FRIENDS CLOSE - ENEMIES CLOSER

                                           The Year of Deciding Dangerously

Though it started well earlier this year, the signals now coming from next door are more fear than cheer.

The world’s third largest democracy celebrated a successful poll in April when the voters made their wishes clear. Since then Indonesia’s politicians have ignored the electors and set about imposing agendas never revealed during the campaign.

The key word in Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s Kabinet Indonesia Maju is Advance.  It would be better labeled Mundur – Retreat.

An effective democracy goes beyond a fleeting link twixt elector and candidate.  The ballot-box encounter is just the start.  Connections between voters and their reps should continue through the parliament’s life.

Hey ho.   That ideal is being torched in Indonesia faster than the jungles of Kalimantan are being slashed and burned for palm oil plantations.

The most widespread worry is the promotion to Cabinet of Widodo’s relentless rival Prabowo Subianto, already covered by this website: https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-threatening-unity-by-seeking-harmony/

Just to recap:  The former son-in-law of second President Soeharto and one-time Special Forces commander comes across as an Asian Coriolanus.  He knows he’s born to rule – and so should the mob.

He was kicked out of the army in 1998 for ‘misinterpreting orders’ and thrashed twice in his bid for the top job.  Now the patrician has so intimidated plebeian Widodo that the loser has won the Defence portfolio.  He’s in charge of a reported AU $13 billion weapons-procurement budget. 

Technically Subianto is answerable to a civilian, former Constitutional Court chief Mohammad Mahfud, now Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs. He’ll have a tough job keeping the old warhorse in harness.

Some think Widodo is following the apparent advice of Chinese general Sun Tzu who lived six centuries BC: ‘Keep friends close and enemies closer’.  Unlikely, as the President is not known to be a philosopher, historian or profound thinker.

A prime example: When announcing his Cabinet he gave Subianto a job description which redefines carte blanche: ‘I believe I don’t have to tell him about his job ─ he knows more than I do.’

As the autocrat hasn’t held a swagger stick for two decades and never been in government, this implies the President thinks Subianto understands advances in weapon technologies by virtue of being a macho-man.

Alternatively it suggests Widodo thinks a military drone is a soldier who won’t stop talking.  So although Commander-in-Chief he prefers the eyelid-fluttering old Hollywood line:  What would Little Me know of Big Boys’ toys?

In the last few days there’ve been photos of the overweight Subianto being saluted on Java’s parade grounds.  These contrasted with pix of slim Widodo dancing with a line of Papuans in traditional costume.

Widodo is legally prevented from serving a third term so politically can use his five-year term to stamp his authority.  That was the expectation.  Trying to fathom why he’s blown his chance to consolidate democracy is puzzling all.

Unless Subianto, 68, is felled by a stroke – his early campaign appearances suggested he may have been struck last year – expect him to be President in 2024. 

In this imagined future Subianto will be elected by the legislature, not the people.  This is the ‘reform’ now openly sought by all major parties whose members detest having to ingratiate themselves to get the wee folk’s votes.

After announcing his Cabinet, Widodo left the mice to play and headed to the western end of New Guinea Island, an Indonesian province.  He opened a bridge, pondered the creation of another province and sidestepped questions about two months of rioting by Melanesian activists who claim they’re treated ‘like monkeys’ by the Javanese.  

We don’t know how many have been killed, wounded and made homeless by the violence because foreign journalists are banned.  Local scribes have courageously reported scores have died; their ability to keep focusing may be curtailed by proposed lese majeste laws which would cheer Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

While Widodo was doing some nimble footwork in the Papuan dust, back in the Big Durian new Attorney General Sanitiar Burhanuddin, a former State prosecutor, called on the firing squads to start greasing their Pindad SS2 rifles.

There have been no executions for the past two years. Malaysia is reportedly intent on demolishing the colonial gallows. There are more than 300 waiting to be strapped to stakes in clearings behind Indonesian barracks, according to Amnesty International.  Many are convicted drug dealers.

When Widodo played Tough Guy by ignoring Australian pleas to stay the shooting of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in 2015, he claimed their deaths were necessary to kill the drug trade.    The wretched business thrives still.

Another distraction from Widodo’s plans to boost infrastructure and reform education came when Bahlil Lahadalia, the Minister Chair of the Investment Coordinating Board, pronounced an immediate halt to all nickel exports.

The Jakarta Post reported the announcement was ‘riddled with nationalistic rhetoric’ and said his statement was based on ‘a collective awareness [among stakeholders] as children of the nation’.

A day later came fresh news:  The ban is just for two weeks.  It will be fully implemented next year.  Corporates noted that policy on the run did not speed attempts to build trust in the race to win international business credibility.

More than half the Republic’s population of almost 270 million is female – only five of the 38-member Cabinet are women.  By these standards PM Scott Morrison’s seven in 23 looks splendidly progressive.

Six retired generals now run ministries, including religious affairs and health.  Here Widodo’s judgment is again shown as questionable.  He appointed Army doctor Terawan Agus Putranto as Minister while knowing the Medical Association had recommended a year’s suspension for an alleged ethics violation. 

Putranto had been promoting a controversial and untested stroke treatment called ‘brain wash therapy’.  More correctly titled ‘intra-arterial cerebral flushing’, it uses the anticoagulant heparin.

Next year comes another health hurt, this time to wallets with a doubling of premiums paid for government health insurance as doctors and hospitals claw for more. Millions are expected to quit the scheme creating even greater fiscal sickness.

Widodo was heralded as a reformer and man of the people when first elected in 2014.  A small businessman from a regional town, free of ties to the military, he was the Heavy Metal fan and biker feeling the Post Millennials’ vibes. 

They thought him woke, a defender of human rights and democracy - independent, divorced from last century’s oppressive oligarchy, ready to make their nation famous for innovation, not corruption. 

They were wrong.  They feel betrayed.  They may not stay quiet.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 4 November  2019

INDONESIAN ELECTION DEBATES ARE SO POLITE

                       Vote patriotism – who wouldn’t?
 
Impossible to imagine:  Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten start a pre-election national TV debate with handshakes and hugs.  Two and a half hours later after gently tapping a few verbal shuttlecocks to-and-fro they pledge to remain friends forever.

That was the scene in Indonesia last weekend when President Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto faced off 18 days ahead of the election. A Kompas national daily headline called the show ‘dynamic’; the writer must have been dozing between commercial breaks. 

It was managed by the General Electoral Commission (KPU) which will be supervising booths for the 194 million registered voters on 17 April. 

The ‘debate’ was supposed to help the country get a clear idea of the candidates’ policies. Instead they competed to be the most passionate flag-embracers.  Though the 18^th century English writer Samuel Johnson’s dictum that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ is little known in Indonesia, voters understand jingoism masks a dearth of policies and an absence of solutions. 

Subianto alleged that Widodo’s office was spreading false rumours that the disgraced former soldier would introduce sharia law if elected. 

This is the Islamic legal system which includes public floggings for homosexuality and unmarried couples being together.  It already applies in the North Sumatra province of Aceh.

Wagging a finger and in a parade-ground bellow Subianto pledged support for Pancasila, the nation’s foundation policy.   

Pancasila (five principles) was devised by first President Soekarno to keep the nation nominally secular and thwart attempts by hard-liners to make the nation Islamic.

All Indonesians are supposed to believe in ‘the one and only God’, a just and civilized humanity, a unified nation, democratic and led by the ‘wisdom of the representatives of the people’, and social justice for all.

Like most motherhood statements it’s flexible.  Hinduism – mainly practised in Bali - is polytheistic, while democracy has been absent till recently.  If ‘social justice’ means the poor and minorities can exercise equal rights, then it’s a misnomer. 

According to an Oxfam report Indonesia is now: ‘the sixth country of greatest wealth inequality in the world … the four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million people.’

There’s no formal equivalent of Pancasila in Australia where we usually shrink from displays of loyalty to the state; the best example would be the Pledge of Allegiance in the US.

Pancasila is taught in high schools but Prabowo wants it extended to primary schools and universities up to doctoral level.  No dissent from Widodo.  Opposing would have been like banning dawn services on 25 April.

Under second President Soeharto, who was deposed in 1998 following years of corruption, Pancasila took a rest.

It was rapidly revived by Widodo to offset the growth of militant Islam, particularly after Jakarta Governor Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama was jailed for two years for blasphemy.  This followed huge protests organized in late 2016 by Islamists against the ‘double-minority’ politician – he’s Protestant and ethnic Chinese.

Blame for the blandness of the TV debate lies partly with the nervous KPU which set rigid rules, disallowing personal attacks.  Prabowo skirted this prohibition by blaming Widodo’s staff for bad briefings of their boss.

Questions and answers were confined to short timed grabs which were more personality show-offs than policy statements with rupiah price tags.  

More revealing was the body language. Prabowo has bounced back from his 1998 military discharge for ‘misinterpreting orders’ regarding the alleged kidnapping and torture of activists, to claim he’s now more army than the army. He’s become a plump, brasher Southeast Asian version of Trump.  He swaggered and hectored.

Widodo, who could get a job as a menswear model if he loses, has been fronting huge rallies around the nation.  He looked exhausted and on two occasions sat down without filling his allotted time.  

Short of the President being caught in flagrante delicto with a gay Chinese Communist, and despite looking like he’d rather be home than on the hustings, he’s still predicted to win a second five-year term by a substantial margin.

This is because prices in markets and bowsers have largely stayed stable, while new toll-roads, ports, trains (including Jakarta’s first Mass Rapid Transport system) are obvious signs of Widodo’s can-do commitment to infrastructure.

He’s a poor public speaker, no match for his blowhard rival, but still maintains his man-of-the-people image.  Prabowo, who was educated in the US, threw in a few English phrases which made no contextual sense.

He wants more spent on defence though there are no threats on any horizon; big boys need big toys.  Later, said Widodo, let’s first find jobs for the kids and promote free trade, like the deal with Australia.

Voters who want a return to father-knows-best government rather than the messy business of democracy, will have been impressed by Prabowo.  But they’re on his side already.

The danger facing mild-mannered Widodo is not that his yawning supporters will switch sides, but will stay in bed on polling day, a national holiday. Booths close at 1 pm. This is such a worry there’s a major campaign against golput (no shows).

Based on the President’s TV performance the only reason for bothering to vote is to make sure the world’s third largest democracy (after India and the US) doesn’t revert to being the world’s second largest autocracy behind China. 

First published in Pearls and Irritations 2 April 2019
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-vote-patriotism-who-wouldnt/

RI ELECTION. DEBATE 1

 When sinking looms, jump.

Imagine if almost six per cent of the Coalition reckoned they’d lose their seats at the next election so switch to Labor. 

Chances are they wouldn’t be piped aboard, as ship jumpers are not favoured in Australian politics, distrusted by the party they betrayed and the one where they seek to stowaway.

Not so in Indonesia where more than 30 in the 560-member House of Representatives (DPR) have sniffed the wind and reckon they’d rather jettison principles than lose prestige.  That’s according to Jakarta think-tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Parties need at least four percent of the national vote to stay afloat in the DPR so members of small shows, often faith-based, have been checking lockers for lifejackets.

Why so keen to hang-in? Politicians everywhere say they’re motivated by wanting to ‘serve the community’. The truer phrase in Indonesia would be ‘take from the community.’  Transparency International claims the law makers work in the Republic’s most corrupt public institution.

In the last 15 years the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has secured convictions against almost 550 public servants and politicians. It remains the most trusted public authority so subject to attacks by its victims for being ’too powerful’.

Seventeen is a mystic number in Indonesian culture; 17 August 1945 was the date the nation declared its independence from the colonial Dutch, so it was appropriate that the first of five national TV debates ahead of the 17 April national vote was held on 17 January.

This pitted President Joko Widodo, 57, and his running mate hardline Islamic cleric Ma’ruf Amin, 75, against Prabowo Subianto, 67, and US-educated businessman Sandiaga Uno, 49.

Widodo, who has held power for the past five years, heads a coalition of seven parties, led by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP). Together they hold 386 seats.  Election of the President is by direct popular vote and doesn’t depend on numbers in the DPR.

With three months before the ballot, the incumbent is leading most opinion polls.   But in this vast and complex nation straddling the Equator, one spark from an inflammatory issue (price of basic commodities, overseas ‘interference’ or religious slur) could start a bushfire turning predictions to ash.

Opposition is the Red and White Coalition (named after the bicolour national flag), with 113 seats.  It’s just two parties led by Gerindra started by Subianto as a vehicle for his bid to remain relevant.

He’s a yesteryear’s warrior hoping to remove Widodo in a contest that deserves close attention, particularly by Australians concerned our foreign policy should be more Jakarta and less Washington

Billed as big, a splendid example of doing politics properly in the world’s third largest democracy, the debate disappointed largely because it wasn’t.  That’s because the General Election Commission (KPU) determined the issues – law, human rights, terrorism and conflict – and gave questions in advance.

Predictably answers were memorised ensuring speakers drove past each other staring ahead; they seldom crossed the median strip threatening a collision of policies which might spark chatter.

Post-event interviews of viewers found many rated the show boring, failing to offer new initiatives to handle old problems.  Some said they dozed off.

Subianto revealed his sclerotic thinking by continually urging ‘strong’ boundaries, laws and responses to crises, wrapping himself in knots (and nots) when Widodo asked about the endorsement of six candidates who’d already been convicted of corruption.

Suggesting it’s up to the electorate to reject them, wasn’t the best response from a man with the power to sift applicants.

For Western viewers Uno appeared the most professional, attacking Widodo on his record and asking why voters should continue trusting his government.  This should have given the President the chance to launch a job-done list.  He blew it.

The challenger’s backers remind voters their hero is properly titled Lieutenant General (retired).  They think electors still hanker for a return to the tough-guy politics which kept Subianto’s former father-in-law Soeharto in power for 32 years last century.

Indonesia’s median age is 30 (Australia’s is 37); the world’s most populous Muslim nation (88 per cent of 260 million), is largely young.  Around 30 per cent were born since Soeharto quit in 1998 after student riots against his economic and conservative social policies, so talk of the Good-ol’-Days means nothing unless it’s a game or smartphone app.

Although a grandfather, calm low-key Widodo looks young, cool and modern, unlike the arrogant Subianto, often astride a horse and wearing dark glasses. His style is fascist aloof. 

Subianto told viewers that raising public officials’ salaries would hasten the defeat of corruption.  However most convicted of bribery were holding top jobs with good pay when arrested. 

Former Golkar Party leader Setya Novanto, once a super-rich wheeler, is now serving a 15-year term involving a AUD $240 million electronic ID card fraud. The lower rungs tend to have higher morals.

Widodo’s offsider Amin is a former head of the world’s largest Sunni Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama claiming 40 million members.  He’s more used to addressing compliant congregations so put in a poor performance, even failing to find anything to say when offered time to summarise.

Why bother to persuade when you can order?  Indonesia’s Human Rights watch has reminded voters that Amin has ‘helped draft and been a vocal supporter of fatwas (religious edicts),

‘Those fatwas, although not legally binding, have been used to legitimise increasingly hateful rhetoric against LGBT people and in some cases, fuelled deadly violence by militant Islamists against religious minorities.’

Sadly these issues stir few voters; the candidates know this well so just give tick-a-box replies on HR and move on to other concerns – food security, energy and natural resources.  All on the agenda for debate two next month. On the 17^th, of course.

Australian journalist Duncan Graham lives in East Java.

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 First published in Pearls and Irritaations, 21 January 2019.  See:
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-when-sinking-looms-jump/