Diehard myths threaten Indonesian democracy
You have to know the
past to understand the present. Astronomer
Carl Sagan
Official public monuments are the victors’ version of
history. The most conspicuous example in
Indonesia is Pancasila Sakti [Sacred Pancasila] where the inscribed founding
principles of 1945 are overshadowed by giant statues of seven officers
slaughtered in an alleged communist coup 20 years later.
General Soeharto, who later became the Republic’s second
president, linked the separate happenings to give his authoritarian Orde Baru (New Order) administration a
top coat of imagined legitimacy. He composed the oxymoron ‘guided democracy’.
Although many ‘facts’ about the event have been debunked by
US scholars, families still go to Pancasila Sakti in East Jakarta to gawp at
sickening dioramas of the killings to shape their understanding of history.
Indonesia identity has many wellsprings. The original has the theme of perjuangan [struggle] culminating in
first president Soekarno’s proclamation of independence on 17 August 1945.
Unlike their neighbors on the Malay Peninsula, Indonesians
didn’t wait for a benign European overseer to bestow freedom. They seized it and hung on through a grim
four-year guerrilla campaign to drive the Dutch from their prized colony.
This story has now become more accessible to Westerners this
year with Australian journalist Dr Frank Palmos’ translation of Student Soldiers (published by Obor),
the memoirs of street fighter Suhario Padmodiwiryo.
There are few kampongs in Indonesia without a concrete
spearman or machine gunner guarding the entrance below the slogan Merdeka! [Freedom]. Repainted every August they remind the
smartphoners: This is how the oldies built the land you now enjoy.
Earlier history offers more nuanced explanations of
influences that have formed the world’s largest Muslim nation with a reputation
for practising moderate Islam.
Long before the 16th century Europeans arrived in
the Spice Islands, Chinese and Indian traders brought their different faiths and
worldviews. These helped create the mighty 15th century Majapahit
Kingdom, still seen by utopians as the Golden Age.
Their crumbling temples, sacred sites, masks, dances, music
and ancient beliefs litter the landscape of Java as adat, the customs and traditions that maintain Indonesian values.
Some believe such symbols and tenets are indigenous,
mystical, ready to reappear and unique to the archipelago. The critical
question: Could the well-embedded folklore, coupled to Soeharto’s corrupted
version of the past, threaten Indonesia’s teenage democracy, born 1998, still
fumbling with change and frustrating its citizens?
Australian academic Dr David Bourchier thinks there’s a
chance. He’s been identifying the
remnants of collapsed ideologies and deciding which remain viable, like
archaeologists rebuild shrines from shattered stones and vandalised statuary.
He’s spent the last two decades assembling the pieces for Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia: The
ideology of the Family State published by Routledge.
The cover features a cynical tableau by Solo artist Herri
Soedjarwanto in the 19th century British cornucopia style. It shows a jolly Soeharto at the head of a
food-laden table, surrounded by admirers.
The author calls it “an intellectual detective story”. It’s certainly that, and better than the
sanitized accounts of the nation’s gestation and birth pangs served to
schoolkids since the 1965 coup.
The lust for freedom from Dutch colonialism peaked in the
1940s. The Indonesia we know today almost didn’t happen as blue-sky notions
collided with international events. Fundamentalists came close to forcing a
theocracy. The occupying Japanese could have run amuck as their empire
collapsed.
Had the Marxists triumphed the People’s Republic of
Insulindia would now be worrying the West. If sentimentalism had prevailed
Indonesians would now be speaking Javanese and have a Thai-style dysfunctional
government.
The bright youngsters who imagined a new world and are now
lauded as nation-building heroes, would today be condemned as traitors. In West Papua [‘taken over by Soeharto in
1969] they’d be imprisoned for seeking independence.
One of the few women among the founder-thinkers was lawyer
Maria Ulfah Santoso who protested the absence of basic rights in the draft
Constitution. Her concerns were flicked
aside by the macho men.
Like her fellow activists during the 1920s Santoso had been
educated in the Netherlands. They dined
on an eclectic menu - Marxism, Fabian socialism, notions of the nation state,
church interpretations of a secular
society, free thinkers, European anti-colonialism; if there was an ‘ism’, it
was there.
At the same time, though far away, the feudal Japanese were
getting interested in the Dutch East Indies with an empire in mind. They’d already shown muscle; in 1905 they
thrashed the Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese
War.
Writes Bourchier: “Accounts by early Indonesian nationalists
highlight this first victory by an Asian nation over a European power … as a
tremendous inspiration…The Japanese changed the way Indonesians thought about
themselves.”
So hardly surprising Indonesians welcomed the 1942 invasion
and for a while cooperated till
discovering the new rulers’ real interests were resources for war. The
brutality of the romusha forced labor
system scarred families everywhere. The invaders might be fellow Asians but not
allies; Indonesians would have to fight alone for freedom.
First Vice President Mohammad Hatta found the Japanese
imperialism unpalatable. Although feted
as the ‘Gandhi of Java’ during a visit he was unmoved by flattery. Indonesians
should give thanks; a lesser man might have imported the North Asian military
ideology.
Ki Hajar Dewantara, a Javanese journalist and activist whose
writings combined elements of Javanese, Indian and Theosophical thinking, was
another spreading ideas of ‘Eastern Democracy’ and ‘feeling-of-family.’
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew with his ‘Asian values’ popularized
the same idea.
Cosy notions, easy to understand and exploit – one nation,
one kin group. The citizen children
would be properly guided by wise and just rulers [Ratu Adil] demanding obedience. No need for checks and balances.
By contrast with the refined and respectful Javanese
approach to authority, the Western model
of democracy puts power in the people’s hands; everyone an equal individual
entitled to her or his opinion, sceptical of authority and demanding limits to
state power .
The Decent Daddy principle is now legless. But before
Soeharto was revealed as a kleptomaniac allegedly accumulating $9 billion, his
definition of the State ruled for 32 years: A big happy family with bloodlines
and beliefs stretching back into the misty rural hinterland where all was pure
and perfect.
Some hanker for those good old fantasy days. T-shirts of
Soeharto captioned ‘better in my time, ya?’ are on sale. While liberals see
Indonesia’s democracy as a beacon to Asia and the Islamic world, others claim
it’s a quarrelsome Western implant upsetting indigenous values of harmony.
Could Indonesians, fed up with corruption, inactivity and
political bickering retreat to ‘a more
culturally authentic style of rule?’ Translation: Authoritarianism.
Bourchier warns that
for Indonesia to avoid repeating history “there needs to be a concerted
effort to construct a national identity more in tune with the needs of a
pluralistic, dynamic, democratic nation.
“A necessary first step is to look critically at romantic
notions of the Volksgeist [spirit of
the people] in both legal and political thinking.
“It is only with an understanding of how key concepts such
as musyawarah [consensus after long
discussion] gotong-royong [community
self-help] kekeluargaan [shared
kinship] and adat came to be part of
Indonesian public discourse and how they have been deployed for anti-democratic
ends that they will begin to lose their seductive power.”
Perjuangan – the
struggle continues.
(First published in Strategic Review - see http://sr-indonesia.com/web-exclusives/view/diehard-myths-threaten-indonesian-democracy )
No comments:
Post a Comment