CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

Indonesia has entered a dynamic period in its politics. A quarter century of political repression and economic growth produced social and cultural changes that led more and more Indonesians to question the New Order institutions and the military force that undergirded them. New international circumstances, especially the end of the Cold War, the democratization of many developing countries, the Clinton administration's pressure to liberalize, the revolution in communications technology, and the Suharto government's own rising foreign policy profile made Indonesia more vulnerable to external pressures. It became increasingly awkward to maintain simultaneously a market-and-export-oriented economic policy, which exposed the country economically to the outside world, and an authoritarian political system, which brought so much political censure from that world.

Economic crisis in 1997 was the straw that broke the camel's back, or perhaps more accurately the match that lit the fuse of opposition to the New Order. The 76-year-old Suharto stepped down with surprising alacrity in May 1998. The armed forces did not attempt to intervene, but instead supported the constitutional succession. The new president, B. J. Habibie, freed the press, parties, and mass organizations and offered democratic elections within a year. He also began the process that ended in the liberation of East Timor and shepherded through Parliament a package of decentralization laws that changed fundamentally the nature of center-region relations. Democratic elections, the first in 44 years, were held in June 1999, producing a multiparty Parliament and People's Consultative Assembly in which no single party holds a majority.

In October 1999 the traditionalist Muslim Abdurrahman Wahid was elected president by a majority of Assembly delegates, even though his PKB won only 12,percent of the parliamentary vote. Abdurrahman was the beneficiary of pious Muslim fears that the election of Megawatt Sukarnoputri, a syncretic Muslim and leader of the secular PDI-P, whose party had won 34 percent of the vote, would lead to discrimination against them. Abdurrahman's singularly incompetent performance as a politician led to his dismissal by the Assembly in July 2001 (Liddle, 2001). He was replaced by his vice-president, Megawatt, whose behavior in that office had been sufficiently reassuring as to remove all serious opposition to her becoming president. President Megawatt then encouraged the Assembly to elect as vice-president the leader of the PPP, Indonesia's largest pious Muslim party. Her cabinet appointments combined professionalism, particularly in the key economic ministries, with broad representation of the party spectrum in the Assembly.

How successful-effective and stable-is the new presidential democracy likely to be? The optimist, from a developmental and democratic perspective, hopes that Indonesian society has changed enough economically, socially, and culturally in the last three decades so that a new kind of politics has been able to emerge. There is some evidence, visible even in the Assembly dance limned above, that the new leaders and parties are sufficiently moderate and tolerant in their attitudes about the relationship between religion and society to avoid the conflicts that have repeatedly set the country on fire in the past. They appear too to be committed to a new balance between the regions and the center that will avoid separatism, although the ties with Aceh and Papua may be so frayed as to be beyond restoration. Military officers say that they accept the principle of civilian supremacy. Finally, the new democratic leaders may understand the value of "Suharto's equation" (market-oriented economic policies=growth=prosperity=political support) well enough that a restoration of New Order-era economics is at least possible.

The pessimist (or perhaps it is only the realist), on the other hand, remembers that Indonesia's previous democratic experience in the 1950s was brief and fraught with ethnic/regional, religious, and class conflict. There was virtually no preparation for democracy during the Dutch colonial era (compare with the British in India or the United States in the Philippines) or the long years of Sukarno- and Suharto-style dictatorships. Few members of the elite, or of the general public, have a deep understanding of or commitment to democracy or market economics. Perhaps most crucially, the armed forces have a long history of intervention in politics, rooted in the country's revolutionary origins. Until very recently, most of its officers claimed that they had a right to rule, or in an emergency, to save the country from domestic enemies like Communism and radical Islam. Many civilians agreed with them, and some still do. Today, the armed forces retain (at least for the time being) seats in Parliament and the Assembly, their territorial system is intact, and most of their budget is not controlled by the government.

In 1994, when the New Order was still unchallengeable, Armed Forces Staff and Command School Commander Maj. Gen. Theo Syafei remarked that "It is the people who are the weakest point in our life as a state and nation. Because of this, if the Armed Forces do not live among the people, then extreme forces will take advantage of them. If we don't defend them, the opportunity will be used by Non-Governmental Organizations, extreme students, extreme religious teachers, who will make the force of the people clash with the force of the government" (Kompas, February 3,1994) . Today, Maj. Gen. (retired) Theo is a prominent civilian PDI-P politician, close to Megawati, who has made a successful transition to electoral and parliamentary politics. His 1994 statement was typical of its time, so perhaps we have reason to hope that he is now a harbinger of a more democratic Indonesia.