INDONESIA ONE CHEER FOR DEMOCRACY IS RAISED BY ELECTIONS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 16

INDONESIA ONE CHEER FOR DEMOCRACY IS RAISED BY ELECTIONS

(Reprinted from the "Economist" by arrangement)

The results of this month’s elections in Indonesia show a clear victory for President Sdharto, but they do not justify putting out more flags for democracy in Asia. The Government’s electoral .machine, the Sekber- Golkar, may have pulled in as many as 60 per cent of the votes, overshooting the sunniest forecasts of its own leaders. Since 100 seats in Parliament are reserved for official appointees, that would mean that the Government can count on the backing of more than 300 of the 460 members of the new Legislature. It would also mean that, when Parliament is called Upon to vote for a new President in 1973, the generals will not need their tanks to make sure that their man gets elected.

But General Suharto’s victory had its price. The Golkar machine is said to have spent more than SUSSO million on its charter planes, < loud speaker vans, its pork- < barrel politicking and its roving bands of troubadors. Part : of that was supplied by the affluent Chinese businessmen '■ who coughed up SUSSOO a head for places at Americanstyle fund-raising banquets. But Golkar’s success depended on more than lavish campaigning. The new electoral laws prevented the opposition parties from doing most of the things that an Opposition is normally supposed to do. For example, they were not allowed to express criticism of Government actions or to discuss "the religious question.” And, especially in the villages, officials eager to produce support for the Government resorted to strong-arm tactics. Jobs threatened There is evidence that some civil servants were threatened with losing their jobs unless they joined Golkar, that some opposition rallies were forcibly dispersed and that peasant voters in the backblocks were herded to (he ballot-boxes by military police. Mr Subchan, the leader of the Moslem Scholars' party (one of the largest of the nine authorised opposition groups), claimed that on most of the island of Sulawesi there was no' Pretence of a secret ballot; There will be more complaints. The irony is that the elections were partly designed to win the approval of the outside world as a step towards civilian rule. But what happened at the elections must be put into perspective. After all, it is easy enough for westerners (and above all for AngloSaxons) to forget that the democratic system is a rarity, and perhaps even a luxury. The copies of Westminster that the British bequeathed to Asia and Africa have had only a precarious existence; most of them have given way to personal dictatorships, one-party rule, or military juntas. The Indonesians’ only previous experience of a free election came in 1955, and was soon followed by the chaotic personal autocracy of Sukarno—one of that breed of third-world leaders that a French observer has called “demigods.” Sukarno substituted the cult of personality for rational planning and an attack on Malaysia for any attempt to come to grips with the country’s economic crisis.

Pogrom’s survivors The men who succeeded him are the survivors of the pogrom unleashed against the army high command by the Indonesian Communist Party on the night of September 30, 1965. That night has rightly been seen as one of the turning-points in recent South-East Asian history. The fact that General Nasution escaped his wouldbe assassins and was able to rally the armed forces 'determined that Indonesia would be ruled today by soldiers rather than the Communists. That also had its price. It has been claimed that more than 500,000 people died between 1965 and 1967 as the soldiers took their revenge. It will not be easy to bury the enmities of those years, and the men in General Suharto’s Government who insist that only a new generation will be able to restore the country to full civilian rule may have a point. And who could govern the country now if the generals and Golkar failed? Their main opposition lies in three places: in the suppressed Communist Party, which stul has tenacious grassroots support in eastern and central Java, where land famine and overpopulation are most acute; in the Nationalist

party, which seems to be held together only by regional chieftains like those in Bali and by a diffuse sense of nostalgia for its golden days of affluence under Sukarno; and in religious groups like the Scholars’ party, and others, whose main appeal is to Moslem chauvinism or Catholic and Protestant fears of Moslem dominance. General Suharto’s real claim to power is that he represents a coalition of interests (the army, the civil servants, the urban professional men) that may be capable, if anybody is, of threading the -country’s thousands of islands together and getting the economy back on the rails by rational management and by attracting foreign investors. And he has not done badly. The rate of inflation has been pushed down to under 10 per cent, compared with 85 per cent in 1967 and 650 per cent in Sukarno’s worst year. The Government has coaxed new concessions out of foreign creditors, including the Russians and the East Europeans, and some SUS64O million is to be poured in as foreign aid this year. Figures like these mask the problems that remain. There is a gaping trade deficit, and much of the SUSI[ billion that was invested by private companies between 1967 and 1970 went into the extractive ! industries, which do not give jobs to many people. There is an urgent need to accelerate internal migration away from land-hungry Java 1 towards the roomier islands and to create new jobs to ! soak up the unemployed. If 1 the Government did some arm-twisting to get its 1 majority that was partly ' because there has not been 1 time for the considerable

economic progress it has brought about to seep down to the man in the paddyfield. That is why some sympathetic outsiders have suggested that General Suharto might have done better to put off the election for a year or two until he could count on more genuine public support. But Indonesia will remain a “supervised democracy”—as the official jargon puts it—for a long time to come. General Suharto has at least managed to widen his political base through Golkar. He has shown that power does not rest solely in the barracks by promoting Mr Adam Malik, the civilian Foreign Minister, as the main Government tub-thumper in the electoral campaign. Small changes, perhaps, but Indonesia was unlikely to sprout a stable party system overnight. One forecast of the country’s political future is that General Suharto will be replaced‘by a retired general who will in turn be replaced by a civilian who

s enjoys the confidence of the f high command. This will not ! happen overnight, but one of i the hopeful things is that i General Suharto does not ■ look to be the kind of man, > who becomes addicted to office. : Before passing judgment jon the Indonesians, it is 1 worth while looking around 1 the region. The -two-party . system in the Philippines has- ; failed to provide an outlet ; for some of the explosive' ! social frustrations that undoubtediy exist there. Malay-' ’ sian democracy is fine if you j happen to be bom a Malay, 5 but less satisfactory if you r are Chinese or Indian. The f armed forces and the local I oligarchy run Thailand, as . they have done for much of » its history; and neighbouring e Burma is under the slackenj ing thumb of an introverted autocrat who has fallen t prey to a morbid fear of i assassination. e In South Vietnam the poliv ticking for the presidential a election scheduled for Octo- ;- ber 3 is going on as intensely i, as ever, despite the war, but o then South Vietnam is a very d special place because the Americans obliged its leaders e to submit themselves to the e voters in order to justify “ their own presence there. No n one really believes that it is ® possible to hold an entirely a clean election in time of ine ternal war. But the paradox e of South Vietnam’s election is that it really is possible ° for the Opposition to over- ” turn the Government, how- “ ever much shady business * goes on beside some hamlet polling-booths, whereas the, e leadership in Hanoi would s never contemplate exposing y itself to the same risk. e Singapore’s status

Singapore remains an island, in a political as well as a geographic sense, and even here there has been mounting criticism of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s tough treatment of his critics, and especially the press. Singapore has be come a de facto one-party state without any illegal seizure of power; which means that despite its booming economic growth it runs the risk of failing to reflect the divisions of opinion in its society. Against this background, it is possible to see the Indonesian generals for what they are: men who are loosening their grip a little in search of some kind of political legitimacy. Rousseau believed that democracy could exist only in small republics, like his ideal version of Geneva or Corsica. He had a narrow view of democracy, but also a necessary sense of the relativity of political ideals. E. M. Forster thought that democracy was worth two cheers; perhaps the Indonesian generals deserve one.