ASIA
HAND Behold Indonesia's democratic
beacon By Shawn W Crispin
With Thailand under military-appointed
rule, the Philippines fresh off a stint of martial
law and an unresolved vote-rigging scandal and the
rest of Southeast Asia under hard and soft
authoritarian yokes, Indonesia has clearly emerged
as the region's healthiest, most vibrant
functioning democracy.
Eight years after
launching a highly ambitious political reform
program, Indonesia has surprised many analysts and
academics
by
how quickly and smoothly the world's
fourth-largest country has consolidated meaningful
democratic gains. Indonesia has since 1998
overhauled every fundamental aspect of its former
authoritarian state, including an amended
constitution, a more powerful parliament and a
reformed election system.
The country's
first-ever direct presidential elections in 2004,
in which former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
was elected on a strong reform ticket, represented
a democratic high-water mark. What's gone less
noticed over that same period have been 250 or so
different local-level elections, which are now
contested down to the grassroots regent level.
Breaking with former strongman Suharto's
top-down New Order regime, Indonesia's peripheral
populations are now less captive to the interests
and abuses of local political heavies, who under
Suharto often inserted themselves as gatekeepers
to financial and natural resources through central
government authority. While many attempted to
co-opt new democratic institutions to perpetuate
their power, nearly 40% of local level incumbents
have in recent years been booted from office at
the ballot box.
In certain
conflict-plagued regions, local democracy is even
having a healing effect. According to a recent
report in the Jakarta-based Van Zorge Report, head
and vice head candidates, often representing
respectively localities' Muslim majority and
Christian minority populations, have frequently
teamed up to beat competing candidates who ran on
a one-religion ticket. That is, local-level
democracy is rewarding politicians who form
religiously inclusive, not exclusive, coalitions.
Since 2001, Indonesia has implemented one
of Asia's - if not the world's - most ambitious
decentralization programs, rapidly devolving
decision-making authority and control of resources
from the center to the periphery. Many pundits
predicted that rushed decentralization would lead
to violent Balkanization across the sprawling
archipelago, where historically aggrieved,
suddenly empowered populations straddling
resource-rich areas would opt to secede rather
than cooperate with Jakarta.
Yet only East
Timor has so far moved to break away - and some
would argue in the wake of recent civil unrest
there to disastrous effect. The long-running
rebellion in Papua province has recently lost
steam as local-level democratic institutions take
deeper root. And Jakarta's promise of more local
autonomy for Aceh province has brought that
grinding 30-year conflict to a democratic
conclusion.
Michael Malley, an Indonesia
expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, California, notes in a recent Van Zorge
Report interview that no new breakaway armed
insurgent groups have emerged since the
promulgation of the 1998 decentralization reforms.
Previously among the skeptics, he said: "Many have
been surprised that such enormous change could
take place without national disintegration."
More significantly, Indonesia's
extraordinary democratic progress has put the lie
to academic debates about whether Islam and
democracy can peacefully co-exist. Predictions
that dismantling Suharto's highly secular state
institutions would lead to a coincident rise in
Islamic fundamentalism have notably not panned
out. Political parties that have campaigned on
strict Islamic platforms fared poorly against more
secular candidates at the 2004 parliamentary
polls.
Fundamentalists elected on
anti-corruption tickets that have since attempted
to push Islamic-tinged legislation in parliament,
including a controversial anti-pornography bill,
have seen their popularity fall dramatically in
public opinion polls. (See The decline of political Islam in
Indonesia, March 28, 2006)
Rapid
transition To be sure, the rapid
transition from a highly centralized to a highly
decentralized political system has been attended
by growing pains, including widespread confusion
about where real decision-making authority lies
over certain jurisdictions.
Investors
reportedly carp that they now must pay bribes not
only to central government authorities, but also
provincial and local-level officials to seal
business deals. Provincial and local-level
officials have quibbled over jurisdiction of tax
revenues, which in turn has raised hard questions
about responsibility for the provision of public
utilities. Central government corruption has in
many areas merely been replaced by local-level
graft.
At the same time, democratization
and decentralization are unmistakably leading to
unprecedented rural empowerment - more so than
Thailand's highly touted, fiscally unsustainable,
top-down populist rural handouts, and streets
ahead of the Philippines' unreformed feudal
countryside, where a clutch of elite families
still owns the majority of land. Indonesian
democracy is paying broad dividends through
greater political stability, a more equitable
distribution of natural and financial resources to
the local level and slowly but surely more
reactive, inclusive local governance.
Those burnished democratic credentials are
fast improving Western perceptions about
Indonesia, which was widely viewed as a basket
case in the chaotic aftermath of the 1997-98
economic crisis, and as a haven for international
terrorism in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombing.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
strongly praised Indonesia's democratic progress
during her recent visit to Jakarta - though
realpolitik motivations of counterbalancing China
may have colored her upbeat assessment. Yet it was
no surprise that Indonesia this month won in a
landslide the right to Asia's revolving allocated
seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Some viewed that as a reward for
Indonesia's new strong democratic leadership role
inside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), particularly in addressing member state
Myanmar's worsening political and humanitarian
crisis. And although criticized domestically for
the US$43 million price tag, Jakarta's recent
decision to send professional peacekeeping forces
under the auspices of the UN to Lebanon speaks to
Indonesia's desire to serve as an honest
democratic broker between Islam and the West in
the Middle East.
President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono deserves much credit for presiding over
and not obstructing the latest phases of
Indonesia's remarkable democratic transition. Yet
he has been widely criticized in the local media
for his slow, deliberate, consensus-building
leadership style - particularly in relation to his
management of the economy, which some
Jakarta-based analysts contend needs a quick
fiscal kick through accelerated infrastructure
spending. (See Need for speed in
Indonesia, September 19)
But
good governance in a checked and balanced
democratic system is often by necessity
slow-moving. Much of the grumbling about
Yudhoyono's deliberate decision-making arises from
an increasingly marginalized political elite, who
received more generous, less scrutinized
government contracts and concessions under
strongman Suharto. Meanwhile, Yudhoyono's
anti-corruption campaign - though by no means as
deep-reaching as it could be - has ruffled certain
politically powerful feathers, down to the
grassroots level.
Yudhoyono's party's
small numbers in parliament has meant some of his
more ambitious reform initiatives have been
quashed by opposition forces, fairly or unfairly
fueling perceptions about his ineffectual
democratic leadership. But that check on
presidential power also speaks to the significant
decentralization of national power, recently
devolved by law from the executive to the
legislative branch.
It's no longer a
question of whether Indonesia's elected
politicians are truly democratic, but rather
whether they are effective leaders and custodians
of their respective national, provincial or local
interests. As seen at the local and provincial
levels, if national perceptions grow that
Yudhoyono isn't performing up to expectation,
Indonesia's newly demanding voters will replace
him with a candidate perceived to be more able at
the 2009 direct presidential polls. Pity the rest
of Southeast Asia, which by comparison doesn't
have that same democratic choice.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
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