Indonesian police are preparing
for protests when the official results of the Presidential contest are
announced next Wednesday.
Unofficial ‘quick
counts’ after the polls closed on 17
April showed incumbent Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo with a ten point advantage over challenger Prabowo
Subianto.
The official slow
count of boxes from the 810,000 booths across 34 provinces has enlarged
Widodo’s lead to around 13 per cent with more than 80 per cent of votes counted.
All lies, shouts
Subianto trying to emulate Donald Trump.
The former three-star general from an elite family believes he was born
to rule, but so far has been a four-time loser.
He pitched for the top job in
2004, then for vice president in 2009 and for president in 2014 and again
this year.
To fulfill his
imagined destiny before being defeated by age, Subianto, 67, argues that his
team has collected 3,000 examples of fraud in the voting and counting process.
So whatever is
announced by the Electoral Commission (KPU) on 22 May he’ll not accept the
result. That’s what he’s saying.
The aggressive, hot-tempered one-time soldier with a dubious
human rights record has more personality defects than campaign ribbons. Prime is his failure to understand that the new
generation of voters in the world’s third largest democracy has a different
view of society.
They want competent civilians in charge and the army out of
politics. Under second president Soeharto’s Dwifungsi (dual function) policy the military held reserved
seats in the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat
(DPR - House of Representatives) and top positions in the public service for
which many were ill equipped.
Subianto’s assertion that he’s won 60 per cent of the vote is
based on figures garnered by the National
Tabulation of Volunteers for Changing the President. As its name reveals, this is not an impartial
organization.
So Subianto will be heading to the Constitutional Court ahead of the
inauguration on 20 October.
That’s no surprise because the former son-in-law of Soeharto
tried that track when he lost to Widodo five years ago.
This time his supporters have been threatening ‘people
power’ street riots. The real version of
that term was the democratic election with an estimated 80 per cent
participation rate.
Every day small numbers parade outside the KPU’s Jakarta
HQ. However they’ve toned down their feigned
outrage since senior clerics from the two largest Islamic organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU - Revival of the
scholars) and Muhammadiyah (followers
of Muhammad), reminded them it’s time to pray, not protest.
One zealot called for Widodo to be beheaded which prompted
the police to arrest. Most of the time
they’ve been watching and warning, intimidating by numbers and discipline, and
avoiding confrontations like forcefully dispersing. This significant shift in crowd-control
techniques follows training by the Australian police.
Two decades ago Soeharto stepped down after men in uniform
(the police were then part of the military) opened fire on student demonstrators,
killing four and injuring scores
So far the Prabowo camp’s anger has also been muted by requirements
of faith. It’s now the middle of the
Ramadan holy month; as the four weeks of fasting heads towards Idul Fitri in
early June, the famished are showing exhaustion.
Napoleon
Bonaparte said an army marches on its stomach. So do rioters.
This is also the silly season. One failed candidate in the
DPR elections, held on the same day as the presidential contest, went to a
mosque and demanded back the green carpet he’d donated to win worshippers’
votes. The huge floor covering was dumped
in the street.
The death toll among people staffing the booths has now
reportedly exceeded 400; Subianto’s team reckons they died not because they
were old, infirm and exhausted, but because they were trying to prevent their
boss from winning, so want autopsies.
Just a couple of problems with this creepy reasoning: If
post mortems showed hearts and minds can be impregnated with a political virus,
despots would demand drums of the stuff to infect their subjects.
The other difficulty is that the Muslim dead are buried the
day they die. The idea of relatives
giving permission for hundreds of exhumations in an attempt to bolster crackpot
theories goes beyond the bizarre. Hey,
that’s Indonesia,
which makes the nation so engrossing.
Most diplomats and foreign observers have accepted a Widodo win
and are now focusing on the likely make-up of his new Cabinet for the second
five-year term. All bets are on the
low-profile Retno Marsudi, 57, holding onto Foreign Affairs so no radical shifts
expected from the present ‘non-aligned’ policy.
Marsudi seemed to get on well with former Australian Foreign
Affairs Minister Julie Bishop; how the Indonesian will cope if Labor’s Malaysian-born
Penny Ying-Yen Wong, 50, gets the job will be worth watching, as Indonesia’s
prurient press will likely make much of the Senator’s lesbianism.
Gays are under attack across the archipelago with Widodo’s sidekick
and soon to be vice-president Ma’ruf Amin, 76, leading the prejudice. The right-wing former NU cleric was shoehorned
into standing to boost Widodo’s Muslim vote, but human rights activists fear
he’ll push the nation further into conservatism.
That’s already underway.
Although the Film Censorship Board approved veteran director Garin
Nugroho’s Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku
(Memories of my body) for public showing, few Indonesians are getting the chance
to view a movie that’s won overseas awards.
It’s being banned by clerics for dealing with LGBT issues on
the basis that watching will encourage youngsters to change their sexual
preferences. With this logic violent films
should be outlawed to stop viewers becoming Subianto imitators.
First published in Pearls & Irritations, 16 May 2019: http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-hungry-for-a-result-in-the-indonesian-election/
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