Indonesia at the crossroads

Indonesia's current elections [May 20-June 7] will not cure pressing problems and may not even make a beginning. Recurring ethnic and religious clashes -- the latest on the island of Ambone in the Moluccas, a flashpoint over the past 50 years -- are symptomatic of weaknesses that go back to the founding of the state.

Jakarta's neighbors and most observers -- including the IMF standing just off stage with a $1.1 billion check in hand -- hope they will come off without too much more violence and bloodshed. For the U.S., too, there are important geopolitical interests. Indonesia straddles one of the world's main arteries of commerce -- oil from the Midest for Japan and China, East Asian exports for Europe and the rest of the world. Chaos or extended civil unrest would threaten destabilization in Malaysia with its strong ethnic and historic ties to the archipelago. And Singapore as the entrepot for the region is at the mercy of events in an Indonesia that surrounds it.

These interests and Indonesia's basic issues -- including the continued unity of the country -- are going to be left up in the air by the carnival into which the history of the last 50 years has transformed voting among a largely illiterate electorate.

Interim Pres. B.J. Habibie and his Golkar, the government party of his mentor, Pres. Suharto, are trying to buy the electoral decision. And they may just do that -- despite the opposition of student activists, the more sophisticated urban population, and three major opposition parties.

It is true that this is the first relatively free franchise since the mid-1950s when former Pres. Soekarno declared himself lifetime president. [It is a formidable task with 413 million ballot papers, 250,000 polling places!] Soekarno, half Javanese, half Balinese, a former political prisoner of the Dutch colonial regime, and a brilliant demagogue ["I am a tool of the revolution"], tried to overcome the regime's basic problem: to contain its vast diversity in the face of grinding poverty and a population expanding at near the biological maximum [doubling since 1960].

Soekarno's solution was to concentrate personal power, enunciate a half-baked "ideology", and pander to a new military class. Soekarno's "Panshila" [the "pan" was from the Sanskrit, his so-called five principles] was an effort to bridge the vast cultural differences within the new country with cliches about religion, government, and progress. It was the logical successor to the pre-World War II cry of the Dutch East Indies revolutionaries who hoped if they insisted vociferously enough they would get their Satu bahasa, satu bangsa, satu tanah-air [one language, one people, one fatherland].

Soekarno refused to face the reality that he and his fellow nationalists had inherited a colonial empire not a nation-state -- some 5,000 inhabited islands, an archipelago with little homogeneity, strung out 3200 miles along southern Asia and north of Australia. His balancing act that employed the massive Communist Party [PKI] against more moderate secularist and reformist Moslem elements ended in disaster. It came unhinged in 1964 when Beijing aided and abetted a Communist coup. That brought on a countercoup by non-Communist army leaders-- those who had not been murdered -- and an archipelago-wide pogrom in which tens of thousands of leftists died.

When the amok ended, Suharto and his army supporters emerged with a military dictatorship that trundled on for 32 years. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Japanese, the U.S. and private investors -- principally oil and mineral developers -- produced a superficial prosperity in the capital and big cities. [Tokyo devoted half its official aid since the 1950s to Indonesia's 200 million people, the world's fourth largest population.]

But in 1997 the East Asian financial crisis and the Japanese recession unhinged the precarious politico-economic balance. Suharto's corrupt and inefficient regime, which had enriched a few, including the largest of the entrepreneurial ethnic Chinese families, collapsed in the face of token student agitation and bitter urban violence -- much of it against small Chinese shopowners and artisans. The army, although now almost completely Javanese but divided among ambitious officers, bowed to increasing pressure and accepted the inevitable resignation of Suharto and calls for reform.

What Indonesia has now is a power vacuum at the center of a highly centralized state. It starts with former Vice President Habibie who was something of a joke for years as Suharto's most loyal spear-carrier. What hasn't been addressed is the fundamental problem of organization of a state that is multiethnic and geographically dispersed.

That issue has reached crisis proportions because of the problem of East Timor, a backward, isolated piece of the old colonial world. By happenstance East Timor didn't get swept up in the decolonialization until the Portuguese revolution in 1975 temporarily installed pro-Communist coup leaders in Lisbon. Not only Jakarta, but Washington and Canberra, with their main concern Cold War strategies, feared a pro-Soviet regime would take over the small territory and use it as the Portuguese had done centuries earlier for their ambitions in the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. The green light was given for the Indonesians to annex the area, not all that different from its surrounding islands which had fallen into Jakarta's lap with the Dutch exit.

What followed, however, was a brutal Javanese occupation that produced human rights atrocities, a guerrilla movement against Jakarta, and demands for Timorese independence. In order to reduce international pressure, Habibie -- with the army reluctantly acquiescing -- has agreed to UN arbitration and a referendum to decide the future of the Timorese. Jakarta's either/or proposition, that is, immediate independence or continued undefined "autonomy" under Indonesia, and support of local pro-Jakarta "militia", suggests professions of good faith in Jakarta are less than meets the eye.

But the issue is much more fundamental than East Timor. Autonomy or independence for Dilli, the Timorese capital, begs the larger question of the relationship between Jakarta and at least a half dozen other areas in the Outer Islands where there are separatist movements. In the face of them, can the unity of the vast area and population be maintained?

When U.S. and Australian pressure finally forced the Dutch to end their attempt to restore the pre-war Netherlands East Indies colonial government in 1950, a federal system was initiated under the rubric of "The United States of Indonesia". The intent was to give self-government, local autonomy, and establish cultural pluralism between the majority Javanese and the Outer Island minorities -- Christian Ambonese [the main reservoir for the old KNIL, the Dutch Indies army], the Hindu Balinese, the ultra-orthodox Moslem Achenese [an oil and gas rich area at the tip of Northern Sumatra which fought two "wars" against the Dutch in this century], the Catholics of Menado, the Moslems of Sulawesi [the Celebes], the former headhunters of New Guinea, etc.

But Soekarno cleverly used Javanese [they form some more than half the population with their more Moslem Sundanese neighbors in West Java] chauvinism, the accusation that federalism was tainted with "imperialism", and simple revanchism to concentrate power. Soekarno's unitary state also "solved" the incredibly difficult problem of resources -- oil and gas, minerals like gold and tin, plantation agricultural cash crops, all are concentrated in the Outer Islands. Java with its record population density and its "cultural overburden" is largely a deficit area.

But now on the heels of Jakarta's Timorese strategy and tactics, the old questions are up for grabs. Already one of the opposition candidates has assured the Achenese that they, too, can vote on separation -- although he was quick to maintain they would not do so. Minerals-rich Irian [Indonesian Western New Guinea] with a 50-year history of Javanese repression, missionary-inspired Christianity, and a fundamentally different people and environment, hears cries for independence. Sulawesi [the Celebes] which led a 1958 revolt against Soekarno and Jakarta has seen ethnic clashes and calls for autonomy.

The new national assembly of 500 seats [with 200 appointed seats including a reservation for the military] will be dominated by political parties and hacks, for the most part, from the old regime, and is to elect a new president. But whether it will have the courage -- and the capacity -- to shape a new state structure that can somehow compromise the demands of the Outer Islands and the needs of Java for their continued economic support to preserve "national unity" remains the unanswered question.

Sol Sanders, a longtime Asian correspondent, watched the emergence of the Indonesian state while living in Jakarta in 1949-50 and has followed events there since.