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While Washington’s attention has been galvanized toward northeast Asia, Southeast Asia’s simmering crisis has deepened:
Indonesia, the world’s fifth largest nation [200 million plus, doubling since 1960], paramount power in ASEAN on which American regional strategy — such as it was — for peace and stability has been based since the fall of Saigon in 1974, a choke point on the major world sealanes, and historically pledged to a tolerant Islam, is falling off the edge.
Its erratic Pres. Wahid Abdulrahman faces almost certain impeachment and dismissal. An East Java religious leader of the most obscurantist Indonesian Islamic elements, Wahid’s followers threaten civil war. Vice Pres. Megawatti Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia’s demagogic first president Soekarno, after long Hamlet-like indecision, is ready to assume the mantle. But were she to take over, even without violence, she has displayed little ability to wield power.
The only all-Indonesian institution, the army, is discredited for its brutal suppression of dissent in the outer islands and its corruption under the 32-year reign of former Pres. Soeharto. But it is likely to be kingmaker despite its internal divisions. That could be bloody. The quintessentially passive islands’ peoples are also notorious for their outbreaks of nihilistic violence — amok is a word of Malay origin. All this is now playing out in an economy spiraling downward.
What, if anything Washington could do in the present situation, isn’t clear.
But that American national interest is involved is indisputable.
In a sense, we are facing the strategic problem of our long commitment in Vietnam working in the opposite direction: the possibility of a spreading instability northward. Malaysia, a multiethnic state going through its own leadership crisis, has racial, ethnic, religious, and even elite family ties to Sumatra just across the narrow Strait of Malacca. Singapore, the ethnic Chinese metropolis traditionally profited from the instability around it, but would now be at risk with an Indonesian meltdown. The Philippines, with its Moslem insurrection again exploding and only recently passing through a leadership crisis, would be subject to further contagion.
Japan has long looked to Indonesia as an important trading partner [half of Japan’s official development assistance]. Like South Korea and China, Tokyo’s dependence on Mideast and Southeast Asia petroleum goes through Indonesian waters, already subject to piracy. [The problem has reached such proportions that Tokyo some months ago made the uncharacteristic offer of joint long-range patrols in conjunction with local navies.] Beijing, a party to the failed Communist coup of 1964, which set off a massacre throughout the islands, and to which the present crisis in no small part harks back, is tied, willy-nilly, to Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority dominating the country’s economy.
All this simply means that we must now concern ourselves with a new “domino theory”: the unraveling Southeast Asian scene’s implications for northeast Asia, a reversal of the concern of the 1950s and 60s.
There are no obvious solutions. After a half century of independence under dictatorial government, Indonesia moved toward its first free elections since 1950 [worldtribune.com, June 2, 1999 — Indonesia at the crossroads]. But not only is the country — a chain of islands stretched across an eighth of the world’s circumference, with some 300 racial, ethnic and linguistic groupings — less than a nation-state, but it lacks symmetry. The majority lives on Java with claims to historical leadership through a more sophisticated history and culture. But the readily exploitable raw materials are largely on the outer islands. Jakarta has grudgingly agreed now to devolution of power. But federal systems are not made in heaven — as US history attests. And a bloody guerrilla war in Aceh, northern Sumatra, an oil and gas rich area, with another threatening in the jungles of New Guinea, are dynamiting the archipelago’s theoretical unity.
Washington policymakers face the reality that the Indonesian armed forces are the only institutional force dedicated to a united Indonesian state. But their hands are bloodied with the atrocities of East Timor and Aceh. Political activism in the country, chiefly among students and the Moslem extremists, wants the army’s power clipped. American human rights activists demanded, and for a time Clinton Administration policy acceded, to cutting off US ties to the military, diminishing our negotiating power.
If Wahid is not bluffing, if his followers do not resort to mayhem, if the parliament goes ahead with impeachment and dismissal, it seems likely that Megawatti will rule with the military looking over her shoulder, the chief implementor of policy. But how to square Achenese demands for independence with the concern that its secession would begin a rush for the door by other regions is a political conundrum to which no one has an answer.
Washington needs to call a dominoes game strategy among the major players — yesterday.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.