Indonesia's Democratic Movement Under Attack
— Max Lane
ON MARCH 28 and 29, a series of rightist mobilizations took place in
Jakarta, Indonesia. The largest of these was a 500-strong mobilization
aimed at disrupting a march and rally being organized by the United
Party for National Liberation (Papernas) protesting foreign domination
of the Indonesian minerals sector and demanding nationalization of
companies in the sector. These groups were armed with scythes, knives
and canes. This was the fourth time in the last six months that
Papernas had been targeted for violent disruption.
Kompas daily newspaper listed the following groups as being involved
in the attacks: Forum Betawi Rempug (FBR), Front Pembela Islam (FPI),
Pelajar Islam Indonesia, Indonesian National Patriotic Movement and
the Front in Defence of the Red and White Flag. Other smaller
mobilizations, but involving people from the same network of groups,
were also mobilized against other targets on the 28th as well as the
29th. These also included the Anti-Communist Movement (GERAK).
The common theme in these attacks has been a virulent anti-communism.
The atmosphere encouraging an offensive by these small rightist groups
has been set by the government, which has launched its own
anti-communist campaign through the Attorney-General's department. The
latter campaign has not been aimed at Papernas, but at the second
group of people who have also come under attack from the rightist
groups on March 28: the numerous historians who have been writing new
histories of Indonesia in the more liberal atmosphere after the fall
of Suharto.
In March the Attorney General banned 14 history textbooks. Previously,
writers and even Ministry of Education officials had been summoned as
part of a criminal investigation initiated by the Attorney General's
Department. The crime of which the historians have been accused? They
no longer label as "a Communist plot" the actions of a group of
military officers who detained and later killed seven generals on 30
September 1965.
The military officers who led the action to arrest their seniors, who
they claimed were plotting to overthrow the then president, Sukarno,
called their group the Thirtieth of September Movement (G30S).
General Suharto, whose faction seized control of the Army, started a
campaign to describe the G30S as a Communist Party (PKI) conspiracy
and started to call it the G30S/PKI. The PKI was banned and more than
a million of its members and supporters killed in an Army-led
slaughter.
The new generation of historians has written textbooks where they
return to using just G30S and sometimes provide alternative
explanations of the events. The fact that they do not continue to
blame the PKI is considered by the Attorney General's department as a
criminal act.
A 1967 resolution of the Peoples Consultative Assembly (MPR), which
had been purged of all its left-wing members, bans the spreading of
Marxism-Leninism. This resolution, which in effect bans communism, is
still in effect.
On March 28, twenty members of the group GERAK protested at the
Indonesian Academy of Sciences, demanding it "clean itself of
communists," singling out historian Asvi Warman Adam, one of the most
active writers and campaigners for the end to the falsification of
history, specially on the events of 1965. Other groups demonstrated at
the Attorney General's department supporting the ban on the history
textbooks.
Papernas and the March 29 Assault
Previous attacks have taken place on Papernas meetings in Surabaya
(2006), in Jogjakarta (2006) and in East Java earlier this year.
Attacks on the party that initiated its formation, the Peoples
Democratic Party (PRD), had last come under this kind of attack in
2001, when they were seen to be supporting President Abdurrahman
Wahid, who had called for an end to the ban on communism or any other
ideologies.
In these earlier instances, the group leading the attacks was the
Indonesian Anti-Communist Front (FAKI), which was able to mobilize
50-100 armed men. In most of these earlier cases, the police stood
between FAKI and the Papernas events, so that no actual physical
attacks took place. At the same time, the police applied pressure on
Papernas to end their events more quickly than they had planned.
The laws banning communism, not questioned by any party in the
parliament, lend a huge "formal" legitimacy to these groups'
activities in the eyes of the police, many of whose views reflect the
conservative mentality developed during the Suharto years.
As a part of launching Papernas's political campaigning following its
founding congress in December 2006, it scheduled a series of morning
rallies and a Jakarta Peoples Rally in the afternoon to demand the
nationalization of the mining sector industries, including oil and
gas. Of the 137 oil and gas companies operating in Indonesia, 110 are
foreign owned with contracts giving them exploration rights over 35%
of Indonesian territory, according to Papernas's analysis.
The occasion for the demonstration was the parliament's discussion of
new laws on investment and a UN seminar, being held at the Shangri La
hotel, reviewing Indonesia's progress in meeting the UN's Millennium
Development Goals. Agus Jabo, Chairperson of Papernas gave me the
details of what happened by phone from Jakarta.
On the morning of March 29 around 2000 supporters of Papernas, many of
them members of urban poor campaign groups, headed for Jakarta in
buses. They had been saving for months, donating a few cents a day, to
be able to hire the buses. As they arrived at the second of their
protest destinations, the Shangri la Hotel, they came under a surprise
attack by around 100 members of the FPI, FBR and other groups who were
wielding knives and canes and threw stones into the crowd or into the
bus windows, smashing at least 20 windows.
The overwhelming majority of the Papernas supporters were housewives,
unarmed of course, many with young children, and were forced to
disperse. Heavy rain made the situation even more difficult. The
Papernas supporters later regrouped back in their base areas. They had
to cancel their planned afternoon Jakarta Peoples Rally at the
Independence Proclamation Park, where another 300 or so FPI, FBR and
other members were also waiting.
Agus Jabo told me that at least 10 people were taken to the hospital.
According to Kompas, the head police detective there was also injured.
Despite knowing of the threats, the police mobilized only a small
contingent to the event totally ineffective in protecting the rally.
The police had only issued the paperwork making the rally and march
legal at the very last minute, using the fact of the threats and
possible violence as a reason for holding up the bureaucratic
permission process.
Still Moving Forward
Papernas members also report that the feeling among their supporters,
after regrouping back at their base, was still strong and angry.
"Later in the afternoon on March 29, we held a press conference
protesting the events," Jabo told me. "There were other groups there
who had suffered similar harassment the day before, such as the
Coalition Against Foreign Investment an NGO coalition that had
protested outside the parliament.
"We will also be suing the FP and FBR for the damages they did to the
buses and to the ten people who were hospitalized, some beaten, some
suffering heart problems," he said.
At the conference a joint protest statement was signed by Papernas as
well as the two main Indonesian human rights organizations, Imparsial
and KONTRAS, as well as the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute and the
pro-democracy advocacy group, DEMOS. Other groups, including the
Working Peoples Association (PRP), have also issued solidarity
statements.
Dita Sari, prominent labor activist and the Papernas presidential
candidate, also related over the phone how three of the women,
housewives, also spoke at the press conference. "They told how these
armed men demanded they confess to being paid to attend the rally.
They refused, saying that they had instead donated 10,000 rupiah to
pay for the buses. The gang members demanded the women confess to
being communists, but they explained they are religious people and
were there to support education and health for poor people. Others
gave evidence of how they were beaten with bamboo canes."
"Again and again we have seen how the police cannot be relied on at
all to protect our rights. I think this means that whenever Papernas
organizes events in the future, we will need our own self-defense
group for protection."
Separate from this, but at the same venue, another meeting was being
held to organize resistance against the attack on the historians.
Hilmar Farid, one of the most active of the historians, told me that
they would be thinking of how to link the responses to the increasing
activity of the rightwing groups. They would consider with their
petition campaign but also try to organize a major public forum to
debate the issue of the right to interpret history.
"It seems there is a conflict sharpening between some of the old
Suharto-era groups and the elite factions who are trying to
consolidate their power," Jabo told me. "Both, of course, want to
shore up the neoliberal economic system so they don't like our
policies. But it may be that the old New Order elements, now out of
power, are trying to provoke wider horizontal conflict as a way of
destabilizing or discrediting those in power now. The groups who
attacked us are just the manipulated agents on the ground, not the
real forces pushing this process along."
The incidents on March 29 involved around 2,500-3,000 people —
2,000-2,500 Papernas supporters and 500 members of the various
rightist gangs. These are small numbers within the scale of the
national politics of Indonesia, a country of 250 million. And there
are probably only a score or more historians at the frontline of the
struggle for the freedom to interpret history, although many more at
the level of post-graduates and recent graduates.
Yet these events have been highlighted in the mass media. A national
TV debate between Dita Sari and Asvi Warman Adam and two conservative
intellectuals took place on April 4. More will follow.
The Democratic Revolution
It is no coincidence that the attack on history and the PRD's attempt
to launch a new party of national liberation have come under attack at
the same time, and are being linked in public discussion.
In the late 1980s in Indonesia, a new effort began to build a mass
movement against the Suharto dictatorship. Students broke out of the
ideological straitjacket that had been imposed during the previous 24
years of near totalitarian military-backed rule. They linked up with
peasants, and later factory workers, and began mobilizing on the
streets.
The landmark activity was the mobilizations with peasants against the
seizure of land with almost no compensation for the Kedung Ombo dam
project in Central Java. The revolutionary impact of this
student-peasant, student-worker street mobilization, even while
beginning small, cannot be overemphasized. It represented a
qualitative break with the political life prevalent between 1965 and
1989.
During this period, the regime implemented a policy known as "the
floating mass" — an explicit substitute for democratic mass politics.
Preceded by the terroristic mass murder of around a million activists,
peasants, workers, students and intellectuals and the imprisonment of
tens of thousands more, the policy banned all mass mobilizations, as
well as membership of political parties at the village level. Left
wing parties, unions and publications were also banned altogether, and
even the leaderships of conservative parties with a genuine mass
following were de facto taken over by the government. The
dictatorship's philosophy was summed up as follows by its chief
ideologue in the 1960s and '70s, Major-General Ali Murtopo:
"The political parties were always trying to marshal mass support by
forming various affiliated organizations based on the ideologies of
their respective parties. The mass of the people, especially those in
the villages, always fell prey to the political and ideological
interests of those parties. Their involvement in the conflicts of
political and ideological interests had as its result the fact that
they ignored the necessities of daily life, the need for development
and improvement of their own lives, materially as well as spiritually.
For this reason it is justifiable that political parties are limited
to the district level only [i.e. are banned from the villages]. Here
lies the meaning and the goal of the depoliticisation (the process of
freeing the people from political manipulation) and the deparpolisasi
[the process of separating the people from political party
allegiances] in the villages.
"In this way people in the villages will not spend their valuable time
and energy in the political struggles of parties and groups, but will
be occupied wholly with development efforts. Through this process
there emerges the so-called 'floating mass.'"
This "depoliticisation" and "deparpolisation," at the heart of the
Suharto dictatorship's political strategy, represented an effort to
wipe out a political tradition that had come into existence in the
very process of creating Indonesia as a nation, and had provided the
political method that was employed to fight attempts by U.S.
imperialism, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to gain
dominance in Indonesia between 1960-65.
Indonesia was one of the most mobilized and most party political
countries in the world in the '50s and early '60s. This is why the
terror had to be so great in 1965, to suppress not just the left, but
the whole tradition of "trying to marshal mass support by forming
various affiliated organizations based on the ideologies of their
respective parties."
What began in 1989 was a new process, aimed at mobilizing people
indeed at the village level, in direct confrontation with the
fundamental basis of the dictatorship. And it caught on quickly:
Through the period 1990-1996, a series of student-peasant and
student-worker mass protests took place which re- legitimized this
method of struggle.
A range of groups pioneered the effort, at the forefront of which was
the Peoples Democratic Party (PRD). By 1996, more moderate party
forces, such as (Sukarno's daughter) Megawati Sukarnoputri's
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), also started to use the mass
mobilization method. In the middle of 1996, responding to attacks from
the dictatorship, militant and angry mass mobilizations of PDI
supporters started to take place. The regime reacted with a Crackdown,
targeting in particular the PRD, but also the activist elements in the
PDI.
Suharto fell as a result of mass mobilizations, which threatened to
radicalize if the ruling class had not sacrificed him. Conceding to
the pressure of the mass radicalization, the balance of forces between
the ruling class and the rest of society was dramatically altered —
not to the extent that the ruling class did not continue to rule, but
it no longer could implement the depoliticizing "floating mass"
strategy.
In the new climate political parties have mushroomed. Aksi, street
protest mobilizations, have become a daily occurrence involving almost
every sector of the population — even though often small, sporadic and
rarely extending beyond a few sites of grievance.
The success of the anti-dictatorship movement has re-won, as a
legitimate method of struggle, mass street protests, strikes and other
forms of mobilization as well as political party mobilization. This,
in fact, represents a key element in the method of struggle introduced
into Indonesia at the beginning of the 20th century in the course of
the anti-colonial struggle that created an Indonesian nation.
Struggle for National Memory
However, 35 years of ideological suppression has meant that the
endemic social protest, while a fundamental feature of Indonesian
political life today, has remained fragmented, not congealing into
national ideological streams of any kind at all.
The dictatorship's political strategy went beyond mass murder, terror
and suppression in order to achieve the "floating mass,"
"depoliticisation" and "deparpolisation." It also carried out a
centralized, coordinated and systematic approach to wipe out the
masses' memory of the previous 60 years of history, the history of the
national revolution that had created Indonesia and which then grew
over into a struggle to consolidate independence in the face of
neocolonialism.
To be sure, the murder of a million people dents a class's memory a
fair bit by simple physical elimination of human brains. Suppressing
the parties and unions, breaking them up with terror as well as legal
bans, smashes up chains of continuity. Banning the writings of
Sukarno, the national revolution's main thinker, as well as all other
leftwing publications was a further blow.
To consolidate these measures, the regime then handed over all efforts
relating to the writing of history, including school and university
curricula, to the Armed Forces History Center. Exposure to any
elements of the populist, left or radical ideological traditions of
the nation's formative process was denied all generations of children
educated since 1965.
Many young people, including high school and university graduates,
never read a single speech by Sukarno — or any other major historical
figure. Instead they have been forced to rote learn one of the
grossest falsification of histories ever undertaken. In this history,
the Army is presented as the national savior since time immemorial
(even before there were modern armies) and the Left, especially the
Indonesian Communist Party, as the embodiment of evil and treachery.
Much of this falsification of history also demonizes Sukarno, although
the regime was constrained by the need to recognize his role in the
struggle for Independence. He was relegated to purely being one of the
"proclamators" of Indpendence on 17 August 1965. For almost 35 years
absolutely no other version of history reached anybody, except the
tiniest number of inquisitive malcontents.
Aksi Without Memory or Ideology
The social protest that has spread so phenomenally after the fall of
Suharto in May 1998 has remained sporadic, in generally small
mobilizations and limited to the site of grievance. Protests have not
generally aligned with any of the almost twenty parties in the
parliament, or the more than 60 parties outside it. Only in a few
cases have they spawned new organizations of their own, and usually
confined to a particular region. Most of these are peasant federations
and trade unions. But they remain small too, and local or located in
just a few sites of grievance.
There has been no crystallization into nationwide ideological or
political organizations, movements or even more vague networks. Any
dynamic in that direction remains weak, still early in its development
and progressing slowly and hesitantly. This is because there is no
ideology, at least no conscious discussion of ideological choices.
This in turn is connected to the suppression of ideological life for
35 years and once more to the falsification of history, the
suppression of memory, particularly as the ideology of mass
mobilization before 1965 was Sukarnoism articulated as "socialism ala
Indonesia."
In 1980-81, the publication of the historical novels of Pramoedya
Ananta Toer and the emergence of a publishing house, Hasta Mitra, led
by radical Sukarnoists Joesoef Isak and Hasyim Rachman, was the first
bomb which blew apart some of the suppression of history and memory.
These novels reminded people that the project of Indonesia was
motivated by the desire for human and social liberation and not
military glory, order and crude economic growth. The fact these
incredibly well received books were published by Sukarnoists revived
an interest among young intellectuals in the Left from before 1965.
The books were banned and the publishers virtually — though not quite
— driven out of business in the 1980s (but they have produced more
books liberating history since the fall of Suharto.) Indeed the issue
of memory and history has been central to key political developments
since the fall of Suharto.
Presidential Politics
Since the fall of Suharto, in May 1998, there have been four
Presidents. Their coming and going has been relatively boring, except
in the case of President Abdurrahman Wahid. In 2000 the Peoples
Consultative Assembly (MPR) elected him even though he was nominated
by one of the smaller parties. He received the support of almost all
the parties operating under an Islamic banner because they opposed the
other major candidate, Megawati Sukarnoputri, as she is a woman. Wahid
also received the support of GOLKAR, the ruling party under Suharto,
which was the main rival to Megawati's party in terms of size.
This meant that Wahid was elected by a very conservative constituency
in the MPR, but he rapidly lost this constituency's support. In fact,
he alienated some of the groups so much that even more conservative
Islamic groups swung their support behind Megawati. The MPR later
deposed him through an impeachment process, voting that he had been
engaged in corruption — based on a very weak and unconvincing case.
What lost Wahid this support? Among a range of factors were two of his
attitudes that threatened the elite's 30-year-old ownership and
control of the national collective memory, and the ideological
hegemony that such control helped ensure. First, he announced that he
advocated a repeal of the formal ban on Marxism-Leninism, arguing that
there should be no attempt to ban any ideology.
Second, he called for reconciliation with the victims of the 1965
suppression, i.e. the pre-1965 Left. These policies galvanized the
most right-wing groups into an explicitly anti-communist formation,
but also galvanized the mainstream right — GOLKAR, the Army, the PDI
(now PDIP) and the Islamic parties into a single bloc against him.
It was also during Wahid's Presidency that the process was begun to
review all history curricula, a process that was not completed until
after he was deposed. Even so, it appears some of the books that came
out of that process are being labeled as "criminal."
The public discussion over interpretation of history has remained
steady since the Wahid period, and has resulted in an explosion of
material on history and the assertion of a more independent stance.
Most of this new work is aimed at "correcting" history, i.e. fighting
the New Order's falsification of history. This is a radically
political process even if, until the conflicts of the last few weeks,
it has taken a mainly intellectual or even academic form.
Panic on the Right
It is not surprising that we are now seeing the first signs of panic
on the right. So far this comes from the ultraright, manifested
through the actions of various paid thug (preman) gangs, operating
either under an Islamic, anti-communist or chauvinist nationalist
banner.
Behind these groups are the most Suhartoist elements in the army and
also ex-Army officers. They are the most sensitive to the threat.
Other rightwing forces, I think, don't yet realize the Pandora's Box
that will be opened if history, and the right to collective memory, is
re-won by the masses of Indonesia.