Indonesia election: An ‘not possible’ nation assessments its hard-won democracy

Budiman Sujatmiko has misplaced not one of the ardour that he used to point out as one of many boldest pupil opponents of Suharto, the soft-spoken however ruthless dictator who dominated Indonesia for 32 years.

“In the Nineties our problem was authoritarianism. We wanted democracy. Today our problem is inequality and backwardness,” Budiman says in his marketing campaign workplace, forward of Indonesia’s presidential race on 14 February.

In a scarcely plausible twist, Budiman is now a spokesman for Prabowo Subianto – the frontrunner within the race, Suharto’s son-in-law and the person who epitomises that authoritarian period. The former particular forces commander has been accused of a string of human rights violations, and was sacked by the military in 1998.

“People change after 25 years, identical to I’ve modified,” Budiman says. “We have each moved to the center.”

It’s a shocking flip of occasions. The once-disgraced army strongman and the fiery activist now discover themselves on the identical aspect in a democratic election. As unlikely as that alliance could appear, it helps inform the story of Indonesia’s young, rowdy democracy.

As BBC correspondent in Jakarta within the late Nineties I reported on Budiman’s brave opposition to Suharto, and on his trial, the place he delivered an hours-long, stinging rebuke of the federal government’s repressive habits. I visited him in jail. I watched Prabowo manoeuvring within the energy battle that broke out amid the chaos of Suharto’s final days, then being out-manoeuvred and forged out. I watched the euphoria of pupil protesters ousting a ruler who had dominated their lives and the lives of their dad and mom. Those have been heady days.

Yet immediately Indonesian politics is dominated by the identical highly effective, rich figures who prospered underneath Suharto.

Some have known as Indonesia an not possible nation. It should not work, nevertheless it does – with its kaleidoscopic vary of political events representing one of many largest and most various populations on the planet. The 17,000 islands – and 700 languages – that make up the archipelago are unfold over an space as giant because the United States. It’s a fast-growing financial system, however with thousands and thousands of its individuals nonetheless residing in poverty.

Yet it has proved remarkably secure. Defying predictions that it might implode, like Yugoslavia, Indonesia has had simply two straight elected presidents over a 20-year interval, each of whom have been reasonable, efficient and fashionable, delivering regular financial development.

What worries many Indonesians now, although, is what’s going to occur to their democracy if Prabowo wins?

From the marketing campaign path, Indonesia’s democracy – the third largest on this planet – seems to be in impolite well being.

Gone is the heated, sectarian divide of the final presidential contest in 2019, when President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, then searching for a second time period, confronted a decided rival in Prabowo who mobilised hard-line Muslim teams to contest the outcome. Per week of rioting left at the least 10 lifeless.

This time Prabowo, in his third try on the presidency, has teamed up with the still-popular Jokowi, who can not run once more. He has taken Jokowi’s son as his working mate and caught together with his development-focussed insurance policies. You will get extra of the identical, he’s promising, and it appears to be working. The platforms of different two candidates, Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, differ little in necessities.

The presidential debates have been largely calm and courteous. Rallies have been boisterous and full. Turnout on polling day will probably be excessive.

But Prabowo’s darkish previous nonetheless looms – regardless of Jokowi’s backing and a slick social media marketing campaign that has remodeled the picture of the army exhausting man who dabbled with inflammatory populism right into a cuddly grandfather determine.

“I wish to ask Prabowo: ‘Where is my son? If he is lifeless, inform me the place his physique is. If he is nonetheless alive, the place is he?'” says Paian Siahaan.

His son, Ucok, disappeared within the final months of the Suharto regime in 1998. The unit Prabowo commanded was held accountable for the kidnapping of 23 activists. One died and 13 have by no means been discovered.

Their households have gathered exterior the presidential palace in Jakarta each Thursday for the previous 17 years. Many are elderly. They need solutions, and greater than anybody else, they blame Prabowo.

Paian Siahaan, now 78 and a widower, makes the lengthy journey each week from his home in Depok to affix the protest. He confirmed me the again of his T-shirt, which learn: “Bring again the disappeared. Don’t let him rule the nation.”

“It is as a result of he’s a kidnapper,” Paian says. That is not the one accusation in opposition to Prabowo: an formidable, clever and hot-tempered officer who, as Suharto’s son-in-law, was a fast-rising star within the army.

He has additionally been accused of involvement in severe human rights abuses throughout Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of Timor Leste. He had a number of excursions of responsibility there, and was a part of the army unit which killed the Timorese chief Nicolao Lobato on the finish of 1978.

Many imagine he was additionally accountable for instigating riots in Jakarta and different cities in May 1998, which focused the ethnic Chinese minority, and finally pressured Suharto to resign.

Prabowo has at all times denied involvement in that, arguing that he was a scapegoat. He has admitted solely to ordering the kidnapping of the 9 activists who survived.

But I recall a gathering with him in early 1998, when he was very indignant with the Chinese business group, blaming them for the large monetary disaster which had engulfed Indonesia. He threatened to deliver Muslim mobs onto the streets in opposition to them.

After Suharto stepped down, the military dismissed Prabowo over the kidnappings, and he spent greater than a yr residing in exile in Jordan.

For Budiman, now Prabowo’s spokesman, these are issues of the previous, identical to his personal resistance. He now believes his vitality ought to be channelled in a special path.

“I’m not idealistic. I’m pragmatic however I’m additionally moral,” he says. “I shouldn’t be restricted to preventing for freedom and justice. I additionally imagine in Indonesia’s development.”

This is from a person who was sentenced to 13 years in jail for opposing Suharto. At his trial, he learn aloud a manifesto for 4 hours, detailing the defects of Suharto’s regime. “It is to the individuals that each energy should be devoted, and it’s from the those who energy comes,” he had declared.

You hear a good quantity of scorn for Budiman now. One of his former comrades informed me he would punch him if he noticed him.

But at the same time as a young radical he was clearly good and impressive, a pure politician. He makes no effort to hide his ambition – on the wall of the ready room in his marketing campaign workplace cling portraits of all seven of Indonesia’s presidents, adopted by Prabowo, after which Budiman himself.

As a comparatively new entity, in comparison with the opposite large events on this election, Prabowo’s political machine gives extra alternatives for a politician in a rush.

And Budiman is not alone. Six out of the 9 survivors of the 1998 kidnappings have both labored for Prabowo, or are backing him for president. Their causes aren’t too completely different to Budiman’s.

Indonesia has modified and so should they, goes the argument. Even a strongman like Prabowo, whom they as soon as opposed, is on the mercy of the poll field now.

At a recent rally, Prabowo launched Budiman by joking about the best way activists have been hounded by the safety forces underneath Suharto. “Sorry man, I used to chase after you too – however hey, I apologised.”

But then on the violent peak of their bitter rivalry in 2019 Jokowi and Prabowo additionally patched up their variations with minimal fuss. Jokowi provided Prabowo the job of defence minister, a robust position which pressured the US to drop the visa ban it had imposed over his human rights document.

Jokowi was the primary Indonesian chief with no hyperlinks to the old political elite, whose humble origins drove his attraction. He had no celebration equipment of his personal, and relied on his talent in co-opting his rivals to have the ability to govern and push by way of his signature growth initiatives.

But he hobbled the once-independent anti-corruption fee. He ushered in a sweeping cyber-crime legislation that has been used to prosecute a whole lot who’ve criticised the federal government. Then he acquired his son on the ticket as Prabowo’s working mate, by way of a controversial ruling on the constitutional courtroom, on which his brother-in-law was a sitting decide.

All of this has uncomfortable echoes of the authoritarian Suharto period. The dictator, like Jokowi, was from the cultural heartland of central Java. He styled himself the “Father of Development” – and that has been on the coronary heart of Jokowi’s legacy too, a lot of it funded by Chinese funding.

“He’s a superb politician, however not essentially chief,” says Okky Madasari, a novelist and sociologist who has produced a collection of video debates warning of the hazards of a Jokowi-Prabowo axis.

“That type of person is a risk to Indonesian democracy. Why? Because he’s not interested by his nation. He is simply interested by how you can protect his energy, and to present it to his household, to his sons.”

What these political compromises have given Indonesia is stability – in his second time period Jokowi had the help of events holding greater than 80% of the seats in parliament.

“We are at all times frightened about disintegration,” says Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a tutorial who has been adviser to 1 president and two vice-presidents.

Back in 1999, she was a detailed adviser to President Habibie, who had the unenviable job of holding Indonesia collectively within the post-Suharto turmoil. “He used to say he was the captain of an plane which was crashing, however everyone was attacking the captain.”

There was communal violence everywhere in the nation, a few of it shockingly brutal. I watched Muslims and Christians tearing one another aside within the Moluccas. One month later I noticed individuals in Kalimantan beheading and disembowelling their neighbours. In Aceh, the military was struggling to comprise a robust and fashionable independence motion. And President Habibie had agreed to a referendum in East Timor, which might finally declare its independence.

To my query then, that will Indonesia take into account letting Aceh go as nicely, Dewi had retorted that Indonesia was both the previous Dutch East Indies or it was nothing. Did the West actually wish to see it break up like an Asian Yugoslavia?

“You know being united is at all times a premium for us,” she says now. “And which means making large tent, rainbow coalitions in authorities, as Jokowi has carried out.”

But she provides: “If you go too far in that path, it’s totally troublesome to build a robust democracy, as a result of then you do not have credible checks and balances, you do not have a reputable opposition.”

A final-minute marketing campaign has acquired logging on, utilizing a four-fingered salute, to tell apart from these utilized by the three candidates to match their registered election quantity, to attempt to persuade voters to again “anybody however Prabowo”.

It will not be clear but how efficient it has been. But the Prabowo marketing campaign is pushing exhausting to win outright within the first spherical and keep away from a runoff, the place the four-finger marketing campaign may decide up momentum.

A few college students at a Prabowo youth rally informed me they felt his message was extra related to the young – round one-third of the voters is 30 years old or younger with no reminiscence of the Suharto period.

When I requested what insurance policies appealed most, they weren’t certain. They simply appreciated the tone and elegance of the messaging. And they felt anybody backed by Jokowi should be factor.

In 1998, an rigid, 32-year-old regime struggling to deal with the brand new forces of globalisation was the apparent goal for pissed off youth. They wished freedom and prosperity as Indonesia was hammered by a large financial meltdown.

Today, after many years of stability and a few prosperity, young Indonesian voters appear extra doubtless to answer an entertaining message – resembling Prabowo’s TikTok-fuelled marketing campaign – than an inspiring one.

Can their democracy survive a Prabowo presidency?

The Indonesian state – constructed up methodically by Suharto – has survived a lot. The violent upheavals of the late Nineties, rising jihadist terrorism within the early 2000s that many thought would unravel it, the experiment with democracy – Indonesia has absorbed all of it, mellowing it within the title of stability and peace.

There is a worth to pay, in rights and freedoms not revered, and previous abuses unacknowledged and unaccounted for.

Many Indonesians want it have been higher. But they understand it may very well be rather a lot worse. They solely should look throughout to Myanmar, in some ways the same type of not possible nation, to know that.