Reply to Akhmad Kusaeni on "The Fall of Suharto"

THE CONTINUED SUBJUGATION
OF INDONESIAN HISTORY

Tak Kenal Maka Tak Sayang
- proverb

For this western reader it was a welcome change to enter a latest account of Indonesia's quite recent tumultuous history. Written in the blogosphere by Akhmad Kusaeni, Deputy Chief Editor of Indonesia's Antara News Agency, 'The Fall of Suharto' promises an authoritative and authentic Indonesian description and explanation of the downfall of Soeharto's 'New Order' regime in May 1998.

In trying to explain those events and their key personalities, Kusaeni offers enthusiastic reference to four westerners' versions of that Indonesian history. Some of these western histories may serve novice readers well by packaging certain details and widely accepted previous accounts into a kind of chronicle form, handy enough for a student's effort at familiarization. Though sadly a very limited sample of an actually much wider discourse, Kusaeni's chosen histories present some analyses and perspectives more or less useful for consideration a decade or so after the events.

But on the more diplomatically delicate and ideologically contentious issues, these studies tend to locate the chief cause of instability away from the economic mechanisms of western-sourced globalization and Indonesia's acute strategic vulnerabilities to that post-Cold War fiscal and cultural expansionism. As Kusaeni summarizes it within his own endorsement, his four chosen authors (Eklof, Vatikiotis, Schwarz, and Kingsbury) believe "the fall of Suharto was more due to intra-elite manuevering than to 'people power', while "economic collapse provided the impetus for" a process of leadership downfall in train years before. At best, this view would hold monetary disaster to be akin to a hard-to-predict environmental calamity. Indonesia's people would be largely ineffectual, almost passive bystanders of almost no significance to the elite spawned from them. Outsider investment circles too would be virtually neutral, disinterested parties in inverse proportion to the extent of their actual wealth, power and ambition.

But that emphasis on anecdotal court intrigues in Jakarta would also be contradicted by many influential western parties themselves, who would prove by the nature of their surveillance the real coercive, gravitational power of their own interests in Indonesia. To deny the very intense Indonesia focus among the west's mutually dependent bankers, statesmen, academics and journalists would be like claiming that Heisenberg's discovery about observed phenomena had no relevance to the very malleable and dynamic fields of human activity we identify as strategy, economics, diplomacy and politics. Regardless, it is arguably quite blinkered and self-justifying - and certainly premature - for any study to draw conclusions which dismiss the causal significance of a phenomenon that actually lies largely unexamined in the study itself.

Is it not now understood as most fundamentally important that monetarist speculation smashed Indonesia's economy from 1997, and that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed extreme austerity measures and conditional terms, thereby all but demanding explicitly Soeharto's exit? Perhaps there is a pattern now typical in increasingly relaxed notions of 'democracy' and 'sovereignty', as the state's 'reformist' and 'moderate' face appears usually when financier elites intend to collect the bigger debts, rents or assets. While on those points, we should not be surprised if Schwarz's 'prediction' of Soeharto's 1998 resignation was more a reasonable assertion of probability based on a 'deadline for Soeharto' heard via financier circles or even from someone directly within the IMF itself.

Instead, the Indonesian military (TNI) and other state apparatus supposedly shoulder the main responsibility for Indonesia's turmoil, including that seen around Soeharto's retirement. Yet during Soeharto's regime in particular, those uniformed TNI members often complied or colluded with a global regime, barely influencing and never commanding it. By mythologies so apologetic for neoliberalism and its essential project called 'globalization', four problematic points strike particularly in the case of the Indonesian Army's Prabowo Subianto and his repeated excoriation as the 'bad guy' of Indonesia's military (or its "virus" by Kusaeni's elaboration of Vatikiotis' account).

A first possible point for dispute is Prabowo's alleged factional intrigues and attached sinister connotations. Presumed factionalism is one of the most enduring western myths about the TNI i.e., 'Red & White / Nationalist' and 'Green / Islamist' factions. "Presumed factionalism" seems a more appropriate term because on close examination source detail is actually vague, thickened by conversational gossip (interviewees), and second-hand gossip (textual references of similar anecdote). Moreover, the discourse can assume a very insidious quality, because the phenomenon itself is undeniable: factionalism is a loosely defined but more or less routine part of organizational politics anywhere. By imposing simplistic assumptions and credulity around local conditions upon universal fact, these views create a polarizing agenda largely devoid of nuance. Thus may gossip mongers counter any reasonable, basic criticism of claimed 'military factionalism' to allege that critics somehow perpetuate nationalistic propaganda about a monolithic compact between state and military. Yet how do the 'factionalism' arguments hold now? A key 'player' in 1998 was Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, for example: supposedly a 'Green' officer and 'Prabowo ally'. Sjafrie progressed well these past four post-Soeharto presidencies. Credulous students would be very tempted to thereby contrive a new 'Garibaldi faction', confounding such gossip about factional division.

Real dynamics of factionalism in scheming, shadowy alliances and treachery - or merely general philosophical or professional concord between colleagues - are usually much less apparent; indeed, they probably intensified most in Indonesia upon attempted manipulation by strong foreign parties. And while it appears true that Prabowo nurtured close connections in countries like Jordan or Tajikistan, mentioning those foreign links would be a conspicuously selective and unfair pursuit if disregarding the larger, more numerous - and often murkier - trails of money leading from Soeharto's Jakarta into western countries and businesses. We may serve history far better by contemplating just such ties and their persistent effects on western diplomacy towards Indonesia.

Another deficiency of such western histories' perspective on Indonesian politics is its typical neglect of political brinkmanship in an environment so highly charged and volatile. Yet such a consideration usually helps when analyzing a 30-year dictatorship that teeters under intense foreign and local pressures. So the orchestrated mass criminality ("riots") of May 1998 makes more sense if seen to threaten devastating 'scorched earth' to leadership contenders; specifically scorched earth in the financial sector as terrified ethnic Chinese either fled Indonesia or contemplated just such action. On the one hand the message seemed rather simple, even old fashioned, in the manner of extortionists petulant over their rejection by old subalterns: burn us, and we leave your prize in yet worse ruin. On the other hand, the mid-1998 unrest in Jakarta and elsewhere could have been a scheming device designed to provoke and implicate some of its obedient participants - just as appears to have happened to a few TNI officers loyal to Soekarno in 1965. But to assert "why the military would instigate riots was also not clear" - as Kusaeni alludes to Schwarz's analysis - seems an odd concession amid repeated, confident allegations of military involvement and direction. If firm conclusions remain unattainable then analysis should offer the available explanations rather than a resigned avoidance of the task.

In a similar way, the fatal shooting of several students at Jakarta's private Trisakti University showed the same dynamic of brinkmanship at work: Trisakti was a well-known finishing school for many children of Indonesia's ruling elite, including those of military and police chiefs themselves. However, even by the middle class standards of Indonesian tertiary education, Trisakti was hardly the wellspring of revolution or challenge to oligarchical wealth and other privilege, much less to military and police powers. The message then seemed an unequivocal one to elements of the ruling elite itself: 'stay loyal, if you don't want yourself or your kids to be next'.

More specific organizational and sub-cultural detail exposes those western histories' weakness on that point and on the apparent caricature in their prevalent historiographical verdict on Prabowo. He was Kostrad Chief at the time, so some units in his chain of command were already based in Jakarta, while others deployed there during that critical emergency period of May 1998 unrest and Soeharto's resignation. However, Kostrad units attached as outsiders to locally based formations, and Prabowo did not hold the direct command responsibility for the capital's security. The chain of command was clear: Sjafrie commanded the TNI's Jakarta territorial command - along with attached TNI and local Police - and Sjafrie was directly answerable to TNI Chief Wiranto. Moreover, Sjafrie's command held the local trump cards for instigating unrest: the local gangland of criminals and street thugs, as used just a couple of years earlier to oust Megawati from her political party. Earlier still, Wiranto too held the Jakarta command and was involved in those processes of territorial 'law and order' when he officiated at public parades to commence paramilitary discipline and organized coordination for such proxy gangster elements so important to routine and special military business.

On that point, the ironies are stark, exposing some rarely addressed neoliberalist cliches. In all the oddities of Jakarta's politics in the 1960s - the claimed 'G30S coup attempt' and the 'Supersemar' succession - historiographical anomalies, distortion and lies accompanied Soeharto's rise from his own term as Kostrad Chief (the CIA station leadership later claimed he was an unknown at the time!)... Little wonder that Soeharto's retirement brought similarly grand distractions, this time in a naïve morality play about the evil that comes from a 'fiercely loyal' and 'hardline' military man. Yet Prabowo's loyalty (and presumably that of Sjafrie, Subagyo - and Wiranto in his time) was to a chain of command that had the civilian office of President at its apex. Therefore, Prabowo was in this sense a staunch supporter of constitutionality and 'civil supremacy' over the military: key tenets of the liberal-reformist advocacy which would mould Indonesia into some idealized western image. Yet many who would claim to advocate those legalistic ideals of state reform would also condemn Prabowo without exception, and without regard for thorough processes of rigour, evidence or contrary views.

Another problem in the 'Downfall from Intrigue' history arises from the racialist overtones of 1998 violence, especially in Jakarta. The May 1998 murders, rapes, arson and looting apparently contained very racist motives among perpetrators at the street level, especially where class resentments mixed with old anti-Chinese hatreds fanned during the colonial-era. By implication, any military involvement in such 'scorched earth' unrest would reveal the heinous creed of race supremacy, especially to European onlookers mindful of colonialism and their own twentieth century history in particular. But Prabowo had some ethnic Chinese descent on his mother's side, still very rare for TNI officers. To not only isolate Prabowo for these crimes but assign to his command the original and main responsibility, or agency, needs good and reliable evidence as well as plausible explanation and analysis. The Intrigue School meets little of any such reasonably expected criteria. Where impressionistic western histories describe an Indonesian Kristallnacht in mid-1998, they do so more from their own navel-view than from specific evidence of fact. In this sense Kusaeni refers to Danish scholar Eklof, who mooted signs of 'a concerted campaign...to drive parts of the ethnic Chinese business community out of the country and thus facilitating a redistribution of their business and other assets to non-Chinese Indonesians'. Alas for Eklof's relativist hunch, any substantial 'redistribution to non-Chinese' could probably be found more in the post-1998 property markets and state revenues of such areas as Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Vancouver, LA and London than in Jakarta.

A final point of dispute here relates a little more deeply to the vague 'factionalism' allegations against Prabowo (and by implication also against the TNI as an institution). Prabowo's supposed 'Green' factional membership was meant to define a preferred or at least calculated affiliation with political Islam nascent since the 1980s. In general, such presumed factionalism tended to exaggerate impressions of an absurd military riven by unprofessional conduct, questionable discipline and compromised loyalty to country. However, in western eyes, a 'Green' label for TNI officers carried a further badge of stigma: the old phobia of an exotic muslim threat, quintessentially and irreconcilably alien, driven by the danger of dogmatic fanaticism, or at least the unreliability of mystical irrationality. In the years after Prabowo's own retirement from the military, it can be seen how the west's demonization of him contained a subdued call to old European prejudices, since rendered in sensationalist alarms of an official and elaborate discourse known typically as 'counterterrorism studies'.

None of this argument is to deny that Prabowo or his colleagues engaged in savage repression in their service to Soeharto's regime. But many of Prabowo's alleged political rivals too had similar experience, if not worse. In 1998 Jakarta too it was clear that Prabowo continued the brutal calling of a career made bloody from Aceh, East Timor and West Papua. So Prabowo was a 'loyalist' in the professional military sense that he had chosen his job and intended to stick by its core rules and ethos. This prompts some questions. Who were not so loyal in the same sense? Where exactly were their loyalties? Were they loyal to foreign parties, and if so, were they not traitors to their own people?

Perhaps on some level Indonesian readers like Akhmad Kusaeni feel flattered that western publishers pay prominent attention to events and personalities in their country. But I think it more a pity when Indonesians have such uncritical regard for western histories of Indonesian politics; shocking where those histories contain much gossip for sources, packaged in simplistic and uncritical analysis. The many nuances of a more lively, multi-dimensional, and human Indonesian history await their composers - Indonesian historians.

Matthew N. Davies
Melbourne

GLOSSARY
G30S: Gerakan 30 September - (alleged) movement supposed to have plotted a Communist coup d'etat
Kostrad: Komando Strategis Cadangan Angkatan Darat - Army Strategic Reserve Command
Supersemar: Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret - Executive Edict of 11 March 1966 conferring officially national powers of governance to Soeharto