After Suharto: Pankaj Mishra reports from Indonesia

[muriel_volestrangler]

A long article, written by an Indian, with both a brief recap of postwar Indonesian history, and a look at its current state. There's a large cast of characters, and it's difficult to excerpt 4 paragraphs to give a full flavour. As well as the control by the elite getting rich quick in the excerpts below, there's outside investment and influence (both Western and Chinese), a Catholic priest standing up for people, the possibility of a break-up (it is a country of many islands, after all), political Islam modelled after the Muslim Brotherhood, and the interesting governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, tipped to do well in next year's presidential election.

While outsiders focus on the new plenty, well-established business groups, many still family-owned, have used their proximity to politicians to acquire an even more disproportionate share of national resources and income. Nearly half the country’s population, employed, if at all, in the informal sector, continue to live on less than $2 a day. In a recent survey, a majority of interviewees said they preferred life under Suharto, who had at least provided affordable basic goods, security and a measure of public health provision.
...
‘I would give a C to democracy in Indonesia,’ a young legislator told me one evening in Jakarta. He had been presented to me as a ‘rising’ politician but, once assured of anonymity, spoke with surprising frankness. His own party, Golkar, formerly the party of Suharto and now led by Aburizal Bakrie, one of the country’s richest businessmen, was proof, he said, that the oligarchs and bureaucrats who had formerly used the centralised state apparatus to secure their privilege had adapted to the current more open political system. Popular consent, too, could be used to protect their political and economic power. Members of the military have made effective use of democracy and decentralisation to further their business interests, often working with local politicians and preman (hoodlums); the police now compete with the army in the business of selling protection to clients ranging from real-estate speculators and illegal loggers to human traffickers and drug traders, and the two forces have fought a number of pitched battles around the archipelago. Many retired generals and former cronies of Suharto have set up political parties which, bereft of principles and ideas, aim only at the capture of state power.

One clear manifestation of this continuity with the past is the prominence in politics of figures like Prabowo Subianto. A candidate for the vice-presidency in 2009 and a likely contender in next year’s presidential election, Subianto was one of Suharto’s American-trained army henchmen as well as his son-in-law (intermarriage was one way the elite tried to retain power). The old elite has sought to extend its privileges to a few more people – just enough of them to stave off mass discontent. The spoils are now trickling down to provincial and district level, as local politics become more important than national politics. People are more interested in becoming a bupati (head of a regency, one of Indonesia’s administrative divisions) than an MP because bupatis control access to local resources. ‘I tell my cadres how to write, how to tweet,’ the young Golkar politician said, ‘but they are only in it for the money.’ Under Suharto, corruption was centralised. Now it’s everywhere.
...
The various projects the bupati told me about, my interpreter said later, were all pretexts to siphon off public and private funds. But in this he was no different from other bupatis. The system doesn’t encourage honesty. If you want to be a bupati, you have to pay party bosses vast sums to secure their support, then spend more to advertise your candidacy and bribe voters on polling day. The money for all this comes from businessmen who want you to do their bidding after you’re elected. So the axis of business, government and the military that once operated solely in Jakarta is now reproduced at the local level, creating a multitude of fiefdoms in the vacuum of ‘substantive’ democracy.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n19/pankaj-mishra/after-suharto

[JDPriestly]

1. Great find. Thanks.