Category Archives: Indonesia

My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe, in the New World, on an island in the mouth of one of the great South American rivers. The island had no sacred places; and it was nearly forty years after I had left the island that I identified the lack.

I began to feel when I was quite young that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness, about the place, and that the real world existed somewhere else. I used to feel that the climate had burnt away history and possibility. This feeling rnight have had to do with the smallness of the island, which we all used to say was only a dot on the map of the world. It rnight have had to do with the general poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system that had come with us from India. It might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather.

Later, years after I had left–knowledge of things never corning all at once, but in layers–I thought that the place was unhallowed because it hadn’t been written about. And later still I thought that the agricultural colony, in effect a plantation, honored neither land nor people. But it was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area–which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree–that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.

There would have been sacred places on the island, and in all the other islands to the north. On the tiny island of St. Kitts, for example, there were–hidden by sugarcane fields–rocks with crude pre-Columbian carvings. But the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were–in the plantation colony–people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.

Too late, then, I remembered with a pang a story I had heard about when I was a child, and later read another version of (in Charles Kingsley’s At Last, 1871). Every now and then, according to this story, groups of aboriginal Indians in canoes came across the gulf from the continent (where remnants of the tribes still existed), walked to certain places in the woods in the southern hills, performed certain rites or made offerings, and then, with certain fruit they had gathered, went back home across the gulf. This was all that I heard. I wasn’t of an age to want to ask more or to find out more; and the unfinished, unexplained story now is like something in a dream, an elusive echo from another kind of consciousness.

Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness–which is more than the idea of the “environment”–that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness–rather than history and the past–that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.

So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries–lran, Pakistan, Indonesia–the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 51-52

In his book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), V.S. Naipaul profiles an Islamic fundamentalist from Sumatra. The profile concludes thus:

Near the end of our talk that Sunday morning I asked him again about his outspokenness in the late 1970s and his troubles then with the government.

He said, expanding on what he had learnt in jail in 1978 and 1979 from the former foreign minister, Subandrio, “Never criticize Suharto. He’s a Javanese. Young people shouldn’t criticize older people, especially big people.” For Imaduddin–not so young in 1977: forty-six to President Suharto’s fifty-six–this went against the grain. “I was trained in the Dutch way and then in the American way, where criticism is O.K. And I was born in Sumatra: I can argue with my father. I had to learn the Javanese way.”

The Sumatran way, which came naturally to Imaduddin, was the forthright, religious way, the fundamentalist way. For Imaduddin it had historically been a source of Sumatran strength.

He had told me earlier, “The Dutch when they came could conquer Java relatively easily, but they couldn’t conquer Aceh and Sulawesi because the people were very religious.”

Mr. Wahid had spoken of the new steamship travel that had from the thirties of the nineteenth century made Mecca more accessible for pilgrimage and study. Out of this there had developed, in colonized Java, the new Islamic village schools, like the one run by Mr. Wahid’s grandfather.

In the independent kingdoms or sultanates of Sumatra, however, the effect of these journeys to Mecca had been more violent. Just as one hundred and fifty or sixty years later colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith in Sumatra equal to the Wahabi faith in Mecca. They were determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences that carried the taint of the religions that had gone before: animism, Hinduism, Buddhism. There had followed religious wars for much of the century; it was what had drawn the Dutch in, at first to mediate or assist, and then to rule.

This was the missionary faith that lmaduddin had inherited. Java, rather than Sumatra, was rich in the monuments of the pagan past. But nothing outside or before the faith was to be acknowledged, not even a great Buddhist monument like Borobudur, one of the wonders of the world. One of Imaduddin’s criticisms of the government in 1979 was that the Indonesian embassy in Canberra looked like a Hindu building. As for Borobudur, that was for the international community to look after.

I asked him about that. He said–like a man whose position now required him to be more statesmanlike–that I had misunderstood. What he had said or meant to say was that money that could be used to feed “hungry Muslims” shouldn’t be used on Borobudur.

In spite of the statesmanlike softening intention, the old Sumatran unforgivingness showed through. For the new fundamentalists of Indonesia the greatest war was to be made on their own past, and everything that linked them to their own earth.

The term “Indonesia” was first used in 1850 by the British anthropologist J. R. Logan to designate islands called the “Indian Archipelago” by other Western writers. For Logan, “Indonesia” did not designate a political unit but a cultural zone that included the Philippines. The forebears of today’s Indonesians had no term for the region or concept of a single political unit linking communities across seas. From ancient times Java had been known by that single name, but most of Indonesia’s islands derive their names from European labeling. Early European traders at the port of Samudera named the entire island Sumatra, and visitors to the sultanate of Brunei called the whole island Borneo.

The Dutch named their colonial possessions Indië (the Indies). Initially the Indies meant Java and a few ports scattered across the archipelago. Between 1850 and 1914 Dutch power engulfed over three hundred separate sultanates and communities, and welded them into a single administrative unit called the “Netherlands Indies.” Subjects were called “Natives,” a legal category alongside “Europeans” and “Foreign Orientals” (local Chinese and Arabs), replacing the terms “Moor,” “Christian,” and “Heathen” used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Associations in the early years of the twentieth century identified themselves by geography and generation, such as “League of Sumatran Youth” and “Ambonese Youth.” As ideological identities developed, parties took the colonial unit as their geographic marker but opted for Logan’s “Indonesia” instead of the Dutch “Indies.” The first to do so was the Communist Party of Indonesia, founded in 1921. Opponents of the Dutch understood “Indonesia” as both a political and a cultural entity; they adopted as a common language a variant of Malay spoken in Sumatra, already widely used as a lingua franca, and called it the “Indonesian language” (Bahasa Indonesia). The political unit they eventually won was the Dutch colony stretching from Sabang Island off northern Sumatra to Merauke on the border with Papua New Guinea, but many wanted the cultural definition of “Indonesia”–Islamic and Malay-speaking–translated into a state that would include Malaya, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, all of Borneo, and Portuguese East Timor.

Following independence Indonesian place-names were substituted for the Dutch. Batavia became Djakarta; Buitenzorg, Bogor; and Borneo, Kalimantan. Indonesian spelling was revised in 1972, making Djakarta Jakarta and Atjeh Aceh. In this book Indonesia designates the state established by Sukarno on 17 August 1945; for the period before 1945, it is used as a shorthand for the islands constituting today’s republic.

SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)

Here’s the U.S.-Indonesia Society’s latest report on the upcoming presidential elections in Indonesia.

Five slates of candidates were formally approved by the National Election Commission (KPU) to compete in the July 5 Presidential Election. The slate of former President Abdurrahman Wahib (PKB) and Marwah Daud Ibrahim of Golkar was not certified, however, because of Gus Dur’s health; he is appealing his disqualification to the courts, although his reclama to the General Elections Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) was denied on May 28.

The five contending presidential tickets are:

• Megawati Sukarnoputri (PDI-P) and Hasyim Muzadi
• Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (PD) and Jusuf Kalla
• Wiranto (Golkar) and Solahuddin Wahid
• Amien Rais (PAN) and Siswono Yudhohusodo
• Hamzah Haz (PPP) and Agum Gumelar

Tracking Poll Favors SBY

A tracking survey issued by the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) on May 31 assessed the popularity of the main candidates, based on face-to-face interviews with 1250 respondents throughout the 32 provinces of Indonesia. Although this survey included potential candidates other than in the above approved slates, the top contenders scored as follows:

41.0% Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY)

11.2% Megawati Sukarnoputri

10.0% Wiranto

 4.4% Amien Rais

 3.0% Hamzah Haz

SBY emerged as the top choice in all regions of the country except for Sulawesi, where Wiranto obtained 35% support in contrast to 29% for Yudhoyono. SBY was also the top choice of both men and women, as well as all age groups. As IFES observes, only in the 55 and above age group is another candidate, Megawati, close to SBY with 19% support compared to 21% who support Yudhoyono. [Comment: Since other than the top candidates were included in this poll, and political party alignments have shifted since the survey was taken, we would caution that the above results are only relative and general indications of popular support.]

Relative Strengths and Weaknesses

As assessed by the Jakarta consulting firm of Van Zorge and Heffernan, the relative strengths of the presidential candidates can be summarized as follows:

• Susilo Bambang Yudohyono: Strong momentum, clean image, attractive to secular voters, running mate Jusuf Kalla is an asset in eastern Indonesia, seemingly popular among armed forces dependents; the main debits is the lack of a strong campaign organization.
• Megawati Sukarnoputri: Loyal PDI-P constituency, value of incumbency, running mate Hasyim Muzadi can attract NU-PKB voters; main weaknesses are lackluster performance as President and declining public image.
• Wiranto: Golkar organizational support and financing, strong campaign team, former military and dependents’ support, media and public presence, running mate Solahuddin Wahid could pick up NU-PKB votes; principal debit is anti-militarism and allegations of past, mainly domestic, human rights abuses.
• Amien Rais: Strong campaign team and media friendliness, loyal Muhammadiyah following, “clean” pro-reform image; minus factors are low drawing power of running mate Siswono and Rais’ erratic reputation.
• Hamzah Haz: Loyal backing of traditional PPP voters; downsides: poor public image and running mate has no significant public following.

[Note: For further analysis, please refer to the biweekly Van Zorge Report at www.vanzorgereport.com, or call (62-21) 3190-3939 in Jakarta.]

Campaign Nuggets:

• Golkar and the National Awakening Party (PKB), affiliated with the NU, have signed an electoral compact to support General Wiranto and Solahuddin Wahid, brother of former President Abdurrahman Wahid (“Gus Dur”). Although the PKB’s institutional weight will be behind the Wiranto team, uniform support of NU and PKB followers cannot be assured because NU chair Hasyim Muzadi is running with President Megawati and some may support the SBY-Kalla ticket.
• Five minor parties have wheeled in behind National Mandate Party (PAN) candidate Amien Rais. The Marhaenism National Party, Freedom Bull National Party (PNBK), United Indonesia Party (PSI), Socialist Democratic Labor Party (PBSD) and Reform Star Party (PBR) have declared their support for the Rais-Siswono ticket. The Reform Star Party won 13 seats in the April 5 legislative election and two other of the small parties garnered one seat each. Observers do not believe that their endorsement will translate into a significant number of votes.

This is the fifth year since Indonesia began implementing comprehensive political and economic reforms in response to the onset of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and a leadership change that occurred in 1998. Indonesia is simultaneously addressing multiple crises – from terrorism and inter-ethnic, sectarian and separatist violence to endemic corruption and rising poverty.

For more information about Indonesia, the upcoming elections, and relations with the United States, please visit www.usindo.org; tel: 202 232-1400; fax: 202 232-7300; email: usindo@usindo.org

The South Asia Analysis Group has the most comprehensive round-up of data and analysis on the April 5 legislative elections in Indonesia that I’ve seen so far.

The voting pattern has indicated that majority still prefers the old school of politics as seen from the strong showing of Golkar, PDI-P and the PPP. On the other hand there are voters (presumably in the urban areas and the younger generation) who are looking for a political change as is reflected in the emergence of parties such as the Democratic Party and the PKS.

There is widespread political disillusionment over the last 5 years (2 years under the deposed president Abdurrahman Wahid and 3 years under Megawati Sukarnoputri). News reports elicited from the people from various walks of life indicated that the general public would be happy to go back to the New Order days when there was more political stability.

One of the main reasons for the disillusionment of Megawati regime has been the slow progress of the economic reforms. Besides some of the reforms such as cuts in power subsidies were unpopular. The high percentage of unemployment has not been attended to. Corruption at all levels is also affecting the economy. Incidentally a survey of foreign businessmen carried out by Hong Kong based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Limited indicates that Indonesia is the most corrupt country in Asia for the third year running.

Unfortunately, the analysis was posted on 20 April, just before the final vote tally and just before Golkar nominated General Wiranto as its presidential candidate. Here’s what the SAAG had to say about the upcoming presidential elections on 5 July.

It may be remembered that in 1999, a loose grouping of Islamic parties succeeded in preventing Megawati from becoming the president even though her party (PDI-P) was the leading party with 34 per cent of the votes. Amien Rais of the National Mandate party, who is also speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), is trying a similar strategic move this time by forming a coalition called “Save the Nation Axis” with the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS). This only confirms his ambitions for the post of the president.

The leading contenders to the post of the President are:

Akbar Tandjung of Golkar (party ranking first in this election)

Megawati Sukarnoputri of PDI-P

Susilo Bambang Yudhyono of Democratic Party

Amien Rais of the National Mandate Party

The position may become clear once the Golkar convention scheduled for 20 April decides about its presidential candidate. Akbar Tandjung, a seasoned politician since 1977 and a former minister under Suharto, has recently been accused of corruption in a major case though he has been cleared by the Supreme Court. The fight in Golkar is primarily between him and General Wiranto, a former armed forces chief who has been indicted for atrocities in East Timor.

With the strong mandate for Golkar, Akbar Tandjung has all the advantages and the political acumen for becoming the next president. However the opinion polls show that Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, the former security minister under Megawati and a former general is ahead of all the other presidential candidates including Akbar Tandjung. He has also scored over Golkar and the PDI-P by selecting Jusuf Kalia, the Chief Social Welfare Minister as his running mate for the presidential election. Both Golkar and the PDI-P were eyeing him as their vice presidential candidate. The chances of Megawati returning as president by a successful manipulation of a viable coalition are not very bright. As Abdurrahman Wahid made it to the presidency in 1999 from nowhere, the presidential poll this time also can bring a surprise winner, though it may not be in the best interests of the country.

The East-West Center has just published two useful backgrounders on the separatist movement in Aceh in northern Sumatra in Indonesia.

The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a Separatist Organization, by Kirsten E. Schulze. Policy Studies 2. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 76 pp. Paper, $5.00.

The province of Aceh is located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. Since 1976 it has been wracked by conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM), which is seeking to establish an independent state, and the Indonesian security forces seeking to crush this bid. At the heart of the conflict are center/periphery relations and profound Acehnese alienation from Jakarta. This paper aims to provide a detailed ideological and organizational “map” of GAM in order to increase the understanding of its history, motivations, and organizational dynamics. Consequently this paper analyses GAM’s ideology, aims, internal structure, recruitment, financing, weapons procurement, and its military capacity. The focus of this study is on the recent past as the fall of Suharto not only allowed the Indonesian government to explore avenues other than force to resolve the Aceh conflict, but also provided GAM with the opportunity to make some changes to its strategy and to transform itself into a genuinely popular movement. It will be argued here that the key to understanding GAM in the post-Suharto era and the movement’s decisions, maneuvers and statements during the three years of intermittent dialogue can be found in the exiled leadership’s strategy of internationalization. This strategy shows that for GAM the negotiations, above all, were not a way to find common ground with Jakarta but a means to compel the international community to pressure the Indonesian government into ceding independence.

Security Operations in Aceh: Goals, Consequences, and Lessons, by Rizal Sukma. Policy Studies 3. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 58 pp. Paper, $5.00.

Since Indonesia’s independence in August 1945, the province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island has often been described as a center of resistance against the central government in Jakarta. The first uprising-the Darul Islam rebellion-began in 1953 and ended only in 1961 after the central government promised to grant special autonomy status to Aceh. When this promise was not fulfilled, another rebellion erupted in the mid-1970s. Unlike the Darul Islam rebellion which sought to change Indonesia into an Islamic state, the rebellion in 1970s took the form of a secessionist movement led by the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM). Despite its defeat in 1977 after the Indonesian military launched a security operation, another GAM-led rebellion broke out again in 1989–and again the Indonesian government responded swiftly with another military crackdown.

This paper examines the purpose, consequences, and lessons to be drawn from the security operations conducted by Indonesian forces in Aceh since 1990. As the vested interests of the TNI and its emphasis on a military solution have contributed to an escalation of the conflict, it argues that the military requires an exit strategy to be followed by socio-economic reconstruction. The paper is divided into four sections. The first outlines the root causes of the conflict and discusses military operations during the period 1990-98 when Aceh was designated a Military Operations Area (Daerah Operasi Militer; DOM). Security operations in Aceh between the downfall of Suharto’s New Order regime in May 1998 and May 2003, when the government finally decided to impose martial law and launch a full-scale military crackdown in the province are explored in the second section. The third explores the conduct of the counterinsurgency operation during the first six months of martial law in the province. The final section looks at how the government’s failure to consider the wider context of the conflict undermines the relative gains achieved on the military front. While security operations during the 1990s contributed to the aggravation of the problem–due primarily to the failure of Indonesia’s litary to protect human rights–the military operation since May 2003 will not end the conflict in Aceh if the government fails to undertake non-military measures to address the root causes of the problem in the province.

Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, UPI Business Correspondent, reports a troubling development for this summer’s Indonesian presidential elections:

SINGAPORE, April 21 (UPI) — The nomination of General Wiranto as presidential candidate for the leading party in the Indonesian general election is adding a new layer of uncertainties for investors in Indonesia.

Wiranto faces a U.N. indictment for crimes against humanity and is partly responsible for a U.S. congressional ban on military ties with Jakarta after mass killings by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1999.

But on Tuesday, the retired general won the nomination of the Golkar party (former President Suharto’s party), pushing ahead of expected winner Akbar Tandjung, the party’s chairman. He won by promising “strong leadership” and an end to corruption….

Golkar is leading the results of April 5 voting, with 21.1 percent of the vote, followed by President Megawati’s party Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 19.5 percent, Former president Wahid’s party the National Awakening Party (PKB) with 11.89 percent, the Islamic party of Vice-President Hamzah Haz’s United Development Party (PPP) with 8.33 percent and the newly formed party of retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Democratic Party (PD), with 7.52 percent.

But, a survey by London-based Taylor Nelson Sofres indicated that 28 percent of the surveyed voters will chose Susilo as president.

For more on the legislative election results, see below.