Bill Guerin, Jakarta – Former three-star general Sutiyoso is Indonesia's epitome of a strong leader, first as Jakarta's military commander and until earlier this year as the capital city's governor. Now, Sutiyoso, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, has pretensions to translate his experience at City Hall into a place at the presidential palace.
Although Indonesia's next presidential polls are not due until July 2009, Sutiyoso has already thrown his hat into the electoral ring, less than a week after finishing his 10-year term as governor. The 63-year-old politician, known for having friends in high political places, said upon declaring his candidacy that he had the support of "a number of political parties and leading figures" – although he did not reveal who exactly backed his bid.
The 25-year military veteran has also intimated broadly that elements in the military have expressed support for his candidacy. The military's political interests are perpetuated by the powerful Golkar Party, the country's best-oiled political machine. If Sutiyoso wins Golkar's support, his announcement could mark the beginning of a stiff new challenge to incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's likely re-election bid.
At the 2004 parliamentary elections, Golkar was the overall winning party, taking 128 seats, while former president Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P) won 109 seats. Yudhoyono's Democratic party won only 7% of the national vote gaining 57 seats, but later that year he won the presidency with 61% of the vote. Yudhoyono has since ruled in a de facto coalition government with Golkar, represented by Vice President Jusuf Kalla, the current party leader.
Yet, Kalla's leadership of the party has met some resistance, with critics feeling he has not pushed hard enough to secure cabinet seats for party members. Moreover, this month incumbent governor of South Sulawesi Amin Syam, who heads Golkar's provincial chapter there, lost narrowly to his deputy in hotly contested gubernatorial elections in Kalla's home province. Some inside the party reportedly feel that Golkar's slipping electoral support in the area could be related to its participation in the ruling coalition.
It's not clear yet that Golkar's rank and file are ready to dump Kalla for Sutiyoso or any other potential presidential candidate. But some political analysts say Kalla, born in Sulawesi, will find it difficult to mount a presidential bid in an election where 60% of the voters are ethnic Javanese and often vote along ethnic lines. Golkar has historically hedged its bets and if it eventually does opt to back a different candidate, Sutiyoso's resume would in many ways fit Golkar's leadership bill.
Sutiyoso graduated from the Military Academy in 1971, two years before Yudhoyono received his diploma from the same elite institution. His military career included more than 20 years of service with Kopassus, the elite Special Forces command. That included a role in Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, where he was allegedly attached to the Kopassus commando squad which now stands accused of the killing five Australian journalists, now famously known as the Balibo Five.
Sutiyoso has consistently denied any involvement or knowledge of the killings. Yet while on an official visit to Sydney this year, Sutiyoso was reportedly furious when a New South Wales police official entered his hotel room and invited him to appear at a coroner's inquest into the death of one of the five killed journalists.
He later served as Jakarta's military commander, sparking controversy when hired thugs, police and soldiers in 1996 attacked the then opposition Indonesian Democratic Party's (PDI), led at the time by Megawati Sukarnoputri, and killed at least 50 while hundreds of others were injured, arrested or disappeared. Despite periodic protests by human rights groups, no one, including Sutiyoso, has ever been held to account for the incident. At the time, Sutiyoso outranked Yudhoyono, who then served as chief of staff of the same military command.
One year later, then-president Suharto appointed Sutiyoso as governor of Jakarta, an indication of his close ties to the New Order regime. After Suharto's downfall in 1998, Sutiyoso was able to maintain his political prominence, straddling the country's metamorphosis from a hard-knuckled authoritarian regime to a modern, rollicking democracy. Under five different presidents, Sutiyoso has never stood in public elections. In the September 2002 elections inside the regional representative's council (DPRD), Jakarta's own legislature, to select a governor, both Golkar and PDI-P supported Sutiyoso's re-election bid.
Megawati actually signed an instruction from the party's central board that ordered all PDI-P members in the city council to vote for him or face sanctions. A senior party official in Jakarta was sacked for not obeying the order. This was viewed by many among the party's rank and file, and many of its most senior figures, as a betrayal and proof of Megawati's indebtedness to the military top brass, who backed the impeachment of president Abdurrahman Wahid and paved the way for her to take over the premiership.
Man of action
Over his 10-year tenure as Jakarta's governor, for better or worse, Sutiyoso earned a reputation as a man of action. He is on record in an interview with Tempo magazine characterizing his personal working style by saying: "Why crawl when you can run? I am a military man used to working fast."
That includes his controversial push to implement his "megacity" policy, a concept to merge the administrations of Jakarta and the other outlying cities to develop a coordinated plan for integrated transport, flood mitigation, waste management and other sticky issues linked to the country's rapid and massive urbanization.
Critics contended the concept was a pretext for Sutiyoso and other powerful elites to expand their political power base and win a share of more mega-projects funded by the central government and earmarked for provincial areas. Sutiyoso has denied such claims, including charges that he was angling to assume the position of a yet-to-be-created megacity ministerial portfolio. "I've cleared that [speculation] up by declaring my presidential bid instead," he recently told the local press.
As a presidential candidate, he has already vowed if elected to uplift the poor, strengthen the country's defense capabilities and strive for national economic and political independence. On the first score, its altogether unclear that his poverty alleviation credentials are as strong as Yudhoyono's or even outpace former president and PDI-P party leader Megawati, whose failure to address poverty and unemployment issues cost her and her party dearly at the 2004 polls.
As Jakarta's governor, Sutiyoso became renowned for taking a hard and sometimes uncompromising line on urban migration into the city. His office launched a concerted campaign against the city's informal business sector, including street vendors, pedicab drivers, commercial sex workers and even beggars. Those tough tactics often put him at odds with rights activists, who accused his city administration of denying poor residents basic economic rights. It was a criticism he publicly deflected, saying in a press interview after a particularly violent eviction incident in 2003, "This problem is actually the affair of the central government because they are not Jakarta residents. They are not my people."
Meanwhile, his policies on tackling air pollution, including a largely ignored ban on smoking in public places, were widely viewed as ineffective due to the lack of action against politically-protected buses and trucks that continue to envelope the capital in black smog. His attempts to tackle chronic traffic jams through the creation of bus-way corridors have also mostly failed, due to the drastic reduction in the width of the capital's major artery roads needed to support the bus lanes. With Jakarta's traffic now reportedly at its worst level ever, the new governor, Fauzi Bowo, has already announced that several kilometers of the bus lanes created under Sutiyoso are now open to all vehicles.
Powerful, not popular
Some political analysts believe that Sutiyoso's track record as governor have alienated him from the city's urban poor, which could influence sentiment among the masses in rural Java, home to an estimated 60% of Indonesia's 140 million voters. Yet while Sutiyoso has been widely and frequently criticized for his role in overseeing forced evictions, poorly designed flood mitigation efforts, chaotic traffic management and poor waste disposal systems, he has also won certain praise for his no-nonsense leadership style.
In May 2006, he was awarded the prestigious Widyakrama medal for his achievement in developing the city's compulsory education program, which under his watch has been better funded and resulted in improved teachers' working conditions and training. Moreover, Sutiyoso's second term as governor was notable for turning budget surpluses rather than deficits. However, the 2007 budget, which his administration devised and set at Rp21 trillion (US$2.2 billion), is set to slip into an unprecedented Rp 1.1 trillion deficit.
It wasn't clear until now that Sutiyoso had presidential ambitions. For instance, he told Tempo magazine in 2005 that "I have no talent for politicking. It's not in my nature" in reply to a question about whether he would in the future join a political party. His change of political heart came recently, when, according to an April interview published by Globe Asia magazine he said one day he would "stand in front of a mirror and ask myself whether I am appropriate to become president".
Still, Sutiyoso has already admitted that without the formal backing of a major political party, spelled Golkar, his electoral chances against Yudhoyono are slim. Yet he and his backers are clearly calculating that they might capitalize on any slip in public opinion polls against Yudhoyono between now and the 2009 polls by portraying the former governor as an alternative strong leader.
If so, he still has a long way to go in convincing the voting public. In the latest Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) poll, given a choice of 20 different possible presidential candidates, 32% of the respondents said they would vote for Yudhoyono at the next poll while 18% opted for Megawati. Only 1% of those surveyed chose Sutiyoso. "His name isn't yet known on a national scale," explained Saiful Mujani, LSI's director.
Mohammad Qadari, executive director of the IndoBarometer Survey Institute, similarly thinks it is too early to assess Sutiyoso's chances at the next polls. His institute's latest poll showed Yudhoyono leading the pack with a 35% chance of winning, followed by Megawati with 22%. Sutiyoso's chances were rated at rounding error levels of 0.5%.
Yudhoyono's Democratic Party has dismissed out-of-hand the notion that Sutiyoso could ever represent a future threat to the president's re-election bid. Party deputy chairman Ahmad Mubarok has already gone on the political offensive, saying that the public should judge Sutiyoso by his performance as Jakarta's governor. "He couldn't even handle the floods, and the bus-way has created traffic jams," said Mubarok.
Yudhoyono's small Democratic Party won just 7% of the 2004 vote, but electoral rules enacted that year stipulated that any party that won at least 3% of parliament's total seats were eligible to field a presidential candidate. Golkar and other major parties are now pressing for that electoral threshold to be raised to 5%.
Meanwhile, Yudhoyono's refusal as recently as October to formally confirm that he will run again in 2009 is galvanizing behind-the-scenes political jockeying, a cut-and-thrust which Sutiyoso clearly aims to capitalize on. Indeed, his bid is already generating plenty of political scuttlebutt. Wimar Witoelar, spokesman of former president Abdurraham Wahid, summed up Sutiyoso's chances during a recent television interview:
"He has a lot of money; he has proven to be successful in the Jakarta gubernatorial election. He is efficient, almost as efficient as [former dictator] Suharto, and almost as ruthless. People like that can win races."
Who the powerful Golkar Party will advance at the upcoming elections is still a wildcard, but an ethnic Javanese former soldier with a well-worn authoritarian streak like Sutiyoso will no doubt appeal to certain party stalwarts. Although Sutiyoso may now lag badly in the polls and appears to lack substantial grass roots popular appeal, his pro-establishment credentials could be all he needs to be anointed as Golkar's choice to challenge Yudhoyono at the next polls.
[Bill Guerin, a Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000, has been in Indonesia for more than 20 years, mostly in journalism and editorial positions.]