AS.45(1)_Covers 1&4 2/18/05 12:36 PM Page 1 ASIAN SURVEY ASIAN VolumeXLV A Bimonthly Review of Contemporary Asian Affairs University of California Press
Vol. XLV, No. 1, January/February 2005
A SURVEY OF ASIA IN 2004 Number 1 Number
The United States and Asia in 2004 • JONATHAN D. POLLACK North Korea in
2004 • KYUNG-AE PARK China in 2004 • MARY E. GALLAGHER South Korea in
2004 • VICTOR D. CHA Japan in 2004 • NOBUHIRO HIWATARI Taiwan in 2004 • STEVE CHAN Russia and the CIS in 2004 • HIROSHI KIMURA Mongolia in 2004 January/February 2005 January/February
• NYAMOSOR TUYA India in 2004 • BALDEV RAJ NAYAR Nepal and Bhutan in
2004 • MICHAEL HUTT Afghanistan in 2004 • LARRY P. G OODSON Sri Lanka
in 2004 • NEIL DEVOTTA Pakistan in 2004 • CHARLES H. KENNEDY Bangla-
desh in 2004 • ALI RIAZ Indonesia in 2004 • R. WILLIAM LIDDLE AND SAIFUL
MUJANI The Philippines in 2004 • TEMARIO C. RIVERA Cambodia in 2004 •
MELANIE BERESFORD Singapore in 2004 • GARRY RODAN Vietnam in 2004 •
ADAM FFORDE Malaysia in 2004 • BRIDGET WELSH Laos in 2004 • DEAN
FORBES AND CECILE CUTLER Thailand in 2004 • ROBERT B. ALBRITTON Myan-
mar in 2004 • KYAW YIN HLAING Brunei in 2004 • A. V. M. HORTON East Timor
in 2004 • JAMES COTTON Papua New Guinea in 2004 • JAMES CHIN
INDONESIA IN 2004 The Rise of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani
Abstract Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired army officer, became Indonesia’s first directly elected president, defeating incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri in a landslide. Key positions in economic ministries were awarded both to pro-market and protectionist groups. A suicide bomb killed nine people and wounded nearly 200, intensifying the nation’s search for al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.
Politics The 2004 Election Cycle Indonesians successfully conducted three general elec- tions in 2004. The first, held on April 5, simultaneously chose members of the national Parliament (called the People’s Representative Council, Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat); the new Senate-like Regional Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah); and representatives for all provincial, district, and municipality-level legislatures throughout the country. The 2004 electorate was the most fragmented in Indonesian history. Eleven parties won 2% or more of the popular vote for Parliament, a feat accomplished by only five parties in the 1999 election.1 The Functional Groups Party (Partai Golongan Karya, Golkar), the former state party during Suharto’s New Order
R. William Liddle is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State Univer- sity, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. Email: [email protected] . Saiful Mujani is Director of Research, Freedom Institute, and Lecturer in Political Science, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta. Email: [email protected] . 1. Election figures for 2004 are from the National Election Commission (KPU, Komisi Pemi- lihan Umum), online at http://www.kpu.go.id/suara/hasilsuara_dpr_sah.php . Asian Survey, Vol. 45, Issue 1, pp. 119–126, ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
119
120 ASIAN SURVEY, VOL. XLV, NO. 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 table 1 Major Party Vote in April 5, 2004, Indonesian Elections
Popular Vote Pancasila/ Parties (%) Islamist Partai Golkar (Functional Groups Party) 21.6 PS PDI-P (Indonesian Democracy Party-Struggle) 18.5 PS PKB (National Awakening Party) 10.6 PS PPP (Development Unity Party) 8.2 IS Partai Demokrat (Democratic Party) 7.5 PS PKS (Prosperous Justice Party) 7.3 IS PAN (National Mandate Party) 6.4 PS PBB (Crescent Moon and Star Party) 2.6 IS Other 17.3 Total 100.0
SOURCE: Komisi Pemilihan Umum (National Election Commission), http://www.kpu.go.id/ suara/hasilsuara_dpr_sah.php , May 5, 2004. era (1966–98), came in first with 21.6% of the vote, almost exactly the same percentage it had received in 1999. Golkar narrowly bested incumbent Presi- dent Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democracy Party-Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan, PDI-P), which plunged from 33.7% of the vote in 1999 to 18.5% this year. In both 1999 and 2004, Golkar’s support spread throughout the archipelago, making it more representative of the Outer Islands, while PDI-P’s vote con- centrated in the predominantly ethnic Javanese provinces of Yogyakarta, Cen- tral, and East Java. Both Golkar and PDI-P are secular nationalist parties, that is, in formal terms, adherents to Pancasila, the five principles of state doctrine enunciated by Indonesia’s national founding father Sukarno in 1945.2 Most In- donesian parties have adopted either Pancasila or Islam (the latter being the re- ligion of 88% of Indonesians, according to the 2000 census) as their basic principle (see Table 1, which lists the major parties in the 2004 election and their basic principles). The relatively high vote totals for the Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat) and the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, PKS), 7.5% and 7.3%, respectively, surprised many observers. Partai Demokrat is new, founded in 2001 as a presidential campaign vehicle for General (re- tired) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, then coordinating minister for political and
2. The principles are belief in God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social jus- tice. The first principle is interpreted broadly by secular nationalists to mean acceptance of and equal treatment for all the major religious traditions present in Indonesia, including Islam, Protes- tantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, and Confucianism.
INDONESIA IN 2004 121 security affairs in the Megawati government. Partai Demokrat has no other prominent members and only a skeletal organization nationwide. Like Golkar and PDI-P, it adheres to Pancasila. PKS is the new name of the Justice Party (Partai Keadilan, PK), which had won only 1.4% of the vote in 1999. PKS is in several ways the opposite of Par- tai Demokrat, being Islamist and rooted in the powerful tarbiyah (education, in the sense of Muslim consciousness-raising) movement seen in secular state universities. Moreover, PKS is the best organized of all Indonesian parties, with 400,000 carefully selected and well-trained cadres, and has cultivated an image of collective decision making in which no individual leader stands out. PKS was the only Islamist party to improve its position in 2004. This was probably because its campaign emphasized not an implementation of syariat (Islamic law) but the broadly popular theme of “clean and caring govern- ment,” in opposition to parties and leaders, both Islamist and secularist, widely perceived by voters to be corrupt and elitist. The largest Islamist party, Devel- opment Unity (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP), dropped its vote share from 10.7% in 1999 to 8.2% in 2004. Of all parties gaining more than 2% of the vote, the four Islamist parties together won 20.5%, while the seven pro- Pancasila parties won 68.8%. On July 5, five pairs of candidates, nominated by parties victorious in the parliamentary election, competed in the first direct presidential and vice presi- dential election ever held in Indonesia. The presidential candidates, in order of their first-round finish, were as follows: Partai Demokrat’s Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, 33.6%; PDI-P’s Megawati Sukarnoputri, 26.6%; Golkar’s Wiranto, former armed forces commander, 22.2%; Amien Rais of the National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional, PAN) and former head of the modernist Muslim organization Muhammadiyah, 14.7%; and PPP’s Hamzah Haz, the incumbent vice president, 3%. Of the five presidential candidates, only Haz represented an Islamist party. As no candidate received an absolute majority, a runoff election was held on September 20 between the top two tickets headed by Yudhoyono and Mega- wati. Yudhoyono won by a landslide, obtaining 60.6% of valid votes cast; he was inaugurated on October 20 to serve a five-year term as Indonesia’s sixth president. His vice president is Jusuf Kalla, formerly coordinating minister for people’s welfare in the Megawati government. In classic ticket-balancing style, Kalla’s background and credentials—civilian, orthodox Muslim, businessman from South Sulawesi—complement those of Yudhoyono—retired military, ethnic Javanese from East Java, and syncretist Muslim. Yudhoyono’s victory was especially impressive because it was broadly based both across the party spectrum and demographically. According to a survey conducted by the Indonesian Survey Institute (Lembaga Survei Indo- nesia, LSI) after the second round, the Yudhoyono-Kalla team won 84.7% of
122 ASIAN SURVEY, VOL. XLV, NO. 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 the voters who had chosen Golkar in the April parliamentary election.3 This was despite the fact that the national Golkar leadership allied with PDI-P, in a newly formed National Coalition (Koalisi Kebangsaan), to support Megawati in the second round. Yudhoyono-Kalla also won 79.5% of the voters for the National Awakening Party (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa, PKB), founded by former President Abdur- rahman Wahid (1999–2001) and supported by many members of the Awaken- ing of Traditional Religious Scholars and Teachers (Nahdlatul Ulama, NU), Indonesia’s largest association of traditionalist Muslims. As organizations, neither PKB nor NU backed Yudhoyono. Amien Rais’s PAN, a pro-Pancasila party identified with Muhammadiyah, gave Yudhoyono-Kalla 84.3% of its voters, and the Islamist PKS gave them 89.2%. Both of these parties did for- mally support Yudhoyono in the second round. Hamzah Haz’s Islamist PPP joined the pro-Megawati National Coalition, but 78.8% of its voters nonethe- less chose Yudhoyono-Kalla. Even 32.6% of PDI-P voters chose Yudhoyono in preference to their own leader. Demographically, there was little distance between Yudhoyono and Mega- wati voters along the variables of rural/urban, region of residence, age, educa- tion, and employment differences. Perhaps most significantly, the two candidates were supported almost equally by pious Muslim voters, who told LSI inter- viewers that they pray five times a day. This is despite the fact that Megawati’s PDI-P is strongly identified with non-Muslims, and Yudhoyono had the impri- matur of the Islamist PKS and the Crescent Moon and Star Party (Partai Bulan Bintang, PBB) in the second round. PBB, at 2.6%, was the eighth largest party in the April parliamentary election. What accounts for Yudhoyono’s broad support, especially recalling that he was not well known among potential voters as recently as mid-2003 and his own Partai Demokrat won only 7.5% of the vote in the April 2004 legislative election? Part of the answer is that he skillfully seized and held the religious high ground, despite attempts by some opponents to smear him as an Islamist and others to paint him as anti-Islam. In this effort, he was helped (as indeed was Megawati) by the willingness of most members of the political elite to cut deals across even the deepest lines of religious cleavage. His effective coali- tion included both secular nationalists and Islamists. More important, Yudhoyono was able to capitalize on pervasive dissatis- faction with Megawati’s leadership of the country. According to the October LSI survey, Indonesian voters are most troubled by the rising costs of basic commodities and difficulty in finding employment. Only one-third of them
3. Analysis is based on a national random sample (Aceh to Papua) of 1,200 respondents in a survey conducted by LSI from October 2–4, 2004. LSI survey methodology is described at http:// www.lsi.or.id .
INDONESIA IN 2004 123 believe that their personal and the national economic situation are better this year than they were in 2003. At the same time, nearly two-thirds agree that their personal and the national economic situation can improve in 2005. High percentages of voters—on average, about 82%—believe that Yudhoyono gets things done, is decisive, charismatic, inspiring, caring, honest, likable, and smart. Much lower percentages—on average, about 54%—see comparable qualities in Megawati.
Yudhoyono’s First Weeks in Office What can we expect from the Yudhoyono presidency? Two early indicators are the mixed signals sent by his cabinet appointments and his troubled relations with Parliament. The significance of his economic ministerial appointments will be treated separately in the next section below. Taken as a whole, Yudhoyono’s cabinet appointments suggest indecisive- ness or a desire to please too many constituencies, qualities for which he is well known. The new president received great praise for naming Supreme Court Justice Abdul Rahman Saleh as his new attorney-general. Saleh had ear- lier distinguished himself as the lone dissenter on a five-judge panel that had reversed the criminal conviction of the national Golkar chair, Akbar Tandjung, for misappropriating state funds. Megawati’s attorney-general, by contrast, had been exposed by the press for his luxurious lifestyle but nonetheless re- mained in office. Observers hoped that Saleh’s appointment would lead not only to more vigorous prosecution of corrupt officials but to broader judicial sector reform as well. Many other cabinet appointments were seen as either uninspired or exces- sively responsive to the demands of party leaders in Yudhoyono’s People’s Co- alition (Koalisi Kerakyatan). Lackluster appointments singled out by the press included those for the key posts of coordinating minister for political, legal, and security affairs, Yudhoyono’s old job under Megawati, and minister of home affairs, who oversees sub-national government. Moreover, the new home affairs minister is a retired army general close to the president. This appoint- ment reaffirms (under a directly elected president!) a pattern of army oversight of civilian government introduced decades ago by President Sukarno and con- tinued ever since. The People’s Coalition was hastily stitched together after the first round of the presidential election in response to the formation of the National Coalition by Akbar Tandjung’s Golkar, Megawati’s PDI-P, Hamzah Haz’s PPP, and some smaller parties. Golkar, PDI-P, and PPP were the first, second, and fourth larg- est parties, respectively, in the April parliamentary election, accounting for 48.3% of the electorate. The National Coalition’s strategy was to mobilize party activists to get out the vote for Megawati.
124 ASIAN SURVEY, VOL. XLV, NO. 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 The most important members of Yudhoyono’s People’s Coalition were his own Partai Demokrat, PKS, PAN, and PBB (the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth largest parties, respectively), which together had won only 23.8% of the April vote. In the presidential race, however, party backing figured much less impor- tantly than did candidate Yudhoyono’s personal attractiveness. Nonetheless, 15 out of 35 cabinet-level positions were given to People’s Coalition party leaders, including two from the tiny PBB. Moreover, the presence of four min- isters from the Islamist PKS and PBB, plus two more from the Muhammad- iyah-affiliated PAN, appeared to tilt the cabinet toward the Muslim rather than the secular nationalist side of Indonesia’s great political cultural divide. The newly inaugurated President Yudhoyono clashed immediately with Par- liament, throwing into sharp relief the antagonism between the National and People’s Coalitions that may haunt him throughout his term of office. After the second-round presidential election, the PPP joined Yudhoyono’s People’s Co- alition, but it remains the smaller of the two alliances with 232 (42%) out of 550 total seats in Parliament. The National Coalition has 264 seats (48%). Former President Abdurrahman Wahid’s PKB, with 52 seats (9%), declined to join either coalition, giving PKB considerable potential bargaining power. Yudhoyono’s clash with Parliament was precipitated by a letter from Mega- wati. One of her last acts as president was to request (as required by law) the agreement of Parliament to the resignation of Armed Forces Commander Gen- eral Endriartono Sutarto and his replacement by Army Chief of Staff General Ryamizard Ryacudu. Sutarto’s resignation was sudden, and still has not been fully explained, but it appears that Megawati then seized an opportunity to make trouble for her successor by appointing the notoriously anti-civilian and anti- American Ryamizard to the highest position in the Indonesian armed forces. When Yudhoyono became president, he sent a letter to Parliament with- drawing Megawati’s request. At this point, the National Coalition, led by Golkar and PDI-P, decided to challenge Yudhoyono by contesting the legality of his action. The new president was accused of treating Megawati as an enemy, em- barrassing Ryamizard, and harassing (melecehkan) Parliament. Forty-nine mem- bers of Parliament submitted an interpellation to the president as “a warning to the government to be careful in adopting any policy, because Parliament and the President are at the same level (dalam posisi sejajar).”4 In mid-December, Sutarto still served as commander and Ryamizard as army chief of staff, but the issue had not been resolved.
The Economy Of all the East and Southeast Asian economies struck down by the fiscal crisis of 1997–98, Indonesia was hit hardest—recording a growth rate of –14% in
4. Kompas, online at http://www.kompas.com/ , December 8, 2004.
INDONESIA IN 2004 125 1998—and has been slowest to recover. In 2004, its gross domestic product grew at 4.3%, a modest improvement over 4.1% in 2003 and 3.7% in 2002 but still well below the 6%–7% needed (and promised by candidate Yudhoyono) for strong growth. Most important, foreign direct investment (FDI), once the main engine driving Indonesian development, has remained flat or negative since 1997. Most observers blame the country’s slow recovery on the extended period of its domestic political instability, from the fall of Suharto in May 1998 through the turbulent presidencies of B. J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid. Mega- wati has gotten higher marks for stabilizing the macro-economy, reducing inflation and the fiscal deficit, and ending Indonesia’s dependence on the In- ternational Monetary Fund (IMF). But her presidency was brief and much re- mains to be done, including tightening labor regulations, trimming export-import procedures, protecting property rights, combating corruption, and coordinat- ing the several levels of the newly decentralized government administration. In all of these areas, Indonesia “lags well behind regional best practice.” A more immediate threat is that fuel subsidies for domestic consumers, which have grown four-fold in recent months because of the rise in international oil prices, will overwhelm the state budget. The estimated 2004 figure “is also al- most double the budgeted 2005 amount, and is approximately equivalent to the budgeted figure for development expenditure in the current year.”5 In his economic appointments, President Yudhoyono fell under intense pressure from several constituencies. The announcement of his cabinet, on in- auguration day, was delayed for several hours by frenetic last-minute negotia- tions. In the end, he appears to have tried to please both protectionists and market-oriented economists. Suharto-era businessman Aburizal Bakrie was named coordinating minister for the economy on the advice of Vice President Kalla, himself a beneficiary of protectionist economic policies. At the same time, three pro-market economists were appointed to key positions: career ministry official Jusuf Anwar, as minister of finance; California-educated Mari Pangestu, as minister of trade; and Illinois-trained Sri Mulyani Indrawati, cur- rently an IMF official in Washington, D.C., as head of the National Develop- ment Planning Agency. Some observers of the new economic team argue that the distinction be- tween protectionists and market economists is exaggerated. Indonesian gov- ernments today, they claim, have no alternative but to follow the dictates of the market. Moreover, both Kalla and Bakrie understand that the policies of an earlier era are no longer relevant. This view was affirmed by the vice presi- dent’s first major economic policy statement, which noted that the revised 2005 state budget would cut fuel subsidies by 40%.
5. Haryo Aswicahyono and Hal Hill, “Survey of Recent Developments,” Bulletin of Indone- sian Economic Studies 40:3 (2004), pp. 277–305.
126 ASIAN SURVEY, VOL. XLV, NO. 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 International Relations On September 9, 2004, a powerful car bomb exploded outside the Australian Embassy in the heart of the Kuningan business and diplomatic district of Jakarta. Nine people, all of them Indonesians, were killed, and nearly 200 wounded. It was the third suicide attack in as many years, following the bomb- ing of a nightclub in Bali in 2002 and the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003. All three bombs are believed to have been the work of a British-trained Ma- laysian engineer named Azahari Husin. Azahari is thought to be connected to Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), the shadowy organization of violent Islamists in Southeast Asia, which, in turn, is allegedly connected to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Since the Bali bombing, the Indo- nesian authorities have worked closely with Australian and U.S. investigative agencies. The alleged spiritual leader of JI, Abubakar Ba’asyir, has been of particular concern to the United States government. He was acquitted in Jakarta of terrorist charges last year but was rearrested and is now being tried in connection with both the Marriott and Bali bombings. During Indonesia’s presidential election, rumors swirled that Yudhoyono was being secretly assisted by the United States. On election day, some politi- cians charged that the U.S. was rigging the results in his favor. The basis of these rumors is probably Yudhoyono’s willingness, when he served as Mega- wati’s coordinating minister, to work with the U.S. after the Bali and Marriott bombings. The larger context of this suspicion, however, lies in the almost universal anger in Indonesia at the Bush administration following U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. As president, Yudhoyono’s actual policies are likely to resemble those of his predecessor, balancing a sensitivity to the world’s only superpower with responsiveness to domestic constituencies. He perhaps signaled this intent by asking Megawati’s foreign minister, the career diplomat Hasan Wirayuda, to stay on the job.
*** The tsunami that ravaged Asian countries on the Indian Ocean in late 2004 hit Indonesia the hardest. The epicenter of the massive December 26 earthquake that spawned the killer waves was located off the coast of Sumatra, whose coastal regions were inundated and destroyed. In the aftermath, at year-end, at least 80,000 people in Indonesia were dead and estimates of the eventual toll were rising.