by Emmy Hafild*
The post-Suharto era calls for a new paradigm because we, the NGOs need to reorient our approach in advocating human rights and development in Indonesia. In the past, we, the Indonesian NGOs when building alliances with foreign NGOs, consciously used outside power to influence Suharto's government policy on human rights, development and environment. That is why we heavily lobbied the World Bank, foreign government involved in IGGI and later CGI, and other multilateral development banks to put conditionalities in their lending to the Indonesian government. Some of our friends at that time criticized these tactics saying that we were imposing a suprastructure on our country's governance.
But, we answered those criticism by saying, in the case where the country's democratic mechanism does not work in an authoritarian government, the tactic of using outside power can be justified, to build and empower the democratic struggle that we were organizing. Outside protection was also needed for human rights and democratic activists working in the country. Conditionalities were needed so that the government is forced to take into account issues that they do not want to listen and adhere to, such as human rights, freedom of speech and assembly, environment, as well as conditionality for participatory approach in development program.
Indeed, the Indonesian government (up to Habibie's current transition government) listened to the IMF and the WB and the US government more than its own legislators. That is why, we tended to bypass the Indonesian legislators, and went directly to outside power, government, multilateral development banks or the UN. Once in a while we went to our parliament, but only to set a stage to get attention and coverage by our mass media. But the real advocacy work lay elsewhere.
Now, when the danger for democratic movement is no longer as severe as before, and a new parliament produced by the first open and transparent general election in 44 years will be convened soon, this argument can no longer be justified. We can no longer ask the outside governments to pressure the Indonesian government to adhere to human rights standards without also lobbying hard the Indonesian parliament to do so. What is then the mechanism of advocacy in the post Suharto era? Before we go into this discussion, let us analyzed the current political and economic situation in Indonesia.
Current Political, Social, Economic and Environmental Context There are three major factors working within Indonesia at the moment.
First, the transition into a democratic society. This transition does not only happen in the state institutions, namely government and parliament but also within the Indonesian society. This transition process is going to be a difficult process, because our experiences of a democratic system were very brief, between 1949 to 1959. In such a short period, there was no accumulation of knowledge and understanding of democratic systems. There are whole generations who have never experienced democracy in any form. The whole understanding of democratic mechanism was dismantled both by Sukarno through his "guided democracy" and by Suharto in his "Pancasila democracy". Suharto was very systematic in erasing the knowledge of democracy within the Indonesian society, by imposing brainwashing curriculum for students from elementary school to university, and within the society through P4 (Pancasila) training. All leaders in society, including CEOs of big business, had to go through this P4 training. If there was understanding about democratic systems, it is only within the scholars and NGOs activists. The rest of the society has no idea what democracy is.
So, transition to democracy will have to occur not only within the government, in the parliament, or judicial system, but also in our society. In our society, we have to address the politics between ethnic and religious groups, among different classes of society, and between civil society and political society. We have to address not only the questions of how to control our government, our legislators and our political leaders but also how to solve ethnic and religious conflicts that have been kept under surface for 32 years? The more fundamental question is: how to run a country in a republican and democratic system? Our understanding about republican system has been blurred by Suharto's attitude as the King to the country. As Ben Anderson put it, we even have to reinitiate our nationalism project, because in three decades, the understanding of Indonesian as a nation has been dominated by the state, and this means by Suharto through his mislead Javanese culture. That has resulted in resentment towards Javanese and the Jakarta-led system. We have to answer the question: what does it mean to become Indonesia?
At the same time, we have to deal with the real situation, how to cope with Ambon conflict, how to deal with the Aceh case, how to resolve the Dayak and Madurese conflicts, East Timor and West Papua, and other engineered and unengineered conflicts – all of them bloody and very painful. At the time where the economic crisis is still at the bottom we have to face class conflicts created by the old economic system. Looting, reclaiming of lands by the evicted, vendetta killings, thuggery, robbery and so on are our daily reality. Our feeling of safety has been lost and replaced by anxiety and fear of unseen enemies. As an activist, I never felt safe before, but I knew who my enemies were, knew where it came from, and knew how to avoid it. But now, I do not know where my enemies are, I could be robbed, mugged or killed without knowing who did it.
As a nation, we have yet to deal with the humiliation that we feel with the East Timor referendum. Most Indonesians do not know what happened in East Timor; the information flow was tightly controlled. Thousands of families have to endure the lost of their love ones, or to cope with invalid husbands, sons and relatives. I happen to live very close to the Indonesian army invalid rehabilitation center and know hundreds of them who have been the maimed in East Timor without knowing why. It is so painful for them to see that their sacrifice has been blown away just like that. I fully agree with the referendum, we should have had this referendum 20 years ago, but I am just trying to portray how we, as a nation, have to face this problem. The loss of East Timor for Indonesia as a nation is the same as the lost war in Vietnam for the US. After 24 years, the US has yet to deal with this pain; the society is still divided. But the USA has a deep democratic root (even if with guns) which we are lacking. I suspect it is more difficult for us to deal with this issue.
And we have still not overcome the trauma of 1965 which haunted us till now. The truth of the coup d' etat is yet to come out. The confusion about the whole situation, who was right and who was wrong, still persists. We are still divided, and millions of us, who have been victimized for three decades have not recovered from the trauma. Can we avoid vendetta, can we deal with the truth, and do we even know the truth?
Second, structural adjustment program, trade liberalization and debt. While we are in transition to democratic society, we have to endure severe IMF program, have to face the incoming agricultural agreement, Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP) and maybe a new version of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). During our struggle against Suharto, we let IMF take over Suharto and his family, let WTO the solve the special treatment that Suharto's son Tommy received for his car industry, we let the IMF trade liberalization dismantled the monopolies owned by Suharto cronies and family (i.e.: rattan, cloves and citrus trade monopoly). These actions actually were cheered by the Indonesian society. IMF is regarded as a hero in this case. Of course, clove farmers for instance, are now enjoying their high market price, after more than 10 years its price and trade controlled by Tommy Suharto.
Very few Indonesian's political and society leaders aware of the other side of the coin, the impacts of SAP and trade liberalization on grassroots and small holder farmers, workers and small and medium enterprises. It seems that democratization for Indonesians is also shifting the economy into market liberalization. IMF was criticised only when they insisted on high interest rates and disagreed on exchange rate control, which in the end killed the economy and made Indonesian banks fall into further financial crisis. The incoming wave of trade liberalization brought by IMF and its allies is still being overlooked by our society.
Third, environmental degradation. We all can breath normally for the time being, but our neighbours to the west of our country have to endure regular haze and smoke exported by Indonesia every year. Forest fires are the tip of the iceberg of the problems in our forest and further environmental degradation has been detected after the economic crisis.
Our air was a little bit better when the crisis hit the worst level last year as people reduced travelling by car. Now, congested traffic, followed by smog can be found every day. Bad air quality is the source of upper respiratory problems in cities like Jakarta. It is the second killer of children under five years old in Jakarta alone. It contributes to 12 per cent overall death. Seventy per cent of ground water in South Jakarta was contaminated by ammonia, bacteria coli, and other toxic waste.
Environmental degradation is estimated to be increasing due to economic crisis. People who lost their job in the cities returned home and participated in looting timber from state owned forests, especially in Java. Logging companies, in their attempt to cut costs, stop logging but buy logs from illegal cutting. It is cheaper that way. To get the economy going again, we have no choice except selling and exploiting our natural resources, meaning minerals, forests and marine and agriculture resources. Our manufacturing has collapsed and in the few that have survived further deterioration of the environment can be expected.
Finally, the new autonomy law. Our transition is not only from authoritarian government to democratic ones, but also from centralized to decentralized government. We have a new law of autonomy at district level. The district governments now are elected and responsible to the district parliament, have the power to allocate natural resources, receive a bigger portion of natural resource rent than central government, and collect taxes to pay their expenses.
This law would not be so controversial if the autonomy rests at the provincial government. In their attempt to maintain their power the central government has approved autonomy at the district level, because it easier for them to deal with small, less powerful district governments than with more powerful provincial governments. The centre also hopes that this will prevent splinters from the unitarian system, because district governments will never be powerful enough to split from the Indonesia Republic, while provincial will have the power if they are autonomous. By accepting autonomy at the district level, the central government, here I refer as the "tiger", will only face 320 "barking deers" who are easier to deal with and harmless compared to 26 strong and aggressive "bulls" of provincial government, who may be much more difficult and powerful.
For us civil society, we are watching this transition of power anxiously. First, civil society is very weak at the district level, very few NGOs or CSOs are working at that level. Therefore, the understanding about democratic systems is very weak. Second, most districts in Indonesia are based on single ethnic majority, because traditionally it was delineated based on former small kingdom. Until now, the feudal system is more prevalent than democratic system. A leader at this level is likely to be a member of the local elite, rather than the best person amongst the many.
Fourth, tension among districts, over natural resources, that is competition for fishing territory, or river water use will escalate. Many of these former small kingdoms were enemies before and were only in "peaceful" situation under the Dutch colonial rule and then under Suharto's authoritarian rule. The hidden bitterness of past feud still exists. I can imagine what will happen. Fishers of my hometown for instance, who have been battling trawler owners from other ethnic groups, some times in a violent way, will drive away those trawlers and will not allow them to fish in their territory. This will be a bloody conflict over resources. In a situation of increasing ethnic conflict, autonomy at the district level is not healthy to our democratization process.
Fifth, in terms of environment, this autonomy could be disastrous. WALHI has always advocated that decision over natural resources should be taken at the grassroots level. Decentralization was our major issue. However, realizing all the weaknesses in democratic system at the district level, we fear the worst will happen to the environment. The local elites are all anxious to compete with other districts in maintaining high levels of economic growth that they could not achieve in the past, due to central government dominance. Now, they are free to exploit their natural resources. This situation is made worse by the fact that skills and knowledge on protecting the environment are lacking at this level.
For us civil society, it is more difficult to pursue a reform agenda, which is: democratization, clean government and good governance in 320 governments, compared to advocacy against 26 governments. Instead of having one centralized authoritarian government, we will have 320 small, corrupt and authoritarian governments. Human rights abuses will not only be conducted by the Indonesian military, but also by these 320 local governments. It is a hell of a task!
Advocacy in the New Context
In this kind of situation, how do we build our alliances to advocate the rights based development process? We face a very different situation now. There is no single enemy as before. Therefore, we will have problems in focusing our advocacy. What are the targets? What are the issues?
One thing that we should do is to avoid imposing a suprastructure on the Indonesian state system. We have to leave those kinds of tactics behind and built new tactics. It does not mean that Indonesia cannot be criticized: all criticism should be aired and exposed. Right now for instance, when Indonesia (both the government and parliament) uses the dual standard to deal with East Timor, the whole world should criticise us, they should impose sanction on Indonesia.
Maybe (I am still thinking out loud about this) we need to develop a two pronged approach: advocacy inside Indonesia and outside Indonesia. Inside Indonesia, we have to make sure that the four issues that I mentioned above will not bring Indonesia back into chaos, human right abuse and deep trouble. In this case, we have to make sure that the democratic mechanisms that we are trying to establish will work. We need to build trust among our people that democratic mechanisms can work and can prevent us from deteriorating into further chaos.
There is a need for all out campaign for democratization, especially at district level. More NGOs and CSOs needs to be established at this level, more civic education is needed. Since many development NGOs are actually working at this level, civic education programmes should accompany development projects, so that increasing welfare will result in civil society developing at village level. Similar arguments can be put forward for community organizing. Community organizing for cooperatives, for instance, should be developed further into community organizing for local governance watch. Therefore, the seeds for civil society could actually spread from income generating projects.
At the same time, outside support for Indonesian civil society during the recent election has actually planted the seeds for new NGOs and CSOs at the district and kecamatan level. Within WALHI for instance, eleven thousands volunteers were recruited during the election. Tens of thousands of volunteers were recruited by other organizations during the same period. These volunteers could be developed into organizations that can be the motor for democratization movement at district and kecamatan level. We need your help in realizing this goal.
Advocacy outside Indonesia should be directed at the compliance of the Indonesian government to a universal democratic standard. We have to avoid the WB or the IMF or the WTO setting human rights, good governance and environmental standards to be followed by the Indonesian government. Those organizations should follow universal standards that have been agreed within the UN body, or under multilateral agreements. Let's not give the power to these institutions which actually are not democratic. Let's direct our challenges to these organizations by forcing them to respect democratic processes that have to take place within the country.
For advocacy I would like to request that our friends go beyond Ambon, West Papua, Timor and NTT to other parts of Indonesia. These concerns are valid but the most effective way to deal with this problem is by ensuring that a democratic government will be installed and with that, a sustainable economic program can be developed.
I would like to argue that the most important thing is that the next government will be the government that has been chosen by the majority of Indonesian people. Let us prevent the government that is not popular to the Indonesian people from winning the next level of election. If this happens, our problem will not be solved and we will go further into chaos.
* Emmy Hafild is the director of Walhi, a network of more than 400 Indonesian environmental organisations. This is an edited version of the paper presented at the Australian Council for Overseas Aid Annual Council Meeting, Canberra, Australia, 11 September 1999.