John McBeth, Jakarta – Controversial new legislation that would give the Indonesian armed forces unilateral authority to deploy troops in the event of an emergency appears to undermine efforts by reformers to impose civilian supremacy over the military.

Critics fear the move by a new generation of conservative officers may return the country to the days of President Suharto, when the army was used as an instrument to maintain the status quo. Analysts link this reassertion of power to several events that together have removed pressure on the military to knuckle under to civilian control.

First, international pressure on the military eased following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. Secondly, the Bali bombings last year refocused attention on domestic security. And thirdly, the Indonesian parliament seems reluctant to cross the armed forces in the run-up to mid-2004 elections.

But former Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono, the first civilian to hold the post, also places much of the blame on weak government leadership. "I blame civilian political leaders for the praetorian-guard mentality that persists among the officer corps," he told the Review. "To be sarcastic about it, the 'un-supreme quality' of civilian political leaders makes 'civilian supremacy' a farce."

Reformers had been hopeful that the military would come under civilian control after Suharto fell almost five years ago. This reform process began under President B.J. Habibie, who succeeded Suharto in mid-1998. Military representation in the regional and national parliaments, which had become enshrined under Suharto, was reduced. Active-duty officers were prohibited from being elected or appointed to positions in the civilian government.

Over time, the military broke its links to the former ruling Golkar party, and in 1999 the 200,000-strong police force was separated from the armed forces. Under Habibie's successor, Abdurrahman Wahid, the military formally abandoned dwifungsi, a doctrine dating back to Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, that gave the military both a political and a security role in Indonesian society. Last year, the People's Consultative Assembly, Indonesia's highest legislative body, voted to end the military's parliamentary participation altogether in 2004.

The furore over the current legislation, called the Indonesian Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia or TNI) Bill has focused mainly on one portion, Article 19. That is a provision under which the armed forces chief is required only to inform the president 24 hours after deploying troops when he determines the well-being of the state is at risk.

It was only this month that the full implication of the provision was publicized by civilian academics who formed part of a 48-man Defence Ministry task force assigned to consider the legislation earlier this month. Even if the offending provision is withdrawn, however, there are serious concerns that the military may prevail on legislators to overlook other flaws, especially ones that blur the lines between civilian and military authority to deal with unrest. "Article 19 is only one of the provisions that will undermine two key principles, one defining political decision-making as the basis for any military deployment, and the other laying out the importance of civilian supremacy," says Rizal Sukma, a political researcher who sat on the task force.

Critics say there is nothing in the bill that determines whether the Defence Ministry or the cabinet will decide on troop deployments to tackle the kind of domestic upheaval seen in recent years in the eastern Moluccan islands and the island of Sulawesi. Nor does the legislation spell out the limits of military involvement in domestic situations or rules of engagement.

Civilian reformers still hold out hope that Defence Minister Matori Abdul Djali or Justice Minister Yusril Izha Mahendra will make significant changes to the bill before it reaches the legislature. Some feel that there might even be an effort by the government to delay the bill until after the elections.

Says Sukma: "At the end of the day, it's the Defence Ministry that has the authority to submit the bill to parliament, not the TNI headquarters." He believes the ministry made a mistake in early 2002 when it asked the TNI to draw up the first draft of the bill, which in affect invited the military to regulate itself. Predictably, when the 48-member task force began discussing the legislation last November, it quickly became bogged down in heated debate. Eventually, the task of sorting out differences was left to a 15-man working committee, which included academics Kusnanto Anggoro and Ikrar Nusa Bhakti.

But when that working committee met for the last time in January, members failed to reach a consensus. Ikrar says it was decided that the final draft of the bill, along with proposed changes, would go back to a plenary session of the task force.

What happened next stunned the civilians, leaving them with the impression they had been dealing with a fait accompli from the start. Unknown to them, a small, four-man panel, comprising three generals and an air force colonel, quietly put the finishing touches on a separate draft – this one closely resembling the original that the military submitted last year. On February 3, the panel bypassed the plenary session and presented its draft to Matori. Insiders say that the minister accepted it because he didn't want to risk a confrontation with the army leadership.

Sudarsono says it is clear that the original drafters paid little attention to Indonesia's constitution or the 2002 Defence Act, both of which stipulate that the sole authority to declare a national emergency rests with the president. But he notes that since mid-2001, senior officers have been genuinely concerned about the civilian political leadership, about the involvement of party leaders in money politics and, especially, about their perception that politicians show more concern for rebel casualties in places like Aceh than the casualties of their own army.

With the Defence minister and the TNI commander both occupying positions in the cabinet, it is unclear where President Megawati Sukarnoputri stands on the bill. She has generally enjoyed a close relationship with the military. But hardline army chief of staff Gen. Ryamizard Ryacudu recently said that the military's primary institutional duty is to the people of Indonesia and it must not side with any politician.

Indonesian media quickly dubbed Article 19 as the "coup d'etat article," implying that it would allow the military to deploy troops against the government. Ryamizard – widely regarded as one of the guiding lights behind the provision – responded by pointing out that if the army was bent on staging a coup, it wouldn't need Article 19 anyway.

For one Western source who was intimately involved in the drafting process, the language of the bill and the way in which it has moved forward are clearly ominous signs. "The momentum is building up," he says. "Article 19 didn't fall from the sky. It's reflecting a mindset about things that are possible again. The whole discussion about the military has fallen back into the patterns that were around before Suharto's fall from power."

There is also speculation – some of it coming from sources close to the military – that army conservatives see Article 19 as a contingency measure to be used in two or three years if the 2004 elections fail to produce a government that can rule effectively. Analysts say if Suharto had a similar article at his disposal, he would not have had to spend three years legitimizing his hold on power after the creeping overthrow of Sukarno, Megawati's father, in 1966.

Former Attorney-General and leading Golkar party figure Marzuki Darusman sums up the feelings of civilian reformers: "The article is just sinister. How can they get away with it?"