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German geographers named it, the Dutch over 350 years [with British help] put it together [with their Calvinist ethic] — and today Washington hegemonic policymakers are stuck with it. And the time has long since passed for some hard-headed realism in dealing with it.
The logic would go like this: Bush II is already overextended — militarily, with commitments from the Persian Gulf oil supply to protecting Taiwan; cerebrally, with issues difficult of solution as Mr. Clinton’s disintegrating Northern Ireland scam to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; psychologically, by domestic U.S. real [and imagined] domestic social problems from school violence to a media drenched in pornography and violence.
But reality is Indonesia is falling apart. Not only is it the world’s fourth largest population, but astride the principle sealanes. If it disintegrates, ministates with no hope of stability and peace will arise and infect its neighbors [the ethnically related Malaysians, the already chaotic Philippines, the city-state-entrepot of Singapore, and not the least, 100 million Overseas Chinese who dominate an entire region’s economy].
What then to do with this irresistible force and the immovable object?
The beginning of wisdom is, of course, to know how much we do not know and how little logic and planning will accomplish.
Indonesia is not only not a nation-state, it will not be one for generations. A half century has been wasted without creating functioning institutions. The military are the only all-Indonesian force in thousands of islands, ethnic differences from decadent, sophisticated cultures with thousands of years of cultural “overburden”, to primitives just coming out of the bush. That institution, for the past 35 years “the new class” in the archipelago, is discredited by its corruption, its ineptitude, and its past barbarism.
What, in Lenin’s famous phrase, is to be done?
Again, to quote Lenin, in the present “revolutionary situation”, power is lying in the streets. If Washington does not seize the opportunity, a long and bitter struggle descending into nihilism will ensue. That is the answer to the suggestion “to let the dust settle”. [The last time Washington chose that option, we ended with a half century of Chinese Communist idiocy and barbarism from which we are still to recover.]
Given the nature of problems, it will take an ad hoc combining the
initiatives of Americans and interested parties. A suggested solution might come from the immediate post-WWI modus operandi. Then a regressive Dutch government sought to reimpose the old Royal Netherlands East Indies. Finally, although delay caused the destruction of moderates in both camps, not a small factor in the present situation, the impasse was resolved through forceful mediation led by the U.S. and Australia.
I do not think that the UN route is the way to go now. But I do believe that a series of international “commissions”, perhaps nongovernmental, under U.S. leadership to tackle Indonesian questions, might be the route. For example, why not an international consulting group to reform the Indonesian military using some of the Indonesian military figures in retirement, uniformed senior military from a half dozen nations with a civilian military tradition? Such a group would wheedle, cajole, and use the carrot of new hardware to set new patterns among the Indonesian soldiery.
On the economic side, finance and economics are much too important to be left to the IMF and the World Bank [with their rather sorry record in Indonesia]. Why not a commission including these institutions with the Asian Development Bank, Japanese representatives [half of Tokyo’s Official Development Assistance went there over the past 40 years], Singapore [which has always lived off the troubles around it], Australia, of course, etc. Again the promise of aid and forgiveness of debt would be the carrot to persuade Indonesia’s political class to pay the bitter price of economic reform.
The Indonesians have committed themselves to decentralization. Of course, federalism is not a toy with which even the most stable societies have played without getting their fingers burned [the U.S. included, 1860-65]. But it appears the only hope to defuse the bitter — and bloody — controversies that have engulfed Aceh and New Guinea and threaten other areas. Best keep the Harvard political scientists at a safe distance, but the world is full of retired foreign service officers — American, British, French, and German as well as Japanese — who might lead the talking through some of these problems.
Indonesians [above all, the Javanese] do have a tradition of combining impossible elements into a whole, or at least, in creating a compartmentalized culture that permits great tolerance. [How else to explain the synthesis of Hinduism and Islam that exists in Middle and Eastern Java?]
Is this all UNbabble? It could be. But wiser heads in Washington might be able to put something like this together, if our hegemonic hubris does not overwhelm us.
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.