Democracy: a risk Indonesia
must take
By Peter Hartcher, and Tim Dodd in Jakarta
It was so simple. It was just childs' play. But it changed
Bo Yang's understanding of democracy forever.
The Taiwanese writer and social critic was watching a
British movie in which a group of kids was arguing. Some
of the children wanted to go swimming; the others
wanted to climb a tree.
"After quarrelling for a while," writes Bo Yang, "they
decided to vote. The majority chose to climb a tree, so
they all climbed a tree. Simple though it seems, this left a
deep impression on me."
Why? He contrasted the episode with what might have
happened in a country with no democratic tradition -
China. There, the kids would have taken the vote but
then ignored the result and split off into two groups
anyway.
In that moment, he says, it occurred to him that
"democracy in the West is more than mere form; it is a
regular part of daily life".
Specifically, the incident revealed that a crucial concept
for a functional democracy the idea of majority rule was
already firmly installed in the children's minds.
Perhaps the most important question for the fledgling
democracy of Indonesia is whether this very concept of
majority rule is established in the minds of the Indonesian
people.
When they go to the polls on Monday for their first free
elections since 1955 in their second attempt in 50 years
to set up a democratic system, Indonesians will be doing
the easy part of establishing a democracy.
The mechanics of the democratic act of voting are
relatively simple. Anyone can have an election. Burma
had one too, in 1990, but it's still governed by a
repressive military dictatorship.
What's more, the claim to democracy is an easy one to
make. Even the mad personalised Stalinist regime of
North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea.
Democracy is not a set of logistical arrangements or just
some sort of brand, it is a set of principles. And to work,
those principles must be widely held.
The hard part for Indonesia will come after the carnival
atmosphere of the election campaign has faded, when the
thrill of voting day has passed, and when the political
parties start jockeying to create a new ruling coalition.
Inevitably, when that process is over, at least one
powerful group will be disappointed - shut out of power.
And when this moment arrives, how will that group
react? Will it, like the kids in the British movie and people
in democracies everywhere, accept the principle of
majority rule? Or will it react angrily, mobilising
supporters to thwart the outcome?
Widespread unrest could make the country
ungovernable, perhaps an invitation to the army to
impose martial law.
These are the risks that Indonesia faces today.
The noted British historian David Thomson wrote in
1959: "Asiatic countries still mainly lack the social and
educational foundations, as well as the political habits and
traditions, of sound representative parliamentary
institutions."
Today, sceptics including the former Australian
ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, still harbour
the same doubts as to whether Indonesia will be ableto
make democracy work in any lasting way.
Is the current outpouring of pro-democracy sentiment
evident in today's Indonesia a commitment to true
democratic principles? Or isit just a release of pent-up
frustrations?
Not even former president Soeharto thinks it can work.
He warned in April that democracy was "lots of trouble".
And it is true that the precedent for Indonesian
democracy is not good. Its experiment in the 1950s
ended in failure. Rebellions in the provinces and a
breakdown in political order gave the then president,
Soekarno, the opportunity to impose an authoritarian
regime.
And from the time Soeharto seized power in 1966 until
the end of his rule in May last year, he permitted only the
trappings of a democracy ballots, political parties and a
parliament without its substance freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, freedom of association, the rule of
law, the independence of the judiciary and the legislature
from the executive.
What an irony that Soekarno's daughter, Megawati
Soekarnoputri, should be trying to win control of the
presidency today through the democratic process that her
father dismantled 40 years ago.
Is there any reason to think that democracy in Indonesia
now can work any better than it did in her father's time?
In Indonesia today there is a palpable hunger for
democracy. Nationalists, radicals, the religious parties,
the army, and even the once omnipotent Golkar party,
are all joined in being steadfast democrats. Soeharto's is
the sole public voice of dissent.
And contrary to his forebodings, the election campaign
has been very smooth. The thousands of foreigners and
rich Chinese Indonesians who fled in fear could have
stayed in safety after all.
Many more people have been killed in traffic accidents
on their way to campaign rallies than in election violence.
The Indonesian police chief noted that in the first 11 days
of the 19-day campaign, 164 people had died and 342
were seriously injured in election-related road accidents.
But not one was reported killed in campaign-related
violence.
(The killings of pro-independence activists in East Timor,
which is facing an independence ballot quite apart from
the national election, is a separate and special case.)
In Australia, Professor Arief Budiman, the head of
Indonesian studies at the University of Melbourne, says
he sees a major change occurring in Indonesian society.
Budiman points out that when the main Jakarta mosque
was bombed three months ago, there were no riots and
no reprisals against Christian churches in the city. The
people did not respond to the provocation as they might
have done in the past.
In a similar vein, an Indonesian historian, Onghokham,
sees a channelling of Indonesian energy away from
violence and into the political process.
He says no one party will be a clear winner from the poll
the vote will be divided among 48 parties, five of them
major ones and this means there will be a long process of
negotiation to form a majority in the parliament and to
decide on a new president.
"People will get absorbed in the negotiations between the
parties," he says.
Onghokham does not see the increasing vibrancy of the
election street parades in Indonesian cities as an indicator
that tension is mounting which could switch to violence.
"After all the energy expended in the campaign, there is
no energy left," he says.
And history shows that societies can evolve. Countries
and societies thought to be barren soil for democratic
roots have become fertile with time.
"Catholicism, for example, has often been held to be
hostile to both capitalism and democracy," writes US
academic Francis Fukuyama.
"And yet by the end of the second half of the 20th
century, a great transformation of Catholic culture had
occurred.
"The vast majority of the new democracies that emerged
between 1974 and 1989 were Catholic societies, and in
a number of them the Catholic church had played a key
role in the struggle against authoritarianism."
And the Asia that David Thomson wrote of in 1959 is a
different place to the Asia of today. Fascist Japan has
become a stable democracy. And in the past 20 years,
Korea and Taiwan have evolved from authoritarianism to
democracy.
And in Indonesia's own backyard of South-East Asia,
the Philippines and Thailand have both set up successful
democracies.
But even the optimists in Indonesia have some major
reservations.
Professor Budiman says: "I think there will be no problem
except if Golkar wins." Golkar is the ruling party, created
by Soeharto and now fielding the incumbent president,
B.J. Habibie.
"I think people will accept a loss if the winner is a
non-status-quo force," he forecasts.
Three of the big five parties have indicated they want to
operate in an anti-status-quo alliance. These are
Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party
of Struggle (PDI-P), Amien Rais's National Mandate
Party (PAN) and Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid's
National Awakening Party (PKB).
These three are all reform-minded opposition groups.
Perhaps they can work together. Maybe they can't. They
have widely different views on core policy issues and a
history of personal differences.
If their alliance breaks up, there could still be
opportunities for Golkar to forge a winning coalition and
have a decisive hand in choosing the presidency.
The expectations of the reformists' supporters are now
running so high that this could be intolerably disappointing
for them.
And all sorts of permutations and combinations are
possible.
Golkar, for instance, is deeply divided between factions
which are for and against the party's presidential
candidate, the incumbent, B.J. Habibie. Amien's PAN is
divided between secularists and a strongly Muslim group.
And the big five parties and their various factions are not
the only possibilities for forming parliamentary coalitions.
The outcome could yet be chaos. But as the reformist
Amien Rais says: "The alternative to the election is
chaos."
Democracy is a risk that Indonesia must take.
afr.com.au
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