The New Order is like a ship swinging at anchor. It may drift, but it always swings back to the same place.
(Harry Tjan Silalahi, 1 March 1990) Indonesians are fond of marvelling at the complexity of their own society. The very fact that it resists flying apart at the seams despite an almost impossible diversity, is something they are rightly proud of. The unity forged by the struggle for independence is hallowed with an intensity verging on fanaticism. So much so, the prominent Sumatran writer, Mochtar Lubis, goes to some length in his recent history of Indonesia to argue the case for an ‘Indonesian’ identity as far back as the archipelago’s proto- and prehistory:
Despite the appearance of great diversity, there is a strong underpinning of unifying force. In the languages and in the artistic expressions such as ornamentation, in the indigenous religions and traditions, very close relationships, linkages, interconnections, which go far back into pre-history, can be discerned.1
Indonesia rejected plans for a federal structure which the Dutch tried offering in the period shortly before independence, opting instead for a unitary state system. At the time, the move was motivated by a fear the Dutch might persuade components in any federal set up to secede from the union—as much of Eastern Indonesia might well have done. But ever since, this has meant that pronounced local autonomy is perceived as contrary to the principles of the state—except for honorary ‘special area’ status conferred on Jogyakarta and Aceh. The unity of the state lies at the very heart of its being. This explains why external criticism of the harsh methods employed to suppress lingering irredentist movements in East Timor, Irian Jaya and Aceh raises nationalist hackles in Jakarta.
NEW ORDER SOCIETY
To make up for this intolerance of regionalism, on a broader cultural level the national motto, ‘unity in diversity’ (Bhineka tunggal ika) conveys a sense of active pluralism similar, though not the same as America’s E Pluribus
Unum. The difference is, that in contemporary Indonesia the means of
giving expression to the country’s diversity are rigidly circumscribed by what some regard as an excessive emphasis on unity.
The New Order sold itself to the people as the very instrument of harmony. The Sukarno period had left a legacy of chaos and betrayal. Neither the pre-1959 party-based parliamentary system, nor the more authoritarian era of ‘Guided Democracy’ which followed, offered stability. Even the harshest critics of the New Order today concede this point. Sukarno’s elevation of the revolutionary struggle as the sole aim of politics instilled fear into those who chose not to toe the line and generated reactionary vindictiveness among those who did. Politik adalah
Panglima (politics as commander) summed up the fiery brand of politics
Sukarno kindled. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many were ready by 1965 to accept order and authority in its starkest form. Yet this urgent wish to be rid of the accusatory, reactionary blend of politics Sukarno offered, paved the way for governance to become steadily more authoritarian.
Intellectuals embraced the military, with its proven discipline and ideals, because the only alternative, it seemed, was anarchy. The extent to which democracy, as enshrined in the country’s Constitution, existed ‘temporarily’ became a secondary concern. It is important to understand the extent to which the country’s intelligentsia in the mid-1960s willingly threw their weight behind the New Order. Their support enabled the ruling elite to develop an authoritarian social and political system with impunity. Reversing Sukarno’s ‘politics as commander’ dogma, economic development took precedence over political development. The new slogan was: ‘economics first, politics later’. Added to this, the constant need for vigilance against the Communist threat unleashed by Sukarno lent the military’s heavy- handed security approach an almost religious sanctity.
The acquiesence of students and intellectuals who supported the New Order at its birth, paved the way for the erection of ornate democratic symbols instead of truly democratic mechanisms. Political parties became stylized and subordinate; their platforms provided only shades of difference for which the voter could express a symbolic preference at election time. Again, society’s memory of the chaos generated by the multi-party system which held sway until the mid-1950s, helped dilute opposition to the New Order’s emasculation of the parties. The government defended a stringent law on mass organizations by insisting that the three sanctioned and strictly
INDONESIAN POLITICS UNDER SUHARTO
controlled parties provided sufficient ‘facilities for the channelling of opinions and ideas of members of society’.2
The government initially focused on fashioning a monolithic political organization out of a collection of groups set up by the military at the end of Sukarno’s rule to combat the influence of the Communist Party. Among them was an obscure group called Golongan Karya, or Golkar, which was first set up in 1964 as an umbrella organization for anti-communist cadres. Golkar has never been styled a party, but is defined instead as a ‘functional group’, an ambiguous term supposedly referring to the basic functions of society it serves. Also functional in this respect was the later fusion of the three secular-nationalist political parties of the Sukarno era into the Parlai
Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI). The PDI, together with an amalgamation of
Muslim parties under the purposely un-Islamic banner of the ‘United Development Party’ (PPP), were launched in 1973 in the wake of the Political Parties and Golkar Bill.
While these new groupings were offered as avenues for popular political expression, the reality was that the state wished to channel the people. Traditional values of collective discussion and decision-making, which the country’s founding fathers had revived to foster nationalist sentiment, now became the only acceptable mechanism of decision-making. Following, ironically enough, the later thinking of Sukarno, the concept of voting whereby ‘50 plus 1’ comprises a majority was dubbed alien. Indonesia’s social and cultural diversity was thought too delicately balanced to allow majorities to impose their will. The success of the PKI in mobilizing mass support left a deep impression on the group of Catholic Chinese students who came to influence early New Order policy-making. Their other fear, probably instilled by the Jesuits who taught them, was that the Muslim majority could conceivably stir up the population against the Christian minority in the same way.
Remarkably enough, the Christian Chinese students close to Ali Murtopo and the Kostrad group surrounding Suharto in the early, formative period of the New Order, helped fashion a new concept of political action styled the ‘floating mass’. Hence the interests of a Christian and mainly Chinese minority dovetailed neatly with a military establishment fearful of a Muslim political revival. The floating masss concept rested on the assumption that the vast majority of Indonesia’s population was unsophisticated and prone to the ill-effects of politicking at the village level. Political parties were therefore banned from operating in the villages, and political activity was severely restricted except for brief periods close to elections. The idea behind the ‘floating mass’ concept, as Leo Suryadinata aptly puts it, was to ‘depoliticize the Indonesian population’.3
NEW ORDER SOCIETY
Meanwhile, the army and the bureaucracy were entrusted with the task of disseminating the national philosophy of Pancasila. Pancasila was another concept inherited from Sukarno’s armoury of hypnotic slogans. Literally the ‘five pillars’, or principles, Pancasila comprises: belief in one God; just and civilized humanitarianism; a united Indonesia; democracy guided by wisdom, through consultation and representation; and social justice for all the Indonesian people. The beauty of Pancasila, as Sukarno conceived it in 1945, was as a device to express the unity of such a diverse people, and above all to ensure that national identity was not defined with any reference to Islam. The safest way to define Pancasila is as a vague philosophical rationalization of a plural society. It seeks to enhance togetherness among people of different races and creeds who find themelves rubbing shoulders with one another under one umbrella of state. In this respect, Pancasila is an admirable device, and few question its validity.
The New Order elevated Pancasila to the status of an ideology. It is commonly referred to as the state ideology, and several attempts have been made to deny Sukarno’s authorship of the concept. By the mid-1980s, under the Law on Mass Organizations, all social organizations and political parties were legally required to make Pancasila their sole principle, or asas
tunggal.
Pancasila is a great leveller; tolerant of diversity, but insisting on beliefs.
Thus the Muslim must tolerate his Christian brother but never slacken the practice of his faith. Agnostics or atheists are branded Communists of the extreme left; religious extremists inhabit the extreme right. In the process, secular, moderate beliefs have been squeezed; hemmed in by strict definitions and rigid screening procedures. Socialists and nationalists—in effect the secular middle ground—became the chief victims of this ‘Pancasilazation’ of the nation.4
The old Sukarnoist Nationalist party (PNI) and its Socialist rival (PSI) were considered too ‘socialistic’; their platforms laying too much stress on mobilizing the masses. Their loss erased the country’s only broad-based secular grouping. The beneficiaries have been, ultimately, the polarizing forces of race and religion the state was so keen to suppress in the first place. That these forces have not come back to haunt Indonesia in a full- blown way is remarkable, and says much about the New Order’s effective containment of society. This entailed neutering all political parties, chanelling Islam through state-controlled institutions, de-politicizing the campuses and squashing all thoughts of autonomy for the regions. By these and other means justified in the name of harmony, the New Order strengthened its grip on power. In the process it stifled expression and required uniformity of a society which is anything but that.
INDONESIAN POLITICS UNDER SUHARTO
The hallmark of Suharto’s New Order was the totally successful extension of state power to all corners of society. Riding through any Indonesian town in the 1990s the first thing that struck the visitor was a profusion of official signboards. Typically, one saw a cluster of offices housing the local administration, then representative offices of all the major provincial departments, added to which there were state-level representative offices; information, agriculture, co-operatives, justice, forestry and so on. The state’s largesse was not distributed solely by the provincial authorities. This might have led to dangerous levels of loyalty to the local authorities and ultimately threaten the unitary state. Instead, the central government ensured that a large portion of public spending was distributed directly to the provincial and village level via what were called ‘Inpres’ programmes. This direct aid was made at the president’s discretion, for which a large portion of the government’s development budget was set aside. For the financial year 1991–2, 16.3 per cent of the development budget, or Rp 3.27 trillion, was allocated for Inpres funding. In the process, Suharto guaranteed himself direct responsibility for the welfare of his people, and guaranteed grass- roots support for his mandate.
The welfare and economic progress fostered by this super-state was hard to argue with. The efficiency and quality of some of the infratsructure might be questioned, but the sheer fact that it extended to the most remote areas of such a vast country was an achievement few dared to challenge. In the largest province of Irian jaya, where low densities of population and the cultural gulf between mainly Javanese bureaucrats and the native Melanesian population posed difficulties for the government, a frequent complaint was the relentless pace of development. Schemes to resettle landless Javanese in Irian Jaya’s ample lowlands aroused anger and resentment among the Irianese whose cultural traditions and agricultural systems depend on a footloose and sparse pattern of settlement.
At the other end of the spectrum, in Jakarta, the upper reaches of Indonesian society were growing weary of the state’s paternalistic manner. This may have suited conditions where a largely rural and poorly educated population accepted the state’s wisdom without question. But three decades of more or less uninterrupted economic development had transformed Indonesia into more of an urban society. The 1990 census revealed that over fifty million people—almost one-third of the population—were living in urban areas. Since 1986, the industrial sector has grown by 13 per cent, and large portions of the rural labour force are now dependent on urban areas for employment.
Accompanying these structural changes, traditional patterns of intercommunal relations, labour relations and even family relations have
NEW ORDER SOCIETY
altered. Prone to over-claiming traditional values, the government had to come to terms with what it meant to become an industrialized nation. The growth of an educated professional class in urban areas unleashed demands for less ideological uniformity, more tolerance of dissent. ‘Openness’—a popular byword for democratization—became a recurrent theme in political debate. However, to equate the wishes of the vast majority with the liberal concerns of a rather limited circle of urban intellectuals would be misleading. The rise of middle-class social consciousness in the classical Weberian sense is discernible, but its wider impact is hampered by the comparatively small size of the nascent bourgeoisie—and their continued reliance on the patronage of the elite.
Even this traditional barrier to change was under stress by the early 1990s. The elite were also growing concerned about their future. What if the monolithic edifice which had afforded them protection for so long really was going to change? Uncertain of where to find the next safe haven, many peers and leaders of larger social groups began to hop on the openness bandwagon by the early 1990s. What alarmed government officials about the Forum for Democracy, launched in March 1991, was that it was initiated by one of the country’s most respected Muslim leaders, and head of the twenty million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama. The fact that the military did little to oppose the move, and may even have lent some tacit encouragement, completed the ring. There appeared to be a growing consensus on the need for political change.
Suharto either recognized himself, or was persuaded to recognize that these demands for social and political change were here to stay: In our hetergeneous and ever-changing society, new aspirations, new forces and new hopes will definitely emerge’, he opined in a speech to parliament in January 1991.5 Instead of offering the familiar menu of external threats
and the need for constant vigilance, Suharto made attempts to add spice to the recipe:
National Stability that offers room for dynamism and dynamism that refreshes national stability are the prerequisites we need in preparing to enter the take-off era.6
Many who listened doubted Suharto’s commitment to thorough social and political change was sincere. His speeches had a defensive ring about them; little was offered in terms of concrete policy to satisfy the swelling chorus of popular demands for change. There was no evidence of any change in the style of Suharto’s leadership to back up his rhetoric. If anything, the president was becoming more remote, more reliant on quasi-feudal symbols of power.
INDONESIAN POLITICS UNDER SUHARTO
Yet the democratization debate, which dominated the close of the 1980s, seemed to pose as the agenda for the 1990s. The remarkable recovery of the economy from the oil shock in the early 1980s and evidence that ‘take-off was just around the corner, prompted people to ask why the government was reluctant to relax its hold over political and intellectual expression. Surely, they asked, the Communist threat had been stamped out; the state of vigilance which had prevailed over the past quarter-century was now redundant. This was, of course, primarily a middle-class intellectual’s view, but the country’s economic growth was quietly strengthening the middle class. The Australian academic Jamie Mackie, in a paper reflecting— albeit generously—on the New Order in December 1989, argued that it had become ‘increasingly exclusionary rather than participatory’.7 Along
with others who watched Indonesia emerge as a new economic force in the region, Mackie was aware that more and more Indonesians were expressing concern at the actual concentration of power at the apex of the political system.
At the time, against the background of crumbling totalitarian states in Eastern Europe, this seemed a tempting scenario. But it soon ran into the stability and elite conservatism bred by economic growth. There was a natural aversion to mass political movements that discouraged popular movements and bred a consensus in favour of established authority. Indonesian society craves stability and resists change out of fear of the chaos it may bring in its wake. Lucien Pye describes ‘the overriding Indonesian need for the psychological suppression of individuality and for the comforts of dependency and conformity’.8
There is a sense in which Indonesia has almost run the whole spectrum of political options in the course of its independent history. Beginning with constitutional democracy, followed by ‘Guided Democracy’, a brief flirtation with Communism, and now something resembling a throwback to the patrimonial rule of the Hindu-Bhuddist kings of the pre-colonial period. Before asking the question ‘what next?’ it is pertinent to ask what kind of society the New Order fostered.
On a blistering hot day in October 1988, upwards of a million and a half people were drawn from all over Java and beyond to the town of Jogyakarta in Central Java to witness the final journey of Java’s last feudal king. A week or so before, on 2 October, Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX died of a heart attack in a Washington hospital. News of his death stunned and saddened the nation. His staunch defence and generous financing of the infant republic had made him a national hero. The Dutch had tried to buy off the Javanese aristocracy in a bid to weaken the republic. They invited the Sultan to form a government in collaboration with them in
NEW ORDER SOCIETY
1949. The Sultan instead helped organize an Indonesian counter-attack. Hamengkubuwono’s resistance helped convince the Dutch that if the aristocracy they had so carefully nurtured was against them, their traditional policy of divide et impera was not going to work.
Seldom has such pomp and ceremony been witnessed in post-war Java. President Suharto and almost the entire cabinet attended the funeral, which had all the trappings of a state occasion. As the late Sultan lay in the palace grounds, for over sixteen hours, 150,000 people entered the palace gates to honour him. The people of Jogyakarta, and to a considerable degree the entire country, revered the Sultan both for his symbolism of a dim and distant sovereign past and his stout defence of democratic principles. Remarkably in a republic, people referred—and still refer to