The politics of
puppetry
The 4 November protests in Jakarta over alleged blasphemous
comments by Jakarta Governor Basuki ‘Ahok’ Purnama ended badly.
Police cars were torched, tear gas sprayed and one man died
as a small gang stirred strife in the dark after most demonstrators had left
the scene.
The thuggery was incited by ‘political actors’ according to
President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.
His explanation followed a tradition.
The Jakarta riots that triggered the fall of President
Soeharto in 1998 took the lives of more than a thousand citizens and destroyed
hundreds of shops. Many were owned by
Chinese businesspeople and their families, the prime target of mobs determined
to make mayhem.
The initiators were dubbed ‘dark forces’.
A year later in the distant Moluccas (the capital Ambon is 2,000
kilometers to the north-east of Jakarta) far more serious fighting erupted. Up to 15,000 may have died and 700,000 made
homeless before a formal peace agreement in 2002.
This civil war was widely portrayed as Christians versus
Muslims in an area where adherents of the two faiths had long lived together in
equal numbers and relative harmony.
No longer. An edgy return to some form of normality has been
achieved with the physical separation of residents according to their faiths.
This them-and-us arrangement is prone to rupture if poked and prodded by the
malicious.
The provokers were labelled ‘outside actors’.
On 5 November President Jokowi was on a teleconference call
to Indonesians in Sydney assuring them that the capital was calm and their
homeland safe. Most listeners would have
been ethnic Chinese studying or doing business in Australia and holding strong
memories of 1998.
If their skills and money stay away from the Republic the
government’s plans to develop the economy with large scale investments,
particularly in the President’s signature infrastructure projects could falter.
Chaos does nothing for business confidence.
In the Moluccan and Jakarta cases no one group has been
proved responsible for starting the fighting.
Instead the public has been told about phantom masterminds in theatrical
terms. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink blaming is not exclusively Indonesian; the French
term agents provocateurs is well
embedded in English.
Hints-not-facts sit awkwardly in modern societies that give
priority to openness, justice and reparation. These principles include exposing those out to
fracture peace, airing their motives, bringing them before the courts and
making them accountable.
However the explanations do fit Javanese cultural views
centered on the dalang puppet master
in the ancient wayang kulit epics.
These accounts of mystical beings pre-date the arrival of Abrahamic faiths in
the Archipelago.
The dalang is a deft
artist taking the roles of producer, director, stage manager, choreographer and
commentator. Performances may include references to current political dramas. He is heard but largely unseen.
He tosses and dances the elaborately crafted puppets before
a lamp so their images flicker across a white cotton screen. Although the wayang are physically two dimensional their characters are
multi-faceted and prone to devious twists and turns, leaving audience in states
of wonder, amusement and puzzlement.
The dalang and his
shadowy figures is the easily understood metaphor for any social drama where
the script is complex and performers devious.
But this doesn’t lead to a just resolution when the guilty remain as
ghosts.
Academics trying to understand the forces driving social unrest
are now moving onto the stage once filled by partisan politicians.
Among this small group of peace experts is cultural
anthropologist Dr Birgit Brauchler, formerly at Frankfurt’s Goethe University
and now a senior lecturer at Australia’s Monash University.
She’s been in Indonesia to talk about research into conflict
resolution; she studied the Moluccan conflict for a decade - how it came about
and what solutions worked, though none have been wholly successful.
When fighting flares the need to restore order is
urgent. In the usual pattern elite
troops, often from afar and with little knowledge of local sensitivities, are despatched.
They enforce peace by deploying more men with bigger guns and exercising greater
discipline than the troublemakers.
Eventually the smoke settles; the soldiers retreat to their
barracks and the job of patching the community’s wounds is left to others. Brauchler said that before the 1999 riots in
Ambon there were less than two dozen NGOs in the region. That number swelled to 400 though not all
were effective peacemakers.
The best involved a mix of locals often working in secret
and with women taking prominent roles.
Brauchler warned post-graduate peace studies students at
Malang’s Brawijaya University that there
were ‘no easy answers’ to the complex question: Why do some groups whet knives
to solve problems when it’s clear that combatants sooner or later must get back
to working and living together?
In her latest book The
Cultural Dimension of Peace she advocates a ‘new anthropology of peace’
where disciplines beyond law and political science get involved. She urges the creation of ‘peace scapes’ as
opposed to ‘war scapes … where the maintenance of peace becomes more lucrative
than war, and where such negotiation and communication can take place.’
During Soeharto’s authoritarian rule public comment on SARA
(suku, agama, ras, antar golongan)
issues of race, faith and ethnicity were banned.
The prohibitions were lifted with the re-introduction of
democracy this century but the power and will to stop community violence using
such emotional fuels has yet to be effectively applied.
Political scientists believe allowing orderly dissent is
essential for a balanced society, and President Jokowi has agreed in the right
to peaceful protest. But he has yet to
discover the sweet spot between Soeharto’s authoritarianism and the current
tension.
He promised to reveal the ‘political actors’ though so far
has stayed silent. Military Commander General Gatot Nurmantyo has stepped in to
suggest US and Australian involvement, though without producing evidence.
Refusing to identify and isolate those alleged to be
responsible is not assisting reconciliation, while mystery references just
shower all players with suspicion.
(First published in Strategic Review 30 November 2016. See: http://sr-indonesia.com/web-exclusives/view/the-politics-of-puppetry
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