Indonesia experiments with freedom

Jonathan Kay
National Post
March 8, 1999

During President Suharto's 32-year rule of Indonesia, political campaigning (if you can call it that in a de facto one-party state) was quite simple. As one holdover political veteran nostalgically wrote in Friday's Jakarta Post, "You just went to the city or town and everything was in place. The audience was already prepared, packed in a large auditorium or square, and you just mumbled the prescribed theme. No one would ever come at you with a nasty question or remark."
But all that is in the past. Today, Indonesians are voting in the first free election since the country's short-lived experiment with democracy four decades ago, and the country's 48 eligible parties have turned the campaign into something of a carnival - entertaining the electorate with orchestras, sing-a-longs, and even belly dancers.

But because the campaign has been so lacking in substance, it is difficult to predict in what direction Indonesia will be taken by its new government. In fact, the politician who stands the best chance of becoming president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has muddled through without providing more than a catch phrase or two about her policies. Although it seems almost certain the election will produce some from of reformist coalition, it is anybody's guess how the new government will treat big issues such as East Timorese independence, regional autonomy, Islamization, racism, free trade -- and , of course, the politically sensitive question of what to do with ex-President Suharto and his allegedly corrupt minions.

How the country deals with these issues will be of fundamental importance to the West. To borrow a phrase from Indonesian expert Andrew MacIntyre of the University of California, Indonesia is "the Brazil of Southeast Asia," and the region will not be able to recover fully from its recent financial collapse if the island giant becomes paralyzed by squabbling or, worse, if post-election chaos encourages the military to end the democratic experiment before freedom has a chance to take root.

In political terms, however, Yugoslavia might provide a better analogy than Brazil. Like Yugoslavia, Indonesia is an ethnically diverse and wholly artificial country. Its 300 ethnic groups were lumped together arbitrarily as a means for Dutch colonialists to consolidate and aggrandize their holdings. After independence, the country was beset by poverty and bouts of bloody violence until Suharto replaced then-president Sukarno (the father of Mrs. Megawati, the current front-runner ), modernized the economy and built a stable, if repressive, political order.
What the world will learn after today's election is whether President Suharto's Indonesia, like Tito's Yugoslavia, represented nothing but gun-barrel multiculturalism. Balkan-style brutality has erupted in many provinces -- such as Western Kalimantan, where ethnic Malays and indigenous headhunters have butchered Muslim settlers of long-standing. And on the island of Ambon, hundreds have died in battles between Christians and Muslims. Military officials admit that, since Suharto's ouster, they simply cannot keep pace with the growing level of inter-ethnic violence.

If Mrs. Megawati assumes the presidency, there will also be great confusion over the status of East Timor, the former Portuguese colony annexed by Indonesia in 1976. B.J. Habibie, Indonesia's caretaker president, announced earlier this year that the East Timorese would be permitted to decide their own fate in an August 8 referendum. But Mrs. Megawati has already declared that she would reject President Habibie's plan, and thereby cast the referendum results in limbo, if she becomes president when the coalition names its leader inNovember.
The West must keep a sharp eye on what happens after today's election. A civil war would be an economic disaster for the region -- especially if it leads, as some fear, to the mass exodus of the country's ethnic Chinese community, a group that composes only 3% of the population, but controls half the economy. An equal danger is that the ethic of religious tolerance successfully fostered by President Suharto will be trumped by a tide of Islamic fundamentalism. Although Mrs. Megawati's party is secular, and her two main Islamic rivals, Amien Rais and Abduraham Wahid, are both running on fairly tolerant agendas, Islamic groups have stepped up their recruiting during the recent economic downturn. Some Islamic political parties explicitly reject secularism, though almost all still fall short of calling for the creation of an Arab-style Islamic state.

If the country's economy takes a further turn for the worse, however, all bets are off. It is impossible to predict how the country's secessionist movements, its pent-up ethnic tensions, its embryonic religious fundamentalism, and its general lack of experience with democracy will play out after the election. Although President Suharto may have been a self-serving dictator, he did manage to transform anti-colonial rage into a strong sense of national unity. It's to be hoped this sense will be sufficient to carry the nation through its unpredictable first years as a truly democratic nation.