Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesian Air Force to deploy squadron of fighter...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesian Air Force to deploy squadron of fighter...:   5 hours ago Biak, Papua - The Indonesian Air Force plans to deploy a squadron of fighter jets in the Manuhua Airbase in Biak N...

Indonesian Air Force to deploy squadron of fighter jets in Biak over concerns of growing West Papua Independence

 

5 hours ago

Biak, Papua - The Indonesian Air Force plans to deploy a squadron of fighter jets in the Manuhua Airbase in Biak Numfor district, Papua province, next year after its status has been upgraded to type A from type B.

"Biak will have a squadron of fighter jets. The plan has been incorporated to the TNI (National Defense Forces) chief's program. The program has been notified to Manuhua Airbase," Commander of the Manuhua Air Force Base, Colonel Fajar Adriyanto, said after a get-together with religious figures and journalists at Gunadi Angkasa building on Tuesday.

The presence of fighter jets at the airbase is expected to strengthen state security defense particularly in the Indonesian eastern provinces of Papua and West Papua, he said.

He said the Air Force has made preparations including facilities and infrastructures for the operation of the squadron of fighter jets.

"The Manuhua Air Force Base in Biak has been equipped with apron facility for fighter jets. All the facilities can be used now," he said.

He expressed hope that the squadron of fighter jets, coupled with Air Force personnel including those from Manuhua airbase, Air Force Special Troops of Command Battalion No 464 and Radar Unit No 242 will strengthen security and surveillance of air space in Papua and West Papua provinces. 

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: BALI emergency status of Mount Agung extended 14 ...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: BALI emergency status of Mount Agung extended 14 ...: BALI   emergency status of Mount Agung extended 14 days This is the third time that the 3,142-meter-high volcano's emergency st...

BALI emergency status of Mount Agung extended 14 days

BALI  emergency status of Mount Agung extended 14 days

This is the third time that the 3,142-meter-high volcano's emergency status is being extended.

The extension of the emergency status is also aimed at easing the deployment of personnel, the use of budget, and the procurement and distribution of logistics, he noted.

A total of 133,457 evacuees are being sheltered at 385 different locations in eight districts and a municipality in Bali.

The Center for Volcanology and Disaster Hazard Mitigation (PVMB) still maintains the highest alert level for the volcano by recommending a ban on any activity within a radius of 9 kilometers plus 12 kilometers from the peak of the volcano.

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: BREAKING NEWS -Armed group attacks patrol vehicle ...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: BREAKING NEWS -Armed group attacks patrol vehicle ...:   10 hours ago Timika, Papua (ANTARA News) - An armed group attacked a patrol vehicle at the 60-mile mark on an access road to PT ...

BREAKING NEWS -Armed group attacks patrol vehicle near Freeport in West Papua

 

10 hours ago

Timika, Papua (ANTARA News) - An armed group attacked a patrol vehicle at the 60-mile mark on an access road to PT Freeport Indonesias mine in Tembagapura, Mimika District, Papua Province, on early Wednesday.

The companys Vice President Corporate Communications Riza Pratama has confirmed the incident.

Following the attack, Pratama said a convoy of the workers Schedule Day Off vehicles from lowlands to the highlands of Tembagapura District was canceled.

"We heard the shootings, but there is no detailed information yet. For now, we have stopped the convoy," he said.

Meanwhile, Papua Police Chief Inspector General Boy Rafli Amar said there were no victims in the shooting incident that took place at the 60-mile mark, as the police had anticipated such an attack.

"Yes, there was a shooting attack. However, as of now, there were no victims. Based on our analysis, there was a plan to launch such an attack at around the 60-67 mile mark, and we have anticipated that," he remarked.

Earlier on Saturday, the police Mobile Brigade of Batalyon B Timika was involved in an exchange of fire with an armed group during a sweeping operation around Banti Village in the Utikini area following an attack on two patrol cars of PT Freeport at the 67-mile mark on the same day.

On Sunday, First Brigadier Berry Pramana Putra from the mobile brigade corps was shot dead at Utikini Bridge in Tembagapura District.

The armed group resumed the attack on early Monday when the police attempted to retrieve the body of Putra, and in the process, four personnel suffered injuries.

On Tuesday, the group attacked a vehicle of Tembagapura Hospitals medical team that was carrying a post-natal patient in Utikini Village. The patient Serina Kobogau was shot in her right thigh.

During the sweeping operation in pursuit of the armed group, the police managed to take over the groups base camp and other camps around the Utikini hills in Tembagapura.

The police have also found handmade weapons, a walkie-talkie, and some other devices.

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Old dominance, new dominos in Southeast Asia

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Old dominance, new dominos in Southeast Asia: Old dominance, new dominos in Southeast Asia Not since World War II has liberal democracy, and the intergroup tolerance that sustains...

Old dominance, new dominos in Southeast Asia

Old dominance, new dominos in Southeast Asia

Not since World War II has liberal democracy, and the intergroup tolerance that sustains it, seemed so deeply endangered in so many places at once. For the first time in three quarters of a century, illiberalism and chauvinism have stolen the march, virtually all over the globe, on their liberal and cosmopolitan rivals. With narrow voices for exclusion and nativism making frightening headway against broader visions of inclusion and diversity in Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, it seems fair to conclude that they can now gain major ground just about anywhere at any time.

If the flu of political and social illiberalism is circumnavigating the globe, Southeast Asia has precious little immunity with which to withstand it. This is a region where authoritarian regimes have always easily outnumbered democracies, and where liberalism and universalism have always struggled to gain traction against religion, nationalism, and communalism as forms of ideology and identification. So it should be no surprise that in a historical moment when democracy feels unsafe even in formerly safe-seeming spaces, it feels in Southeast Asia as if democracy could readily be extinguished entirely.

It wouldn’t be the first time since decolonisation that Southeast Asia suffered a complete democratic wipe-out. Historically speaking, the region’s democratic nadir ran from the early 1970s, when Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos converted their electoral legitimacy into outright authoritarian powers, until the mid-1980s. For most of that decade and a half, Southeast Asia boasted literally zero regimes that met even minimally democratic standards—with the minor exceptions of Thailand’s fleeting democratic experiment from 1973–76 and grudging democratic opening over the course of the mid-to-late 1980s. The Cold War did not produce the dominos of successive collapse from capitalism to communism across Southeast Asia that American interventionists feared, at least outside of what was formerly French Indochina. What it did help produce, though, was a region-wide domino effect of democratic collapses into authoritarianism.

Could Southeast Asia domino its way into a total 1970s-style democratic abyss again? Since most of the region is enduringly authoritarian to begin with, it is already—and always—most of the way there. As in the early 1970s, the global ecology for democracy is looking downright toxic. External contributions to democratisation in Southeast Asia should never be overstated, of course. But whether by coincidence or not, democracies in Southeast Asia (as well as Northeast Asia) have almost always either been cosy or trying to get cosier to the United States. If that gravitational pull of American democracy has ever really reached all the way to Southeast Asia, it has changed from propulsion to repulsion almost overnight with the presidential ascendancy of Donald Trump. One could have recently imagined, for example, Vietnam following the path of Taiwan (and arguably Myanmar) by responding to an increasingly threatening and intrusive China by burnishing democratic credentials as down payment on a stronger American alliance. If Hanoi wants better ties with Washington now, it would be better advised to start building the right brand of luxury hotels than the right kind of political regime.

Old dominance

Even before disturbing global authoritarian trends emerged, Southeast Asia displayed a dismal democratic baseline. We would thus do well to distinguish the cases of old dominance that establish that dismal baseline from what we might call the new dominos that find themselves either tumbling or looking increasingly wobbly in these troubled global times.

None of the region’s long-dominant authoritarian regimes appear deeply endangered at the moment. Singapore’s PAP is riding high in the saddle after its most recent electoral-authoritarian landslide. It remains disinclined toward political liberalisation despite the manifest lack of risk to its own dominance from doing so. The gossipy drama of the Lee family feud distracts from the deeper point that an honest and independent media outlet could never get a license to investigate and report on it freely and openly. In Malaysia, venality is up far more than brutality is down. So long as the ruling BN can compensate for its high-level corruption with high-level repression—especially by re-imprisoning opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim—they seem likely to get away with it. Commentators commonly fret that Hun Sen just killed the last remnants of democracy in Cambodia when he shuttered the Cambodia Daily and moved to ban the country’s only major opposition party. But what is really transpiring is a transition from multiparty authoritarianism to single-party authoritarianism, since Cambodia has not met even minimal democratic standards for the past 25 years. Speaking of single-party dictatorships, Vietnam’s leaders have recently stepped up repression of dissidents. But it is not as if the Vietnamese Communist Party has ever brooked serious dissent in the first place.

Not coincidentally, in all four of these cases, old dominance is rooted in old authoritarian ruling parties. In this sense, Southeast Asia is far from unique. Dictatorships ruled by parties have long tended to be more stable than those in which the military plays the leading role. So it stands to reason that the greatest action in the region, not just now but over the past decade, has been in countries where the military either still is, or in the past was, a leading power in political life. A militarised past means a high potential for a domino-ing present.

The new dominoes

Just as we can identify four clear cases of old dominance rooted in authoritarian ruling parties—Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam—four cases fit more readily in the new domino category: Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand. Across all these cases, long histories of parties failing to decisively supersede the power of the military left democracies with relatively little institutional strength to sustain themselves. In the case of Thailand, these weak civilian institutions have already laid the groundwork for outright democratic collapse at the military’s—and monarchy’s—hands.

Even among these latter four cases, I hasten to add, the story in terms of national regime type has been one of stability far more than instability. Of the eight Southeast Asian cases discussed here, only in Myanmar and Thailand have outright regime transitions occurred since the turn of the millennium. And one of the two, Myanmar, has moved in a more democratic direction since 2011. So it is worth stressing that Southeast Asian democracy has not exactly been cratering.

But the times and the tides seem to be turning. Could Myanmar soon follow Thailand’s recent path back to unchallenged military rule? Could the Philippines, now ruled by a strongman backed by martial law in Mindanao, descend from its current fragile status as an illiberal democracy into an outright one-man dictatorship? And does the shocking imprisonment of Jakarta’s ethnic Chinese former governor on blasphemy charges portend the demise in Indonesia of the tolerant norms on which even a minimalist democracy depends?

Although all four of these countries have been travelling distinctive trajectories downward, there is a vital common theme. When procedural democracy arises in otherwise politically and socially illiberal and intolerant conditions, democracy’s own key features can easily—and ironically—undermine its own quality and even threaten its own survival. Specifically, democratic procedures have a tendency to produce unbridled majoritarianism and unconstrained leadership in the absence of powerful countervailing forces to contain them. In settings where liberal institutions and societal commitment to inclusive and cosmopolitan values are relatively weak, minorities exist at the mercy of majorities. Sometimes that minority is defined demographically; other times it is established electorally.

The Philippines and Thailand both exemplify the dangers of domineering and abusive executives in illiberal democratic settings. Empowered and emboldened by decisive electoral majorities, Thaksin Shinawatra has attempted and Rodrigo Duterte is now attempting to overcome legacies of unresponsive, oligarchic politics in both countries through force of personal will. In Thailand this did not lead to outright populist authoritarianism, in part because the Thai military and monarchy saw fit to re-establish oligarchic authoritarianism instead. It is in the Philippines where a brazenly violent populist seems inclined to seize as many authoritarian-style powers as the system and public will allow. As abysmal as Duterte has been for human rights, his defenders quite plausibly prefer a highly popular president responding to actual social ills like the drug trade over a discredited one hanging on through electoral malfeasance like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did a decade ago.

Human rights are precisely the terrain on which conditions are sliding downhill in Indonesia and Myanmar as well. In Indonesia both anti-communist and anti-Chinese sentiment have made frightening comebacks from their Cold War demises. Since these were the same fear-filled mentalities that spawned and sustained Suharto’s New Order, their re-emergence suddenly makes democracy feel unsafe again at the national level. Conditions in transitional Myanmar are of course immeasurably more dire. But democratisation does not deserve the brunt of the blame for an ongoing calamity like the forcible expulsion and—why split hairs?—the state-sanctioned mass murder of the Rohingya. In Myanmar as in Indonesia, it is the ideological potency of ethnic and religious nationalism that explains why minorities get brutalized. Ethnic nationalism—or what I would prefer we call nativism—is one of the most dangerous gateways to authoritarianism, as well as a sapper of democratic substance. Democracy may embolden an electorally supercharged ethnic or religious majority to believe it can do whatever it wants with unvalued minorities. But it is authoritarian legacies of militarisation in Myanmar and ethnic and ideological scapegoating in Indonesia that best explain the severity and ugliness of both countries’ nativist downturns.

Reasserting liberal democratic values

If one vivid lesson shines through the dim shadows of Southeast Asia’s democratic downslide, it is that democratisation and human rights are far from the same thing. Especially when a country’s citizenry is more deeply steeped in religious than in liberal educational institutions, they will quite understandably tend to see the world in terms of good people and bad people. Meanwhile nationalists steeped in a lifetime of authoritarian state propaganda are analogously primed to see the world in terms of us, who belong, and them, who do not. Under such conditions, democratic rights may get extended; but no further than the ranks of the supposedly virtuous.

What all this suggests is that our global crisis of liberalism and democracy is first and foremost a crisis of education. Heroic histories of mass urban mobilisation to topple dictatorships naturally lead us to expect that if civil society is to help forge democracy, it will be by organising the resistance: “People Power,” as we like to say.

This may still be largely true in Southeast Asia’s cases of old dominance, where dictatorship must somehow be dislodged before democracy can be defended. But in Southeast Asia’s new dominos, as in Western democracies where pluralism is under assault, a deeper educational imperative underlies the organisational challenge confronting us. Remarkably, we have reached a moment when our politics most urgently needs to be driven not by an exalted desire to maximise human freedom, but by the base yet pressing need to minimise human cruelty. And if educational institutions—with a big assist from the mass media—do not spread the message that even the lives of minorities and suspected criminals have value and are worthy of protection, who will? For civil society to help save Southeast Asian democracy—or democracy anywhere in these dark days, to be truthful—its educational mission will need to loom as large as its organisational one.

•          •          •          •          •          •          •          •

Dan Slater is Professor of Political Science and incoming Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan. His research has focused on the historical and contemporary sources of authoritarian durability and the emergence of democracy, particularly in Southeast Asia. You can follow him on Twitter at @SlaterPolitics. This post appears as part of the Regional Learning Hub, a New Mandala series on the challenges facing civil society in Southeast Asia, supported by the TIFA Foundation.

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesia demands explanation after US refuses ent...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesia demands explanation after US refuses ent...: Indonesia demands explanation after US refuses entry to military chief Gatot Nurmantyo Jakarta: Indonesia is demanding an explanatio...

Indonesia demands explanation after US refuses entry to military chief Gatot Nurmantyo

Indonesia demands explanation after US refuses entry to military chief Gatot Nurmantyo

Jakarta: Indonesia is demanding an explanation after it said its military chief Gatot Nurmantyo was refused entry into the United States, moments before his plane departed from Jakarta on Saturday.

General Gatot - who earlier this year suspended military ties with Australia over teaching materials perceived as derogatory at a Perth Army base - was travelling to Washington with his wife and a delegation.

He had been invited to attend a conference on countering violent extremism on October 23 to 24 at the invitation of General Joseph Dunford, the US's highest ranking military officer.

However, the Indonesian Armed Forces said moments before General Gatot's departure on Emirates, the airline informed him he had been denied entry to the United States by US Customs and Border Protection despite having a visa.

Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said the Indonesian Embassy in Washington DC had sent a diplomatic note to the US Foreign Ministry to obtain clarification on what had happened.

"Considering the US Ambassador is out of Jakarta at the moment, the Deputy Ambassador has been summoned to Kemlu (the Foreign Ministry) tomorrow to give an explanation," Mr Nasir said.

TNI (Indonesian Armed Forces) spokesman Wuryanto said General Gatot had been invited to attend a conference on countering violent extremism by his "best friend and senior" General Joseph Dunford,  the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Photo: AP

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between th...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between th...: Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between the military and the police and political corruption to dog Indonesian Progress We d...

Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between the military and the police and political corruption to dog Indonesian Progress

Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between the military and the police and political corruption to dog Indonesian Progress

We do not have to look far to understand the problems of bureaucratic reform in the country. The Indonesian word for government is pemerintah, a modification of the word perintah, which means to order. So it is within the mindset of the Indonesian people that the job of the government is to order, a practice that was perfected by Javanese kings and queens who spoke to their subjects only to demand loyalty and tributes.

For centuries, this common practice continued to persist until modern times. The New Order regime of president Soeharto further refined the practice by using the bureaucracy to collect rent from businesses, in the process creating a massive system of kleptocracy.

The downfall of the Soeharto regime ushered in a bureaucratic reform, which was an attempt to free the government from corruption, collusion and nepotism. Every administration in the post-Soeharto era tried to undertake the reform, with the latest attempt carried out by former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who in his second term listed bureaucratic reform as his administration’s top priority in the Long-Term National Development Plan 2010-2025. The progress, however, has been very slow. Corruption continues to run rampant while the process of dealing with the bureaucracy remains a complicated one.

The administration of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, which will enter its third year today, has also declared bureaucratic reform its number one priority. He started off by campaigning on what he termed revolusi mental(mental revolution), which is aimed at transforming the culture of priyayi (privileged class) in the bureaucracy from one that demands service to one that delivers it.

While serving as mayor of Surakarta, Jokowi streamlined the bureaucracy by introducing a one-stop service for business licensing, a service he wanted to replicate at the national level.

In three years of his administration, Jokowi has unveiled 16 reform packages, most of which deal with deregulation and bureaucratic reform. There is reason to believe that the current reform could work, simply because Jokowi is the type of leader who demands results. The reason he travels so frequently around the country is because he wants to see progress being made firsthand.

Jokowi also has no qualms about publicly scolding government officials who fall short of their expectations. Earlier this week, the mayor of Medan, Dzulmi Eldin, issued a public apology after Jokowi scolded him for failing to fix pothole-filled roads in the North Sumatra capital.

Symbolically, Jokowi has made steps to bring a friendly face to the government. He gives out bikes to people who provide the correct answers to his quizzes and drops by at youth-oriented music concerts, which has burnished his image as a leader who is close to the people.

Rising sectarian tensions, the turf war between the military and the police and political corruption may continue to dog his performance, but, fundamentally, things are moving in the right direction.

Jakarta Post

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta: Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta The past year or so has seen conspicuous setbacks to Indonesian democracy’s capacity to...

Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta

Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta

The past year or so has seen conspicuous setbacks to Indonesian democracy’s capacity to protect many social rights, including of some of the more vulnerable members of society—most notably women, religious and sexual minorities, and victims of the 1965–66 mass killings. Ironically, this has occurred under a government whose declared agenda of extending access to social services has been a celebrated and defining characteristic, not to mention the presumption that its establishment had deflected a prior possible reassertion of authoritarian-like politics.

By 2015, a wide-ranging survey had offered the proposition that Indonesia’s hard-won democracy had stagnated. However, many of the more sombre assessments of this condition were to come in the wake of the second round of the Jakarta gubernatorial election in April 2017, and the farcical blasphemy case that saw the defeated Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”) sentenced to jail. The mood of these analyses could not be more different from the upbeat tone that characterised those that immediately followed the victory of Ahok’s close ally Jokowi over Prabowo Subianto in the 2014 election. That result had spared most Australia-based analysts—and many of the people of Indonesia—from the pain of having to contend with what might have been an overwhelmingly clear signal of democratic regression.

But the manner of Ahok’s downfall is merely symptomatic of much deeper problems within Indonesia democracy, which have never been resolved since the fall of Soeharto. These problems are intertwined with continuing oligarchic dominance and the manner in which intra-oligarchic conflict now occurs. The mobilisation of identity politics has become a more salient feature of conflicts over power and resources. In fact, we may be entering a new phase in which conservative takes on Islamic morality, and the hyper-nationalism which is being positioned against them, become the most important cultural resource pools from which the ideational aspects of intra-oligarchic struggles are forged—thus accentuating the illiberalism of Indonesian democracy. Indeed, the relative absence of organised social forces that would drive an agenda of liberal political reform is more palpable than ever before.

Islamic mobilisation and oligarchy in Jakarta

The race for the Jakarta governorship provided some of the best indications of how continuing oligarchic domination relates to the growing prominence of the illiberal characteristics of Indonesian democracy. Undoubtedly the most socially divisive local election in Indonesian history, it was even more hotly contested than the 2014 presidential contest, which was already considered exceptionally polarising by a number of analysts.

Ahok had been widely regarded as an able governor. But his fateful words about the Koranic verse Al Maidah 51 came to position him, effectively, as the co-author of his own political demise. The mass mobilisations against him combined calls for Islamic solidarity with a familiar narrative about the systematic marginalisation of the ummah. This narrative has been long entwined in Indonesian modern history with the perception that Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority has disproportionately benefitted from preferential economic treatment since colonial times. One irony, of course, is that these anti-Ahok demonstrations appeared to be supported by the children of Soeharto, whereas it was their father’s own New Order regime that had been responsible for nurturing the giant ethnic Chinese-owned conglomerates in Indonesia in the first place by providing them with political and economic protection. The implication of members of that family in the protests indicated that matters of oligarchic conflict were far from being entirely separated from the events surrounding the fall of Ahok.

The two most widely discussed interpretations of Ahok’s defear have been provided by Ian Wilson and by Marcus Mietzner and Burhanuddin Muhtadi. Wilson has emphasised how Ahok had created antipathy among the poor residents of Jakarta, mainly by pursuing urban rejuvenation projects that involved the eradication of entire slums. Mietzner and Muhtadi, however, argue that Ahok’s loss was more plainly related to religion: an aversion among many voters to back a non-Muslim and the belief that the governor had indeed committed blasphemy against Islam. Neither explanation is completely dismissive of social-economic issues on the one hand, or religious identity issues on the other—so there is little point in accusing either side of being unaware of the interrelatedness of the matters at hand.

But a somewhat different—though not necessarily incongruous—interpretation would place his defeat more firmly within the evolution and mechanics of broader conflicts within Indonesia’s oligarchy. All three candidates in the first round of the Jakarta polls had essentially served as proxies for competing coalitions of entrenched elites. Ahok represented the ruling coalition driven by the PDI-P. Anies Baswedan competed as the candidate of a bloc led by Prabowo’s Gerindra Party. And it is difficult not to construe Agus Yudhoyono’s sudden foray into the political arena, necessitating the abandonment of a promising military career, as anything less than an attempt to forge a political dynasty on the part of his father, SBY, founder and leader of the Democratic Party.

If this sort of interpretation has any merit, Ahok’s defeat in the face of FPI-led mobilisations was less an indication of the inexorable rise of Islamic radicalism in Indonesian politics than of the ability of oligarchic elites to deploy the social agents of Islamic politics for their own interests. The broader implication is that radical expressions of Islamic identity—which go together with rigidly conservative interpretations of Islamic morality championed by the FPI and similarly hard line groups—are being increasingly nurtured and refashioned within the present requirements of oligarchic politics.

In fact, by facilitating expressions of frustration by many ordinary citizens through the use of a predominantly religious-tinged political lexicon, Indonesian oligarchic elites have all but ensured that Indonesian Islamic politics would move increasingly toward a conservative direction. Moreover, it is instructive that the resultant social and political conservatism is being mainstreamed with the aid of oligarchic elites who would not be normally considered the social agents of Islamic politics.

In the aftermath of the Jakarta election, many took to warning that it signalled the rise of such religious extremism, which presents an immediate threat to Indonesia’s pluralist social fabric and to its internationally praised democracy. In a way, such fears represent a revisit of older concerns, expressed during the early years of reformasi, that democracy would result in the political ascendancy of Islamic radicalism, which had supposedly been suppressed only because of the iron-fisted rule of Soeharto. Indeed, Indonesians who tend towards secular forms of democratic politics should be aware, now more so than ever, of the historical and contemporary weakness of politically liberal (or social democratic) streams within Indonesian politics.

The hyper-nationalist reaction

Given the long absence of Leftist traditions as well from the scene—since the violent destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in the 1960s—it has become increasingly clear that the most durable bulwarks against hard line Islamic politics are to be found within strains of nationalist politics. The problem for Indonesian democracy is that these strains are typically entwined with social interests embedded within the apparatus of the state, including the military, that have been more historically concerned with social control than social representation.

This point is crucial in understanding the significance of Jokowi’s response to the newly-assertive Islamic mobilisation. It is expected that the same tactics of mobilising identity politics against Ahok will be employed against him, though perhaps in not exactly the same manner or degree of effectiveness. There is already much rumour-mongering in social media about Jokowi’s personal background and history that casts Indonesia’s president as a closet ethnic Chinese communist. In spite of their somewhat fantastical nature, it is apparent that the president himself has become quite concerned about the swirling rumours surrounding his identity. At the very least, he has become sufficiently irked to deliver an irate rebuttal and to describe them as nothing less than a politically-motivated attack on his character.

In policy terms, Jokowi’s main reaction has been to deter such rumours by promoting the cultural symbols associated with Indonesian nationalism. He has done this, for instance, by way of initiating a new national holiday—Pancasila Day—on 1 June. The sanctity of the Unitary State of Indonesia (NKRI), based on the founding idea of “unity in diversity”, has been emphasised quite conspicuously as well in his speeches and public comments since Ahok’s defeat. He has even vowed to demolish organisations that are anti-Pancasila, in the kind of forceful terms that would not have been out of place in the heyday of the New Order.

It is not surprising that the president has felt compelled to deliver a response designed, at least in part, to buoy those Indonesian citizens who would be wary of a democracy that unwittingly opened the door for the ascendancy of conservative Islamic morality. There is some delightful irony in the fact that FPI leader Habib Rizieq Shihab has been investigated by the police for an indiscretion prosecutable under a wide-ranging anti-pornography law, which his organisation had heavily supported at its inception. This is the case even if political liberals should possess awareness that the pornography law is essentially as inane—from the point of view of democratic rights—as the blasphemy law that had brought down Ahok.

Nevertheless, banning the FPI altogether carries political risks for a president expecting to be attacked on the basis of his own questioned Islamic credentials. Instead, Jokowi landed a symbolic blow on an Islamist enemy via the Perppu (regulation in lieu of law) enacted in July 2017. This decree paved the way for the government to ban, without judicial process, organisations deemed to be undesirable, with Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) being the first target as expected. As part of the ban, university lecturers who are known to be members of the organisation have been threatened with expulsion from their jobs, giving rise to fears of a broader government instigated witch hunt. Even critics of Islamic hard line groups have warned that the government is embarking on an anti-democratic “slippery slope”.

The bigger picture: oligarchy, Islam, nationalism?

The political dynamics being witnessed speak to larger points about how oligarchic power has had the capacity to change in relation to new circumstances, and therefore, to evolve. As the Indonesian oligarchy is much more decentralised in nature today than during the pinnacle of the New Order, competition among its factions over power and resources has taken place largely via the institutions of democratic governance. It is in the context of such contests that appeals to conservative ideals of morality—whether Islamic or nationalist—may become a more entrenched rather than just fleeting feature of Indonesian democracy. This is because such appeals have the potential to connect otherwise detached oligarchic elites to broader bases of social support, by at least temporarily obscuring actual divisions within Indonesian society through moral appeals, but without being linked to any kind of agenda of transformation of the way in which power is constituted.

As I and other scholars have argued, the New Order-nurtured oligarchy reinvented itself in the course of the struggle over the direction of reformasi. It did so by colonising the institutions of Indonesian democracy—its parties, parliaments and elections. This was assisted, in turn, by the endemic and systematic disorganisation of civil society sustained by decades of rigid and often brutal authoritarian rule. The consequence was that social forces effectively representing politically liberal or social democratic alternatives were almost nowhere to be seen in the crucial early years following the fall of Soeharto. Leftist ones had of course been long obliterated.

As discussed above, the primary form of pushback to the rigid and inflexible Islamic conservatism has been a similarly retrogressive hyper-nationalism, which references the inviolability of the Indonesian Unitary State (NKRI) and the state ideology, Pancasila. This is so even if that state ideology has proven to be quite pliable throughout modern Indonesian political history, utilised somewhat differently (in different contexts) by presidents Soekarno and Soeharto. Indicative of the basically retrogressive nature of this response is a new proposed arrangement by the Minister of Home Affairs whereby the rectors of Indonesian universities would be chosen by the president, as a means of ensuring that Islamic radicalism does not grow unabated in university campuses due to tacit support from some within the higher ranks of academia. Of course, the problem with such an arrangement is quite similar to the one surrounding Perppu No. 2 2017; it could be used potentially to stamp out other kinds of “threatening” ideas in the future, such as those connected even to mainstream political liberalism. Already, university students have been warned by a military luminary of the dangers of “liberalism, communism, socialism and religious radicalism”, all of which he facilely categorised under “materialist ideology”.

In other words, it is not hard to imagine that the establishment of hyper-nationalist barriers to Islamic radicalism will have quite authoritarian effects, certainly in the medium to longer term. It also encourages rigid conformity to a set of values and ideas—in this case associated with rigidly organic-statist definitions of Pancasila rather than to a religion—to which democracy activists were opposed during much of the New Order period. Among these was the notion of society where the pursuit of self-interest was supposed to be contained by a state embodying the common interest—but which in fact helped to insulate a particularly predatory form of capitalism from potential challenges emanating from civil society. In line with this sort of development has been the promotion of the Unit Kerja Pembinaan Pancasila (Work Unit for the Cultivation of Pancasila), which presents an eerie reminder of New Order-style so-called P4 courses, wherein people from all walks of life used to be indoctrinated to the state ideology through mind numbing mandatory classes. Yet embarking on similar exercises is now somehow accepted by many as a progressive step, rather than a nod to the intrinsic conservatism and suffocating insularity of earlier organic-statist tendencies in Indonesian political thought and practice.

Long-time democracy activists in Indonesia will find it particularly disconcerting that present circumstances have made it so easy for the commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) to declare—and not for the first time—that democracy contradicted the principles of the state ideology of Pancasila. It goes without saying that the general concerned, Gatot Nurmantyo, was not lamenting the prevalence of money politics or oligarchic domination. Instead he was lambasting the actual practice of voting, which in his view, inhibited another practice—that of consensus-building—deemed more in keeping with an essentialised notion of what constitutes an authentic Indonesian culture. Though not surprising given its source, these kinds of comments inevitably bring back uncomfortable memories of the suffocating nature of New Order political discourse, which frequently quelled dissent by labelling it as inherently “foreign” or un-Indonesian. In fact, there is a real danger that liberal—let alone more Leftist critiques of the way that power is constituted in post-Soeharto Indonesia—will be increasingly susceptible to a similar kind of labelling, whether by reference to the sanctity of the values of Pancasila or those considered to be of divine origin.

The new populist currents

One final point needs to be made. This relates to the increasingly attractive idea that populist politics has come to make its mark on Indonesian democracy. There has been much discussion of the rise of populism in Indonesia since the 2014 presidential elections—from authors such as Ed Aspinall, Marcus Mietzner, William Case, and myself with Richard Robison—in which the two candidates were widely seen to be making use of populist rhetoric. But apart from the “outsider” status claimed by both, which has been one focus of attention, a major characteristic of populism is that it attempts to “suspend” difference, albeit temporarily, among sections of society to bring them behind a particular political project. In other words, there is a penchant within populism for supposing homogeneity in the face of actually growing social heterogeneity, largely by juxtaposing the fate of the many and pure against that of the few and morally corrupt.

References to members of an ummah who have in common the experience of systemic marginalisation since colonial times, can form the ideational basis of an Islamic form of populism, whereby the downtrodden and pious are juxtaposed against rapacious elites.  But given the organisational incoherence of Islamic populism in Indonesia, the binding of people to Islamic vehicles is less achieved by maintaining their loyalty—for example through the provision of material benefits by way of access to social services, as has been the case in parts of the Middle East—but through continuous efforts to sustain controversy.

Nationalist forms of populism, which are more conventional in the global sense, relatedly aim to define a “people” who are the repository of virtue as well, in contrast to evil and rapacious elites, including foreign ones. In Indonesia, it is sustained in part by reference to supposedly authentic and immutable cultural values that allegedly value harmony, which may become under siege by a range of influences, including potentially that of radical forms of Islamic politics.

What we may be effectively witnessing in Indonesia is therefore a newer phase within which political conflict increasingly relies on the employment of different variations (and combinations) of religious and nationalist forms of populism, and where political liberalism and Leftist critiques are effectively as side-lined as they had been in the authoritarian New Order.

 

Indeed, in the case of Indonesia, social groups that had been assumed—especially within the paradigm of modernisation theory and its associated more recent and sophisticated manifestations—to be the harbingers of socially and politically liberal values have in fact never displayed such a sociological characteristic very strongly. Richard Robison had already emphasised the conservatism of the Indonesian middle class and bourgeoisie of the 1990s, developing as they had within an authoritarian social order where the fear of uncontrolled mass politics was systematically cultivated. Thus, in dubbing Jokowi the “middle class president”, Jacqui Baker is reminding us that the president’s “illiberal tendencies… are not qualities of the man per se, but symptomatic of the Indonesian middle class and the unique political conditions under which it was formed”.

Some of this conservativism, reshaped within a new social and political context, is now being expressed through world views sustained by references to Islamic morality or hyper-nationalism. These can be linked to ways of asserting modes of political inclusion and exclusion that are detrimental to the rights of the more vulnerable members of Indonesian society. Significantly, the process of further political illiberalisation is being facilitated no less than by the evolving imperatives of oligarchic domination and the mechanics of intra-oligarchic competition over power and resources within Indonesian democracy—something for which there is no obvious institutional remedy.

…………………………

This an adapted version of the author’s paper presented at the 2017 Indonesia Update conference at the Australian National University, which will be published in full in the December edition of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.

Vedi Hadiz is Professor of Asian Studies and Deputy Director at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. An Indonesian national, he received his PhD at Murdoch University in 1996. His research is in the broad areas of political economy and political sociology and covers Indonesia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Among his books are Islamic populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2016), Localising power in Indonesia: a Southeast Asia perspective (Stanford University Press 2010) and, with Richard Robison, Reorganising power in Indonesia: the politics of oligarchy in an age of markets (Routledge 2004).

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: What’s Next for Indonesia-Vietnam Defense Ties?

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: What’s Next for Indonesia-Vietnam Defense Ties?:   Last week, the defense ministers from Indonesia and Vietnam led their respective delegations for another round of their bilateral d...

What’s Next for Indonesia-Vietnam Defense Ties?

 

Last week, the defense ministers from Indonesia and Vietnam led their respective delegations for another round of their bilateral defense meeting held in Jakarta. The meeting saw both sides discuss broader regional and global security issues as well as take stock of their bilateral defense cooperation, including outlining future steps for cooperation through the signing of a new joint vision statement out to 2022.

As Indonesia-Vietnam relations have developed over the years, from a comprehensive partnership agreement signed in 2003 to a strategic partnership in 2013, the two countries have also looked to make progress in the security domain as well. Recent defense dialogues have focused on further steps to implement their memorandum of understanding inked in 2010, efforts to develop defense ties more generally including joint exercises, dialogues, and military equipment, and means to better manage challenges, including the treatment of fishermen amid some recent clashes at sea.

Last year was an active year for defense ties, with Indonesian Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu making his first Vietnam visit since assuming his position and then-General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party Nguyen Phu Trong making a trip to Indonesia – the first by a Party chief since the late Ho Chi Minh in 1959 and the first by a top Vietnamese leader since the inking of the 2013 strategic partnership. Though the focus of his visit, which included a meeting with Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, was on the relationship more generally, there were some defense-related developments including the signing of a letter of intent on cooperation between their two coast guards.

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This time around, Vietnam Defense Minister Gen. Ngo Xuan Lich was in Jakarta to meet with several top Indonesian officials, including Ryacudu for their defense meeting on October 13. During the meeting, both sides discussed the broader regional and global challenges they both confront, including terrorism, cybercrimes, human and drug trafficking, illegal fishing, and the South China Sea issue. Ryacudu in particular emphasized the fact that none of these challenges could be confronted alone and required partnership among regional states.

The two sides also discussed thornier issues, most notably managing their maritime boundaries amid some recent clashes at sea as both concluding negotiations on the delimitation of their exclusive economic zones. This has been an ongoing issue that has factored into their recent engagements even though it often is not as widely publicized in official accounts by the two sides as much as other areas of convergence.

They also reviewed the existing infrastructure of the bilateral defense relationship, agreeing to continue the joint working group for their armed forces and the implementation of a defense policy dialogue into 2018. They noted areas for future progress such as education and training and defense industrial cooperation. Both sides also inked a joint vision statement to guide the overall defense relationship out to 2022. That was both a notable step in the institutionalization of the defense relationship and yet another indicator of the emphasis they are placing on security ties as being a pillar of the broader Indonesia-Vietnam strategic partnership.

By Prashanth Parameswaran for The Diplomat

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesia, Russia Ink Defense Protocol Amid Fighte...

Kerry B. Collison Asia News: Indonesia, Russia Ink Defense Protocol Amid Fighte...:   Indonesia and Russia held the latest iteration of their talks on military technical cooperation. The dialogue, which saw the signin...

Indonesia, Russia Ink Defense Protocol Amid Fighter Jet Deal

 

Indonesia and Russia held the latest iteration of their talks on military technical cooperation. The dialogue, which saw the signing of a protocol agreement, comes as both sides consider ways to further boost their defense collaboration even as they manage existing challenges.

As I have noted before, as Indonesia modernizes its military, Russia, currently Jakarta’s largest military supplier, has obviously been part of the conversation. But though both sides have been mulling several deals as well as broader advances in defense cooperation over the past few years, they have also had to factor in their priorities, which on the Indonesian side includes a greater insistence on developing its domestic defense industry.

From October 10 to October 11, the two countries held the thirteenth iteration of their talks on military technical cooperation (MTC). During the talks, officials as well as defense industry representatives from both sides discussed several issues, including areas of potential cooperation as well as overcoming challenges.

Unsurprisingly, one of the areas of focus was how to ensure that ongoing defense collaboration between the two countries is in line with Indonesia’s existing procurement laws and its policy objective of developing its domestic defense industry. Indonesia’s Law 16 specifies that offsets, local content, and countertrade should be worth no less than 85 percent of the value of the contract, with local content making up no less than 35 percent of this.

One outcome from the meeting, the Indonesian defense ministry disclosed in a statement released thereafter, was the inking of a draft protocol. The agreement, Indonesian defense officials said, would facilitate not only the purchase of defense equipment from Russia, but also the strengthening of broader defense ties including areas like joint development and joint production as well as maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) through technology transfers.

The military-technical agreement comes as both countries continue to make progress toward the inking of a long-mulled Indonesian purchase of Sukhoi Su-35 multirole combat aircraft. As I have noted repeatedly, the deal has faced repeated delays since Indonesian defense minister Ryamizard Ryacudu first announced Indonesia had decided to buy the aircraft in September 2015, including over procurement regulations (See: “Why is the Indonesia-Russia Fighter Jet Deal Still On Hold?”).

As of now, though Indonesia is not expected to build the aircraft or parts of it by itself, both sides have been working out the structure of the deal to include MRO, countertrade, and offset opportunities, including Indonesian export of commodities and defense products. Though specifics are still being negotiated, Indonesian officials have previously said that, within the $1.14 billion expected deal for 11 Sukhoi jets, around $570 million will be paid for in Indonesian commodity exports such as palm oil, tea, and coffee, with around $400 million sourced through an offset program, and the remaining paid for through cash.

Thus far, Russia, which is eager to make further inroads in the defense realm in key Asian markets, has been willing to factor in Indonesia’s domestic priorities into the discussion. This pattern continued at the dialogue held last week with the Sukhoi deal still on the horizon, with the latest date of finalization set by Indonesian officials as November.

By Prashanth Parameswaran for The Diplomat