POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND PROCESS

 

As noted at the end of the "History" section, four distinct regime types or forms of government-two democratic and two authoritarian-have been adopted as institutional frameworks for managing and resolving political conflict in independent Indonesia. These are, using labels commonly applied to them by participants and scholars: parliamentary democracy (1950-1957), Guided Democracy (1959-1965), the New Order (1966-1999), and presidential democracy (1999-present). Parliamentary democracy was a genuinely democratic regime (that is, its leaders were cho­sen in free elections, held in 1955), as is today's presidential democracy (whose first free elections were held in 1999). Guided Democracy, despite its name, was an authoritarian regime. It was headed by Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, who established it by decree with the collaboration and protection of the armed forces. The New Order was also an authoritarian regime, headed by the country's second president, Suharto, a general whose primary power base was the army.

 

How did these regimes work, and how successful have they been at man­aging and resolving political conflict? In this section the focus is on the New Order, at thirty-three years by far the longest lived of the four regimes, and on the attempt since 1999 to create a presidential democracy. The New Order is also important because it is the immediate predecessor and has powerfully influenced many aspects of today's presidential democracy. Whether the parliamentary democracy of the 1950s and the Guided Democracy of the early 1960s failed to perform satisfactorily or were just overthrown by their enemies is a controversial question that cannot be de­cided here. There is no doubt, however, that both had their weaknesses. The parties in the parliamentary period tended to be too accurate a mirror of the cleavages in society, leading to governmental immobilism that Sukarno and the army were able to exploit for their own purposes. These issues will be taken up in the discussion of presidential democracy below. In the even shorter-lived Guided Democracy period, Sukarno tried unsuccess­fully to convince a wide range of groups that their interests could be inte­grated or absorbed into his radical-sounding but vague and mystically tinged formulations of the national interest. Even worse, he tried to balance backing from the right wing, status quo-oriented army, which had helped him into power, with support from the leftist, social revolutionary Communist party. This strategy was a recipe for disaster, for the bloody showdown that in fact occurred on October 1, 1965.

 

The New Order

 

How successfully did the New Order regime deal with conflict? To answer that question, we must first examine the logic behind the decisions of President Suharto, who dominated Indonesian politics for three decades until 1998. Suharto's decisions were made in a context of constraints and op­portunities. These included his beliefs, values, and goals, his perception of the obstacles and opportunities presented by the outside world, both do­mestic and foreign, and the reactions of others to his choices.

 

What did the world look like to Suharto on October 1, 1965, and sub­sequently? What were his goals and how did he choose the means to im­plement them? These are not easy questions to answer. There is, to be sure, direct evidence of a kind. Suharto published an autobiography and over the years gave many speeches in which he addressed these questions. These statements must be read with care, however, because they almost always had a political purpose, a targeted audience to be persuaded or dissuaded at the time they were written, that supersedes any truth value they may contain.

 

On the morning of October 1, it is probable that Suharto-like other Indonesians shocked by the news of the previous night's events-was anx­ious, confused, and uncertain as to how to act. Americans in a political cri­sis, such as the assassination of President Kennedy or President Nixon's coverup of Watergate, naturally turn for solutions to the institutions estab­lished and legitimated by the U.S. Constitution. Indonesia's Guided Democracy was a system of personal rule and of political forces locked in a death struggle, not an institutionalized regime with an unambiguous, agreed-upon set of rules. Suharto himself had been only a second-echelon player, with a status inferior to that of his senior officers, let alone to the charismatic, nation-founding, but now left-leaning Sukarno.

 

Perhaps instinctively, his first choice was to rely on his own staff, troops, and sympathetic fellow officers to overcome the immediate threat from bat­talions in the Jakarta area loyal to the coup plotters. In these early days, it is likely that survival-his personal survival as well as the corporate survival of the army as he knew it-was uppermost in Suharto's mind. In the weeks and months that followed, however, his primary goals clearly shifted to preser­vation of army domination of the political system and of his own control over the army. They remained the same until he left office on May 21, 1998.

 

 

What enabled Suharto to stay in power for so long? In my view, it was his skillful construction and deployment of a set of instruments of coercion, exchange, persuasion, and organization that was highly effective in the Indonesian society and culture of the last third of the twentieth century.

 

Coercion

Coercion was the bedrock of the New Order political system. Throughout 1965 and 1966 and sporadically for the rest of the decade, Suharto allowed or encouraged the army and various civilian organizations, including Muslim and Christian youth groups, to conduct an anti­Communist pogrom that resulted in as many as 500,000 deaths. Another 100,000 Communists and fellow travelers were kept in prison for more than a decade. On many occasions from the 1970s through the 1990s, student, Muslim, and other dissidents were arrested and jailed for long periods. An urban crime wave in the early 1980s was countered by special army units that tracked down and killed, vigilante style, several thousand known ha­bitual criminals.

The main instrument of coercion was, of course, the armed forces, at the core of which was an army of 216,000 (International Media Corp., 1990, p. 465). The armed forces were created shortly after the declaration of in­dependence in 1945, ostensibly to fight against the returning Dutch. From the very beginning, however, they were embroiled in conflicts with fellow Indonesians, including national-level civilian politicians like Sukarno and re­gional and local level ethnic, religious, and class-based dissidents. They also suffered from internal splits, many of which mirrored ethnic, religious, and class-based conflicts in the larger society.

Out of these experiences the leaders of the national armed forces de­veloped a doctrine to legitimate an autonomous role for themselves in na­tional politics. In the 1950s this doctrine was labeled the middle way, signi­fying a claim to a specifically Indonesian solution to the problem of civil-military relations that copied neither the western pattern of civilian dominance nor the Latin American and African pattern of direct military rule. In the late 1960s it was renamed the twin functions doctrine, under which the military assigned to itself responsibilities to protect the country from external aggression and to act on its own when it perceived domestic threats to national security.

 

President Suharto used the twin functions doctrine to justify the cre­ation and maintenance of a broad range of military institutions that regu­larly intervened in civilian political life. The first of these institutions spe­cific to the New Order was Kopkamtib, the Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order, created on October 3, 1965, to enable then Major General Suharto to act independently of the still powerful President Sukarno. In the 1970s Kopkamtib evolved into a kind of perma­nent emergency or martial law agency, an extraconstitutional club with which to threaten political dissidents and an alternative chain of command to allow Suharto to bypass the top brass if necessary. In the 1980s Kopkamtib came increasingly to seem anachronistic in a political system that had been stable for many years. In 1988 it was reorganized and re­named Bakorstanas, the Coordinating Agency for Preserving National Stability, and was presented as an agency that coordinated the actions of government officials in response to security threats. Until the end of the New Order it remained under the control of the army high command and ultimately of Suharto himself.

 

Within the Department of Defense and Security, there was a chief of staff for social and political affairs (kassospol). His responsibilities included assigning military officers to civilian government and political positions, serving as liaison with the department's appointees in national and regional legislatures, screening candidates for legislative office, and actively inter­vening in political party and organizational life. The kassospol reported to the armed forces commander, but also had to please the president.

 

The Department of Defense and Security maintained a system of ten territorial commands spanning the whole of the archipelago: two for Sumatra, four for Java, one for Kalimantan, one for Sulawesi, one for the Lesser Sunda Islands (including Bali and East Timor), and one for Maluku and Papua. The ostensible original purpose of these commands, created during the revolution, was to organize logistical support from the local population in the struggle against the returning Dutch army. In the 1950s they became political resources or power bases in the hands of ambitious military politicians. They were the focus of much internal army conflict, including the regional rebellions that were quelled only in the early 1960s. In the New Order the commands were brought firmly under the control of the armed forces commander in Jakarta. They functioned as a watchdog, a mil­itary bureaucracy paralleling the regional civilian government bureaucracy. They were also a major testing ground for career officers moving up the promotion ladder.

 

The Department of Home Affairs is an important ministry in a unitary or nonfederal state like Indonesia. It is very different, for example, from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages national parks and other feder­ally owned lands. During the New Order, Home Affairs directly administered regional government in 27 provinces, more than 300 districts, and thousands of subdistricts. It supervised the administration of tens of thousands of vil­lages and hamlets below the subdistrict and also ran the public schools. Home Affairs was always headed by a high-ranking, recently retired army gen­eral whose loyalty to President Suharto was unquestioned. One of the minis­ter's top officials was the director-general for social and political affairs, also always a retired officer. Much of the work of the directorate-general and its branch offices in the provinces and districts involved surveillance and control of local-level political and politically related activity.

 

Above and beyond, directing and coordinating the activities of all these agencies was military intelligence. The most powerful intelligence organi­zation was the Strategic Intelligence Agency, long controlled by General (ret.) L. B. Murdani, who was armed forces commander from 1983 to 1988 and minister of defense from 1988 to 1993. Considered highly capable, po­litically shrewd, tough to the point of ruthlessness in dealing with political opposition or social unrest, Murdani was a valuable asset to Suharto. From 1987, when Murdani began to raise the issues of the greed of the presi­dent's children (three of whom were very successful in business, in large part due to official favoritism) and the necessity of planning for the presi­dential succession, the relationship began to sour. In the 1990s Suharto re­asserted his personal control of military intelligence and of the armed forces as a whole.

 

Every New Order cabinet -a regular five-year cycle of cabinet reorgani­zation and reappointment began in 1968-included several serving or re­tired military officers. At the second ministerial echelon, consisting of sec­retaries-general, directors-general, and inspectors-general, there were also many soldiers. A study conducted in 1982 found that half of these positions were held by active and retired officers (MacDougall, 1982).

A similar pattern could be found in regional government, where many governors and district/muncipality heads had military backgrounds. Legislatures were penetrated by the military in two ways. First, there was the straightforward appointment of officers to the People's Consultative Assembly, Parliament, and the provincial and district legislatures. One-fifth of the members of the three latter bodies were by law selected in this way. The People's Consultative Assembly consisted of the 500 members of Parliament, including 400 elected representatives and 100 military ap­pointees, plus an additional 500 appointed members. Many of the latter were also military, either appointed directly as such or indirectly as mem­bers representing the regions or other groups.

 

The second way in which the military penetrated the legislatures was through the political party system. There were only three legal political par­ties in New Order Indonesia: Golkar (the state political party); PPP (Development Unity Party), identified with Muslims; and the nationalist­Christian PDI (Indonesian Democracy Party). It was a measure of the mili­tary's distaste for parties that the government refused to label Golkar a party, calling it instead a "sociopolitical organization." In the six general elections that were held starting in 1971, Golkar averaged well over 60 per­cent of the vote. In 1992, for example, Golkar won 68 percent, PPP 17 per­cent, and PDI 15 percent (Liddle, 1993). In 1997, one year before Suharto's fall, Golkar won 74 percent, while PPP received 23 percent, and PDI dropped to 3 percent. The reason for PDI's collapse was voter anger at Suharto's forcible removal of Megawati from the party's leadership.

 

Golkar, originally named Sekber Golkar (the joint Secretariat of Functional Groups), was created by army politicians in 1964 to counter the rapidly growing strength of the Communist party among such groups as plantation workers and agricultural laborers. The Joint Secretariat brought together under military leadership a number of new anti-Communist orga­nizations with preexisting interest groups that were not affiliated with po­litical parties. In this form it was able to obtain, through pressure on President Sukarno, up to half of the seats in the Parliament and the re­gional legislatures.

 

In the late 1960s President Suharto decided to hold a national election, the first since 1955, as a part of his attempt at legitimizing the New Order. Golkar was then transformed from a loose collection of military-supervised interest groups into a state party, more precisely the partisan political face of the military and civilian bureaucracy. Most civilian officials (the Department of Religion was excepted in this first election but not there­after) were required to sign an oath of loyalty to Golkar. Military officers, especially in the territorial commands, were given the key positions in the formal party structure. Their job was to support the campaign conducted by the civilian bureaucrats and village officials and, in general, to make clear to the electorate that the government, led by the military, wanted a large vote for Golkar. Quotas, based on the 1955 election results and cal­culations as to the degrees of likely local resistance, were assigned to every province, district, subdistrict, village, and hamlet. The result was a stunning 62 percent victory for Golkar, 40 percent more than had been received by any party in the free elections of 1955.

 

This outcome was accomplished with relatively little use of direct force. The army-backed killings of 1965-1966 were still fresh in villagers' minds, which undoubtedly had something to do with voter docility. There was a shoulder-shrugging belief that no alternative to Golkar and military rule was possible for the present. More positively, there was also a general, if ten­tative, attitude of hope that the new atmosphere of political and economic stability and economic development would continue. In most places the ballot counting was conducted honestly, in the presence of representatives of the non government parties.

 

There was, nonetheless, a widespread pattern of intimidation of those not inclined to go along with the government's plan. Two memories stand out from my own experience as an observer, living in a village on the Indian Ocean south of Yogyakarta in Central Java. One is of a devoutly Islamic hamlet head threatened with the loss of his job if he did not campaign for Golkar among the households under his care. With tears in his eyes, he told me that his choice was between a comfortable existence on earth and eter­nal salvation. (Many Indonesian Muslims believe that their faith requires them to vote for an Islamic party.) He campaigned for Golkar. My second memory is of watching a truck full of soldiers arrive in the village a week be­fore the elections. The troops were just there to guard the polling places, I was told, but most villagers felt that a low vote for Golkar would surely bring punishment.

 

The military continued to dominate Golkar until the end of the New Order. During the 1970s the active military increasingly withdrew behind the scenes, preferring to allow retired officers and civilians to appear to run election campaigns and the between-elections party organization. In the 1997 election, well over half of the provincial and district branches were led by retired officers fronting for the armed forces leadership.

 

Nine other political parties, basically the remains of the party system of the 1950s after the destruction of the left, competed in the 1971 elections. In 1973 these parties were forced to fuse into the PPP and the PDI. Party leaders considered uncooperative by the government were expelled or de­nied leadership positions. Party congresses since that time often had lead­ers imposed on them. Party nominees for legislative seats were frequently rejected in a screening process controlled by the president and the military. PPP and PDI also were not permitted to establish branches below the dis­trict level.

 

Armed forces control did not stop with the political parties. Ostensibly nonpolitical or at least nonpartisan organizations, such as labor and farmer unions, associations for students, youth, women, Muslims, Christians, doc­tors, lawyers, engineers, scholars, journalists, and so on, all felt the heavy hand of the military. In many areas of social life, only one organization was permitted or a peak association was formed to facilitate government con­trol, in a style reminiscent of the old Soviet Union.

 

Many of these organizations were forced to affiliate with Golkar. An ex­ample is labor, where the government permitted no union other than its own All-Indonesian Workers Union. A startling, but not in fact atypical, ex­ample of intervention occurred in North Sumatra in 1993, when the terri­torial commander unilaterally settled a leadership dispute in the country's largest Protestant church, most of whose members live in that province. He justified his action in national security terms, and the protests of the losing faction in the church were ignored.

 

Finally, the press was also a target of military intervention. The largest circulation newspapers and magazines have always been privately owned, and most of their owners and editors are firmly committed to the idea of a free press. The New Order government developed a doctrine of a "free and responsible" press, in which "responsible" was interpreted to mean confor­mity to the government's wishes. A ministerial regulation gave the govern­ment authority to grant and revoke publishing licenses, and many newspa­pers and magazines were suspended or permanently closed. Most damaging was the "telephone culture," the frequent use of the telephone by intelligence officers to demand that a story not be printed.

 

Over the whole of the New Order the general trend was for tighter and tighter restrictions on what could be reported. In the early 1990s the lid was lifted to a degree. New, more forthright opinion magazines appeared, and the established press resorted less than it once had to euphemism and in­nuendo. Criticism of the president and his family, however, remained taboo, and licenses were still not given to publications that openly chal­lenged the fundamental principles and doctrines of the New Order. In 1994, the leading newsweekly, Tempo, was banned for questioning editori­ally the purchase of virtually the entire former East German navy by the gov­ernment. The chilling effect, felt throughout the media, lasted until the overthrow of Suharto.

 

Exchange

Coercion, it should be obvious by now, was a central element in the New Order system of rule. If we are to understand its effectiveness and endurance, however, we must locate it in a broader framework of instru­ments that include exchange, persuasion, and organization. By "exchange" it is meant the trading of goods and services for political support. Exchange has two dimensions: (1) individual versus group and (2) overt versus covert or, roughly, legal versus illegal.

 

The New Order had far more goods and services to exchange than ei­ther of its predecessors or, so far, its successor. Partly this is due to good for­tune. Two dramatic increases in the world oil prices in the early and late 1970s gave the government a terrific windfall in foreign exchange and tax revenues levied on the export sales of oil by private companies. By 1981 pe­troleum products accounted for 82 percent of foreign exchange earnings and 73 percent of government budget receipts (Booth, 1992). Good eco­nomic management was also a factor, however, as a glance at the disastrous policy histories of similarly oil-rich populous countries like Iran, Nigeria, Mexico, and Venezuela easily shows.

 

There will be more about New Order economic policy in the next sec­tion. The main point to be made here is that the economy grew at nearly percent per year from the late 1960s to the early 1980s and, after a slump in the mid-1980s, returned to a 6 to 7 percent growth rate which it main­tained through 1997. This growth made possible a distribution of overt and covert benefits carefully calculated to win support from a variety of individ­uals and groups. The connection with coercion was twofold: It financially rewarded the coercers, making them more loyal to Suharto and to the New Order, more willing to carry out coercive acts, and it provided an alterna­tive reason for beneficiaries outside the armed forces, including civilian government officials and members of various groups in society, to support or at least acquiesce in the system.

 

Overt benefits came in the form of an expanding bureaucracy, better salaries, allowances, perquisites and retirement opportunities for civil ser­vants and military officers, and a wide range of programs that reached every village, indeed virtually every individual, in the country. The best known of these programs were called Presidential Instruction programs, a label that made it clear to whom the citizenry should express their gratitude. They in­cluded construction of schools, health centers, community halls, roads and bridges, reforestation programs, and so on. In addition to providing col­lective benefits, these programs were a major source of local-level employ­ment. Other highly successful programs, for which the government even won international recognition, were in rice production and marketing (rice is the staple food for most Indonesians), and family planning.

 

Overt benefits were mostly recorded as state budget expenditures or in­creases in gross national product, while covert ones originated in private payments to the ruler from individuals outside the state. Covert benefits were also generally paid out to individuals rather than to groups. All sides tried to keep these transactions secret, so scholars know much less about them than about budget revenues and expenditures. The state oil company Pertamina, which processes payments made to the Indonesian government by foreign oil producers, was a significant source of extra budgetary rev­enue, as was Bulog (Badan Urusan Logistik, Logistic Affairs Agency), a state

company that monopolizes the import of agricultural products and con­trols the domestic buying and selling of rice.

 

The private business community was also a major source of income for top civilian and military officials. Foreign companies were expected to pay high commissions and provide joint venture partnerships to the family mem­bers of officials. Perhaps 75 percent of the successful domestic businesspeo­ple, the middle- and upper-class entrepreneurs, in Jakarta and other cities are Sino-Indonesian in origin. The political position of Sino-Indonesians, as described earlier, is fragile. The legal system, underdeveloped and itself rid­dled with corruption, provides little protection. Many Sino-Indonesians thus seek security by developing personal relationships with high officials, in re­turn for which they make large financial contributions.

 

During the New Order, many of these contributions were just straight­forward bribes or protection money. Others became more institutional­ized. President Suharto established several foundations to which the largest Sino-Indonesian companies, most of which listed members of the presi­dent's family as stockholders, contributed perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. Much of this money was probably used for political purposes. The three parties, none of which had a substantial independent income or col­lected dues from its members, were openly given large annual sums from one of the president's foundations. Covert payments were undoubtedly made to many individuals and groups.

 

Persuasion

 

Compliance to the will of the ruler may also be obtained through persuasion, by convincing the ruled that the ruler's policies, polit­ical arrangements, and basic social and political ideals and values are their own. Success at persuasion reduces the need to coerce or to offer specific goods and services. Most rulers would probably prefer to get as much sup­port as possible through persuasion, which is cheaper and less morally am­biguous than either coercion or exchange.

Persuasion was certainly a major element in Suharto's strategy and was well integrated with the elements of exchange and coercion. At the level of policy, in the late 1960s a new language of pembangunan (development) quickly emerged and replaced Sukarno's decades-long rhetoric of commit­ment to revolusi (revolution). Development, in its New Order formulation, connoted a state-directed effort to raise the standard of living of all Indonesians. As such, it was attractive to civilian bureaucrats, whose status as well as income had suffered badly during the Sukarno years. Development was explicitly connected to stabilitas (stability), which ap­pealed to the military and to the millions of Indonesians whose lives had been disrupted by the political battles of the 1950s and 1960s. The empha­sis on all Indonesians, expressed in the government's rhetoric as pemerataan (equalization), also made it compelling, at least in principle, to many eco­nomically weak groups in society. The concept was consistently invoked for three decades, in annual presidential independence eve and budgetary ad­dresses, five-year and even twenty-five-year plans.

 

In political institutional arrangements, there is rather more continuity between the Suharto and Sukarno periods. Suharto claimed that the New Order was a Pancasila democracy. Virtually all nation-state governments to­day call themselves democracies. The reason for this is that popular sover­eignty, the idea that the people "own" their country or have the right to rule themselves, is the universally accepted legitimating principle of our time. Democracy is the set of institutions-elections, parties, legislatures, execu­tives, judiciaries-through which popular sovereignty is exercised.

 

Indonesia's basic law creating and regulating these institutions is the Constitution of 1945. Originally in force from 1945 to 1950, it was read­opted in 1959 by President Sukarno, at that time in alliance with the armed forces against the parliamentary system dominated by the parties. President Suharto not only accepted the 1945 Constitution but attempted to raise it to the level of a sacred document that must be adhered to totally and may not be amended. Of course, he permitted no challenges to his own inter­pretation of its provisions, which enabled him to dominate all other gov­ernmental institutions.

 

Pancasila is a political doctrine comprising five principles of belief in God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social justice. It was devised for a famous 1945 speech by Sukarno, who was attempting to cre­ate a unifying political formula for a diverse society. Sukarno was particu­larly concerned about deflecting pressure from Muslim leaders who wanted the new republic to be formally declared a Muslim state. Though accepted as a temporary compromise by Muslim politicians at the time, Pancasila re­turned as an issue in the 1955 election and the subsequent constitutional debates. In the early 1960s, after the Muslim statists had been defeated, it became a symbol of the right and was used by the military and its allies to attack the Communists as godless totalitarian internationalists.

 

President Suharto's use of the term Pancasila democracy was an asser­tion that the political arrangements he created within the framework of the Constitution of 1945 were both genuinely democratic and uniquely Indonesian. It was an attempt to persuade Indonesians that the three-party system, the role of the military and bureaucracy in Golkar, the appointment of soldiers to the legislatures and to the executive outside the Department of Defense and Security, the restrictions on freedom of organization and the press were all justified in the name of the specific characteristics and needs of Indonesian society.

 

Suharto's claim that Pancasila is indigenous rested on a prior assertion: that there is a coherent prewestern Indonesian cultural tradition comprising distinctive values and ideals that are still worth living by. This assertion is common across the developing world and, indeed, in already industrialized nonwestern countries like Japan, where so many people are simultaneously attracted by what the industrialized western world has to offer and fearful of the consequences of modernization for their cultural and social lives.

 

Though psychologically reassuring, the argument is dubious for several reasons. Perhaps most important, every culture is made up of many differ­ent attitudes, beliefs, and values that are constantly undergoing change. A major source of change is interaction with others, which in the case of the west and the developing world has been going on for hundreds of years. For countries like Indonesia, which have no precolonial history as a single soci­ety, it is even more unlikely that there is a common traditional culture be­neath contemporary diversity. These objections did not, of course, stop Suharto and other New Order spokespersons from claiming that Pancasila democracy was deeply rooted in the soil of traditional Indonesian culture. What they usually meant by this is traditional Javanese culture, as described earlier in the section, "Political Culture."

 

Organization

 

The fourth and final instrument of Suharto's rule was orga­nization. Coercion, exchange, and persuasion were all dependent to some degree on organization, which made possible the translation of Suharto's will into implemented policy that impacted on society. The building of a wide range of increasingly effective and hierarchically controlled organiza­tions was one of the greatest New Order achievements. Examples include the military agencies responsible for civilian surveillance and intervention described above, the legislatures and the five-year cycle in which their mem­bership is renewed, civilian government agencies charged with implement­ing economic policy, the provincial and district government agencies that brought development projects to the local level, and the proliferation of schools and health centers that directly raised the level of living of ordinary people. The charismatic Sukarno is remembered for his ability to mobilize his people in the struggle for independence, the campaign for Papua, and the over-throw of parliamentary democracy. None of these goals required extensive or permanent organization. It is unclear whether Suharto will be remembered more for his development successes or for the repressiveness of his regime, but both were accomplished in large part through the cre­ation and maintenance of effective organizations.

 

Evaluating the New Order

 

What were the consequences of Suharto-style government and politics for Indonesian society? It is fashionable today to dismiss Suharto as just another failed developing world dictator, and there is some merit to the argument. He certainly was a dictator, as the above analysis of his leadership makes abundantly clear. Moreover, his greatest claim to success was in developing the economy, but he left office after fail­ing to resolve the worst economic crisis that Indonesia had experienced since 1965-1966. In 1997, Indonesia was hit harder than any other East Asian country, suffering an economic decline of 14 percent in 1998, in part because of the corruption in the banking system, state and private industry that Suharto himself had either created, encouraged, or tolerated, but cer­tainly manipulated for familial and political gain.

Our tentative (tentative because Suharto stepped down so recently) judgment is more balanced. On the positive side, in 32 years in power Suharto laid many of the critical economic foundations of a modern soci­ety. His achievements in this area compare to those of Park Chung-Hee in South Korea, Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, and Lee Kuan-Yew in Singapore over the same period. He transformed state agencies, like the department of finance, the central bank, and the National Planning Agency, from ad­ministrative shells without many trained staff into relatively competent im­plementers of government economic policy. In the 1960s he committed his government to the development of a modern mixed economy, and he worked steadily throughout his years in office at creating a state capable of doing its part.

 

Perhaps most crucially, Suharto's policies made possible the emer­gence and expansion of private businesses of all kinds-foreign and do­mestic, agricultural, industrial, and service, large, medium, and small ­throughout the country. Though his instincts were pro-state, he understood that capitalism is the chief engine of growth today. By the 1990s, for the first time in Indonesian history, manufacturing contributed more than agriculture to the Gross National Product. Suharto also ex­panded the modern educational system, providing access to elementary ed­ucation to virtually all Indonesian children and vastly increasing access to secondary and tertiary education. His Presidential Instruction programs created a nationwide infrastructure of roads, bridges, markets, and health centers, making it possible for most Indonesian citizens to participate in the expanding economy and in modern society in general.

 

One important result of these changes is that today's class structure is much more complex than that of the 1950s or earlier. To be sure, civil ser­vants, who as a group suffered badly from the 1940s through the 1960s, were restored to their pre-independence glory by Suharto. But the New Order was not a recreation of the old Dutch colonial order. Two very visi­ble differences are the presence today of a substantial indigenous upper en­trepreneurial and professional class and of an urban working class. Even at the end of the New Order, few indigenous businesspeople were willing to question the government leadership. Today, many of these same people ap­pear to believe that the New Order was a better political system than the democracy that has followed it. Many workers, on the other hand, were ready to be mobilized politically, as evidenced by the explosion of wildcat strikes and illegal labor unions in the 1990s.

 

Less visible, but perhaps equally important, differences include the emergence of a small town and even village indigenous entrepreneurial class (evidenced, for example, by the rapid growth of savings banks); the consolidation of a small-scale landowning elite at the village level, especially in the densely populated wet-rice cultivating areas of Java; and the rapid ex­pansion in the number of landless laborers who move back and forth be­tween the village and the city in search of employment. Many of the small town and village people who benefited most from the New Order have mixed feelings today about its democratic replacement, which has yet to perform well economically.

 

Culturally, Suharto also for the most part struck the right tone of do­mestic pluralism and equality combined with international openness. His origins were small town Java, he had little formal education, and he spent many of his formative years in the army. His exposure to and understand­ing of his own society (both Java and Indonesia) and of the outside world were thus much more limited than that of his predecessor, Sukarno, and of many members of the national political elite of his time. Perhaps his most important cultural choice as president was to promote, as Sukarno had done, a pan-religious rather than a Muslim definition of Indonesian national identity. This choice was undoubtedly rooted, as it was for Sukarno, in his abangan or religiously syncretic background. It enabled other aban­gan and non-Muslim Indonesians to feel a part of the national project, which they would not have felt if he had chosen to define Indonesian iden­tity in more Islamic terms. It also gave santri, or pious Muslims, of his gen­eration and more importantly of his children's generation, an opportunity to rethink their relationship with Indonesian nationalism.

 

The pious Muslim community itself changed enormously in the Suharto years, in part as a result of his policies. The expansion of the edu­cation system meant that many village and small town children of pious Muslim background were given an opportunity to advance in Indonesian society that they had not had before. Under the Dutch, and in the early years of independence, Christians and other non-Muslim minorities had greater access to education, with the result that the modern national elite was (and remains to a lesser extent) disproportionately non-Muslim. Moreover, many abangan children became santri during these years because of the government's policy of requiring children to study the religion of their choice in school. Abangan-ness is not a religion, but a variant of Indonesian Islam. Abangan children were therefore registered as Muslims and received formal religious instruction throughout their school years, which in many cases turned them into pious Muslims.

 

Most of these new santri appear to be liberal in their political views. The reasons for this are unclear, but probably have something to do with the in­fluence of beliefs and attitudes derived from local traditional ethnic cul­tures, steady economic growth, which gave most people employment op­portunities, plus the Suharto government's repression of Islamic militants. Liberal Muslims in Indonesia place more emphasis on the substance or content of belief and practice than on the form, believe that the Koran's message must be reinterpreted by every generation of Muslims in the light of social conditions prevailing at that time, and recognize that no human being can be certain that he or she understands fully the will of God. These views lead them to be tolerant toward other religious groups and even to­ward diversity within the Islamic community, to disavow the idea of an Islamic state, and to endorse popular sovereignty and the institutions of democracy as suitable for twenty-first century Indonesia. Suharto's patron­age in the 1990s of the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, led by Minister of Research and Technology Habibie, was a reflection of these changes.

 

Suharto's Javanese upbringing probably did not predispose him to be open to egalitarianism or international influences. Javanese society and cul­ture are, as described above, generally both hierarchical and inward-look­ing. Moreover, his wife was proud of her family connections with the royal court of Mangkunegaran in Surakarta, central Java. Official life, in the pres­idential palace especially but throughout the government, strongly re­flected these influences. Nonetheless, Suharto's economic policies opened Indonesia to the outside world, bringing in foreigners and foreign influences and enabling many Indonesians to study abroad. Jakarta and Surabaya became increasingly cosmopolitan. Suharto's political rhetoric was explicitly egalitarian, as for example in his concept of a "development trilogy," which included political stability, economic growth, and economic and social equality. This was in keeping with the nationalist ideology (in which all citizens are equally members of the nation) that he shared with most members of the elite, and his government's commitment to national economic development and mass education. In short, in the New Order there were fewer barriers than ever before for young people to rise above their social and cultural origins.

 

The most important negative consequence of the New Order was polit­ical: the lessening of the capacity of Indonesian society-in particular its po­litical institutions, organizations, and leaders outside the New Order-to re­solve the religious, ethnic/regional, racial and class issues that divide its members. As described above, for more than three decades Suharto per­sonally monopolized the accumulation, maintenance, and deployment of all major political resources and instruments of power. His views on key issues were therefore the only ones that mattered. He was a political giant and all other players, both inside and outside the regime, were political pygmies. Coercion was his primary resource and instrument, followed by control over the distribution of economic goods and services. All other resources were ei­ther directly controlled by him or denied to others through the deft manip­ulation of sticks and carrots, and therefore rendered ineffective.

 

This was particularly true of the resource of mass support, which can take many forms: voting in elections, joining political parties or interest or­ganizations, becoming a party or organization activist, attending party or organization rallies or demonstrations, contributing money or other re­sources to the party or organization, and so on. Throughout the New Order, no politician was allowed to develop an independent base of mass support. Suharto's own mass support was in part manufactured, the prod­uct of the effective deployment of coercive, exchange, and persuasive re­sources described above. Two aspects of this system had especially negative consequences: stealing from state agencies and extorting money from Sino-­Indonesian businesspeople in order to fund election campaigns. The first practice made corruption seem, if not ethical, at least a normal political practice, while the second exacerbated the already high level of tension be­tween indigenous and Sino-Indonesians.

 

Excessive governmental centralization in Jakarta went hand-in-hand with Suharto's personal concentration of political resources. The trend had begun in the late 1950s, when President Sukarno and the national armed forces put down rebellions in several regions. It was greatly strengthened by Suharto's development program, which vastly expanded the financial re­sources available to the central government to distribute to the provinces and lower administrative levels. Officials and citizens in the regions had a mixed view of the new largesse. While they appreciated receiving the funds, they resented that the center made all the key decisions as to how they would be spent. There was also much resentment, especially in eastern Indonesia, toward a growth pattern that appeared to benefit Java and Sumatra dispro­portionately. By the late 1990s, the level of regional resentment was high in many provinces but the center was not yet willing to change.

 

Given these conditions, a post-Suharto transition to democracy, a system of government in which mass support is the essential resource, was therefore bound to be rocky. During the 1990s, Suharto's last years in power, would ­be challengers had to act surreptitiously to avoid suppression. After he stepped down, they had simultaneously to develop their links with preexist­ing mass bases, forge new support groups, and figure out how to deal politi­cally with each other. Moreover, they had to act in a political institutional context, including the institutions of the Parliament, Assembly, and presi­dency, which had been used throughout the New Order almost entirely as a facade and instrument for Suharto's personal authoritarianism.

 

In conclusion, we return to the question that began this discussion of the New Order. How successfully did the regime deal with religious, eth­nic/regional, racial, and class conflict? Two somewhat contradictory an­swers have been presented. First, the New Order's development policies may have significantly altered the nature of Indonesian society and there­fore the underlying causes and patterns of religious, ethnic/regional, racial, and class conflict. Some of these changes may be for the good, such as the growth of a business and more broadly middle class and the liberal­ization of Islam described above. Some, however, may have negative or mixed consequences, at least in the short term. The most obvious example is the internal migration that occurred during the New Order, as large numbers of individuals moved from one part of the country to another in response to economic opportunities. Recent outbreaks of religious and eth­nic violence, between long-settled Christians and newcomer Muslims in Maluku and indigenous Dayaks and immigrant Madurese in West and Central Kalimantan, are directly related to these demographic changes.

 

The second answer to the question is more straightforward. As a repres­sive dictatorship, the New Order did not create the political institutions or al­low the development of organizations necessary for the long-term manage­ment and resolution of conflict in all modern societies. The effects are most evident in the unpreparedness of the major national political parties and their leaders to exercise power in the post-Suharto era. It is as though the country has gone back to square one, to its starting point in 1950 after the in­dependence revolution, at the end of centuries of Dutch colonial rule.

 

The anger of today's Acehnese and Papuans, the two provincial popu­lations most directly and brutally coerced throughout the New Order, is also a direct result of this institutional failure. The effect may now be irre­versible, since large numbers of Acehnese and Papuans, perhaps a majority of the politically conscious, appear committed to separation from Indonesia. Moreover, they have before them the example of East Timor, occupied by Indonesia for 24 years but finally free because of a determined independence movement, central government weakness, and international pressure. A less obvious example is the potential for revenge-seeking of the working class and other constituencies of the Communist party. PKI mem­bers and leaders were killed and imprisoned in the hundreds of thousands in the late 1960s, and have been suppressed and terrorized ever since. Even today, they are social and political outcasts in many parts of Indonesian so­ciety. Their anger, and that of their actual and spiritual descendants, is al­most certain to play a role in Indonesia's political future, particularly if and when a labor movement reemerges as a result of restored economic growth.

Presidential Democracy

 

How successfully is the new presidential democracy dealing with conflict? The first, and maybe the best, answer is that it is too soon to tell. After four decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Sukarno and Suharto, Indonesians are just beginning to learn how to operate a democracy. Democratic legislative elections (for Parliament, provincial, and dis­trict/municipality legislatures) were held in June 1999, followed by the in­direct election of President Abdurrahman Wahid in the People's Consultative Assembly in October of that year. As mentioned earlier, Abdurrahman was dismissed as president by majority vote of the Assembly and automatically replaced by Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had been vice-­president, in July 2001, after serving only twenty months of his five-year term. Abdurrahman had been charged in early 2000 with corruptly accept­ing money from a government agency and the sultan of neighboring Brunei, but was finally dismissed from office on grounds of challenging the constitutionality of the Assembly's right to dismiss him and unconstitution­ally ordering the armed forces to dissolve Parliament. Until very recently, the Assembly has been sovereign, the final authority in the country.

 

Our assessment of the prospects for Indonesian democracy will begin with an analysis of the Constitution of 1945 as a framework for the conduct of democratic politics. Because it is neither clearly presidential nor clearly parliamentary, the Constitution has complicated the transition to democ­racy. It has also become itself a source of conflict and has been amended three times since the fall of Suharto. Examination of the Constitution will be followed by an analysis of the nature of political resources available to the new democratic politicians in comparison to their New Order predecessors.

 

The democrats have one major resource, mass electoral support for po­litical parties, that was almost nonexistent during the New Order, when elections were tightly controlled by the government. In general, however, political resources are fewer, of lower quality, and more dispersed today than during the New Order. The consequence is that it is more difficult for would-be presidents to accumulate sufficient resources to enable them first to get into office and then to use the powers of office to solve the problems facing the country. New Order-style "Pancasila Democracy," as argued above, was illegitimate because it was not truly democracy. Today's presidential democracy is a true democracy, but it too may become illegitimate if it cannot provide the personal security and economic prosperity that were the hallmarks of the New Order.

 

Democracy and the Constitution of 1945

 

Indonesia's version of presiden­tial democracy is perhaps unique in the world. Most countries with presi­dential systems of government elect the president (and vice-president) di­rectly for a fixed term, as does the United States. Members of the national legislature are chosen in a separate election. It is this two-election arrange­ment that distinguishes presidential from parliamentary systems. In the lat­ter, there is only one election, for the national legislature or Parliament. A majority of the newly elected members of the legislature then choose the executive, typically in the form of a prime minister and cabinet, as in the British case. The executive, or government in British usage, governs at the pleasure of the Parliament. It may be dismissed if it loses the support of a majority of parliamentary members.

 

In two-party systems like Britain's, the government usually stays in power from one election to the next because it represents the party with the majority of seats. In multiparty systems, on the other hand, if one party does not have a majority, then two or more parties must form a coalition in or­der to govern. Coalition governments, because they depend upon the con­tinuing support of two or more parties, are less likely to stay in power for the whole inter-election period. Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy of the multiparty type from 1950 to 1957. During that period there were seven governments but only one election, in 1955.

 

Indonesia's current presidential system is based on the Constitution of 1945, which was adopted in wartime and revolutionary conditions shortly after the declaration of independence on August 17, 1945. In its original form (it has now been amended three times, in 1999, 2000, and 2001), the Constitution specifies that "sovereignty resides in the hands of the people and shall be exercised in full by the People's Consultative Assembly." The Assembly meets at least once in five years. It consists of members of Parliament "plus delegates from the regions and special interest groups as provided for by law." Parliament meets at least once a year. The Constitution does not specify how members of Parliament are chosen.

 

The powers of government are vested in the president, assisted by a vice­-president. The president has the power to formulate laws, which must then be approved by Parliament. Laws initiated by Parliament may be vetoed by the president. The president also has the right, "in pressing circumstances," to issue government regulations in lieu of laws, which must then be ap­proved by Parliament at its next session. He or she holds the highest au­thority over the armed forces, and may declare a state of emergency. With the approval of Parliament, the president declares war and makes peace, ap­points and accepts ambassadors, and grants clemency. The president ap­points and removes government ministers. He or she submits an annual budget to Parliament. The president and vice-president are elected by a ma­jority of the members of the Assembly for a five-year term and may be re­elected. While there is no mention of impeachment, Article 8 states that "Should the president pass away, resign/be removed, or be unable to carry out his or her duties during his or her term of office, he or she should be re­placed by the vice-president until the end of his or her term." (In the Indonesian language, there is just one word for both she and he, so this pas­sage is not as awkward as it looks in our translation. The word translated as resign/be removed is berhenti, which literally means to stop or halt.)

Within a few months of its adoption, the Constitution of 1945 was in­formally set aside in favor of a de facto parliamentary system. The reasons for the change are unclear, but may have had something to do with the al­most immediate emergence of a multiparty system in Parliament, with no one party holding a majority, in a time of national crisis. There was a con­stant need to maintain the support of a parliamentary majority in the face of severe threats, externally from the Dutch, who wanted to restore colonial rule, and internally from the Communist party and its allies, who wanted to take power from the dominant nationalist coalition led by Sukamo. In 1950, the 1945 Constitution was formally replaced by the Constitution of 1950, which was genuinely parliamentary but intended to be temporary, un­til a constitutional convention could adopt a permanent constitution. This process, as described above (see the "History" section), was cut short by President Sukarno's 1959 declaration to return to the Constitution of1945. Both Sukarno and Suharto (see the discussion of the New Order in this sec­tion) then used the Constitution to give the appearance of democratic le­gitimacy to their respective authoritarian governments.

 

The Constitution of 1945, as amended, is still in effect today. In its orig­inal form, it appeared to pull simultaneously in opposite directions. It was presidential, in the powers of the office and in the fixed term given to the president. These were the characteristics seized upon fIrst by Sukarno and later by Suharto. But it was parliamentary in that the president and vice-­president were chosen by the Assembly, which consisted of members of Parliament plus an unspecified number of appointed members. Article 8 also provided an opening wedge through which a president, like a prime minister, could be voted out of office by a legislative majority. Under Suharto, Parliament consisted of 500 members and the Assembly of 1,000 members, the 500 members of Parliament plus an additional 500 ap­pointed from the regions, the armed forces, and various social and cultural groups. Since Suharto controlled both the election and the appointment processes, he never had to worry about being reelected or removed, even in the Assembly session of March 1998, two months before he was forced to step down.

 

In the post-Suharto era, however, the inherent contradiction between the powers of the office (formally great) and the manner of selection of the president (totally dependent upon the Assembly, and therefore largely de pendent upon Parliament) became obvious. This was especially true since, as in 1945, no single party has a majority in Parliament or the Assembly that would enable it to choose the president and keep him or her in office until the next general election. Democratic Indonesia since the election of 1999 has thus been more like the classic continental European multiparty par­liamentary system, with ever changing prime ministers and cabinets, or like Indonesia's own multiparty parliamentary system in the 1950s, in which prime ministers and cabinets rose and fell at the rate of once a year, than it has been like a true presidential system.

 

Abdurrahman Wahid, elected by the Assembly in October 1999, was Indonesia's first democratically elected president under the Constitution of 1945. His greatest failing as a politician (he has many!), the root cause of his dismissal 20 months later, was his unshakeable determination to act like a president in a presidential system (Harry Truman was a role model, he told me in an interview while still president). That is, he made personnel and policy decisions on his own, after minimal consultation outside (some­times inside as well) his circle of advisers and his party (which has only about 10 percent of the seats in Parliament and the Assembly), as though he had been directly elected by a majority of voters. Had he acted more like a prime minister in a multiparty parliamentary system, carefully and con­tinuously cultivating the support of the party leaders and members of the Assembly who had in fact elected him, he would have been much more likely to remain in office until the end of his term.

 

After the fall of Suharto, Indonesian politicians became aware of the deficiencies in their Constitution and have slowly and haltingly begun to correct (or at least to change) them. Since 1998 there has been a great de­bate as to whether the country should move decisively toward a presidential system (specifically by direct election of the president and vice-president) or return to the parliamentary system of the 1950s. This debate has pro­duced as much heat and confusion as it has light, both because of lack of knowledge of the alternatives by the major political actors and of uncer­tainty as to the consequences for their partisan interests. It has also been complicated by debate on two other issues: decentralization of governmen­tal authority to the regions, including the possibility of federalism, versus continued centralization in Jakarta; and single member district or plurality election of members of Parliament versus proportional representation by province and party lists, which has been the practice since 1955.

 

These debates have produced three packages of amendments, one each in the now annual sessions of the Assembly in 1999, 2000, and 2001. The general tendency of the amendments of 1999 and 2000 was to limit the role of the president and to expand the powers of Parliament. The presi­dent and vice-president may only be reelected once. The members of Parliament are to be chosen in a general election. The president no longer formulates laws together with Parliament, but instead submits bills to Parliament. Parliament's independent law-making power has been enhanced. Parliament now has "the rights of interpellation, inquiry and com­mentary." Its individual members "have the right to submit questions, make proposals and voice opinions, and shall enjoy immunity from prosecution." Several articles spell out for the first time basic human and civil rights, in­cluding freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion, for all Indonesian citizens.

The 2001 amendment appears to shift the balance back toward a stronger presidency, indeed to lay the foundation for a genuine presiden­tial system as described above. It also commits the nation to an independent judiciary, including a constitutional court, and a quasi-federal bicameral legislature. The amendment specifies direct election of the president and vice-president (to begin in 2004) and limits the grounds on which a presi­dent can be dismissed or impeached. Sovereignty is no longer held in full by the Assembly but is instead implemented in accordance with the Constitution. A new constitutional court will exercise powers of constitu­tional interpretation and will try the president if he or she is impeached. The 2001 amendment also establishes a new national-level legislature, the Regional Representative Council, with substantial powers on matters rele­vant to the regions, including natural resource management. Council members will be elected as individuals, not from party lists (National Democratic Institute 2001).

 

The Nature and Distribution of Political Resources Today

 

Within this insti­tutional frame, the nature and distribution of political resources available to political actors today is vastly different from the highly centralized, bu­reaucratized, militarized, and economically (relatively) disciplined New Order, which was so successful politically that it was unchallengeable until Suharto grew too old to maintain the Leviathan he had created. By far the most important change is that the primary, indeed foundational, political resource today is mass support for political parties in elections, not the coercive capacity of the armed forces. Where the latter was concentrated or mono­lithic, and therefore extremely valuable to its sole possessor at the top of the hierarchy, the former is dispersed, spread among the several parties, none of which enjoys a majority in either Parliament or the Assembly. It is there­fore much more difficult to accumulate and deploy by political actors. PDI­P of course has the greatest share of the resource of mass support, followed by Golkar, PKB, PPP, and PAN. PBB and PK are only minor players. This pattern of distribution requires a would-be president to put together and maintain, as in a multiparty parliamentary system, a coalition comprising a majority of the members of the Assembly.

 

President Abdurrahman, as indicated, failed to appreciate this differ­ence, acting as if he possessed a resource equivalent in value to Suharto's coercive capacity. He paid the ultimate political price for his mistake. As vice-president, Megawati was a close observer of Abdurrahman's presi­dency, and has not made the same mistake. Instead, she encouraged the Assembly to pick Hamzah Haz, from the Islamic PPP, as her vice-president. Megawati's PDI-P, it will be recalled, is the principal party of abangan and priyayi political culture and also represents Christian and other non-Muslim minorities. Many of its leaders and supporters have a strong, almost obses­sive, fear of santri or pious Muslim politicians. PPP, on the other hand, is the only one of the five major parties that declares its goal to be imple­mentation of Islamic law for Indonesian Muslims. Megawati also chose a broadly based cabinet, giving virtually every major party in Parliament at least a small stake in her government. Perhaps most interestingly, she ap­pointed a modernist Muslim-albeit a liberal rather than a conservative­as minister of education, a sensitive position held throughout the New Order and before by abangan and priyayi politicians or officials.

 

Coercion remains a valuable resource in democratic Indonesia, but it is much less concentrated and monolithic than it was under Suharto. Moreover, its deployment is frequently controversial, raising serious do­mestic problems of legitimacy that did not trouble New Order officials. Internationally, the Indonesian armed forces are a pariah, unable to extract significant resources from the rest of the world. The military's reputation sank to its lowest point, from which it has yet to recover, during the East Timor debacle in 1999. Following the August 30 independence referen­dum, in which nearly 80 percent of the East Timor population voted to leave Indonesia, Indonesian armed forces-backed militias destroyed much of the territory's infrastructure and forced hundreds of thousands of peo­ple to flee. Since that time the United States and most other countries have been unwilling to provide training or other assistance.

 

All governments use coercion to achieve their goals. Authoritarian gov­ernments, like Sukarno's Guided Democracy or Suharto's New Order, use it arbitrarily. What counts is the will of the ruler or subordinate who con­trols coercive instruments like police or armed forces and who is account­able to no independent authority. Modern democratic governments, like post-Suharto Indonesia, use it (at least in principle) as the final recourse within the framework of the rule of law. An individual who breaks a law is coerced, for example arrested and jailed, by the relevant authority, usually the police. The police are in turn accountable to the courts, where a judge or jury independently decides whether a law has or has not been broken.

 

In post-Suharto Indonesia, the armed forces has publicly renounced its notorious twin functions doctrine which was used to justify many forms of political intervention, as described above in the section on coercion in the New Order. To long-term Indonesia-watchers, this was an astounding de­velopment, since we had been told for decades by officers at all levels that the twin functions doctrine would never be rescinded. It was part of the "na­tional consensus," rooted they claimed in the armed forces' autonomous role during the independence revolution. In democratic Indonesia, how­ever, officers are no longer given job assignments in nonmilitary govern­ment departments. Participation by the military in Parliament and regional legislatures and probably the Assembly is being phased out. The Department of Defense and Security has been renamed the Department of Defense, to indicate that the internal security function is now being per­formed by the national police, which has become a separate agency, re­porting directly to the president. There is no longer a chief of staff for so­cial and political affairs. The military did not intervene in the 1999 election. Nor does it involve itself in the internal affairs of political parties, mass or­ganizations, or the press. The main state intelligence agency now reports to a civilian president.

 

Despite these changes, the armed forces remain an important inde­pendent political actor. More than half of their budget (no precise figures are available) is self-generated through independent business activity, much of which is unsavory: gambling, prostitution, protection rackets, and so on (International Crisis Group, 2001). It is probably an iron law of politics everywhere, but certainly in Indonesia, that what the government does not pay for, it does not control. The territorial structure, which was not part of the twin functions doctrine, is intact, which means that the armed forces maintain offices parallel to the civilian government throughout the coun­try, from the provincial to the village level. Armed forces units in the field frequently carry out actions-a vicious raid against a Muslim boarding school in Aceh, covert protection of Muslim vigilantes en route to terrorize Christians in Maluku, the murder of a prominent separatist politician in Papua-that may or may not have been ordered by their military superiors but that are almost certainly unknown to the president and the civilian min­ister of defense.

 

Some individual officers, both active duty and retired, also appear to have personal political agendas and the financial resources, often acquired through corruption, to carry them out. General (ret.) Wiranto, President Suharto and President Habibie's armed forces commander-in-chief, is an example. He is reported to be extremely wealthy and to have used his wealth to buy street demonstrations, Assembly support for his vice-presi­dential candidacy in 1999, and so on. Perhaps most disturbing for the fu­ture of democracy, there are many signs that civilian politicians, both in the center and in the regions, themselves see the military and its coercive ca­pacity as a significant political resource. The civilians have several times demonstrated their reluctance to let the army implement its own plan to withdraw from political life. A striking example was the overwhelming vote by all major parties in the 2000 Assembly session to prolong the armed forces presence in the Assembly until 2009, a concession for which the mil­itary itself had not asked.

 

Like coercion, material resources available for exchange are diminished in quantity and much more dispersed than they were during the New Order. One of Suharto's great strengths, a key to his political success, was the abil­ity of his government to generate economic growth at 6 percent per year or better for nearly three decades. This gave him not only legitimacy (the resource of persuasion) as the father of development but also the material re­sources that he could exchange for political support, both in the form of corruption (business opportunities to generals, underwriting of Golkar's budget) and of policies such as aid to rice farmers or subsidized consumer rice prices. In 1998, Suharto's valedictory year, the economy shrank by 14 percent. Most of the major businesses, especially those engaged in domes­tic trade, are now bankrupt, their assets (much reduced in value) acquired by the government. The banking system has not functioned since late 1997. Tens of billions of dollars, mostly in Sino-Indonesian capital, have fled the country. New foreign investment is flat.

 

The decentralization laws that were passed during the Habibie admin­istration and that began to be implemented in 2001 under President Abdurrahman are also having a powerful impact on the distribution of ma­terial resources available for exchange, dispersing them away from the cen­ter. A quarter of the national budget must now be set aside for direct pay­ments to local governments, which will have the primary say in how the funds are spent. In the extreme cases, special autonomy laws were written for Aceh in the far west and Papua in the far east. Under these laws, 80 per­cent of the government's earnings from mineral extraction (all of which is hard currency earned by foreign companies from sales abroad) are being given for at least the next several years to the regional governments. These provinces have been two of the four most important foreign exchange-pro­ducing regions in the past. The Louisiana-based Freeport-McMoRan cop­per and gold mine in Timika, Papua was the New Order's largest corporate taxpayer, and Exxon-Mobil produces billions of dollars in revenue annually from its liquefied natural gas plant in Lhokseumawe, Aceh.

 

Another new element in democratic Indonesia is the increase in un­regulated competition for material resources compared to the hierarchical New Order. Because Indonesia's democracy is so new, it is hard to tell whether the level of corruption will also rise. It is reasonable to suppose that it will, since there is no effective superior authority to impose limits. At the personal level, there already appears to have been an explosion of pure greed on the part of many, perhaps most, members of the political class. Membership in Parliament and the Assembly and on a lesser scale in the provincial and district/municipality legislatures is eagerly sought for the income it will bring, not in formal salaries, which are small, but in the op­portunities for corruption. Visitors to the Parliament/Assembly complex frequently complain that legislators are rarely to be found in their offices because they do little normal legislative work, such as attending committee meetings or responding to the problems of constituents.

 

Political party leaders, with an eye to the next parliamentary election in 2004, have also begun to compete for campaign funds. Their two major sources are covert, illegal payments by state bodies, like the food distribu­tion agency Bulog to the officials who control those bodies, and contribu­tions from wealthy, mostly Sino-Indonesian, businessmen. These contributions are offered in return for favors, such as an exclusive license to sell a product or protection from strikes by their workers. There have already been several scandals, during the Habibie and Abdurrahman presidencies, involving the illicit use of state funds. On business contributions, a senior Assembly leader told me in disgust in an early 2000 interview that the pres­idential palace was full of businesspeople, morning, noon, and night. They were waiting to see the new president, Abdurrahman, who as an NGO leader had pledged to end the corruption of the Suharto era. In telling his story, the Assembly leader made a racist gesture, indicating that most of the businesspeople were Sino-Indonesians. The incident reminded me that re­lations between Sino-Indonesians and indigenous Indonesians have not im­proved with democratization.

 

In his brief tenure, President Abdurrahman demonstrated little con­cern for economic policy. He seemed, in fact, to be ignoring one of the ba­sic lessons of the Suharto presidency, that effective distribution of material resources, made possible by steady economic growth, was the best guaran­tee of a long political life. Many of his ministerial appointees were eco­nomic nationalists, too strongly pro-state and too weakly pro-market. They were also excessively suspicious of foreigners. They alienated not only po­tential foreign investors but also institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose continuing assistance is critical to economic recovery.

 

President Megawati appointed better ministers, but has not yet taken the decisive steps, for example in selling off the assets acquired from bank­rupt companies, that economists believe are necessary to restore confi­dence in the economy. In public, international institutions continue to ex­press optimism that her government will act, but observers increasingly believe that their patience is wearing thin. Like Abdurrahman, she does not seem to have a sense of the urgency of the economic crisis that confronts the country, nor of the enormous political gains (in legitimacy as well as in­crease in material resources) that can be reaped if a steady growth pattern can be restored. Instead, she and most other politicians are acting as though they believe that Suharto did their work for them. The economic pie is now big enough that they need only divide it up. If this is true, the al­most certain prospect is for slower growth than during the Suharto years, and perhaps for growing opposition to a democracy that does not perform as well as did the dictatorship.

 

Since Indonesia is now genuinely a democracy, with leaders chosen in popular elections, it should be easier for politicians to win support through persuasion, the quintessential resource of democratic politicians. American President Theodore Roosevelt once said that the presidency was a "bully pulpit," meaning a wonderful (the British term "bully" doesn't mean some­one who pushes other people around!) podium for persuading people to support his policies and programs. Indeed, both of Indonesia's democrati­cally elected presidents, Abdurrahman and Megawati, began their terms of office with almost universal support from the members of the Assembly and the political parties they represent. Public opinion polls were strongly fa­vorable. Positive editorials appeared in most of the national and local daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines. As in the United States, and per­haps in most other countries with presidential systems of government, there were high expectations that the new president would offer a vision and policies that would enable the country to solve or at least forcefully at­tack its most pressing problems.

 

For the most part, these expectations were not fulfilled. Neither Abdurrahman nor Megawati moved decisively to articulate a vision or for­mulate policies based on that vision, with the result that the initial mo­mentum and promise of their presidencies were largely lost. The drop, re­ally collapse, was most marked in the case of Abdurrahman, who within weeks of his inauguration in October 1999 came under sharp fire from the parties that had initially supported him. The principal actors in Parliament and the Assembly soon concluded that he had to be removed from office. In August 2000 they put into motion the constitutional process that ended in his dismissal in July 2001.

 

The jury is still out on Megawati, but there was a similar drop in support after her first few months in office. Initial hopes were that she would act de­cisively to restart the economy and to restore order in regions troubled by ethnic and religious conflict. Since her inauguration, however, there has been little movement on the economy, resulting in a growing feeling of pub­lic despair that nothing will change before 2004 at the earliest. On religious conflict, she has been both luckier and more politically astute. She was given an opportunity by the United States' attack on Afghanistan in the latter part of 2001 to defend Muslims, the constituency most dubious about her presi­dency. In a well-publicized speech at a Jakarta mosque on an important reli­gious occasion, she implied that just as Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had no right to attack the United States, the United States had no right to attack Afghanistan. In both cases, she said, many innocents would suffer. Her state­ment cost her some American goodwill, but it won her wide support from pi­ous Indonesian Muslims that may translate into votes in 2004. It was, how­ever, a reaction to events, and probably does not foreshadow the articulation of a more coherent vision for the remainder of her presidency.

 

Why has the Indonesian presidency not yet been much of a "bully" pul­pit, despite the strong initial public support given to the first two democra­tic presidents? The answer is probably complex, with many parts. One part has to do with the individual personalities of Abdurrahman, considered overconfident if not arrogant, and Megawati, generally said to be modest and unassuming, a non-career-oriented homemaker thrust by family name and fate into the role of Suharto-slayer. If the problem is primarily per­sonal, idiosyncratic to the incumbents, perhaps it will be solved when the next president takes office.

 

A second part of the answer, surely, is sheer administrative or organiza­tional incapacity, a point to which we will return below. Indonesian presi­dents and their ministers do not have the skilled staff that all politicians need to help them formulate and articulate even the most basic vision of governance and the policies and programs that would carry it out. They also do not have the experience and practice in bargaining and negotiating that is so central to successful persuasion in democratic politics. The current co­ordinating minister for the economy, Professor Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti, is frequently criticized for not being able to persuade members of Parliament of the merits of President Megawati's economic program. A principal reason for his difficulty is that he is starting from scratch. His pre­decessor, Professor Widjojo Nitisastro, for 30 years had to persuade only one decision maker, President Suharto. Suharto used other resources, no­tably coercion and exchange, to get his way with Parliament.

 

A third reason for the unpersuasive presidency may be the sense of sep­arateness, entitlement, and noblesse oblige of elite politicians across all ethnic and religious groups, a characteristic frequently noted by observers since the 1950s (McVey, 1970; H. Geertz, 1963; Feith, 1962). The national politi­cal elite is a small group, it has been said, no more than a thousand in the 1950s, all of whose members have known each other too long and too well. In colonial times, Dutch education was limited to a very few. From the 1970s to the present the proportion of university-educated Indonesians has grown rapidly, and the network of personal ties has necessarily loosened. Old ideas remain, however; indeed they were strongly reinforced by the power­fully persuasive Javanist, bureaucratic, and developmental elitism of Suharto's New Order.

 

Elite members still like to cast themselves today (as they have for more than half a century) as the pemimpin, leaders, who must take responsibility for the welfare of the rakyat, literally the people but often connoting the un­educated and unmodernized, the great unwashed who are incapable of rec­ognizing and acting upon their true interests. Such a conception helps to explain why elite members seem unconcerned with providing responsive leadership to the Indonesian people as a whole, or even to their own fol­lowers. It is also used as a mask to hide from public view the venal streak in elite behavior that I have described above. We are reminded that democra­tic values have not yet been deeply implanted in Indonesian society, that Indonesia is different from developing world countries like India or the Philippines, which have a long democratic history and where democratic values now appear relatively secure.

On its face, Indonesian elitism would seem not to accord well with democracy. Even in the mid-1990s it was hard to find many Indonesian politicians-across a fairly wide spectrum that included many opponents of Suharto-who wanted to replace the New Order with democracy. Most be­lieved that democracy might come at the end of a long historical road, when the economic, social, and cultural foundations of modernity were firmly in place. Today, it is certainly possible to imagine the current ruling elite, or some threatened part of it, calling upon the armed forces to "re­store order" and then to attempt to rule into the indefinite future. On the other hand, there are strong historical and even contemporary parallels to Indonesian elitism in both British and Japanese political culture, which have strong deferential or noblesse oblige elements. So we should be careful not to jump to the conclusions that elitist attitudes either lower the quality or might shorten the life of Indonesian democracy. Indonesia may instead provide just another democratic variant, with its own characteristics, prob­lems, and possibilities, rooted in its unique historical experience.

 

Organization is a political resource that cuts across all of the others. The effectiveness of mass electoral support, coercion, exchange, and persuasion are all dependent on implementing organizations. The greatest contribu­tion of the Suharto regime, as described above, was to improve the capacity and autonomy of the state in the area of economic policy formulation and implementation. These improvements affected a wide range of state agen­cies, for example, the departments of agriculture, trade, and manpower, as well as finance, the central bank, and national economic planning. The armed forces also became a more powerful (though, as we have seen, in the end problematic) implementer of the government's coercive policies. Other areas of social life benefited as well, notably education, as elementary schools were made available to virtually all Indonesians. Secondary and ter­tiary educational opportunities grew rapidly, creating the dense nationwide network that exists today.

 

Since the demise of the New Order, organization, like the other political resources described earlier, has been reduced in quality and dispersed among many political actors. To some extent this is a byproduct of the eco­nomic crisis that began in 1997, which diminished significantly the mater­ial resources available to the government and other actors for organization building. It is also a side effect of the dispersal of political power, from a sin­gle military/bureaucratic center controlled by Suharto to multiple political party centers. In order to win majority support from the Assembly, both Presidents Abdurrahman and Megawati appointed many cabinet ministers from political parties other than their own. These ministers owe their pri­mary allegiance to their parties, not to the president who appointed them. Many government departments have thus become primarily sources of party patronage and future campaign funds, not instruments of policy im­plementation mobilizable by the president. It is a regressive step reminis­cent of the parliamentary system of the 1950s.

 

The greatest deficiency of New Order organization building, even in terms of its own goal of developing the economy, was its lack of attention to the judicial sector, from the police and prisons to prosecutors and judges. An already poorly trained and poorly paid judicial sector was almost totally neglected during the New Order. Loss of morale was extensive and cor­ruption rampant, even in the country's highest judicial institutions. Today no one, Indonesian or foreign, attempts to resolve conflicts through the ju­dicial system if he or she can avoid it. The largest bribe to the judges, knowl­edgeable observers agree, determines the outcome of nearly all court cases.

 

The reason for the neglect of the judicial sector was probably Suharto's fear that an autonomous judiciary could challenge his total dominance of the political system. In fact, a modern economy requires an independent, capable, and honest judiciary. Investors, domestic and foreign, want pre­dictability in their dealings with the government and other economic ac­tors. Modern judiciaries provide that predictability in most developed countries, including authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries like neighboring Singapore and Malaysia. Suharto's authoritarianism also pro­vided predictability, but it was dependent on a single individual and the co­ercive force he could deploy. In the post-Suharto period, it has become clear that renewed economic growth will require a comparable guarantee of predictability, and that in a democracy this can only come from a capa­ble, honest, and independent judiciary. Unfortunately, even if there is po­litical will (which there does not seem to be in the Megawati government) such a judiciary may take decades to build.

 

Finally, a word should be said about the impact of international resources on democratization and democracy in Indonesia today. For three decades, the New Order was able to draw upon a vast array of international financial and technical assistance for its economic development programs. It was al­most as if there was no barrier between domestic and international eco­nomic resources, as if it was no more difficult for officials to access the one instead of the other. The principal reason for this was the solid working re­lationship between the economic team headed by Professor Widjojo, a grad­uate of the University of California at Berkeley, and international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The larger context was the desire of already developed countries, led by the United States, to see non-Communist countries like Indonesia prosper.

 

This cooperation extended to the political sphere as well, despite the lack of democracy. From the early 1960s, during Sukarno's Guided Democracy, through the 1980s, the United States, Great Britain, and other anti-Communist governments provided substantial resources to the Indonesian armed forces. The purpose of this assistance was not to help Indonesia defend itself against foreign enemies, of which there were none. It was rather to ensure that the armed forces itself, during Sukarno's time, and then the New Order government of President Suharto, would be able to suppress its domestic rivals: first the Communist party, which was de­stroyed by the late 1960s, and then the nebulous, never very convincing threats from radical Muslims, leftist students, and so on.

 

By the early 1990s, when international Communism had disappeared as a threat and Suharto himself was embracing modernist Islam, there were no longer credible reasons for the United States and other international actors to support the Indonesian armed forces in its continuing war against its own society. U.S. policy changed gradually during the Clinton administra­tion, particularly after the massacre of unarmed civilians by Indonesian army troops in Dili, East Timor, in November 1992. Suharto's rule was not opposed, but pressure began to be applied on him to hold armed forces' members accountable for their actions. By 1998, the year the East Asian economic crisis took full effect in Indonesia, the United States was ready for the 76-year-old Suharto to step down and for a genuine democratization process to begin. Since that time, the United States and other developed countries have provided substantial assistance for (in their terminology) political as well as economic development, that is, for conducting and mon­itoring elections, building NGOs, political parties, legislatures, rewriting the constitution, and so on. This policy continues to the present.

 

How significant were the resources provided by the United States and other foreigners to Indonesian actors? At one level, it is indisputable that Indonesians themselves overthrew Suharto and created the new democra­tic system. The spur was an international economic crisis, but the actions were taken first by ordinary Indonesian protesters and then by the opposi­tion politicians who had been quietly planning for years to move against Suharto when the time was ripe. The New Order politicians, including the military, reacted with the resources available to them, finally concluding that their best course was first for Suharto to step down and second for au­thoritarianism to give way to democracy. The United States and other for­eign actors played almost no direct role in these events.

 

At another level, it is clear that U.S. policies and more broadly political changes in the rest of the world created a context in which democracy was now a much more attractive alternative than it had been throughout the Cold War. The Soviet Union no longer exists, either as a political model or as an alternative resource available to developing world governments. Democracy is now-almost-the only game in town. Most countries in the developing world- Latin America, Africa, the rest of Asia-have become democratic during the last 30 years. Democratic activists in Indonesia took considerable hope and inspiration from these changes, as well as material resources from foreign governments and international NGOs engaged in democracy building. These resources certainly helped them to mount and sustain a campaign against Suharto and then successfully to conduct de­mocratic elections. But perhaps the best way to put it is that at some point in the late 1990s there was a sea change in Indonesian political conscious­ness, the cumulative result of many domestic and international events. All of the Indonesian actors -New Order stalwarts and democratic reformers alike-realized that the world had changed. New Order authoritarianism was the past, democracy the future, at least for the time being.

The question of the future of Indonesian democracy will be discussed in the conclusion