David Warren on Indonesia
September 22, 2004
Some good news
The apparent landslide victory of "S.B.Y." (Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) in the Indonesian presidential election is promising. He has a reputation for getting things done; he has no time for Indonesia's Jihadis. He knows that free enterprise within a stable constitutional order is the way out of membership in the "Third World". And he says what he knows, with an uncommon boldness. He is intelligent and articulate (in English as well as Indonesian), and surrounded by advisers who are neither obsequious nor sanctimonious nor infamously corrupt.
Outgoing President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of the country's founding dictator, had none of these qualities. She presided like a constitutional monarch. She is not an especially bad person, but in three years as the country's first fully freely-elected leader, proved frankly incompetent, dithering, obtuse. The margin of victory for the challenger in the run-off, at more than 60:40 (the full formal count will take some more days), gives the budding, huge Indonesian democracy a fresh start after several false ones.
As President Megawati's sometime security minister, S.B.Y. was the only cabinet member who said unambiguously that the terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah needs eliminating, not negotiating with. He was the only one who seemed to grasp that the endless underpublicized terror attacks on Indonesia's Christians were bad news not only for them, but for the whole country.
President-elect Yudhoyono wants to restore full military co-operation with the U.S. The leftist "human rights" gallery will hate him, as they hate all pro-Western generals; but this graduate of Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth stood up against corruption under the Suharto regime. He is clean, competent, and energized. From the U.S. point of view, his election might be considered the equivalent of one free, $500-billion invasion.
Among the stupider things the Clinton administration did, in toying with U.S. national security, was cancel training programmes with the Indonesian military to protest human rights abuses by the Suharto regime. The human rights abuses were real enough (though nothing to compare with, say, China, or Vietnam, or Iran); but by cancelling aid, and grandstanding over East Timor, the U.S. threw away what leverage it had, and alienated many of its most reliable Indonesian friends.
The habit of punishing allies, for relatively minor transgressions, while rewarding enemies, for relatively minor improvements in behaviour, is a root cause of U.S. unpopularity around the world.
Make no mistake, Gen. Yudhoyono will be president of Indonesia, not America' s Paul Bremer in Djakarta. He will not simply take orders from the State Department in Washington (thank goodness, for it's not always clear which side Foggy Bottom is on). He will, for instance, be an earnest champion of Indonesia's economic interests against things like U.S. trading restrictions. He will not pose politically as an Americanizer. But there is every indication that his heart is in the right place, that he wants a "modern" (in the sense of efficient), "secular" (as opposed to sectarian), open-for-business Indonesia. And one which is unambiguously allied with all forces of civilization against the spreading menace of Islamist totalitarianism.
Indonesia has a long and rich tradition in Islam: eclectic, even syncretic, broad, tolerant, more spiritual and less political than the modern-age Islamic traditions nearer the heart of Arabia. This has been under siege for more than a generation by the proselytizers, arms smugglers and bomb-makers of the fanatic and purist Wahabi sect, floating financially on the sea of Saudi Arabian oil. But Indonesia has its own oil revenues, its own vast economic possibilities, if order can be maintained.
More good news. That U.S. State Department has finally put Saudi Arabia on its formal list of religious persecutors. The country had gained an exemption, heretofore, from cravenly political calculations: the U.S. not wanting to offend the sheikhs who control the West's great oil pumps.
But Saudi Arabia is a country in which the very existence of a Christian, a Jew, a Shia Muslim, or anyone who is not Wahabi-sect Muslim is legally under threat. It is a monstrosity of a country: kept backward, savage, vindictive, duplicitous, by the extended polygamous family of Sauds; yet tarted up externally by anything they can buy with their oil money.
It is the Bush administration that has, consciously, if cautiously, been breaking with the tradition of all previous administrations since that of F.D. Roosevelt, by calling the Saudi spade a spade. It deserves support and encouragement to continue.
Real progress in the war against the international Jihad requires correctly identifying the enemy. And it seems that some real progress is being made.
David Warren |
