"POUND
FOR POUND, Indonesia has to be the least understood country in the
world," complained New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last July 9. "[A]sk
most Americans about Indonesia," Friedman explained, "and only three things are
likely to come to mind: Bali, East Timor and The Year of Living Dangerously."Friedman's thesis was that ignorance was leading people in the United States to underappreciate Indonesia's rich complexity and, especially vis-ŕ-vis East Timor, to cast Indonesia unfairly as a pariah state. But while congressional and grassroots pressure over Indonesia's brutal occupation of East Timor has forced the Clinton administration to take some small steps toward limiting U.S. complicity with Indonesia, such as cutting off the sale of small arms, U.S.-Indonesia relations under President Clinton differ little from those under his predecessors.
The
U.S.'s Brutal Ally
As the world's fourth most populous country,
a major center of multinational-corporate activity and a dependable Western ally,
resource-rich Indonesia has long been of great concern to Western elites. Described
by former President Richard Nixon as "by far the greatest prize in the Southeast
Asian area," Indonesia is today one of the Clinton administration's "big emerging
markets." As a senior administration official effused about General Suharto, Indonesia's
autocratic ruler, during Suharto's 1995 visit to the White House, "He's our kind
of guy."
Suharto has been Washington's kind of guy ever since his bloody rise to power in 1965-66. In the aftermath of an alleged attempted coup by the Communist Party of Indonesia and the murder of six Indonesian military generals, Suharto assumed control of the military and orchestrated a massive slaughter. The vast majority of those killed were from the left, members of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations of peasants, workers and women.
The exact scale of the killings that occurred between October 1965 and March 1966 is unknown. Amnesty International estimated "many more than one million" killed. The head of Indonesia's state security system approximated the toll at half a million, with another 750,000 jailed or sent to concentration camps. While even the CIA described the massacres as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century," official circles in the West welcomed the overthrow of Sukarno, the country's first president, and the emergence of Suharto's "New Order." Time magazine hailed Suharto's brutal seizure of power as "the West's best news for years in Asia."
The U.S. role in the killings was far from innocent. The Johnson administration supplied weaponry and high-tech communications equipment to Suharto's faction inside the Indonesian army in the early weeks of the slaughter, and the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta supplied the Indonesian military with the names of as many as 5,000 Communist Party cadre and leaders of affiliated mass organizations.
Over the last 30 years, Suharto has significantly "liberalized" the economy, much to the satisfaction of international capital, and has proven a reliable U.S. ally. Indonesia is today one of the world's fastest growing economies, with an annual growth rate of more than 7 percent. At the same time, the economy is wildly corrupt, largely dominated by Suharto and his family and a handful of cronies, creating wide social and regional disparities and engendering deep resentment toward the regime in the process. While Suharto has opened up the political system to varying degrees over the last several years, thus providing spaces for oppositional voices, he has not hesitated to crush any dissent seen as threatening to the status quo.
Little of this appeared in mainstream U.S. media, which largely ignored Indonesia until recently, despite the country's economic importance and the significant role that the United States has played in sustaining Suharto's rule and facilitating some of the regime's great crimes. Now, however, U.S.-Indonesia relations are increasingly the subject of debate in the halls of power, largely due to the attention and international legitimacy conferred on East Timor's struggle for self-determination by the awarding of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to East Timor's José Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Belo, and to controversies related to Clinton's re-election campaign financing. Combined with rising political instability within Indonesia, the increasing spotlight on the regime and on Washington-Jakarta relations has the potential to upset a lucrative applecart and undermine the Suharto regime in the process.
Agitating for Democracy
Pro-democracy opposition to the Suharto regime grew during the early 1990s. Independent
labor organizing, the proliferation of non-governmental organizations, an increasing
number of underground newspapers and growing criticism within Indonesia of Jakarta's
occupation of East Timor were just a few of the signs. From that context emerged
the July 1996 attack by the Indonesian military against the headquarters of the
Indonesian Democratic Party and the ensuing mass riot.
Suharto's "New Order" allows only three political parties to exist: Golkar, the government party; the Muslim party, known as the PPP; and the Indonesian Democratic Party, or PDI. Like the PPP, the PDI was created by the regime in 1973 as a weak and largely compliant party. Since then, the military and the government have often interfered in the internal affairs of the PDI to guarantee its loyalty to the regime. Both the PDI and PPP, for example, always endorsed Suharto as their candidate in the presidential "elections." A hint by the PDI that it might not nominate Suharto for the presidency in the 1992 elections infuriated the security state. The party's vocal criticism of the regime led to an increase in its share of the vote to 15 percent (up from an average of 10 percent). For six months after the election, the regime tried to engineer the election of a new, compliant leadership, but the party's rank and file ultimately defied the government and overwhelmingly elected Megawati Sukarnoputri as its president. Under Megawati, daughter of the country's first president, the party for the first time represented a real threat to the "New Order." There were fears in governing circles that the PDI would significantly increase its share of the vote in the 1997 general elections for 425 seats in Indonesia's rubber-stamp People's Representative Assembly, the smaller of the two chambers of parliament.
(The Indonesian military appoints the other 75 Representative Assembly members; the Representative Assembly makes up half of the People's Consultative Assembly, along with 500 Suharto appointees. It is the Consultative Assembly that elects the president. It is thus impossible for a challenger to defeat Suharto; yet, even though the Representative Assembly has very little power and the structure of the legislature ensures Suharto's reelection, the very threat of a contested election proved too much for the regime to stomach. Any diminution of the percentage of the vote for Golkar was perceived as intolerable to Suharto's prestige.)
The regime therefore decided to remove Megawati as PDI president before the next election. In June 1996 it orchestrated an "extraordinary party congress." The "delegates" to the meeting unanimously voted to remove Megawati from office and replace her with former party leader Soerjadi. The bogus congress led to demonstrations in support of Megawati throughout the country, a manifestation not only of her strong support within the party but also of widespread disaffection with the regime. Following the event, hundreds of Megawati supporters guarded the party's headquarters in Jakarta each night to prevent the imposition of the government-chosen leadership. Open-mike forums, attended by thousands, took place daily at the building.
Then on the morning of July 27, hundreds of soldiers and hired thugs, posing as supporters of Soerjadi, attacked. Soldiers reportedly stoned the building and even threw petrol bombs; they also entered the party compound and bludgeoned and stabbed anyone they came upon. The rumors of a massacre quickly spread through Jakarta, and people began gathering in the neighborhood. Seeing the growing crowds, which eventually swelled to tens of thousands, the military, which had cordoned off the area, attacked the people in the street, provoking the largest riot in Indonesia's capital city since 1974. The crowd burnt a number of government buildings and businesses. The clashes continued until late into the night. By the time the military regained control, hundreds had been injured. The death toll may have been as high as 50. (Many are still missing.) The riot, witnessed by legions of foreign journalists and diplomats, represented the greatest public defiance of Suharto's authority in years.
The regime quickly regrouped, using the riots as an excuse to crack down on the pro-democracy movement. Suharto had a scapegoat ready at hand: a small pro-democracy group, the new People's Democratic Party, or PRD. Growing out of the student movement, the PRD was led entirely by youths in their twenties. Suharto, top government ministers and generals publicly accused the organization of masterminding the riot and of being a Communist front, and the regime arrested dozens of its activists and leaders. The government also arrested Muchtar Pakpahan, the head of Indonesia's largest and longest surviving independent trade union, under the regime's draconian anti-subversion law.
The International Contest
Images
of the huge riot and of Indonesian soldiers and police brutally beating protesters
were quickly transmitted throughout the world. Non-governmental organizations
and solidarity groups from Hong Kong to Canada held protests outside of Indonesian
diplomatic outposts; the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for,
among other things, a release of all political prisoners and an end to all arms
sales to Indonesia; the Clinton administration sent former President Jimmy Carter
on a secret visit to Jakarta to meet with Suharto (whom Carter reportedly told
that the U.S. would not look favorably on a seventh term as president); and, under
Congressional pressure, the administration banned the sale of armored personnel
carriers and postponed a scheduled sale of F-16 fighter jets. Even the international
business community was critical, with several leading business journals editorializing
against the regime's corruption and cronyism.
The October 1996 announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee of the joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize to two East Timorese sent shock waves through Jakarta's ruling circles. The award intensified the international spotlight on Indonesia and its genocidal occupation of East Timor, which has taken the lives of more than 200,000 East Timorese, about one-third of the pre-1975 invasion population, helping to invigorate an already growing international solidarity movement and strengthen international governmental activity aimed at resolving the East Timor crisis on the basis of international law and human rights. Relations with Jakarta are now an increasingly contested terrain in countries as diverse as Britain and Chile, Japan and South Africa.
Yet, while U.S. congressional activity on East Timor has increased significantly since last October, the Clinton administration still resists breaking off the U.S. partnership in crime with Indonesia. Over the last four years, the administration has provided Jakarta with almost $400 million in economic aid and has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of weaponry to Indonesia's military rulers. And, as recently reported by the Far Eastern Economic Review, U.S. Green Berets have been providing specialized training to Indonesia's elite special forces, which are responsible for many of the ongoing atrocities in East Timor.
Indonesia's
Precarious Future
The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in
the aftermath of the PDI affair has certainly taken its toll. More than 100 PRD
activists remain in prison, as does Muchtar Pakpahan and leaders of many other
pro-democracy and worker organizations. The PDI, still under Soerjadi's control,
is almost totally discredited as a government puppet, earning a record low 3 percent
of the vote in the recent elections, and Megawati and her supporters continue
to organize to reclaim the party. General anti-regime activity continues, albeit
perhaps at a more subdued pace.
The May 29 "elections" for the Indonesian parliament were widely criticized as being farcical, even by the U.S. State Department. Suharto's Golkar party, as expected, won more than 70 percent of the vote. There was widespread voter abstention, however, and pre-election violence claimed the lives of dozens of people. The East Timorese resistance, meanwhile, used the occasion of the elections to launch attacks in a number of locations. More than 25 Indonesian soldiers and police lost their lives. Yet challenges to Suharto's grip on power are still a far cry from, for example, the "People's Power" movement that drove Ferdinand Marcos from power in the Philippines in 1986. And it looks as if Suharto has every intention of opting for another term as president when the People's Consultative Assembly meets next March.
But there is no question that instability in Indonesia, and in East Timor, can only grow. A post-Suharto government will emerge in the foreseeable future; the only question is when and how. Much depends on Suharto himself, and on his governmental and corporate patrons in the West, especially in countries like the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. Thus far, however, Suharto seems too stubborn to see the writing on the wall, and his Western patrons too enamored by Indonesia's riches to end their complicity. The combination does not promise a peaceful transition to a democratic, post-Suharto era.
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