From the arabnews.com by Amir Taheri
Excerpt:
The key question now is:
What is it precisely that the Indonesians have chosen by electing SBY?
The honest answer is:
Nobody knows.
-----------------------------------------------------
New Indonesian Leaders Have Fared Very Well
Amir Taheri, Arab News
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono! Hard name to learn. So, let us call him SBY, as do his compatriots, especially the tens of millions who voted last week to make him the first directly elected president of Indonesia.
Under normal circumstances I should have had a personal grudge against SBY. The reason is that when I covered the fall of Gen. Suharto’s dictatorship in the late 1990s, I was one of the pessimists who feared that Indonesia was heading for “Yugoslav-style” disintegration and civil war. Now SBY and his people have proved me, and other pessimists, wrong. Nevertheless, let me put in a good word for myself.
At the time of Suharto’s fall the Indonesian economy was on the verge of collapse, with the state heading for bankruptcy. I met countless members of the recently created middle class who had suddenly been thrown down the social ladder by the economic meltdown.
The nation’s currency had become as worthless as paper money in a game of Monopoly. Everywhere one went symbols of Suharto’s corruption were in evidence. The airport where one arrived belonged to his daughter.
The taxi that took you to the hotel was run by a company owned by his brother. The petrol station where the taxi filled up belonged to Suharto’s son. The hotel where you stayed belonged to the president’s son-in-law. One could almost spend one’s whole life in that country without leaving the Suharto family property circle. There was much worse.
In several Indonesian cities we ran into Al-Qaeda style militants wearing uniform-like qamis and parading like conquering armies. The Indonesian military was divided between the “reds”, that is to say the nationalists, and the “white”, that is to say the Islamists.
In the empty hotels, where a few foreign journalists gathered with locals to share their respective brands of pessimism, all the talk was about the artificial nature of Indonesia as a state: An archipelago of 17,000 islands, of which 13,000 are inhabited, with a population of almost 200 million divided into a dozen ethnic and religious communities, and speaking many different languages and dialects. The whole edifice of the state was falling apart.
One day we even walked into the so-called “high security” prison to have tea with Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the East Timor rebels who could, theoretically at least, have walked out with us.
Many scenarios were discussed at the time, each worse than the other. One was that Indonesia would disintegrate into many mini-states.
Another was that the army would stage a coup and slaughter hundreds of thousands as it had done in the 1960s. A third scenario envisaged an Islamist takeover that would drive the ethnic Chinese, who provide the backbone of the Indonesian urban economy, out of the archipelago.
Well, none of those happened. And Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, is beginning to emerge from decades of corrupt dictatorship followed by weak government and national self-doubt. How did Indonesia escape the fates that many had envisaged?
The first, and in my opinion, the key reason was the remarkable moderation showed by the new leadership elite that emerged in the immediate post-Suharto era.
Almost all the leaders, from right-wing Islamists to left-wing socialists, and passing by liberals and conservatives, that suddenly appeared on the scene, manifested a degree of self-restraint and intellectual discipline. They disagreed with one another about the diagnosis of their nation’s ills and its cures. But they never questioned each other’s goodwill and everyone’s right to his or her own opinion.
Indonesian journalists, too, demonstrated a unique degree of moderation and responsibility. Having suffered censorship for decades they did not exploit their freshly won freedom to settle personal or political scores or to stir the pot of popular anger with sensationalism.
Unlike in some parts of the world where, as soon as a ruler has fallen, everyone, especially his most ardent erstwhile bootlickers, demand his head, I met no one in Indonesia who wanted Suharto mistreated, let alone executed. The general continued to live in his downtown villa, with his favorite parrot, under a sort of house arrest.
The second reason why Indonesia managed to negotiate that roughest patch in its short history as an independent state was that the crisis had come years after the end of the Cold War.
There were no rival blocs to try and stir things up in Indonesia against one another. Nor were regional rivalries to be projected into the Indonesian crisis, as had been the case in Yugoslavia where the Germans, the French, the British, the Russians and the Americans had pursued rival policies until events forced them to abandon that later-day game of imperial politics.
The third reason why Indonesia avoided the worst was that the international community took urgent action to bail it out of its economic crisis. At the time the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank worked together as a team. No one wanted Indonesia to be destroyed so that the US would be discredited.
To be sure, just as one swallow does not a summer make, a single election does not ensure the permanence of pluralism in a society with no democratic traditions. But the election that has brought SBY to power is an important landmark if only for one reason: The losers have accepted its result without ifs and buts. And this is not always the case even in mature democracies. (Remember the bad blood caused by the Florida vote count in the least American presidential election.)
The key question now is: What is it precisely that the Indonesians have chosen by electing SBY?
The honest answer is: Nobody knows.
SBY campaigned on a platform based on his personal qualities as a former general, a strong leader, a committed patriot and a devout believer.
He offered the voters virtually no policies besides broad remarks about fighting corruption and creating jobs. SBY should know that democracy is not something that is won once and for all.
Unless he takes measures to show the voters that they can get results through democracy, SBY could soon find himself facing the many demons that have threatened Indonesia’s peace and stability for the past half a century.
The fundamentalists and their terrorist cells are still there. If they are keeping a relatively low profile it is because they know that they have little popular support.
The terrorists cannot be flushed out and destroyed through military action alone. It is important to drain the swamps of ethnic tension and social despair that breeds these mosquitoes. SBY would need all his talents to tackle the problem without undermining the nation’s newly-won civil liberties.
One priority should be decentralization.
Since there is no “iron-fist” at the center anymore, it is impossible to run the vast archipelago from Jakarta. A law to divide the country into 450 self-governing districts was passed under the outgoing President Megawati Sukarnoputri and has been applied with some success. But it needs amendments to close loopholes that allow for corruption, and to cut down duplication and bureaucracy.
Indonesia has immense economic potential and has already shown it can be an Asian “tiger”. To be sure, the “tiger” has been rather sick in the past decade. But to blame it all on the market economy and capitalism would be missing the point.
Capitalism cannot work normally when leaders act as pirates, plundering the wealth the nation creates. The Suharto regime acted like an authoritarian clique in a one-party state, a bit like Saddam Hussein’s setup in pre-liberation Iraq.
A return to genuine capitalism could help re-launch Indonesia’s economy, especially at a time that the whole of Asia, propelled by the twin engines of China and India, seems to be surging ahead.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=52120&d=29&m=9&y=2004
Excerpt:
The key question now is:
What is it precisely that the Indonesians have chosen by electing SBY?
The honest answer is:
Nobody knows.
-----------------------------------------------------
New Indonesian Leaders Have Fared Very Well
Amir Taheri, Arab News
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono! Hard name to learn. So, let us call him SBY, as do his compatriots, especially the tens of millions who voted last week to make him the first directly elected president of Indonesia.
Under normal circumstances I should have had a personal grudge against SBY. The reason is that when I covered the fall of Gen. Suharto’s dictatorship in the late 1990s, I was one of the pessimists who feared that Indonesia was heading for “Yugoslav-style” disintegration and civil war. Now SBY and his people have proved me, and other pessimists, wrong. Nevertheless, let me put in a good word for myself.
At the time of Suharto’s fall the Indonesian economy was on the verge of collapse, with the state heading for bankruptcy. I met countless members of the recently created middle class who had suddenly been thrown down the social ladder by the economic meltdown.
The nation’s currency had become as worthless as paper money in a game of Monopoly. Everywhere one went symbols of Suharto’s corruption were in evidence. The airport where one arrived belonged to his daughter.
The taxi that took you to the hotel was run by a company owned by his brother. The petrol station where the taxi filled up belonged to Suharto’s son. The hotel where you stayed belonged to the president’s son-in-law. One could almost spend one’s whole life in that country without leaving the Suharto family property circle. There was much worse.
In several Indonesian cities we ran into Al-Qaeda style militants wearing uniform-like qamis and parading like conquering armies. The Indonesian military was divided between the “reds”, that is to say the nationalists, and the “white”, that is to say the Islamists.
In the empty hotels, where a few foreign journalists gathered with locals to share their respective brands of pessimism, all the talk was about the artificial nature of Indonesia as a state: An archipelago of 17,000 islands, of which 13,000 are inhabited, with a population of almost 200 million divided into a dozen ethnic and religious communities, and speaking many different languages and dialects. The whole edifice of the state was falling apart.
One day we even walked into the so-called “high security” prison to have tea with Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the East Timor rebels who could, theoretically at least, have walked out with us.
Many scenarios were discussed at the time, each worse than the other. One was that Indonesia would disintegrate into many mini-states.
Another was that the army would stage a coup and slaughter hundreds of thousands as it had done in the 1960s. A third scenario envisaged an Islamist takeover that would drive the ethnic Chinese, who provide the backbone of the Indonesian urban economy, out of the archipelago.
Well, none of those happened. And Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, is beginning to emerge from decades of corrupt dictatorship followed by weak government and national self-doubt. How did Indonesia escape the fates that many had envisaged?
The first, and in my opinion, the key reason was the remarkable moderation showed by the new leadership elite that emerged in the immediate post-Suharto era.
Almost all the leaders, from right-wing Islamists to left-wing socialists, and passing by liberals and conservatives, that suddenly appeared on the scene, manifested a degree of self-restraint and intellectual discipline. They disagreed with one another about the diagnosis of their nation’s ills and its cures. But they never questioned each other’s goodwill and everyone’s right to his or her own opinion.
Indonesian journalists, too, demonstrated a unique degree of moderation and responsibility. Having suffered censorship for decades they did not exploit their freshly won freedom to settle personal or political scores or to stir the pot of popular anger with sensationalism.
Unlike in some parts of the world where, as soon as a ruler has fallen, everyone, especially his most ardent erstwhile bootlickers, demand his head, I met no one in Indonesia who wanted Suharto mistreated, let alone executed. The general continued to live in his downtown villa, with his favorite parrot, under a sort of house arrest.
The second reason why Indonesia managed to negotiate that roughest patch in its short history as an independent state was that the crisis had come years after the end of the Cold War.
There were no rival blocs to try and stir things up in Indonesia against one another. Nor were regional rivalries to be projected into the Indonesian crisis, as had been the case in Yugoslavia where the Germans, the French, the British, the Russians and the Americans had pursued rival policies until events forced them to abandon that later-day game of imperial politics.
The third reason why Indonesia avoided the worst was that the international community took urgent action to bail it out of its economic crisis. At the time the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank worked together as a team. No one wanted Indonesia to be destroyed so that the US would be discredited.
To be sure, just as one swallow does not a summer make, a single election does not ensure the permanence of pluralism in a society with no democratic traditions. But the election that has brought SBY to power is an important landmark if only for one reason: The losers have accepted its result without ifs and buts. And this is not always the case even in mature democracies. (Remember the bad blood caused by the Florida vote count in the least American presidential election.)
The key question now is: What is it precisely that the Indonesians have chosen by electing SBY?
The honest answer is: Nobody knows.
SBY campaigned on a platform based on his personal qualities as a former general, a strong leader, a committed patriot and a devout believer.
He offered the voters virtually no policies besides broad remarks about fighting corruption and creating jobs. SBY should know that democracy is not something that is won once and for all.
Unless he takes measures to show the voters that they can get results through democracy, SBY could soon find himself facing the many demons that have threatened Indonesia’s peace and stability for the past half a century.
The fundamentalists and their terrorist cells are still there. If they are keeping a relatively low profile it is because they know that they have little popular support.
The terrorists cannot be flushed out and destroyed through military action alone. It is important to drain the swamps of ethnic tension and social despair that breeds these mosquitoes. SBY would need all his talents to tackle the problem without undermining the nation’s newly-won civil liberties.
One priority should be decentralization.
Since there is no “iron-fist” at the center anymore, it is impossible to run the vast archipelago from Jakarta. A law to divide the country into 450 self-governing districts was passed under the outgoing President Megawati Sukarnoputri and has been applied with some success. But it needs amendments to close loopholes that allow for corruption, and to cut down duplication and bureaucracy.
Indonesia has immense economic potential and has already shown it can be an Asian “tiger”. To be sure, the “tiger” has been rather sick in the past decade. But to blame it all on the market economy and capitalism would be missing the point.
Capitalism cannot work normally when leaders act as pirates, plundering the wealth the nation creates. The Suharto regime acted like an authoritarian clique in a one-party state, a bit like Saddam Hussein’s setup in pre-liberation Iraq.
A return to genuine capitalism could help re-launch Indonesia’s economy, especially at a time that the whole of Asia, propelled by the twin engines of China and India, seems to be surging ahead.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=52120&d=29&m=9&y=2004