April 2 2009

Campaign fever and the corruption crackdown make Indonesia sweat

 

President Yudhoyono may seem to be pandering to Islamists, but the grafters will be running scared if he wins another term, says Eric Ellis

WITH landmark elections due next week in Indonesia, I recently got a rich taste of how grassroots politics really works here.

Moving to Jakarta, we’d hired a flotilla of domestic staff drawn from Indonesia’s massive pool of the unskilled and uneducated who drift into the capital from impoverished villages in search of work and hope. There was a maid, a gardener, a pool attendant, a driver and a live-in ‘security’ guard, each engaged with a caution from neighbours that the $300 a month we intended to pay each of them — about treble Indonesia’s GDP per capita — was most irregular. Money defines class in Jakarta, and our newly-democratised neighbours didn’t quite say it would give their itinerant countrymen ideas above their station. It was more like: ‘You’ll make it bad for the rest of us if you pay this much.’

Then a new parade of supplicants padded to our door: hopeful handymen, possible plumbers, aircon guys, rubbish collectors, water vendors, the newspaper boy and, most intriguingly, a man who lived at the bottom of the street, whose self-appointed job was as vigilante deterring would-be miscreants. But surely that was the polisi’s job, I asked our security chap. One didn’t need fluent Bahasa to catch his scorn. ‘Polisi? Korupsi!’ he chortled, an Indonesian mantra. Law enforcement in Indonesia has been so polluted that freelancers have stepped into the vacuum. Privateer paladins patrolled territories of around 200 houses, levying 50,000 rupiah a month from each household, a nice little earner. It was only about $4, but since we already had security we saw the service as superfluous. Don’t even think about it, he explained, everyone pays because you never know what happens if you don’t. We paid for the sake of a quiet life.

But it took a burglary to discover what this character was about. We returned from a break to find our house violated, stripped of computers, cameras, the usual loot. Grubby prints daubed walls and floors. The thieves had jemmied a window and fled up our papaya tree to the neighbouring kampung. I marched to the vigilante’s house demanding to know how this had happened. He explained he’d been at home that night, as he was most every night. Security? That was just what he said he did. He gestured at posters in Islamic green that festooned his house, a shrine to the Islamist United Development Party, known as the PPP per its Bahasa acronym. The monthly fees he extorted from the neighbourhood had little to do with security, but were in effect political donations to the PPP, the third-biggest party in Indonesia’s parliament.

And what a party to contribute to. Often accused of corruption, the PPP’s long-time leader Hamzah Haz was Megawati Sukarnoputri’s vice-president at the time of the 2002 Bali bombings (after resiling from remarks two years earlier that no woman should ever be president of Indonesia). More alarmingly, Hamzah had invited Jemaah Islamiyah chieftain Abu Bakr Bashir to a cosy vice-presidential dinner two months before those bombings, warning those who’d sought his help in cracking down on radical Islam in Indonesia that ‘if you want to arrest Abu Bakr Bashir you will have to deal with me first’.

We contemplated calling the real police. Then a friend brought us news of another burglary, where thieves had made off with about $250,000 worth of jewellery. The cops wanted a bung of $2,000 simply to consider an investigation.

It was a revealing confluence of three defining influences in Indonesia; money, corruption and religion. The burglaries occurred on the holiest day in the nation’s religious calendar — the festival of Eid-al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the Ramadan fast. As we learned, it’s the prime time for break-ins in Jakarta. At Eid, Muslim families gather en groupe for the break-fast while non-Muslims, notably relatively wealthy expatriates and Jakarta’s Chinese business class, tend to take the week off. Homes are vulnerable, pickings are rich. No matter that Eid is supposed to be the most charitable day of the Islamic year.

But Indonesia’s good news is that the radical Islamist politics threatening the secular state seems to have been eclipsed, despite my unwitting efforts to sustain it. Support for the two main religious parties has collapsed since the last parliamentary elections in 2004, though not without the unedifying spectacle of various pols playing footsy with the mosque vote. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) himself nodded through an anti- pornography law demanded by mostly Javanese Islamists who really didn’t care that its strictures would make offences of millennia-old cultural practices in faraway Hindu Bali and Christian Papua. SBY’s office described the palace’s support as a ‘symbolic gesture’.

The PPP is the third-largest party in parliament after Suharto’s old fief Golkar and Megawati’s vehicle, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, both secular strongholds. But now it will be lucky to pick up half of its present support. February opinion polls show PPP support running at about 4 per cent. And those good friends of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the creepy Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, are tracking about the same. They’d polled 7.5 per cent in the 2004 elections and were running as high as 15 per cent through 2007-08. Of the other parties with a greenish hue, Amien Rais’s National Mandate Party (PAN) and ex-president Abdurrahman Wahid’s National Awakening Party (PKB), both really secular outfits, will be lucky to carry 5 to 6 per cent between them on 9 April. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Jakarta thinktank, says the Islamic vote has collapsed from a third of the electorate in 2004 to a wobbly 14 per cent today.

But corresponding social measures don’t at all suggest a drop in religious activity. Quite the contrary, as the fuller- throated muezzin of the mosque 200 metres from our house testifies. Rather, they speak to the emerging maturity of Indonesian voters to separate the strictures of the mosque from the possibilities of state. They speak to the innate good sense of the Indonesian voter who, after only a decade of democracy, has genuinely embraced the power of the ballot box.

Indeed, Indonesia has emerged as a paragon of representative democracy to shame Australia’s unreliable neighbours elsewhere in south-east Asia; the always peevish Malaysians seem about to appoint a leader carrying the whiff of murder about his office; Singapore’s oligarchy-by-libel-suit struggles to keep its social contract as the economy plunges; and the permanent instability of Thailand’s four governments in a year, where elites and their opponents have learned a thing or two from the untidy Philippines’ export of people’s power coups. And let’s not go there with the one- party states of Indochina and Burma, whose malodorous generals modelled themselves after Suharto’s grasping brass.

Take corruption, the issue that most agitates Indonesians. They know that their pot-holed roads, the lack of sanitation, infrastructure, jobs, schools, competence, capacity and accountability — indeed the dam that broke to swamp suburban Jakarta last week to drown scores of the chronic poor — are down to rampant graft. And terror too, which thrived in the negligence of Megawati’s dysfunctional apparatus and still festers in vinegary madrasas and schools the state hasn’t yet reached with its secular curriculum.

Yudhoyono won the presidency in 2004 on an anti-corruption, anti-terror ticket. He felt a few collars in his first year — bent governors, police commissioners and cranky clerics — and was very popular. Indonesians felt he was delivering. At last, after Bali and the Suharto kleptocracy — the old crook’s main Australian apologist Paul Keating describes as ‘nonsense’ the evidence backed by the World Bank and others that Suharto stole up to $30 billion — Indonesians believed that their nation could be a better place, more honest, normal. Indonesia moved up from being one of the world’s five most corrupt nations, as measured by Transparency International, to near mid-table.

But SBY dropped the ball mid-term. The parliament was revealed by a probing media — press liberty being the single biggest success story of post-Suharto ‘reformasi’ — to be rancid. Laws were auctioned to the highest bidder and no party was innocent. So, too, the central Bank Indonesia. The BI’s missing money is measured in the billions — remember this was the nation Australian taxpayers helped bail out from financial crisis in 1997-98. As corruption spread, the Islamist parties, particularly the PKS, prospered. Around the time the BI’s governor was directing monetary policy from remand prison, a poll showed support for the PKS to be around 15 per cent and trending higher.

And then last year SBY started doing his job again. He gave more powers to his capable finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the most powerful woman in the Indonesian government and a possible SBY running mate in the July presidential poll. A hard man arrived at the state’s anti-corruption authority, nailing MPs, officials and businessmen. One of the more spectacular stings was of Billy Sindoro, right-hand man of the media and property baron James Riady, filmed in a lift handing around $50,000 to a commissioner of the anti-monopoly agency deliberating a case involving a Riady media business. Along with the cash, investigators seized the executive’s eight mobile phones, each equipped with throwaway SIM cards. Islamists liked it too — the born-again Christian Riady sponsors mega-churches in the Javanese heartland.

As the corruption crackdown gathered force, SBY’s numbers began to rise again. And the Islamist parties fell. Now, SBY’s centrist and secularist Democratic party, founded just two days before 11 September 2001, leads opinion polls with 20 to 25 per cent support. Compare that with the 7.5 per cent it polled in the 2004 legislative election. The Democratic party seem to be taking votes away from its notional coalition partner, the Islamist PKS. SBY won office in 2004 with the support of Golkar and its plutocratic clients in Kadin, the national chamber of commerce littered with old Suharto cronies and their heirs, like the kingmaking mining tycoon Aburizal Bakrie. But such is the Democratic surge, SBY may not even need such allies. Golkar’s support has fallen to 14 per cent and Megawati’s PDI-P to 16 per cent, down from 22 per cent and 19 per cent in 2004 respectively, a collapse that has prompted slightly desperate plans between these two once-mortal enemies to team up and stare down the rising SBY juggernaut.

Opinion polls for the separate presidential poll on 8 July show SBY in even greater command, tracking at 40 to 45 per cent. That’s more than double the support for SBY’s closest opponent, ex- president Megawati, whose 2001-04 tenure in the Istana Merdeka, Jakarta’s Dutch colonial confection of a presidential palace, is mostly remembered for her shopping trips to Singapore. None of the other 16 or so potential candidates can raise more than 5 per cent support. Conventional wisdom has it that SBY will walk away with another term, and that the September run-off he needed to beat Megawati in 2004 will not be necessary this time around. That’s certainly the result Canberra and Washington want.

Once, the best one could say of SBY’s tenure in office was the simple democratic achievement that he looked likely to serve a full term, unlike his three post-Suharto predecessors. But, stronger now, if he does triumph as the polls suggest, SBY just might get a genuine mandate to conclusively fix Indonesia. Australia will have a functional and reliable neighbour, the dual horrors of Bali won’t be repeated and Indonesia’s victims of crime won’t need to pay bent police to investigate it.

And our ‘security’ man will be out of a job.