote address, John Roosa set the analytical and moral puzzle in the context of the “social non-memory” of the killings, asking why the consequence of the 1 October events was mass violence. Echoing Brad Simpson’s conclusion from US archival research, Roosa emphasised the anxiety on the part of American officials in October 1965 that the Indonesian army would settle for punishing only those directly involved in the 30th September Movement, and that Sukarno would be allowed to recover his political balance. The PKI, US officials decided, had to be eradicated, root and branch. As Roosa put it, “The commonly heard line in Indonesia about the time being one of ‘either kill or be killed’ hardly explains why the general pattern of the killings was the secret execution of detainees, nearly all of whom were noncombatants before their incarceration.”

Why is our knowledge of the killings so poor? asked Roosa. In part, the answer is that “the killings were designed so that they would not be narrated; they constituted an event that cancelled out its own facticity”:

The unchivalrous, shameful nature of the killing in 1965–66 partly explains why the perpetrators have been so quiet and have not proudly recited heroic narratives about battlefield exploits. The Suharto regime’s propaganda was silent on the killings, pretending as if they had never happened. While the “crushing” of the PKI was glorified in the abstract, the specifics of the violence were left unstated.

The mechanics of the mass murder, and the labour involved, have remained intentionally vague. More than a decade after the end of Suharto’s New Order there has still been no thorough examination of any of what must have been hundreds of separate massacres. The complexities and enduring conundrums of explaining the 30th September Movement – Roosa’s theme in his forensic classic Pretext for Mass Murder – still function as a “grand distraction,” Roosa concluded, from the exploration of how the great killings were actually conducted. And reconciliation is hard even to begin if there is no clarity about who did what.

One of the features of the conference was searching and often passionate commentary – not only from the Indonesian designated commentators on each of the papers, such as Yosef Djakababa, Susanto Pudjomartono, Cornelius Purba, Natalia Subagio, George Aditjondro, Hilmar Farid and Arief Zulkifli, but also from members of the invited audience of academics, ex-political prisoners, journalists and activists, such as Putu Oka Sukanta and Suzie Sudarman. It quickly became clear that this was an extremely significant space for analytical, political and autobiographical statements from the audience – a measure of the persisting lack of social space in the wider society to work through the issues under discussion. To their credit, the conference organisers encouraged this added dimension of the collective work.

THE last night opened with a public forum, again to a packed audience, on “Indonesia in the Power Game of the Cold War,” which showed both the political advantage – and indeed necessity – of the conference’s Cold War theme, and some of its limitations. The Jesuit philosopher Franz-Magnis Suseno opened the discussion on a theme he had explored in the conference by reflecting on his own ambivalent responses to the coup and the killings as a young priest in Jogjakarta in 1965. To those who had been dismayed by Suseno’s memory of his young self welcoming the coup after the months or years of gathering threat, he was unequivocal about his perception then and now that the mass killings that followed were a great crime.

The poet and film-maker Putu Oka Sukanta spoke powerfully about one point in particular. He rejected the language of “victims” – he was, he insisted, not a victim of his decade of imprisonment, but a survivor. Retaining that sense of agency was important not just for Sukanta, but also for many other former prisoners who spoke at the forum and at the conference.

The last speaker was retired Major-General Sudrajat, former Indonesian ambassador to China and chairman of the lead and zinc mining company, Earth Fortune. Sudrajat, a former military spokesperson from the Wiranto era, was intelligent and reasonable, and like Wijoyo, attested through his words and his presence to the importance of reconciliation as a way forward. The Cold War, he argued, had made puppets out of Indonesians, and both sides had been caught in what he described as the “hegemony of the Cold War.”

Yet while Sudrajat’s genial ecumenicalism was welcome, coming after Suseno’s and Sukanta’s more personal and political explorations his theme amounted to an abjuring of responsibility and a conspicuous failure to examine the particular responsibility of the leadership of the institution he served for three decades. While it was remarkable to have former generals and former political prisoners on the same panel before an audience that included the widows of murdered generals and murdered communists, it was at this point that the limitations of the politically necessary framework of “Indonesia in the Cold War” most showed through.

Later that night, the final event at GoetheHaus was one of the most remarkable: a dance performance titled Tjap Merah (Red Stamp) choreographed by Vincentius Yosep Prihantoro Sadsuitubun (Yosep) and performed by eight women (Ajeng Soelaeman, Achadia Suci Deashinta, Shinta Maulita, Hernis Mayatari, Gina Fitriyani, Adinda Pratiwi, Imawati Sardjono and Diliani). The performance explored the different facets of actual and imaginary accounts of Gerwani, the PKI-aligned women’s organisation banned after the coup. One of the most successful aspects of the disinformation campaign accompanying the coup was the fabricated story of Gerwani women writhing orgiastically in dance at Lubang Buaya as the kidnapped army officers were tortured and killed and their bodies mutilated before being thrown into a well.

As with the opening speech by Lieutenant-General Agus Wijoyo and the personal statements of many in the audience, Sadsuitubun’s production grew from the myriad webs of personal and family connections with the events of 1965–66. On the night of 30 September 1965 the choreographer’s grandfather, Inspector Karel Sadsuitubun (K.S. Tubun), was part of a Police Mobile Brigade guard outside the Menteng house of Deputy Prime Minister Leimena. Attracted by the sound of shots coming from the nearby house of General Nasution, Sadsuitubun was killed in the firefight with the would-be kidnappers.

Dressed alike in red cotton, Yosep’s eight dancers hinted at the propaganda images of both sides of the conflict – the evil and erotic anima conveyed by the winners’ disinformation campaigns, and the heroic imagery of struggle beloved of communist propagandists. With subtle and measured inflections from Javanese dance, Tjap Merah moved beyond the propaganda to provide a triumph both for its artists and for the Goethe Institute.

The fact of the dance performance and the forum before a packed and again largely young audience, following on from the conference and the earlier events, was proof that a foreign cultural organisation could play a small but useful part in helping Indonesian society work through the dangerous silences of the repressed past.

The courage of the Goethe Institute and their co-convenors raises two sets of questions. Most obvious, and most important for Indonesia, is the question raised by Agus Wijoyo: does the present society have the capacity to work through the trauma of the past, with the painful exploration of the truth of what actually happened and who did what as the necessary prerequisite to reconciliation, or at least a quietening of the graves?

The second question follows from the German initiative. Can countries much closer to these events than Germany begin to face their own historical roles and the consequences for themselves and Indonesia? Given the evidently active and potent, if still murky, role of the United States, Britain and Australia in the events leading up to the great killings of 1965–66, can these countries’ cultural organisations in Indonesia follow the German example? Can they transcend their normally anaemic and sanitised offerings and collaborate with Indonesian intellectuals and artists to work through their part in creating and maintaining those still explosive silences? •

Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate with the Nautilus Institute.

Photos courtesy Goethe Institute Indonesia

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I FIRST met Filep Karma in the Papuan capital, Jayapura, in November 2000. Even in the relatively open political climate that prevailed in Papua during the first years after the fall of Suharto, he was a courageous and striking figure. He had recently completed a term in prison for his leadership of the July 1998 flag-raising protest at Biak, which had been suppressed by the security forces with considerable loss of life, and he was wearing the uniform of an official in the provincial government (a position he still occupied) with a Papuan national flag pinned provocatively to his chest. Later, in 2004, he was arrested again for raising the Papuan flag at a peaceful commemoration of 1 December 1961, which is regarded by Papuans as their independence day. In May the following year he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on charges of treason, a sentence he is still serving.

At the time we met, Karma was active in the Papua Presidium Council, which was then the dominant pro-independence organisation. Typical of his forthright approach to politics, Karma was critical of the council leadership’s pragmatic and accommodating approach, and once again it was a debate about the flag that brought matters to a head. Earlier that year, as a gesture of reconciliation, President Abdurrahman Wahid had agreed to change the name of the province from Irian Jaya to Papua and had given permission for the Papuan flag to be flown. But, as the year progressed, flag-raisings again became a focus of conflict between the Indonesian authorities and Papuans. The council’s leaders had negotiated a restricted and carefully monitored commemoration and flag-raising with the Indonesian authorities, but Karma asserted that Papua had not become independent in 1961 and so independence needed to be proclaimed at that year’s commemoration – a course of action that would have risked a violent response from the security forces.

In the report I wrote soon after for the International Crisis Group, I used Karma and his provocative attire as a symbol of the dual loyalties of many senior Papuan officials in the Indonesian administration. Some, like Karma, actively supported Papuan independence; others, probably a rather greater number, were sympathetic but not active. The Indonesian authorities knew that Karma was saying publicly what many of his fellow bureaucrats thought and felt. In fact, in mid 2000 an Indonesian intelligence document concluded that the Papua provincial government had been “contaminated” by the independence ideal and recommended that strong sanctions be applied to well-known supporters of Papua Merdeka (Free Papua) among local officials. Filep Karma was one of the officials named in the report.

Attached to the same document was a diagram headed “Papuan Political Conspiracy” that depicted the various groups of Papuans whom the Indonesian intelligence community thought supported independence. In addition to the best-known public advocates, the diagram named local people who had been successful in the Indonesian system, including Barnabas Suebu, who was Indonesia’s ambassador to Mexico and is now governor of Papua, Suebu’s immediate predecessor, another former governor and a number of Papuan members of the Indonesian parliament.

The criminalisation of peaceful political activities, which led to the imprisonment of Filep Karma, has proved effective in keeping Papuan nationalist sentiments off the streets. But the security forces’ concern about the influence of pro-independence ideals among Papuan government officials persists. A 2007 secret report by the Kopassus unit stationed in Kotaraja, a suburb of Jayapura, argued that the activities of the separatists in Papua were centred on the city, where most activists lived. “Most of the separatist group,” it reported, “had become officials in government institutions and occupied important positions.” The separatists were not a large group, but their prominent positions meant that their views were often reported in the media, according to the report. As many young Papuans did not have a strong Indonesian nationalist ideology, the separatists, who “increasingly had an objective of the ideal of Papuan independence,” were able to “influence all levels of society and government institutions.”

The Indonesian authorities’ distrust of Papuan politicians and provincial government officials has made it difficult for Jakarta to implement the 2001 Special Autonomy Law in a way that might have achieved its objective of reducing Papuan support for independence. The law was the government’s response to the revival of the independence movement after the fall of Suharto and provided for a much more extensive devolution of authority and revenue than that granted to other provinces under the regional autonomy laws of 1999.

Earlier this year Agus Sumule – one of Governor Suebu’s advisers, but writing in a private capacity – outlined how the Indonesian government has endeavoured to limit the autonomy devolved to the provincial government in Jayapura. First, he described the practice of distributing the budget allocation of Special Autonomy funds to Papua every couple of months rather than on an annual basis. Sumule argued that an annual allocation of these funds would facilitate optimal planning and program implementation. He understands that the practice of graduated allocation of funds was introduced at the behest of one of the Indonesian intelligence agencies, out of fear that annual distribution would increase the likelihood that the money would be used for “subversive” purposes. Second, he described how there has been virtually no practical devolution of authority to Papua – despite the fact that the Special Autonomy Law devolves authority to the provincial government in all areas of government except foreign affairs, defence and security, finance and religion.

In a similar vein, late last year the Sydney Morning Herald quoted a September 2009 cable from the US embassy in Jakarta that said, “Many central government ministries have been reluctant to cede power to the province. As a result, implementation of the [Special Autonomy] law has lagged and Papuans increasingly view the law as a failure.”

FILEP KARMA’s fifteen-year prison term for raising the Papuan national flag contrasts strikingly with how the Indonesian authorities dealt with the members of the Indonesian security forces who videotaped each other barbarically torturing Papuans. The depravity of the behaviour depicted on the video attracted considerable media attention after it was posted on the internet last October. In January this year a military court in Jayapura sentenced three soldiers from the TNI infantry battalion 753/AVT to ten, nine and eight months respectively for torturing two Papuans, Anggun Pugukiwo and Telenggen Gire, in May last year. The judge, Adil Karo-Karo, found that “the three accused disobeyed their superior’s command and that they had used violence towards civilians.”

In an earlier military trial of soldiers accused of violence against Papuans, also recorded on video, the four accused were given sentences of five to seven months. Like the soldiers in the January trial, they were sentenced for disobeying orders. But the head of the military court noted that the soldiers’ behaviour had tarnished the good name and image of the armed forces in the eyes of society and the world. Speaking to a group of military and police leaders during the January trial, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono recognised that there had been acts of violence by the security forces in Papua. “I am concerned about cases in Papua. These acts were not the policies of generals, marshalls or the government. They were incidents.”

The treatment of Filep Karma and the military’s violence against Papuans not only raise questions about the values and functioning of the Indonesian legal system, but also symbolise the governance issues Indonesia faces in Papua. The security forces’ abuses of human rights, the criminalisation of non-violent political activity and the mutual distrust between the Indonesian government and many sections of Papuan society are among the issues that have motivated a concerted effort by Papuan activists – notably the leading Catholic figure, Neles Tebay, and researchers at the government’s Indonesian Institute of Sciences, led by Muridan Widjojo – to promote dialogue between Jakarta and Papua. Tebay and his Papua Peace Network have sought to mobilise Papuan support for dialogue, especially among the independence activists, while Muridan and his colleagues have sought to persuade the government that Papua’s complex and entrenched problems can only be addressed through dialogue, and that dialogue doesn’t mean negotiations for independence.

On the eve of his visit to Australia last month, the Indonesian vice president, Dr Boediono, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the government recognised “there was room for improvement” in its Papua policies and needed to take a broader approach than its usual focus on economic development. But he explicitly ruled out the possibility of a dialogue with Papuans. Boediono also foreshadowed the creation of a new agency that would coordinate policy-making and implementation for Papua. That new agency is the Unit to Accelerate Development in Papua and West Papua, part of a broader reformulation of Papua policy, which has been mentioned in the media at least since November last year.

Djohermansyah Djohan, Indonesia’s director-general of regional autonomy, argued that the unit is needed because special autonomy has been more effective in Aceh, where authority has been devolved to the province under the supervision of the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Board. “Whatever the circumstances,” Djohermansyah asserted somewhat patronisingly, “the father has the responsibility to take care of the children.” Vice President Boediono’s spokesman, Yopie Hidayat, explained that the new policy, of which the unit is the institutional centrepiece, was expected to “gain optimum results through centralized planning.”

Ironically, the one issue on which there is agreement between the Indonesian government and some of its Papuan critics is that the Special Autonomy Law has failed. Yet this recognition has produced sharply contrasting responses. The government seems intent on reasserting its direct control over Papua and reducing the limited authority that had been devolved to the provincial government. In Jakarta’s new policy framework, the provincial government would remain part of the planning process but won’t have the critical role envisaged in the Special Autonomy Law’s provisions for self-government. As Agus Sumule noted, the draft policy documents being prepared in the vice-president’s office barely mention the position of governor and the role it has played in the development of Papua over the past nine years.

The responses of the Indonesian government and its Papuan critics to the failure of special autonomy are informed by their different understandings of how the conflict in Aceh was resolved. Jakarta focuses on the success of the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Board in Aceh, and has decided to establish a similar agency, under its direct control, to accelerate development in Papua. Papuans, on the evidence of the public consultations organised by the Papuan People’s Assembly in mid 2010, see the resolution of the conflict in Aceh differently. They want negotiations or dialogue, involving an partner, with the Indonesian government to resolve the political, cultural, historical – as well as economic – dimensions of their conflict with Jakarta. Some Papuans envisage significantly greater autonomy, as happened in Aceh under the Helsinki Agreement and the Aceh Governance Law, but policy-making in Jakarta seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

It is difficult to envisage much progress being made in Papua – with either economic development or the entrenched governance, political, cultural and historical issues that have fuelled Papuan nationalism – unless there is a policy framework that recognises and seeks to address these complex and interrelated issues.

There is no doubt that Indonesia can sustain its rule in Papua. Neither the ad hoc and poorly armed resistance of the Free Papua Movement nor the non-violent activities of numerous pro-independence organisations threaten Indonesian control, and so the government feels little pressure to engage in dialogue. But the governance issues embodied in the treatment of Filep Karma, and grotesquely dramatised in the Indonesian soldiers’ videos, raise questions about the legitimacy of Indonesian rule. After all, the Indonesian government has the responsibility to protect its citizens in Papua.

More generally, the growing gap between the severely constrained political space in Papua and the robust democracy in much of the rest of the country, together with the continuation of human rights abuses by the security forces, is an Achilles heel for an Indonesia aspiring to play a regional and role appropriate for the world’s third largest democracy. •

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“WE WANT to avoid business as usual,” says Ilarius Wibisono. From the thirty-year insurgency to the Boxing Day tsunami to a frenetic reconstruction, not much of the recent past in Indonesia’s Aceh province could be described as “business as usual.” But Wibisono, an adviser on sustainability to the province’s governor, is talking about the sort of status quo that results in greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere in ever-increasing volumes.

Sitting in the lobby of Banda Aceh’s Hermes hotel, Wibisono speaks over a din of background music and conversation. It’s late on a weeknight but the place is packed with people drinking tea and coffee (but no alcohol – Sharia law is enforced here), talking and smoking. Government officials in green uniforms linger from the day’s healthcare reform meeting. The odd local politician moves from table to table. The air hangs thick with smoke and agendas, all of which marks Hermes out as the Rick’s of Banda Aceh – the sort of place where everyone goes, or winds up.

Just a smattering of foreigners remains. One arrives in a white UN car of the type once ubiquitous here. A middle-aged European stays just long enough to pick up some pastries from the lobby cafe. Others who might be officials, aid workers or investors talk in small huddles with local contacts or among themselves – the usual suspects of international travel, veterans of a hundred hotel lobbies. Ultimately, though, it’s the locals who are now in charge of developing Aceh. And Ilarius Wibisono reckons a plan to use carbon trading to protect Aceh’s forests will help to do just that.

The consequences of deforestation are as stark as the landscapes it leaves behind: vast swathes of wasteland; whole ecosystems destroyed; tigers and orangutans deprived of homes and threatened with extinction. Above all, it hastens global warming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deforestation is responsible for 17 per cent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. In Indonesia, land use, land use change and forestry is estimated to account for a massive 85 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, making Indonesia one of the world’s largest sources of climate pollution.

As the world’s leaders have cast about for an effective response to climate change, carbon trading has come increasingly to the fore as a means to lower emissions. Whether it’s the compulsory EU Emission Trading System or voluntary markets like the Chicago Climate Exchange, the principle is the same: credits generated by reduced emissions can be purchased by others to offset their own emissions over a specified cap, or to sell on.

Now there is pressure to deal forests into the carbon markets, by allowing projects that avoid deforestation to generate tradable credits. The Bali Road Map, agreed at UN climate negotiations in 2007, encouraged the development of measures to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This strategy – the UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries – is usually known as REDD. Last December’s Copenhagen Accord endorsed the concept of REDD+, which expands the program to include measures that enhance forest stocks. The Accord called on rich nations to provide “substantial finance” to developing countries for REDD projects. This “fast-start” financing period is generally seen as a bridge to a more economically sustainable model under which forest-generated credits would be included in carbon markets.

An early test of the REDD concept is underway in Indonesia’s tropical Aceh province. It’s a challenging context: an estimated 170,000 of the province’s residents were killed by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and whole communities were wiped out. The province has been rebuilding ever since, aided by billions in foreign donations. And Aceh is also dealing with a legacy of conflict: a thirty-year struggle between an independence movement and the Indonesian state ended only in the wake of the tsunami, with the signing of a provincial autonomy deal.

As tragic as it has been, the upheaval of Aceh’s recent past has created its own opportunities. The massive injection of foreign aid provided funds and expertise for forest protection. The demobilisation of insurgents and high unemployment make the prospect of REDD jobs and REDD funds attractive. And the conflict kept the rate of logging down, meaning there are still forests in Aceh to protect.

In 2008 the province’s first popularly elected governor, Irwandi Yusuf, announced a policy framework for sustainability – the Green Economic Development and Investment Strategy for Aceh, or “Aceh Green.” Sustainable land use, forest protection and reforestation feature prominently in the framework; “major new investments and financing from a variety of sources” is a specified goal.

Wibisono, the governor’s adviser, describes Aceh Green as a framework for integrating “environmental, social and peace concerns into the whole developmental agenda.” According to Wibisono, one of the Aceh Green secretariat’s roles has been to balance the different interests of the players involved – profit-seeking firms, NGOs seeking environmental protection, local communities seeking a livelihood – and “ensure that they are making progress together.”

Aceh Green is part of Governor Irwandi’s strategy for building a post-disaster, post-conflict economy. Finding work for demobilised combatants is the immediate challenge, but the larger goal is to encourage whole communities to stop deforestation and rely on less destructive ways of earning a living.

REDD, which Irwandi promoted at the 2007 UN climate conference in Bali, was identified as a means to this end. First, protect the forests, then measure the benefits, then generate carbon credits with which to fund local communities. The linear progression of a REDD project makes its attractions clear, but also gives rise to significant risk. If the right standards are not satisfied at each stage – consent from affected communities, verification of improvements on the business-as-usual baseline – no carbon credits are generated and there’s no payoff for anyone. No wonder, then, that a foreign project officer describes the Aceh Green team as “massively overworked. They are so committed to what they are trying to achieve, but there are a lot of capacity weaknesses.”

A big test for the team is the world’s first commercially funded REDD project in the forests of Ulu Masen. The project is a collaboration between the Aceh government, Carbon Conservation (the firm that brokered the deal), Merrill Lynch (which provides funding in return for a share of the expected carbon credits) and Fauna & Flora International (the NGO running the protection activities). Former insurgents, loggers and poachers have been trained as rangers and charged with monitoring the forests for illegal logging. The Aceh government gave ex-combatants portions of land but they often had no idea how to farm, so farming techniques are being taught. Nurseries have been encouraged to diversify local incomes, and rangers have been posted to look out for marauding elephants, which can devastate communities’ crops.

The project is slated to last for thirty years, but its ability to protect significant amounts of forest and generate the carbon credits to sustain that protection should become clear far sooner.

The next step is likely to be a REDD project in the Leuser ecosystem, the vast tract of forests south of Ulu Masen. Together, the protection programs in Leuser and Ulu Masen constitute the World Bank–overseen Aceh Forest and Environment Project, which has been one component of the tsunami recovery effort. The project – originally due to end in June – has been extended into 2011 while leftover funds are spent.

In Leuser, the Leuser International Foundation has been training local forest rangers to use maps and GPS to accurately record forest damage. Some are trained in law enforcement. The foundation uses satellite images to monitor deforestation, advises government on responses and provides information to public meetings and the local media.

G.V. Reddy, the foundation’s ecosystem manager, told me that the Ulu Masen project is at “an experimental stage – there is a lot of enthusiasm.” According to Reddy, a model for REDD projects has emerged in Aceh. It has been shaped by the extraordinary local circumstances: the tsunami, the recovery effort and the resulting forest protection project – “the right kind of project at the right time,” according to this veteran forest manager. He is adamant that the forests in Leuser “have a future only in the carbon projects.” If a REDD deal can be put together, says Reddy, “the ecosystem will survive” and “the community will get at least some money.” And if the community sees that direct benefit, they might then stop cutting down the trees.

Yakob Ishadamy, who heads the Aceh Green secretariat, stresses that Leuser is not only much bigger than Ulu Masen, it is home to “incomparable” biodiversity. Global Eco Rescue, a project management firm, is currently designing a REDD project for Leuser under the Aceh Green framework and in partnership with local firms. According to Global Eco Rescue, one such firm – Mitra Koalisi – has been in contact with villages across the ecosystem to gauge approaches to community consultation, benefit-sharing and dispute resolution.

ACEH’s government, meanwhile, has wider ambitions for REDD revenue. In May Aceh hosted the Governors’ Climate and Forests Taskforce, a meeting of subnational governments championed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ilarius Wibisono says the taskforce can “encourage international negotiations to come to the final deal.” Even in the absence of such a deal, he has high hopes that the taskforce can develop into a fledgling market for carbon credits, bringing together supply – Indonesia and Brazil – and demand – US states and also, Wibisono hopes, Canadian provinces.

Jane Dunlop, Fauna & Flora International’s REDD team manager in Aceh, describes the taskforce as crucial. “It’s a very open process and it’s a process where states such as Aceh have a real say in contributing to what [states] like California might be developing.” Dunlop says that the taskforce could indeed form the basis of a market while the world waits for a UN deal. This makes it “a real opportunity for a province like Aceh to contribute to international developments on climate change and REDD.”

International developments thus far have been characteristically fitful. From 29 November the world’s governments will meet in Cancun for the annual climate change summit. After the disappointment of Copenhagen, expectations are low. Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia’s forestry minister, has predicted that “there will be no agreements on REDD reached in this year’s meeting.” He compared the UN talks to World Trade Organization rounds, “which fell apart several times,” and stressed the “need to increase our voluntary deals” on REDD.

Hasan’s focus on voluntary deals is understandable. At the moment, that’s where the money is. In May, fifty-eight nations met in Oslo under the banner of the REDD+ Partnership. A minimum of US$4 billion by 2012 was pledged for REDD projects in developing countries.

So it is not surprising that for Indonesia, with a reported forty-five REDD projects at various stages of development, voluntary carbon markets are where the action is. By far the biggest voluntary financing deal Indonesia has struck is with Norway. At the Oslo meeting in May, Norway pledged US$1 billion to support REDD projects in Indonesia. This is foreign aid rather than a component of Norway’s own emissions mitigation effort, and the government in Oslo isn’t expecting carbon credits in return.

The Norway–Indonesia deal was presented to other nations and UN agencies on the fringes of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York last month. With financier George Soros, US climate envoy Todd Stern and Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd looking on, Indonesia confirmed that a national REDD taskforce would be established to drive government strategy on the issue.

Although the agreement between Norway and Indonesia did not include Aceh, one source I spoke to suspects that bringing Aceh into the deal, given the progress of the Ulu Masen project, will have been canvassed in recent negotiations between the two countries. Ilarius Wibisono says the Aceh government would be “more than happy” to be part of the Norway deal.

Norway has previously committed US$1 billion to Brazil, payable if that country meets deforestation reduction targets. Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, explains the thinking: “To reduce deforestation is the way we can achieve the quickest, the biggest and the cheapest reductions [in emissions]. That’s why Norway is pushing so much forward and is so active.”

WHATEVER its merits, the fact that movement on REDD is happening outside the UN negotiations underscores the lack of consensus on the model in the international community. Among environmentalists and affected communities, REDD remains intensely controversial. There are vocal critics of individual projects, of the REDD+ Partnership negotiations and of the concept of trading forest credits itself.

At the Governors’ Climate and Forests Taskforce in May, a group calling itself the Civil Society Forum for the Sovereignty of Mukim protested against what it called “the hype marketing of Aceh as [a] REDD designated area.” (A mukim is a traditional jurisdiction in Ulu Masen.) The group complained that “basic information about forest and climate projects is barely available for the affected local people.” It pledged to reject any REDD proposal until “indigenous community rights to land and management of natural resources and other property” are recognised.

Some observers have raised doubts about whether the protesters were from areas affected by the Ulu Masen REDD project. Nevertheless, there are many other critics. Friends of the Earth Indonesia – known by its local acronym, WALHI – has flagged “a number of potentially problematic issues” with the Ulu Masen project, including concerns about “transparency” and “adequate representation of local communities,” and has called for the project to be monitored closely. WALHI “rejects REDD in its current guise” and raises the spectre of “indigenous and forest dependent peoples” being barred from the forests that are their home. According to the organisation, it is “vital that greater recognition of indigenous and forest dependent communities’ land tenure and improving forest governance form central components of future REDD negotiations.”

Chris Lang, who runs the REDD-Monitor website from Jakarta, maintains that “trading carbon stored in forests without meaningful emissions reductions in the North isn’t going to address climate change.” His concern is that a trade in forest credits would become a loophole in the emissions reductions commitments of developed countries. REDD, he says, is “being sold as an easy solution to a very complex problem.”

In Indonesia, as in Brazil and elsewhere, it is a game of trial and error played with a diminishing resource against a ticking clock. Some corners may be cut. David Ritter, head of biodiversity campaigns for Greenpeace UK, is broadly supportive of the interim REDD+ Partnership but flags concerns over the negotiation’s “unseemly haste, rendering the proper involvement of Indigenous peoples in particular, practically impossible.”

Such concerns are born of experience. Foreign aid for environmental protection has been wasted or embezzled before, and local communities have suffered as a result of poorly designed projects. But there is also undeniably a model to be tested. G.V. Reddy, the ecosystem manager, is confident that the model is sound: “Government per se has no money exclusively for forests. All the time government has been looking at forests as a source of revenue, not a place to invest money. But ultimately now the trees can also give money in the form of REDD.”

If the critics are right, REDD projects could generate windfall revenues for firms and governments while leaving forests and local communities no better off. If REDD goes to plan, though, it will achieve community development and social justice as well as forest protection. As myriad projects are launched in the world’s disparate forest-rich nations, both outcomes are possible, perhaps even likely. •

The post Financing the forests appeared first on Inside Story.

BETWEEN 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009, 5304 individuals sought refuge in Australia by applying for a protection visa onshore. Some of them – 966 to be precise – happen to have arrived by boat without prior authorisation. The federal opposition argued that that the policies of the Rudd government had encouraged a new wave of people smuggling through Indonesia to Australia. Although there may be a small element of truth to this, the government is correct to insist that the recent upsurge in arrivals is part of a worldwide phenomenon largely explained by events in source and transit countries. The four largest refugee populations in the Asia-Pacific region are Afghans, Burmese, Iraqis and Sri Lankans, and it isn’t surprising that some of them have come our way using any means available.

Afghanistan’s turbulent history since the 1979 Soviet invasion has made it the world’s largest producer of refugees. Although the American military action against al Qaeda led to the downfall of the Taliban – a regime whose grave and widespread human rights abuses created a flow of refugees – the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 is itself causing forced displacement. By the end of 2008, 2,856,307 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers were living outside their home country, with the vast majority in Iran and Pakistan. In 2009, the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan caused thousands more to flee. Meanwhile, Afghans who had found refuge in Iran and Pakistan came under increasing pressure from the governments of those countries to move on. As a consequence, they have been fleeing further afield. In the period from January to September 2009, 16,743 Afghans lodged new asylum claims in European countries, far more than in the same period a year earlier. Countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, have also experienced a surge in Afghan asylum seekers.

Burma is run by a military junta that ruthlessly suppresses political opposition. It is known to hold at least 2000 long-term political prisoners and to engage in extrajudicial killings, torture and other serious human rights violations in response to popular uprisings and incursions by ethnic rebel groups. In consequence, some 206,750 Burmese refugees and asylum seekers were living mostly in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand at the end of 2008. In 2009, intensified civil conflict in Burma caused thousands more to flee, mainly into other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

As at the end of 2002, 421,700 Iraqis had been forced out of their home country by the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Despite the US-led military action, Iraq remains insecure and forced displacement has continued. At the end of 2008, 1,903,519 Iraqis were refugees, most of them in Syria and Jordan. In each of the last four year, enough Iraqis have also made their way to the west to make Iraq the number one source country for asylum seekers seeking protection in the industrialised world. But the number of Iraqi asylum seekers arriving in industrialised countries has been on the decline in 2009, a trend which has also manifested itself in Australia.

For most of the past twenty-five years Sri Lanka was embroiled in civil war, in the course of which both the Sri Lankan government and the separatist rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, committed serious and widespread human rights abuses. At the end of 2008, 144,809 Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers were living abroad, about half of them in India. The other main countries of asylum for Sri Lankans were Canada, France, Germany and Britain. The final phase of the Sri Lankan civil war was particularly brutal and resulted in mass displacement; by mid-November 2009, 143,161 of the approximately 274,000 civilians who had been internally displaced were still in government-run camps awaiting resettlement. The Sri Lankan government has indicated that most of the remaining internally displaced people will be resettled by 31 December 2009, while arguing that the pace of resettlement will depend to some extent on the pace at which de-mining of the North can be accomplished. Conditions in the camps are appalling and the fate of those singled out as supporters of the Tigers is uncertain. What is certain is that Sri Lankans are continuing to flee the country in search of asylum.

Over 90 per cent of the mostly Middle Eastern and Sri Lankan asylum seekers who have travelled irregularly to Australia by boat have been determined to be refugees entitled to benefit from Australia’s international protection obligations. The problem from the perspective of successive Australian governments is that the need to give effect to these obligations is at odds with the desire to “decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Accordingly, Australia has long had a system of offshore border controls designed to minimise the number of asylum seekers who come its way.

HOW DOES this system work? For a start, all non-citizens travelling to Australia must obtain a visa in advance. People seen as potential asylum seekers are unlikely to be granted visas. International carriers are penalised if they bring people into Australia whose documentation is not adequate, which is a very effective incentive for carriers to scrutinise their passengers carefully and deny passage to those who might be rejected by Australian authorities. For many years Australia has also posted its own immigration, customs, police and other officials in potential source and transit countries to assist in interception, and has poured millions of dollars into building the border control capacity of countries in its region.

Australia’s cooperation with Indonesia is particularly intense. Among other things, it has led to eighty-nine interceptions involving 2221 people over the past twelve months. For reasons I canvassed in an earlier article for Inside Story, although asylum seekers intercepted in Indonesia are worse off than they would have been if they had made it to Australia, they are at least a lot better off than if they had been intercepted in some other countries in the region – for example, in Malaysia.

Malaysia is host to about 90,000 refugees and asylum seekers. While it is impossible to estimate what proportion of the individuals in Malaysia plan to travel on to Australia, it is a fact that many of the asylum seekers who arrive without authorisation in Australian waters have followed a route which has taken them through Malaysia and Indonesia. A few have also travelled through Malaysia directly to Australia.

It is not difficult to understand why asylum seekers would wish to move on from Malaysia. Without proper authorisation, new arrivals face fines, jail, caning and eventual deportation, even if they have sought asylum. While Malaysia permits the UNHCR to conduct refugee status determinations within its territory and sometimes complies with UNHCR requests, it does not consider itself in any way bound to do so. As a result, there have been many documented cases in which it has engaged in refoulement, sending asylum seekers back into danger. Human rights organisations have documented many other serious human rights violations at the hands of the People’s Volunteer Corps and corrupt Malaysian officials. Notwithstanding all of this, Australia is acting to ensure that asylum seekers in Malaysia are prevented from travelling onward to Australia.

The Australian Department of Immigration has officers in Malaysia, including an Air Line Liaison Officer, or ALO, stationed at the international airport in Kuala Lumpur. The main function of Australian ALOs, who are specialist document examiners, is to assist local immigration and airport authorities and airline personnel to check for false passports and visas. On 1 January 2005, for example, eleven Afghans attempting to travel from the Middle East to Brisbane on counterfeit Australian visas were intercepted at the Kuala Lumpur airport by an Australian ALO. They were detained by Malaysian immigration authorities and returned to the Middle East later the same day, despite the fact that they sought asylum: a disquieting outcome, to say the least.

The Australian Federal Police and the Royal Malaysian Police have been working together for some time to disrupt people smuggling to Australia via Malaysia and have made fifteen interceptions involving 552 people over the past twelve months. It’s to be hoped that those individuals met with a better fate than the Afghans intercepted at the Kuala Lumpur airport in 2005. Australian and Malaysian defence forces and customs services are also working together on border control and the Australian Attorney-General’s Department is working with its Malaysian counterpart to harmonise people-smuggling law. Since late 2008, Kevin Rudd, foreign affairs minister Stephen Smith, immigration minister Chris Evans and national security adviser Duncan Lewis have all had discussions with Malaysian authorities from the prime minister down, resulting in ever-increasing cooperation on border control. The Australia–Malaysia working group on people smuggling and trafficking in persons, which had its inaugural meeting in late August 2009, is mandated with achieving further intensification of border control cooperation.

In fairness, it needs to be noted that refugee protection hasn’t been entirely forgotten. Most recently. Australia has provided the UNHCR in Malaysia with $1.86 million in funding for determining refugee status and providing medical care and other basic services. This could, however, be likened to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, given Malaysia’s woeful record on respecting the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, non-refoulement.

Worse even than exposing asylum seekers to the risk of being returned to the country in which they face persecution is preventing them from leaving that country in the first place. Yet, this too Australia is prepared to do. For example, Australia and Sri Lanka have been cooperating on border control for years, but the cooperation appears to have increased exponentially of late. Kevin Rudd, Stephen Smith, Chris Evans, home affairs minister Brendan O’Connor and various senior government officials have had discussions with their Sri Lankan counterparts in recent months about dealing with Australia’s Sri Lankan asylum seeker problem. The government has also appointed a special envoy to Sri Lanka whose task is to keep the high-level discussions going until they yield results.

The Attorney-General’s Department is working with Sri Lanka to strengthen its anti-people smuggling laws. The Customs and Border Protection Service will be establishing a liaison post in Sri Lanka and recently contracted the International Organization for Migration to conduct a public information campaign aimed at dissuading people from engaging in irregular movement. So far, so good. What is more problematic is that the AFP has established a new liaison post with two staff in Sri Lanka and is working on enhancing local law enforcement capacity by providing training and logistical support. Logistical support sounds fairly innocuous until one realises that it translates into such things as the Department of Immigration–funded surveillance cameras at Colombo’s international airport, which make it harder for those who need to flee to do so by air. Sri Lanka has also asked Australia to assist in building its defence and coast guard capacity, and Canberra may well have agreed. In any event, the Sri Lankan defence forces have recently become more able (or more willing) to intercept people trying to travel to Australia by sea.

Once again, it must be noted that the Australian government is also attempting to do something about the factors causing forced displacement from Sri Lanka in the first place. It is investing in de-mining and reconstruction in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces; it is assisting with the internal resettlement of displaced people; and it is doing its best to foster post-conflict political reconciliation. The salient point, though, is this: the fact that Australia is making praiseworthy attempts to eliminate in the longer-term the root causes of Sri Lankan asylum seeker movement does not constitute any kind of moral alibi for seeking to ensure that those who need to flee the country in the meantime are unable to do so. It certainly does not make any more palatable Kevin Rudd’s boast that close cooperation between Australia and Sri Lanka has resulted in fifteen interceptions involving about 260 individuals in the past twelve months.

As well as entering into bilateral arrangements with these and many other countries in the region, the Australian government promotes regional cooperation through mechanisms such as the Bali Process on People Smuggling and Trafficking, in which over fifty countries and several international organisations participate. Until recently, Bali Process activities have focused on disrupting transnational crime rather than strengthening refugee protection. But the Australian government has flagged its desire to use this and other processes to achieve the long-term objective of an “enduring protection framework” for the region. The framework contemplated is one involving the UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration and source, transit and destination countries in which refugee status claims would be assessed properly, “durable solutions” would be found for those assessed to be refugees, and arrangements would be made for the dignified, safe and sustainable return of those assessed not to be refugees. All of this sounds very, very good, but achievement is not a foregone conclusion. Civil society organisations will need to be vigilant to ensure that the aim and outcome of intergovernmental negotiations is not just better border control.

Even if a satisfactory framework is negotiated, putting it into operation will be a daunting task. First, the many countries in our region that have not yet made a formal legal commitment to provide effective protection to refugees, and even some of the few that have, are a very long way from providing effective protection in fact. There will need to be a very heavy investment in protection capacity-building in order to bring the conditions in those countries up to acceptable standards. Second, an enduring protection framework will need to deliver durable solutions for individuals within a reasonable timeframe; otherwise, even people who have been recognised as refugees will continue to succumb to the temptation of irregular movement.

For many refugees, voluntary repatriation is a pipe dream because of the long-term nature of the threat that caused them to flee in the first place. This leaves two possible solutions, integration in the country of initial refuge or resettlement in a third country. If history is any guide, most countries in our region will not easily be persuaded to contemplate local integration of refugees. As for resettlement, on a worldwide basis the need for resettlement places far outstrips availability.

ON ITS OWN, Australia cannot provide a solution for every refugee. But unless it is prepared to do its fair share other countries in the region will quite reasonably continue to suspect that the real agenda is not responsibility-sharing but burden-shifting. Australia’s planned Refugee and Humanitarian Program for 2009–10 offers 13,750 places. 6000 of these places have been allocated for resettling people who have been identified offshore as being refugees. The remaining 7750 places have been allocated for resettlement under the Special Humanitarian Program (mainly sponsored entrants) and for onshore asylum seekers who are granted protection visas. Counting onshore protection visas as part of the Refugee and Humanitarian Program was a political stunt by the previous government which has been continued by the present one. The onshore–offshore linkage is designed to make the political point that Australia has a finite capacity to assist refugees, with the consequence that every place taken by an onshore asylum seeker is a place taken away from a person offshore. This is not, however, an argument that withstands scrutiny. Australia has been far more generous with resettlement places in the past and can easily afford to be so again.

A former High Commissioner for Refugees said that his “dream for the future” was for every developed country to provide an annual resettlement quota of 0.1 per cent of their existing population. This quota is well within the absorption capacities of the countries concerned and would make resettlement a genuinely available solution for those who need it most. In Australia’s case the formula translates into about 22,000 resettlement places per year (which should not be reduced by the number of protection visas granted). It’s time for us to “pony up.” •

The post Australia’s expanding borders appeared first on Inside Story.

AUSTRALIA RIGHTLY regards itself as a liberal democracy. What distinguishes “liberal” democracies from “illiberal” ones is their adherence to the view that all individuals have fundamental moral rights, of which even a political majority cannot deprive them. The notion of universal human rights was in a real sense born of liberalism. Unfortunately, it is not always easy for a government to be true to liberal values in a democratic society. Sometimes, as the Rudd government is presently discovering, it can be extremely hard.

In the period 1 January to 27 October 2009, thirty-six boats carrying about 1800 asylum seekers have arrived in Australian waters without prior authorisation. As the Rudd government has been at pains to emphasise, this is a miniscule number when compared with the numbers of asylum seekers who have entered European countries without authorisation in the same period. Nevertheless, the Coalition parties have attempted to gain political mileage by arguing that Australia is experiencing a larger number of arrivals now than it did in the latter years of the Howard government because policy reforms instituted by the present government are operating as a “pull factor.”

The impression their rhetoric attempts to create is one of an “invasion” by the world’s dispossessed, attracted towards us by a perceived weakening in our determination to keep them out. The Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey has suggested that terrorists may be entering Australia in the guise of asylum seekers; David Johnston, a Liberal senator, characterised asylum seekers as potential disease carriers; and the West Australian Liberal premier Colin Barnett described them as potential criminals.

For the most part the opposition has avoided articulating exactly what it would do to address the concerns that it has raised, but the subtext is that the government has a responsibility to keep asylum seekers out of Australia using all measures physically available. After all, the Australian people should be able to “decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” It is a message that resonates with the Australian public because it speaks to the democratic strand of our political tradition.

There are a couple of choices open to those who wish to prevent the opposition from gaining political traction. One is to assert that the concerns it has raised have no foundation in fact. But this would be misleading and a distortion of the more nuanced picture the Australian electorate has a right to know. Although there is a great deal of truth in the government’s claim that the recent upsurge in irregular asylum seeker arrivals is part of a worldwide phenomenon explicable by reference to events in source countries such as Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, there is also some truth to the opposition’s claim that Australia’s renewed reputation for respecting human rights is a “pull factor” for potential arrivals. Similarly, any denial that some unauthorised arrivals could possibly pose a threat to the security of the Australian community would simply be an attempt to keep inconvenient facts out of public discourse.

The more politically mature, albeit difficult, choice is to acknowledge that the dilemmas identified by the opposition are real, even if they are being overstated. At the same time, however, the Australian public needs to be reminded that there is a price to be paid if we wish to remain a liberal society. Namely, no matter how threatened we feel by unauthorised arrivals, some solutions are off the table not because they are ineffective (though they may also be that) but because they are inconsistent with liberal values. However effective it may have been as a deterrent, the arbitrary and indefinite detention to which past Australian governments (on both sides of politics) subjected unauthorised arrivals was inconsistent with liberal values. That is why the Rudd government made reforms to immigration detention policy and that is why, to its credit, it has continued to stand by those reforms.

What the Rudd government also did upon coming into office was to strengthen border control initiatives of previous governments which were consistent with liberal values. These initiatives had the long-term aim of eliminating the root causes of forced displacement, as well as the shorter-term aim of ameliorating the plight of displaced people in overburdened countries of first asylum so that they would have less incentive to engage in “secondary movement.” The government was, in short, on the right track, until it began to fear that the right track might lead it right back into opposition in 2010. The boat carrying seventy-eight asylum seekers (including five women and five children) that put out a distress call on 17 October 2009 was, in that sense, Kevin Rudd’s Tampa. The boat presented the government with a choice and the choice it made was the same one the Howard government made in relation to the Tampa, in essence if not in detail.

The boat in question was in international waters at the time it made a distress call to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, or AMSA. Since the boat was in Indonesia’s internationally designated search and rescue area, AMSA relayed the call to the Indonesian authorities. As it turned out, the vessel best placed to respond to the distress call was the Australian navy vessel, HMAS Armidale. What the Armidale discovered on locating the boat was that it was unseaworthy. Accordingly, arrangements were made to transfer its passengers onto the Australian Customs ship, the Oceanic Viking.

The moment of choice came in determining what to do next. To discharge its international obligation to ensure safety of life at sea, Australia had only to arrange for the rescuees to disembark at the nearest port, which would have been an Indonesian port. But, as the Australian government would have been well aware, the situation also engaged Australia’s treaty and customary international law obligations not to return a person directly or indirectly to a place where they face a real risk of serious human rights violations. Why? Because the rescuees, who happened to be asylum seekers, had come within the effective control of agents of the Australian state.

As Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator, pointed out in parliament on 19 October 2009, the most effectual way for the Australian government to ensure it fulfilled its international human rights obligations would have been to bring the asylum seekers to Australia, to determine any protection claims they presented, to allow those with valid claims to remain and to return those without such claims to their country of origin. The government chose instead to arrange a handover of the asylum seekers to the Indonesian authorities. In other words, it chose to place the fulfilment or otherwise of Australia’s already engaged human rights obligations within the control of a country that has chosen not to make all of the same international legal commitments in respect of asylum seekers that Australia has made.

It is debatable whether this “Indonesian solution” is more or less consistent with liberal values than the Howard government’s “Pacific solution.” The Pacific solution did at least have the merit of keeping the Australian government firmly in control of the fate of the asylum seekers. The criticisms that can properly be made of the Pacific solution are, first, that it involved Australia exploiting its superior bargaining power to shift a burden to Nauru and Papua New Guinea and, second, that it was implemented in a way that resulted in violations of the human rights of at least some of the asylum seekers concerned.

Asymmetry of bargaining power is not a concern in the negotiations presently taking place between Australia and Indonesia to intensify a process of cooperation initiated by the Howard government. It is more than likely that the outcome will be a win–win from the perspective of the two states involved. What is less certain is that the outcome will result in the better protection of the human rights of those whose fate is being negotiated. We have some reason to hope for the best because the attitude of both governments towards asylum seekers is relatively benign. But if there is one thing that history has taught us, it is not to trust the realisation of liberal values to the benign intentions of governments but rather to mechanisms that force transparency and accountability. •

The post Liberalism’s asylum dilemma appeared first on Inside Story.

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING of Indonesia, including in the Australian media, has tended to oscillate excessively from the euphoric to the gloomy. The recent Jakarta bombings, the first in Indonesia in almost four years, are certainly a terrible tragedy. But the country is in good hands, and its economy is doing better than most at the moment. And the election of Dr Boediono as vice president in this month’s election is further good news for the country, its neighbourhood and Australia.

One of the most durable and important elements in the Australia–Indonesia relationship is the large number of Indonesians who have studied in our universities. Among recipients of Australian graduate-level scholarships, Indonesians are the largest group, and Australia also hosts the largest number of private Indonesian university students studying abroad.

More so than alumni from almost any other country in Southeast Asia, these graduates increasingly occupy senior positions in government, business, universities and civil society. It is no exaggeration to say that this is probably the single most important dynamic in the bilateral relationship. At elite levels in Indonesia, we are probably now better understood than any other western nation. And the fact that many earlier Australian graduates send their children here to study adds further momentum.

In the outgoing Yudhoyono administration three cabinet ministers were graduates of Australian universities; in the recently elected administration, which assumes power in October, vice president-elect Boediono has close Australian connections. For more than a decade, he has been the most important economic policy-maker in Southeast Asia’s dominant power.

Boediono (who, like many Javanese, has only one name) is a courteous, understated, cautious, reserved individual. He is not a crusading, charismatic figure, and is quite different in style and substance from the current vice president, Jusuf Kalla, a controversial, “can do” politician. But Boediono can be tough and resolute, as he has shown in handling several demanding portfolios and dealing with policy challenges way greater than his Australian counterparts ever have to contemplate.

He has had a stellar academic, ministerial and now political career. Born in 1943, he spent extended periods at three Australian universities, initially courtesy of a Colombo Plan scholarship. He graduated with an economics degree from the University of Western Australia in 1967, followed by a Masters degree from Monash in 1972. He also spent two years in the early 1970s as a junior researcher at the Australian National University, the university with which he has continued to have a close intellectual association (and from which his daughter also subsequently graduated). He later earned a PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most of Boediono’s academic career has been at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Even as a government minister he has maintained Yogyakarta as his principal place of residence, and often conducts Saturday classes at the university.

From the mid 1980s Boediono was increasingly pulled into the Jakarta policy world. Appointed to the senior staff of the National Planning Agency, Bappenas, he rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a deputy (or sub-minister) in the late 1980s. He was one of the directors of the Bank Indonesia, the central bank, over the period 1993–98. Boediono’s ministerial career formally commenced in May 1998, when the incoming president, B.J. Habibie, appointed him as planning minister (and head of Bappenas), a position he held throughout the seventeen-month administration. He was technically out of government during the controversial Wahid presidency, but returned as finance minister under Megawati from August 2001 to November 2004. After another short break, he returned to cabinet as President Yudhoyono’s coordinating economics minister in December 2005, a position he held until June 2008. At the behest of the president, he was then appointed to the position of governor of Bank Indonesia in May 2008, overcoming an impasse that had arisen from the parliament’s refusal to agree to any of the other candidates nominated by the administration.

This short summary of Boediono’s ministerial career highlights two key achievements. One is that over the past decade he has held every major economic policy-making position in the Indonesian government. It is difficult to think of a policy-maker in any other major country with comparable experience. The other is that he has been at the centre of decision-making when Indonesia faced momentous challenges. At least three deserve mention. The first was the Asian financial crisis in 1997–98, during which the Indonesian economy contracted severely, both the currency and the banking system collapsed, and relations with the donor community soured. Second, as finance minister in the early years of this decade he presided over a remarkable recovery in state finances, rapidly bringing down public debt and managing to control the spending propensities of a divided cabinet not known for its economic literacy. He also adroitly navigated the country’s exit from the detested IMF program. And, third, he was in charge of the nation’s central bank as the current global financial crisis hit; thus far the country has navigated its way through the crisis competently.

One other feature of Boediono’s ministerial career deserves comment: at a time of unprecedented political turmoil and intrigue, he has managed to remain above the fray. At one stage, Indonesia had had five presidents in six years, and Boediono was a senior figure under four of them. The governorship of the central bank in particular has been a political minefield. In spite of its independence – which was a condition of the IMF rescue package – all occupants of that position, except for Boediono, have subsequently faced extended legal action, house arrest or imprisonment. The closest Boediono came to political controversy was as a result of the so-called BLBI scandal at the height of the financial crisis in 1997–98, when the central bank spent billions of dollars in an effort to rescue the ailing banking system. This led to the dismissal of the bank’s governor, and his subsequent long-running trial. For a period, it appeared that Boediono might also be charged, but he has since been officially cleared.

BOEDIONO turned sixty-five last year. It was widely expected that he would complete his distinguished career of government service by serving out the five-year term as head of the central bank, and then return to academe. But following this year’s April parliamentary elections, at which Yudhoyono’s party was the clear, but minority, victor, attention turned to the choice of running mate for the 8 July presidential elections. The initial assumption was that Yudhoyono (universally known as SBY) would choose a leader from one of the other political parties. Quite suddenly, however, rumours surfaced that Boediono might become his vice-presidential candidate, and in mid-May this became official.

Two reasons appear to explain his selection. One was SBY’s greatly enhanced power following success at the parliamentary elections, and hence his freedom to appoint a vice-president of his choosing. As a corollary, since this is his final term, vice presidential loyalty was considered to be essential, and a “non politician” was therefore preferred. An occasional irritation during SBY’s current term has been the sometimes erratic behaviour of his outgoing deputy, Jusuf Kalla. The second factor was the difficulty of choosing an acceptable candidate from among the four Moslem parties with which SBY had teamed up.

The parallels with Indonesia’s earlier pre-eminent economic policy-maker, Professor Widjojo Nitisastro, are striking, even though the authoritarian and democratic eras are so very different. Both Boediono and Widjojo were hand-picked by two Javanese presidents, SBY and Soeharto, military men by career, and with an instinctive recognition of the importance of good economic management. Both presidents developed a very close rapport and personal chemistry with their principal economic advisers, both also Javanese, quintessential technocrats of great intellect and integrity, and with an evident capacity to read their leader’s mind and mood. Soeharto in fact wanted Widjojo as his vice-president in 1983, but personal circumstances got in the way.

It is not clear how Boediono’s candidature affected the outcome of this month’s presidential elections. The campaign was mainly personality-based. It lacked fire, controversy and grand policy or ideological debates. The three presidential candidates dominated the media. The other two vice-presidential candidates were controversial and divisive military figures who still remain subject to US travel restrictions.

Boediono is not a natural politician, but he adapted to political life more quickly than expected and ran an effective campaign. As expected, he was especially comfortable dealing with economic policy issues, which surveys showed to be the dominant concern of the electorate. Along with his impeccable personal credentials, this was undoubtedly an asset for SBY. Nor did it go unnoticed that his personal wealth was the lowest of the six presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Perhaps the most contentious poll issue was the pejorative “neo-lib” label that a desperate and populist opposition tried to pin on Boediono. This was a scurrilous attack on his record in government, alleging that he is too close to the IMF and foreign investors and that he neglects issues of social justice. These strident “nationalist” assertions are of course wildly misleading.

APART FROM a series of widely used textbooks, Boediono’s academic publications are not extensive. His major outlet has been the Australian National University’s Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, or BIES, with which he has been closely associated as a board member since 1984. He has continued to write when out of government. By far the most important recent paper is his “Managing the Indonesian Economy: Some Lessons from the Past,” presented at ANU’s annual Indonesia Update conference in 2005 and published in BIES. This essay provides the best English-language summary of his views on economic policy-making in Indonesia. His survey of post-independence economic policy-making emphasises the need for economic policy cohesion (present under Soeharto, absent for much of the next few years), a coherent and credible economic strategy, and macroeconomic stability.

Boediono regards the central challenges as building institutions to underpin a fragile democracy. These include, crucially, the judiciary and law enforcement, on which he notes slow progress to date, and the civil service, reform of which was neglected in the early post-Soeharto era. In the article he warns of the possible “disharmony between politics and economics” and argues that some economic policy-making should be insulated from the pressures of vested interests. Examples include central bank independence and legislated fiscal policy constraints – both achieved in Indonesia in recent years, with Boediono playing a central role in the process.

Boediono is a technocrat and, although he is popularly elected, he does not have an independent political base. Nor does he have further political aspirations; in fact, he did not seek this high office. He is therefore likely to be more of a prime minister, a cabinet coordinator, especially on economic policy, and a manager of the often unpredictable and assertive parliament. He will therefore free SBY for broader national and issues.

The most important consideration for Australia is that for the next five years Boediono will be a central player in the major power of our neighbourhood. Nothing matters more to Australian foreign policy than a stable and prosperous Indonesia at peace with itself and its neighbourhood. This will be an administration whose cabinet is far more “Australia-literate” than can be said of the converse. (Regrettably, we have never had an Australian minister deeply immersed in Indonesia.) That means an administration well disposed towards us.

In the case of Boediono, it also means we have a natural partner for a range of initiatives including, importantly, G20-based reforms of the economic and financial architecture, and further institution-building in the Asia–Pacific region. His elevation will also enhance the effectiveness of our development assistance program to Indonesia, which, approaching $500 million annually, is our largest country program, and the second largest bilateral program to Indonesia.

Conversely, it is important not to have unrealistic expectations. Inevitably, there will be differences in a bilateral relationship between two neighbours who are so different in so many respects. Particular individuals can do only so much. In the final analysis, it is the broad layers of social, cultural, commercial and personal relations that are the arbiters of whether there is a close and durable friendship between two nations. •

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IN A QUIET VILLAGE in North Aceh, Amran is contemplating his new life as a politician. Amran (not his real name) is about forty years old and in many respects he’s like a lot of other middle-aged men in this part of Aceh. Born in a sleepy rural backwater, he grew up in the shadow of the massive natural gas fields opened up in North Aceh in the 1970s. In his youth he travelled to Malaysia, and stayed there almost twenty years – just as many young men have left this part of Aceh for Malaysia, often illegally by boat, to seek their fortune. When he was first in Malaysia, however, Amran also joined the Free Aceh Movement – Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or GAM – and he was one of the first people from his sub-district to sign up. When he came back to Aceh a few years later he was a low-level commander in what became one of Southeast Asia’s longest-running guerilla wars.

For much of the next two decades Amran divided his time between Malaysia, where he was a successful small businessman, and Aceh, where he was a guerilla fighter. “It’s easy to go illegally to Malaysia from here, across the sea. Lots of people do it,” he explains to me as we talk on an open-sided wooden platform under the coconut trees in the yard of his family home.

The scene is a village not far from the main highway that snakes down Aceh’s eastern coast. It’s a world of broad rice fields and closely-knit communities where, just a few years ago, there was also a military post every few hundred metres. Now, men walking or cycling down the road stop off for a while, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and listen to the conversation. Though Amran is respected here for the role he played as a guerilla leader, nobody treats him with special deference. Instead, there’s an atmosphere of casual intimacy. In the war years, these close ties were put to the service of the rebellion, as village people raised money for local fighters, supplied food to them, or hid them in their houses. Now, they’re being used to bring about a political transformation.

Amran was elected to the local district parliament in April. One of thirty-two members of the Partai Aceh to be elected to the forty-five member parliament of North Aceh, he was part of a wave that saw members of the party of former GAM members swept into local legislatures across Aceh during Indonesia’s nationwide elections. The party won 48 per cent of the vote for the provincial legislature, just short of an absolute majority – a level of support that is very rare in Indonesia.

Amran and a number of his colleagues who join in the discussion are satisfied with their victory, but they are worried that their party won’t be able to live up to the promises it made at election time. If the legislators can’t keep their supporters happy, “I won’t be able to come back and live here in the village,” he laughs, looking around. During the campaign, the leaders of Partai Aceh said a lot of things about achieving a new vision of self-government for Aceh and about generating greater economic prosperity for the people. The legislators-elect doubt that they’ll be able to put it all into practice to the satisfaction of their supporters. One of them, a local religious teacher in an Islamic boarding school, is especially worried that they didn’t quite win 50 per cent of the seats in the provincial parliament: “The other parties are national parties,” he explains, “They are more loyal to Jakarta than to the Acehnese nation. How can we get self-government with them?”

Of course, politicians the world over worry about how to deal with their rivals, satisfy their supporters and win re-election. What makes this group of newly elected legislators distinct is that they worry they will not only generate disillusionment, but also face demands for money, threats and even violence from their supporters and former comrades.

THE ELECTION VICTORY of Amran and his friends is the latest act in a peace process that is rightly praised as one of the most successful in the world. But the peace is still heavy with unresolved tensions. In August 2005, representatives of the Indonesian government and GAM signed a memorandum of understanding in Helsinki, ending almost thirty years of on-again off-again guerilla warfare in Aceh. At the heart of the peace deal was a compromise in which GAM agreed to give up its armed struggle and its demand for complete independence from Indonesia in exchange for “self government” for Aceh. It also won the chance to compete for political power at the local level. An early step in this process came when a former GAM propagandist, veterinary science lecturer Irwandi Yusuf, ran as an independent candidate and was elected as Aceh’s governor back in December 2006. A total of ten GAM-affiliated candidates were also elected as mayors and districts heads, covering just under half of Aceh’s districts.

With much of the local executive government in their hands, the next step in GAM supporters’ road to power came when people in Aceh were allowed to form local political parties. To compete in elections throughout the rest of Indonesia, parties must show that they have branches spread across much of the nation: that they are national parties. The explicit goal is to prevent regional sentiments and loyalties from gaining a foothold in the formal political system. An exception was made for Aceh when Indonesia’s national parliament passed the Law on the Governing of Aceh in mid 2006. This law embodies many (but, in the eyes of GAM supporters, not all) points from the Helsinki memorandum, including its provision for local parties.

Aceh’s transformation is testing the ability of Indonesia’s ruling elite to manage regional tensions of the sort that have produced a series of local rebellions since the country declared independence over six decades ago. There is still a vast gulf between what most former supporters of GAM think self-government entails and what Jakarta is prepared to give. But the peace process is also testing the former GAM rebels who, having agreed to give up their armed struggle, are faced with the complexities of overseeing Aceh’s public administration and economic development while resisting the temptations of corruption.

Partai Aceh achieved its electoral victory by relying on both the muscle power and the credibility it built up during its war to free Aceh of Indonesian rule. The war left GAM and its successor organisations with a network of former combatants, cadres and supporters that penetrates down to the villages. The network was a powerful tool for mobilisational during the elections. Especially in the relatively densely populated strip along the east coast, many villages are virtual GAM fiefdoms, and solid Partai Aceh territory. Candidates from rival parties cite examples of former GAM combatants in these areas threatening their supporters, denying them access to villages, or “accompanying” villagers while they cast their votes.

But everybody agrees that Partai Aceh would have won an impressive victory even if its followers had practised no intimidation. And it is a moot point what the overall effect of irregularities were: Partai Aceh supporters insist that they also lost seats because of the military’s intimidation of voters and manipulation of the counting in some inland and southerly districts – places where the population is sparser and more ethnically diverse and where GAM has always been weaker. In these areas the military is still a significant political actor, and it often works hand in hand with powerful local business-political clans.

As well as organisation, the key to GAM’s strength in the war years was the depth of the Acehnese nationalism it was able to arouse in the population. For almost thirty years, GAM’s fighters were motivated by the doctrine, instilled by the movement’s founder Hasan di Tiro, that Indonesia was a neocolonial fabrication and Aceh had a glorious and much longer history as an independent nation-state. Independence would allow Aceh to reclaim its rightful place in the world.

Partai Aceh’s victory drew on a recalibrated version of that vision. Party campaigners say that during the campaign they stressed the party’s loyalty to the old traditions of struggle and promised to remain true to them. As one former fighter turned parliamentarian recalled, “We told the people that we gave up our weapons for the Helsinki MoU and to uphold the dignity of the Acehnese nation; now Partai Aceh is our weapon to continue that struggle.” They always stressed that the party would hold firmly to the Helsinki memorandum, which means that they no longer struggle for independence. Yet they are adamant about asserting Aceh’s distinctiveness and its special rights. In many respects, even the leaders of Partai Aceh are far from being reconciled with Indonesia. They know that the struggle for independence is well and truly off the table, but they seek to maintain, in the words of party spokesperson Adnan Beuransyah, “a clear dividing line” between Aceh and Indonesia. They begrudgingly accept that Aceh is part of the Indonesian state but, as Beuransyah puts it, “we must have entirely separate authorities.”

DESPITE its decentralising reforms over the last decade, in some respects Indonesia remains a highly centralised polity. Certainly, many national government officials maintain a very centralistic mindset and are reluctant to interpret either the Helsinki memorandum or the Law on the Governing of Aceh in a way that maximises Aceh’s autonomy. The Helsinki memorandum includes this key sentence: “Aceh will exercise authority within all sectors of public affairs, which will be administered in conjunction with its civil and judicial administration, except in the fields of foreign affairs, external defence, national security, monetary and fiscal matters, justice and freedom of religion.” GAM supporters interpret this to mean that the central government should have authority only over these fields in Aceh, and that Aceh’s government should have unfettered authority over every other imaginable policy area. But Indonesia’s law on regional government, which applies to the whole country, contains a very similar phrase, and the central government still manages to have far-reaching national laws and regulations that cover everything from the internal organisation of the civil service to mining and the formation of new districts.

Moreover, the Law on the Governing of Aceh already, in the eyes of GAM supporters and many other Acehnese, contains articles that weaken the provisions of the Helsinki memorandum. For instance, one article – 235.2.a. – gives the central government power to annul any regulation passed by the provincial parliament if the centre deems it to contravene the “public interest” – a rubbery phrase that will continue to generate dispute. The law also leaves many crucial aspects of Aceh–Jakarta relations to be defined by further central government regulations, some of which have already been issued, while others are still being prepared.

Already, some of these new regulations have proved to be troubling for GAM supporters. A 2007 government regulation, for instance, required local parties to register with the Justice and Human Rights Ministry. Central government officials then insisted that such local parties had to be, as presidential adviser Andi Mallarangeng told the Antara news agency, “consistent with existing laws and uphold the unitary principles of the state.” When GAM supporters tried to register the name Partai GAM they were refused on this ground, because the name GAM was seen as implying support for independence. They next tried to call their party the Partai Gerakan Aceh Mandiri (where mandiri is a softer word for “independent” than the original merdeka) but they were again refused. Eventually they settled on Partai Aceh.

It’s not hard to identify many future points of friction. One concerns the division of oil and gas revenues between central and regional governments, which has been a contentious issue ever since the development of the gas fields in North Aceh in the 1970s. For decades, Aceh was one of the world’s most productive sources of natural gas. ExxonMobil operated the gas wells, tankers from Japan and South Korea queued up off the coast, and engineers and other staff flew in and out from the neighbouring province of North Sumatra. A technologically sophisticated industrial enclave grew up, surrounded by rice-farming and fishing villages. The bulk of the government revenues went to Jakarta, and local people felt they saw little in the way of tangible benefits. It became an article of faith for GAM and other Acehnese dissidents that Jakarta was interested in Aceh only for its natural wealth. If Aceh were independent, they used to say, Aceh would be as wealthy as Brunei.

Under the Helsinki memorandum and the Law on the Governing of Aceh, 70 per cent of the revenues generated by oil and gas sales in Aceh will go back to the region. Although this provision has led to an increase in provincial revenues, many Acehnese think the increase should be greater. The problem, as they see it, is that revenues generated by Aceh’s oil and gas sales are collected by the central government, which then makes its own calculations and transfers to Aceh the funds it thinks the province deserves. Precisely how the centre calculates these amounts is a mystery even to Acehnese local government officials: details on the volume of sales, prices, and the contracts between ExxonMobil and the Indonesian government remain obscure. Every year, Acehnese government leaders claim the province has been short-changed, but they lack the solid data to prove their case.

To make matters worse, the oil and gas are running out. In the district of North Aceh where Amran and his friends live, a process of deindustrialisation is under way. ExxonMobil is slowly winding down its operations and two big fertiliser factories have already closed. As we drive between our appointments, Amran swerves his car left and right to avoid the potholes that stud the road. “This is an Exxon road,” he says, “In the old days it was never like this.” Having been a source of bitter resentment for so long, it’s a supreme irony that Aceh’s natural gas revenues are running down precisely as a political movement that was partly generated by that resentment is coming to power.

In May, the Indonesian finance minister, Sri Mulyani, announced that the central government this year was granting Aceh revenues from oil and gas revenues amounting to 554 billion rupiah (about $A67 million), much less than half the 1.32 trillion that had been written into the provincial budget. The central government blames the shortfall on declining production and falling world prices, but Governor Irwandi complained about the central government’s lack of transparency. The Aceh government has formed an “advocacy team” to try to find more accurate information about how the sum was calculated and to lobby for an increase, but with little success so far. It’s difficult for the Aceh government to be more than a supplicant on this issue, with the central government holding all the cards – as it still does on so many aspects of centre–region relations.

WITH PARTAI ACEH about to take a near-majority in the provincial legislature, there are some areas in which the new legislators will try to test the limits of Aceh’s authority. Amran, his colleagues, and other newly elected Partai Aceh candidates repeatedly told me that their main goal in power would be to achieve full self-government. They want to create a system of government that is distinctively Acehnese. One issue that is close to the hearts of many of them is the position of wali nanggroe or “guardian of the state,” the title that the GAM founder, Hasan di Tiro, conferred on himself in the 1970s. The term dates back to the nineteenth century, when Aceh was a sultanate and one of Hasan di Tiro’s ancestors was a leading figure in the war to resist Dutch invasion and colonialism. Both the Helsinki memorandum and the Law on the Governing of Aceh provide for the establishment of the position of wali nanggroe, but the outgoing provincial legislature prepared a draft regulation that makes this a symbolic post, representative of Acehnese culture and traditions.

The draft regulation has been put on hold, and the new Partai Aceh legislators speak of drafting a much more powerful version that will make the wali nanggroe akin to a monarch in a constitutional monarchy (“like in Denmark or Britain” as one of them put it to me), with the power to dismiss the governor and to sign laws. But such an arrangement would conflict with Indonesian laws, and even the constitution, which make the governor the head of provincial government.

Despite these and many other sources of potential friction, in practice the political behaviour of the former rebels has been much more accommodating than their rhetoric sometimes suggests. GAM leaders have forged close personal relations with some of Indonesia’s national political leaders, especially vice-president, and presidential aspirant, Jusuf Kalla, who was the leading Indonesian government figure behind the scenes in the Helsinki negotiations. Since then, Kalla has opened access to GAM leaders, and whenever there are tensions in the province they can visit or call him. Two weeks ago he made a much-publicised visit to the Partai Aceh office in Banda Aceh and promised that, if elected, he would amend the Law on the Governing of Aceh to make it accord more closely with Acehnese wishes. It’s an implausible promise, however, since Jusuf Kalla is unlikely to win next week’s presidential election and his Golkar party only has a minority of seats in the national parliament.

Many Acehnese are also favourably disposed towards the incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, under whose watch the peace deal was signed, and who has prevented the military from destabilising it. He is the favourite to win the presidential elections. During April’s legislative elections, many Partai Aceh leaders directed their supporters, at least informally, to vote for Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat in the elections for the national legislature (for which local parties like Partai Aceh are not entitled to nominate candidates) and the party won a handsome victory in the province at the national level. Governor Irwandi Yusuf and other GAM-affiliated public officeholders have become members of Yudhoyono’s “success team.”

So there’s plenty of evidence that, despite their sometimes incendiary rhetoric on self-government, the former separatists are prepared to compromise. With Yudhoyono likely to be re-elected, Indonesia will have a president who has a personal stake in the peace process. As long as Jakarta is not too blatant in its attempts to circumscribe the Aceh government’s new powers, it seems likely that Partai Aceh and other GAM leaders will continue to deal with Jakarta and to adapt to being part of government rather than opposing it. In such circumstances, the forces that are most threatening for GAM and its long-term political role come not from the government in Jakarta but from the predatory politics in which their own supporters are immersed at the local level.

BACK IN THAT VILLAGE in North Aceh, Amran and his newly elected Partai Aceh colleagues are worried about the pressures they’ll face from their former comrades-in-arms. “Just imagine,” Amran explains “there are about 15,000 KPA members in North Aceh alone, while there are just thirty-two of us in the district legislature.” (The KPA, or Aceh Transitional Committee, is the organisation of former GAM combatants.) “We’ll have an income and they do not: that’s how they will see it.” The Partai Aceh legislators, he thinks, will have to come to some sort of agreement among themselves. “We should divide our salaries of five million rupiah [about $A800] a month in two: 50 per cent for us and 50 per cent for our people,” but this would be done “on the condition that that’s it: no other request, no other demands, no anonymous and threatening telephone calls in the middle of the night.” Even so, “we can predict that we’ll get lots of curses from KPA folk: that’s certain.”

Since the Helsinki memorandum was signed, former fighters throughout Aceh have been scrambling to enrich themselves by using their access to local officials to win government construction projects or other lucrative economic opportunities. With the former separatists now the dominant force in the province’s politics, many ex-combatants feel that they should benefit personally from the control over government budgets and expenditures that political dominance brings. Petty violence and intimidation are often part of this story: former fighters threaten officials who allocate construction tenders, wreck the equipment of rival contractors, or terrorise rival workers. Former separatists who became heads of district governments are not immune, and many of them have to face endless and exhausting demands for money, projects or preferential treatment. Sometimes ex-combatants threaten them with violence.

This can be a scary environment for GAM members who are now in positions of influence, and it explains why Amran and his friends view their victory in last April’s legislative elections with mixed feelings. They know that a lot of the ordinary ex-combatants feel they haven’t benefited materially from the end of the war. Some people higher up the chain say they are compelled to get into business or engage in dubious fund-raising methods so that they can provide jobs to unemployed former fighters, or at least help them out when they are in financial distress. At the same time, this is also a very lucrative environment for those former guerillas who have enough personal authority, the right connections and the boldness to grasp the new opportunities for their own advantage. Everywhere you go in Aceh the fruits of their efforts can be seen in the fancy new houses and shiny new cars that former leading guerillas now possess.

And there are already signs that at least some of the GAM-affiliated local government heads are being affected by the culture of corruption that pervades the bureaucracy in Indonesia – or at least that they are unable to control it. The most spectacular example is Ilyas Hamid, the district head of North Aceh. This former guerilla commander quickly developed a taste for the trappings of power after being elected in December 2006. In particular, he became a figure of fun in his district because he cultivated a fanatical love of golf, the pastime par excellence of male members of Indonesia’s bureaucratic and business elite. Senior military officers regularly invited him to play as part of their confidence-building approaches after he was elected, and he got the taste for it. He is now reputed to spend several days a week at luxury golf resorts in the neighbouring province of North Sumatra, far from his own district.

More seriously, Ilyas Hamid’s government has become the centre of a large corruption scandal currently absorbing media and public attention throughout Aceh. A group of his advisers, and his deputy, were involved in a scheme to take 220 billion rupiah (approximately $A27 million) of North Aceh government funds to a bank branch in Jakarta. In the end, 200 billion rupiah was deposited in the bank and much of that which was deposited promptly disappeared into about one hundred separate accounts, some of them in the names of relatives of advisory team members, and was used for all sorts of purposes, including buying foreign currency. In mid June, the Aceh newspaper Serambi Indonesia reported police sources as saying that they had so far recovered only 177 billion rupiah. The investigations are still underway.

Several of Ilyas Hamid’s advisers have already been interrogated or detained. Some of them are locally reputed to have track records of involvement in corruption or as brokers in shady business deals. One, Salahuddin Alfata, was briefly detained in New York when, accompanying Governor Irwandi on an official visit, he tried to deposit a bad cheque for $US32.5 million; it turned out he was a victim of a so-called Nigerian scam. Ilyas Hamid’s precise role is still unknown. Some people are ready to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow that he was simply fooled by the carpetbaggers who have attached themselves to him. Even so, it appears that the money was transferred to the Jakarta bank on the basis of an order he signed without the required authorisation by the local parliament.

This is an extreme case, but it’s not an isolated one. Many of the districts headed by GAM-affiliated officials are in the midst of corruption probes. In many of these cases it’s far from clear that the government heads were personally involved, but in some they may be legally responsible. An investigation is reportedly underway at the provincial level into the sale of scrap iron from old bridges, which the Aceh rumour mill suggests involves many close allies of Governor Irwandi.

There is talk of dark conspiracies by Jakarta to ensnare the rebels-turned-officials in corruption charges. In fact, when I interviewed some of these same district leaders two years ago, just after they were elected, some of them told me that such an outcome was what they most feared. Corruption in the bureaucracy in Aceh is as pervasive as elsewhere in Indonesia, and it would take little effort by any law enforcement agency to find evidence. Some of the journalists who have been most energetically investigating corruption in the local governments do appear to have military protection. Already people in Aceh talk about an “Abdullah Puteh scenario,” referring to a former governor of the province who was jailed on corruption charges several years ago. Others draw parallels with the fate of Nur Misuari, the former Southern Philippines rebel leader who came to power following a similar peace deal only to be brought down by accusations of serious corruption. After attempting to lead a renewed insurrection he was captured and incarcerated. Such a dramatic breakdown of the peace is not on the cards in Aceh. But for many of Aceh’s new politicians, the danger is that political rehabilitation and reconciliation will end not with a breakdown of the peace and a return to armed struggle, but with the disgrace and disillusionment that corruption brings. •

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A POPULAR bumper sticker among Indonesian Islamic activists in recent years declares: “Islam is the solution.” For many of these activists, this slogan captured a mood of Islamic revival and confidence – a sense that Islam was reasserting itself in the social and political life of the country after years of marginalisation.

The results of last month’s legislative elections, however, provide compelling evidence that this sanguine attitude is misplaced, at least for the moment. Despite the fact that almost 90 per cent of the electorate is Muslim, Islamic parties gained less than 30 per cent of the vote – their lowest figure over the three democratic elections held after the downfall of President Soeharto in 1998. The declining vote for these parties deserves close analysis for what it tells us about popular attitudes towards religion in politics. The majority of Muslim voters appear not to regard Islam as critical to their electoral decisions, even though it may be important in their personal lives.

Before examining the reasons for these parties’ falling support, some “mapping” of Indonesian political Islam is necessary. Of the 38 parties contesting the national elections, ten can be regarded as “Islamic” because they have either a formal ideological basis in Islam or rely on an overtly Islamic identity for most of their support. According to both the provisional result of the Election Commission and the four quick count polls conducted on election day, these ten parties are likely to gain about 29 per cent of the national vote, down from 38 per cent in 2004 and 37 per cent in 1999. All but one of the established Islamic parties suffered a decline in their share of the vote and only four of these parties gained enough votes to clear the 2.5 per cent threshold for gaining seats in parliament: the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), currently with 8.2 per cent of the vote according the Election Commission, the National Mandate Party (PAN) with 6.3 per cent, the United Development Party (PPP) with 5.2 per cent and the National Awakening Party (PKB) with 5.2 per cent. The drop in support for PPP and PKB is especially notable: in 1999, these were the two biggest Islamic parties, but the vote for both has fallen by more than half in the past two elections.

This poor result for Islamic parties is even more striking if we consider broader historical and religio-cultural trends. In Indonesia’s first free and fair election in 1955 Islamic parties gained 44 per cent of the vote, 15 per cent more than in this year’s election – despite the fact that Islamic pietism has become far more pronounced in the intervening years. A far higher percentage of Muslims now attend diligently to regular prayer, fasting during Ramadhan, attending Qur’anic study groups, and consuming “Islamic products,” such as shari’a banking and Muslim clothing. These contrasting trends – rising religiosity and falling support for political Islam – indicate that many devout Muslims no longer see voting as “confessional” behaviour, explicitly linked to their faith.

The picture becomes more interesting if we look at the variations between the ten parties. Indonesian Islamic parties fall into two broad categories: Islamist and pluralist. Islamist parties formally proclaim an Islamic identity and seek, to varying degrees, to apply Islamic law more extensively in politics and society. All Islamist parties list Islam as their ideological foundation and many have policies for greater shari’a implementation. By contrast, pluralist Islamic parties have as their basis the religiously neutral state ideology of Pancasila and eschew pro-shari’a agendas. While not ideologically Islamic, religious identity is nonetheless a primary factor in their electoral support and most are embedded in particular sections of the Muslim community. The distinction between Islamist and pluralist Islamic parties is important because it indicates the type of politics which the various parties are likely to engage in. Of the ten Islamic parties, seven are Islamist and three pluralist. The seven Islamist parties gained 17 per cent of the total vote and the pluralist Islamic parties got 12 per cent (down from 22 per cent and 16 per cent respectively in 2004, and 16 per cent and 24 per cent in 1999). Support for pro-shari’a policies seems to be stagnant and limited to a very small minority of the Islamic community.

Why have so many Muslim voters turned away from Islamic parties? A number of factors would appear to be at play. One of the better documented is that voters have shrinking confidence in Islamic parties’ ability to address pressing socio-economic issues. Surveys conducted by the respected Indonesian Survey Institute over the past two years show an inverse correlation between the perceived “Islamic-ness” of a party and its capacity to bring prosperity to the country.

Results for PKS provide the most glaring example of this. Twenty per cent of respondents ranked it as “Islamic” but only 6 per cent credited it as “having community welfare programs,” despite the fact that PKS is the only party with extensive welfare activities and a detailed economic policy emphasising equality. The figures were worse for PKB and PPP, which scored 18 per cent and 15 per cent on the “Islamic” scale but just 2.5 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, on welfare issues. Overall, the big four Islamic parties had a total Islamic score of 56 per cent but a mere 12.5 per cent for “community welfare.” By contrast, the combined community welfare figures for the four main non-Islamic parties – President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party, former president Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, Golkar and Gerindra – was 43 per cent.

The same surveys showed that economic and welfare issues far out-rank religion as priorities for voters. Only 1 per cent of respondents regarded “morality and religious” issues as pressing but three-quarters ranked “the economy and people’s welfare” as paramount problems for the government to handle. Hence, the credibility gap for Islamic parties between their religious identity and perceived economic performance appears to be a central factor in explaining their poor election results.

It is not surprising that Islamic parties suffer credibility problems when we consider the performance of their ministers in cabinet and their internal instability. Five Islamic parties have party cadres or strong sympathisers in the ministry, but nearly all have been disappointing. The forestry minister, M.S. Ka’ban, who is also chairman of one of the small Islamist parties, has been dogged by a succession of corruption scandals and has been lucky to retain his portfolio. The cooperatives minister, Suryadharma Ali, who leads PPP, has been almost invisible, despite his party’s supposed commitment to economically empowering Indonesia’s Muslim poor. The public housing minister, Yusuf Asy’ari, a nominee of PKS, has been widely criticised as ineffective in a portfolio of direct relevance to community welfare. Of all the Islamic party cabinet members, only agriculture minister Anton Apriantono, who is close to PKS, can claim to have performed creditably.

Many of the Islamic parties have also been rent by serious internal divisions in recent years. PKB has had four chairmen since 2004 and been embroiled in constant legal action between various rival groups. Charismatic former president Abdurrahman Wahid, who has regarded PKB as subject to his personal whim, is now estranged from the party and attacked its current leadership repeatedly during the 2009 election campaign. Not surprisingly, the party’s once solid support base among rural Javanese Muslims has crumbled amid the turmoil, with many voting for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s PD. PPP is split into factions based on Indonesia’s two main Islamic organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and its leadership has been both lacklustre and riven with tensions deriving from personality and sectional differences. PAN has been led by the millionaire entrepreneur Soetrisno Bachir since 2005, and he has proven an eccentric and at times comical figure, out of step of the party’s conservative Muhammadiyah heartland. His policy of recruiting high-profile celebrities as legislative candidates has helped to shore up PAN’s electoral support but its longer-term prospects are uncertain. The party is, moreover, deeply divided over who to nominate in the upcoming presidential election.

PERHAPS the most intriguing of the Islamic parties is PKS. This party has a number of features which distinguish it from its rivals. It is the only genuine cadre party and has a much younger, better educated and more disciplined membership than other Islamic parties. It alone among Muslim parties draws heavily upon Middle Eastern thinking, and particularly Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, for its ideology. PKS is also less corrupt and more intellectually engaged than other parties, and produces a large quantity of books and webpage discussion on policy and doctrinal issues.

The party’s vote leapt from 1.4 per cent in 1999 to 7.3 per cent in 2004, due largely to its clean, pro-reform image, and PKS leaders had hoped to gain at least 15 per cent at this year’s election. To help achieve this, they had made some major compromises to attract “moderate” mainstream voters, including shifting the party from an Islamist to a pluralist orientation, and remaining in the governing coalition despite evidence of growing voter disillusionment. The party was also much better funded and had access to far more detailed market research than previously. Consequently, PKS leaders were dejected at receiving just 8 per cent in the April election.

The failure of PKS to lift its vote substantially is instructive. It appears likely that the party’s compromises were met either with scepticism or disapproval by many of the electors whom it was hoping to attract. The pragmatic shift seems to have robbed the party of some of its reform credentials and perceived idealism, a process underscored by several PKS parliamentarians being implicated in corruption cases and the growing tendency of its leaders to engage in the type of high-level politicking normally associated with “ordinary” parties. PKS now faces difficult decisions about whether to continue to move to the centre of the political spectrum or to return to a more overtly Islamic stance.

While the clout of political Islam has diminished as a result of these poor election results, the four main Islamic parties will continue to be important players in Indonesian politics. Any government or opposition coalition needs to include a major Islamic party if it is to claim broad appeal. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – popularly known as SBY – has shown himself to be acutely sensitive to criticism from Islamic groups, and is anxious to ensure that at least two Islamic parties are part of his governing alliance. This gives these parties some bargaining power, though they also keen to share in the spoils of government. PKS and PKB appear almost certain SBY partners, but PAN and PPP may also back the president again. PKS and PAN are hopeful that their nominees, Hidayat Nur Wahid and Hatta Rajasa, may become SBY’s running mate in the July presidential elections.

Islam’s role in Indonesian politics is changing rapidly, and it would be wrong to assume that the declining Islamic party vote signals the disappearance of faith as a political factor. Rather, the 2009 elections show that Islam’s impact is more diffuse and subtle than before and it can no longer regarded as the exclusive preserve of Islamic parties. All of the major non-Islamic parties combine Islamic appeals in their campaign messages. For example, SBY’s Democrat Party, which describes itself as “religious nationalist,” had election advertisements celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth. The advertisement featured party leaders in Muslim attire saying that Islamic values were important to PD’s anti-corruption campaign. Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle adopted a different approach, forming a high-profile Islamic wing to mobilise moderate Muslim support. This “soft” selling of Islam was commonplace in the 2009 election.

It is also possible that the existing Islamic parties can reverse their slide in support. More effective leadership, particularly with an emphasis on performance rather than clientalism or access to power, re-energised and professionalised recruitment and branch structures, and a more serious commitment to policy formation would all improve the prospects of these parties. And the strength of two of the main non-Islamic parties, PD and PDIP, may not last until the next election, given that SBY must resign as president in 2014 and Megawati is likely to stand down as party chair after the coming presidential election. Without these two pivotal figures, support for both parties could drop sharply, which may also benefit the Islamic parties. •

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ON 30 SEPTEMBER last year the Australian Navy intercepted a boat off the coast of Western Australia and took the twelve Middle-Eastern asylum seekers on board to Christmas Island. These individuals, who had made their way from Indonesia, were the first unauthorised boat arrivals of the Rudd era. Since then several more boats carrying mostly Middle-Eastern asylum seekers have made the same trip. I use the term “asylum seeker” advisedly because all the arrivals to date appear to have made protection claims. What is more, all the protection claim decisions of which I am aware have been positive. In other words, the claimants have been recognised as refugees and granted permanent protection visas.

The federal opposition is arguing that the abolition of temporary protection visas and the softening of immigration detention policy have encouraged a renewal of people smuggling, which means that the government is to blame for the spate of unauthorised boat arrivals. There may be a small element of truth in this, but I tend to agree with the government’s assessment that the recent upsurge in irregular asylum seeker movement is part of a worldwide phenomenon largely caused by events in source countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, the one point on which government and the opposition are in rhetorical agreement is that Australia needs to keep intensifying its efforts to strengthen border control and disrupt people smuggling until the boats stop coming.

The historical evidence suggests that completely suppressing irregular movement is impossible, especially where it is driven by factors even more compelling than a convergence of interests between workers in one country and employers in another. No matter how highly motivated and no matter the lengths to which it is prepared to go, no state has yet succeeded in exercising complete control over its borders. Although I do not approve of the political cynicism underlying the ploy, I can understand why the opposition would wish to frame the public debate in such a way that the government’s political credibility stands or falls on its ability to achieve perfect border control (although today’s Newspoll suggests that most members of the public are sceptical about the possibility of a perfect solution). What I cannot understand is why the government is foolish enough to do the same thing when it must know that the inevitable and only winner will be the opposition.

I have spent the past few years making a close study of Australia’s many layers of offshore border controls, which include Australian immigration, customs, police and other officials posted in potential source and transit countries to assist with interception and millions of dollars poured into building the border control capacity of regional countries. Australia’s work with Indonesia is particularly intense and many more asylum seekers are intercepted there than ever manage to arrive here. Of course, it is always possible to do more. The salient point is that we could easily spend our way into bankruptcy without achieving the goal of complete border control. It seems to me that the government would better serve its own political survival by focusing its efforts on helping the Australian public to understand why the boats keep coming.

Some time ago Indonesia indicated that it intended becoming a party to the Refugees Convention and Protocol; whether it actually does so remains to be seen. In the meantime, a 2002 directive of the Indonesian Immigration Directorate General states that people seeking asylum or refugee status in Indonesia must be referred to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, for refugee status determination. In addition, the Howard government initiated, and the Rudd government has continued, an arrangement with the Indonesian government and the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, known as the Regional Cooperation Model. Under the model, Indonesian authorities intercept irregular migrants and refer those they believe were headed toward Australia or New Zealand to the IOM for material assistance. The IOM informs these people about their right to make asylum claims and refers those who indicate that they wish to make such claims to the UNHCR. The IOM continues to provide individuals with accommodation, food and medical assistance pending determination of their claims by the UNHCR. If an individual wishes to return home then the IOM provides repatriation assistance. If they are recognised as refugees the UNHCR takes responsibility for their care in Indonesia.

The IOM’s role in the Regional Cooperation Model is funded by Australia. Although the UNHCR is not a formal participant in the model, the Australian government has also been providing some of the funding for that organisation to determine refugee status and provide material assistance to refugees in Indonesia. All of this is to Australia’s credit.

But refugee protection in Indonesia remains far from satisfactory. The 2002 directive provides that “the status and presence of aliens holding Attestation Letters or identification cards issued by UNHCR as asylum seeker, refugee or persons of concern to UNHCR, must be respected,” and this appears to be the case in practice. But there is some evidence that irregular movers are occasionally deported without being given the opportunity to make contact with the UNHCR in the first place, even if they come from known refugee-generating countries.

The next set of problems faced by asylum seekers in Indonesia relates to the refugee status determination process itself. From a legal perspective, the most significant problem is that the UNHCR’s process falls short of the standards of procedural fairness necessary to ensure that all those who are refugees are correctly identified as such. From a human perspective, the most significant problem is delay. Many asylum seekers in Indonesia are left waiting for about six months for their status determination interview. One asylum seeker who left the IOM’s care and made his way to Australia explained his feelings after waiting a month and knowing of others who’d been waiting three months: “Of course, we were very afraid because the UN did not come to us and there was no procedures that started in order for us to be assured. So that's why I was very afraid and that's why we had to escape.”

Living standards appear to be adequate for individuals who are in the care of either the IOM or the UNHCR in Indonesia. But there are a number of asylum seekers registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia who do not fall within the scope of the Regional Cooperation Model because they didn’t have either foot on a boat headed toward Australia or New Zealand at time of interception. These asylum seekers do not receive material assistance from IOM and are for the most part left to look after themselves (unless and until they are recognised as refugees). Since asylum seekers (and for that matter recognised refugees) in Indonesia are not accorded the right to work, these individuals can find themselves in quite straitened circumstances. Given that they face the prospect of penury, the only rational choice for asylum seekers who arrive in Indonesia with a few thousand dollars to their name would appear to be expending that money attempting secondary movement to Australia.

Depending on the complexity of the case, a period of three months to a year can elapse between the refugee status determination interview and a decision. Measures to speed up the process (without compromising the quality of decision making) would of course be welcome, but they wouldn’t solve the real problem: an individual who is recognised as a refugee by the UNHCR in Indonesia is not much closer than before to achieving a long-term solution to his or her plight. The Indonesian government insists that local integration is not an option, leaving recognised refugees in a state of limbo until changed circumstances in their country of origin make voluntary repatriation a possibility, or until a resettlement place is found in a third country.

At best, this state of limbo will last for years; at worst, for a lifetime. It means that children are deprived of effective access to education and adults are deprived of the meaning given to life by gainful employment. Many live with the stress of separation from family members left behind, while those who brought families with them to Indonesia see their children grow to adulthood without any prospect of a safe and productive future. Depression is pervasive among adults and children and so too are psycho-physiological illnesses. It is not surprising, therefore, that even recognised refugees have made (or attempted to make) their way to Australia by boat. The common theme running through the explanations provided by all of these individuals for their actions is the strongly felt need to bring an end to their state of being neither here nor there, even at the risk of death. •

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PEOPLE SMUGGLERS have reactivated the maritime route from Indonesia to Australia, and once again we are enduring a panicky, acrimonious media debate while the government attempts to find an appropriate policy response. The complexity of the ethical and practical challenge of this “fifth wave” of unauthorised arrivals is underlined by the terrible events at sea last Thursday.

At the time of writing it is impossible to know exactly what happened. One account, in the Age, suggests that while fuel was deliberately poured on the deck to prime the boat for sabotage, the spark that ignited the explosion was accidental. The report says that some of the asylum seekers aboard the vessel had been turned back from Australia once in the past and were determined not to allow this to happen again. Further investigations should reveal whether this account is accurate and whether a crime has been committed. If it has, the person or people responsible must be prosecuted; in the meantime, we should reject the insinuation that everyone on board is somehow guilty.

If we accept the “accidental sabotage” thesis for now, this raises two questions. First, why would asylum seekers prepare to sabotage their own boat? Second, what are the implications for Australian government policy?

The first question has been answered by the former immigration minister Philip Ruddock. He told the Australian that people smugglers give advice to asylum seekers to disable the vessel they have travelled on to ensure that it cannot be returned to Indonesia. That sabotage of this nature has happened in the past is well documented, not least in relation to the “children overboard” affair. Here is a brief excerpt from the evidence Commander Norman Banks of HMAS Adelaide gave to the Senate Select Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident:

“Efforts to provide assistance, such as water, were not welcomed. Indeed, on occasions, the water that we provided was thrown overboard by the unauthorised arrivals on receipt… With 200-plus irate personnel on board and a boarding team of eighteen, all operating in a small and very unfamiliar vessel, it was not a surprise to me that the vessel was continually being sabotaged. The steering and the engines were disabled at various times. Vandalism and arson had been conducted, and continued.”

It is important to note the context in which these events occurred. Commander Banks had already fired warning shots across the bow of the asylum seekers’ boat, which was known as SIEV 4. (This was the fourth “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel” to attempt to reach Australian territory since the Howard government had implemented a tough new approach to asylum seekers arriving by sea.) The commander was acting under strict instructions from Canberra to “deter unauthorised boat arrivals… from entering Australian territorial waters” and prevent them “from gaining access to the Australian migration zone.” These orders, imposed in the wake of the Tampa affair, replaced the previous policy of intercepting vessels and transferring those on board to immigration detention on the mainland.

The first level of post-Tampa defence took place on the high seas, where Norman Banks and other navy commanders were hailing boats and ordering them to change course. If unauthorised vessels continued into Australia’s “contiguous zone” (the twenty-four nautical mile limit around an Australian territory like Christmas Island) then “a boarding party was to detain the SIEV, sail it to the outer edge of that contiguous zone and, if safe, release it.”

Commander Banks forced SIEV 4 out of Australia’s contiguous zone as instructed, but remained close by, anticipating – correctly as it turned out – that the damaged boat would ultimately prove unseaworthy and require rescue. When the asylum seekers raised a distress signal he took the boat under tow and proceeded to Christmas Island. The boat broke up on the journey and the asylum seekers on board had to be plucked from the open seas, putting them and the crew of Adelaide at great risk.

When the new measures to force boats out of the contiguous zone failed to deter the SIEV 4 (and SIEVs 1–3 before it), Canberra updated its orders, putting greater stress on the policy of turning boats back. As Rear Admiral Geoffrey Smith told the Senate inquiry, “we received new instructions which were to, where possible, intercept, board and return the vessel to Indonesia” (see pages 26–27 of the Senate committee’s report).

In subsequent weeks, half the boats intercepted by the navy were successfully returned to Indonesia (four boats in total, carrying more than 500 people between them). In my view, the policy of returning boats to Indonesia was ultimately decisive in ending the “fourth wave” of unauthorised arrivals in late 2001.

Of course a range of factors probably contributed to stopping the boats, including the “offshore” processing regime set up under the Pacific solution, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, increased cooperation with Indonesia to break smuggling rackets and the deterrent effect of the SIEV X sinking (in which 353 lives were lost). But the Howard government’s success in physically returning vessels trumped all other measures by indicating to asylum seekers waiting in Indonesia that the people smugglers could not deliver on their promises and that money spent on getting to Australia would be wasted.

The discussion about the “softening” of asylum seeker policy under the Rudd government has focused on the decision to end the Pacific solution, create a more humane detention regime and scrap temporary protection visas. But these changes do little to explain why traffic on the maritime smuggling route from Indonesia is once again building. Harsh detention was in place long before the “fourth wave” began in 1999 and did nothing to stop the arrival of boats. (Detention on remote islands in the Pacific was in effect an extension of the existing policy of detention in remote desert locations.) Nor did the introduction of temporary protection visas in 1999 stem the flow of boats. If anything, TPVs probably encouraged the increased movement of women and children because it closed off the possibility of a legal route to family reunion once an asylum seeker had been recognised as a refugee and granted Australian residence.

The “fifth wave” of boat arrivals is the local manifestation of the global increase in asylum applications documented by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. As such, the phenomenon cannot simply be traced back to a “softening” of Australia’s harsh policies. But the one policy change under Rudd that is directly relevant is the decision to end the post-Tampa practice of turning boats around and forcing them back to Indonesia. As the immigration minister Chris Evans confirmed to me in an interview last year, the Australian navy, is no longer in the business of forced return. “I don’t think that’s been operational policy for some time,” he said. “The reality was, as you know, that the response to that by the people-smugglers was to drill a hole in the bottom of the boat, so the effective tactic of trying to return boats by towing them was thwarted. My understanding is Defence haven’t been applying that policy for some time. If they find people in Australian waters, they take them on board and take them to Christmas Island for processing.”

AND SO to the second question: what are the implications for Australian policy? If the aim is simply to guarantee “no unauthorised boats” (as opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull told Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast), then calling out the navy to force boats back to Indonesia could perhaps be effective.

But as Senator Evans pointed out when I spoke to him, the cost of such a policy would be unacceptably high. It would undoubtedly result in further acts of sabotage and loss of life at sea as asylum seekers and smugglers attempted to render their vessels unreturnable. It would tarnish Australia’s international reputation and involve the Royal Australian Navy in a highly politicised task that has nothing to do with military defence. It would force RAN sailors to undertake work that is not only dangerous but deeply distressing, and likely to leave permanent emotional scars. And of course it would do nothing to resolve the very real dilemmas of the asylum seekers themselves.

If turning back the boats is out, then what are the alternatives? The best option appears to be stepping up cooperation with Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in an effort to intercept asylum seekers before they undertake dangerous sea voyages. Indonesian immigration officials are alarmed by the recent increase in the number of asylum seekers (mostly from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma) entering their territory via Malaysia. Facilities to house and/or detain foreign asylum seekers are already full, and Jakarta fears being left with a second “Pulau Galang” (the detention island where Vietnamese boat people languished for almost two decades from 1979 to 1996).

As Savitri Taylor describes elsewhere in Inside Story, Australia already has a substantial program of cooperation with Indonesia. But, with traffic increasing, it needs to be improved and enhanced. Two vital ingredients must be added to the policy mix. First, asylum seekers must be assured that their claims for refugee status will be assessed swiftly and fairly. This will require increased resources for the UNHCR. Secondly, asylum seekers must be confident that, if they are found to be refugees, resettlement in a third country will follow soon after. Australia (perhaps with a little help from New Zealand) should guarantee to Indonesia (and Malaysia) that it will find permanent resettlement places for intercepted refugees. This would be a similar policy response to that employed by Malcolm Fraser during the first wave of boat arrivals in the 1970s. In league with other developed nations, Fraser developed the comprehensive plan of action to guarantee resettlement places to refugees sheltering in camps around the region. This reduced the incentive for boat people to travel on to Australia and for Southeast Asian authorities to refuse sanctuary and push boats back out to sea.

Improved cooperation with Indonesia will not stop all boat arrivals and, as Savitri Taylor suggests, the federal government should tell the public why unauthorised entries are likely to continue and provide reassurance that arrivals can be managed in a humane and reasonable manner. But improved cooperation with Indonesia and Malaysia could reduce boat numbers, and even if all of those intercepted were subsequently brought to Australia as refugees, orderly resettlement would help take the political sting out of the issue. Such a policy may even save some lives. •

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IN JANUARY 2005, I attached myself as a volunteer to a team of over twenty Australian surgeons, paramedics, nurses and healthcare managers who had flown to Banda Aceh after the tsunami surged across Aceh’s coastal zones, killing around 160,000 people. The Australian team had set up in one of Banda Aceh’s private hospitals, and there they performed many life-saving operations. They brought a planeload of sophisticated medical equipment and supplies with them, and dazzled the local Indonesian staff with their skills, techniques and treatments.

But – at least when I joined them – no member of the team was able to speak more than a few words of Indonesian. Doctors doing their rounds had great difficulty asking patients basic questions like “Where does it hurt?,” let alone explaining complicated medical procedures or the treatments patients would need to follow after being discharged. Many of the patients and their relatives were distressed that they couldn’t ask the doctors what was wrong with them or about their prospects of recovery.

With no other practical skills of my own to help survivors, it was a great relief to be able to use my knowledge of Indonesian language to work as an interpreter for the Australian team. In doing so, I joined several other Australians – mostly exchange students, NGO workers and the like – who helped out in this way because they happened to be in Indonesia at the time. It was a moving experience to help, in a very minor way, this team of Australian health professionals working in the aftermath of an enormous tragedy. Many of the survivors had horrific lower-body injuries, caused by pieces of tin or other objects in the swirling waters. The doctors performed what seemed to me to be miraculous surgery, patching over gaping wounds and pulling people back from the edge of death. They also treated their patients with warmth and humanity. The memory of the assistance they rendered, and of the gratitude of those they helped, remains vivid.

But the lack of Indonesian speakers on the team struck a jarring note. Certainly, I do not mean to criticise in any way the team members who went to Banda Aceh and performed such great service. I don’t know whether it had proven impossible to find Australian health professionals who spoke Indonesian fluently, or whether doing so had been forgotten in the rush to put the team together. But the absence of Indonesian speakers seemed a sad reflection of the state of relations between Indonesia and Australia: at a moment of such great need, when the Australian government and some of its people were making a generous and life-saving gesture, a basic and serious communication gap remained.

LAST NIGHT, Kevin Rudd launched a major conference on Australia–Indonesia relations in Sydney. No doubt the conference will conclude with many fine-sounding statements about how relations between our two countries have never been closer. Government spokespeople will make much of Australia’s commitment to forging greater understanding of Indonesia.

My experiences in Banda Aceh suggest that in some ways the relations between Australia and Indonesia are much narrower and more fragile than they are often portrayed. But things could get worse still, as one of the unacknowledged foundations of good Australia–Indonesia relations is in crisis. The study of Indonesian society and language has never reached critical mass in the Australian education system. It would be unusual to find an Indonesian speaker in any randomly selected group of twenty Australian professionals in any field. But at least the study opportunity has been available for many years to most Australian university students who want it. Now, Indonesian studies at Australian universities is feeling the impact of a decade-long decline in funding and activity. It is approaching a terminal phase. And not only is the Rudd government doing nothing to save it, some of its policies are actually worsening the situation.

Kevin Rudd has said that promoting “Asia literacy” is a key goal of his government. In a speech in Singapore last August he declared that he was “committed to making Australia the most Asia-literate country in the collective West.” His vision, he said, was “for the next generation of Australian businessmen and women, economists, accountants, lawyers, architects, artists, film-makers and performers to develop language skills which open their region to them.” There are few signs that he has acted to make this happen.

For decades, Australia has been a leading centre for research and teaching about Indonesia. Australian universities have produced a large group of graduates who are fluent in the Indonesian language and understand the culture, history and politics of the country. These people are now a crucial part of the connective tissue at the heart of the Australia–Indonesia relationship. They populate the government departments, businesses, NGOs and the aid organisations that work in or on Indonesia, and they teach Australian school children. European, Japanese and American policy-makers and government officials who visit Indonesia often express amazement at the number of knowledgeable Australians they meet.

This cohort of Indonesia-savvy Australians is an invaluable resource for our country. They are one factor that elevates Australia’s relationship with Indonesia above that which that country shares with other Western countries. Yet the framework that produced this layer of people is now under threat. University after university has either closed its Indonesian program or is considering doing so. Indonesian experts who were trained and recruited in the heady days of the late 1960s and 1970s are retiring and not being replaced.

Less than a decade ago our largest city, Sydney, had Indonesian language and studies programs available at or through all five of its major universities (the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney), with full majors offered at three of them. Now a full program only survives at the University of Sydney and the only other university still teaching Indonesian, the University of NSW (which a decade ago had one of the most vibrant programs in the country) has this year replaced its major with a minor. In Perth, a city with an especially large Indonesian community only three hours flying time from Jakarta, Indonesian programs have either closed or are under threat in two of the three universities where they have traditionally been offered. Our third city, Brisbane, used to have three separate Indonesian programs, but these have now been replaced by a consortium arrangement that allows students from Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University to learn Indonesian through the University of Queensland. At Melbourne University, until a couple of years ago another major centre, most of the key staff have retired or resigned and not been replaced. At most universities, staff in Indonesian studies programs sense the axe swinging ever closer to their necks. Nationally, perhaps a third of all Indonesian language courses are under threat of closure in the next twelve months.

In part, the decline of Indonesian studies is a result of funding pressures in a tertiary sector now driven almost entirely by market forces. Long ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, Indonesian studies attracted large enrolments, but it has not done so for decades. Instead, a spread of small programs provided Australia with a steady stream, rather than a flood, of Indonesia-literate graduates. Over the past decade or so, student numbers have dwindled, as students get turned off by the economic, political and security problems in Indonesia.

When added together, though, these many small programs still make Australia the world leader (outside Indonesia itself) in advanced training and research about Indonesia. No other country has the breadth of tertiary sector expertise on Indonesia, and it is this breadth that provides depth for both our knowledge of Indonesia and our varied relationships with it.

But small programs cannot survive when the logic of the market dictates all. Deans in financially pressed faculties have to make hard decisions to balance their budgets. Having to justify to their staff which programs to close, they understandably target the smallest ones first, which means Indonesian studies is often in the firing line. Australia’s foreign policy priorities count for little in such decisions.

In the absence of national planning, Indonesian studies dies the death of a thousand cuts. Here and there, high-flying academics are able to win big grants and carve out temporary Indonesian studies fiefdoms. Others shelter under the protection of unusually sympathetic deans or directors. But they do so with few guarantees of long-term survival, and without the institutional continuity and ballast that has made Australia the pre-eminent country for Indonesian studies.

In this context, it is significant that arguably the only Australian university where Indonesian studies has maintained a major presence and has not declined or experienced significant threat over the last ten years is the Australian National University. The unparalleled depth of Indonesia expertise here is made possible by special federal funding that subsidises the ANU’s Institute of Advanced Studies, one section of which focuses on Asia and the Pacific. Without similar federal priority on a broader level it is hard to imagine a long term future for Indonesian studies at most Australian universities.

In the early 1990s, the Keating government backed its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy by funding NALSAS, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy. The Rudd government promised to revive this program but has so far only initiated NALSSP, a pale and parsimoniously funded imitation. In the Keating years, the study of Indonesia, and Asia more broadly, experienced a renaissance in Australian universities. So far, despite all the rhetoric, there have been no signs of equivalent leadership from the new government.

More than just sitting on its hands, the Rudd government has actively harmed Indonesian studies in Australia by issuing over-cautious travel warnings to Australian citizens who plan to visit Indonesia. Wishing to cover itself against any risk of criticism for not warning of possible threats, and responding to popular fears aroused by the 2002 Bali bombings, the government has consistently exaggerated the threat of further terrorist attacks. No independent expert on Indonesian terrorism or security issues gives credence to the government’s evaluation of the risks, and the Australian warnings have consistently been more alarmist than those of other countries.

The travel warnings have done great damage to Indonesian studies in Australia: parents forbid their children from studying Indonesian, schools cancel study tours and close language programs, universities ban or restrict their students and staff from visiting the country. The travel warnings mean that, despite all the feel-good talk about better relations and Asia literacy, a culture of fearfulness and risk aversion permeates all facets of the Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, from the top down.

As the Australia–Indonesia bilateral relations conference begins, I can’t help remembering my experiences in Banda Aceh, and Kevin Rudd’s aim of fostering Australian professionals – including health professionals, one would hope – who speak Asian languages. This week’s conference is a fitting time for the government to put flesh on the bones of its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy. It is also an opportunity to move away from the obsession with terrorism and security that dominated the Howard government’s attitude to Indonesia. Revising the travel warnings would be a start. Putting real resources behind teaching and research about Asia in Australian schools and universities would be even more significant. •

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