Shawn W Crispin – With Thailand under military-appointed rule, the Philippines fresh off a stint of martial law and an unresolved vote-rigging scandal and the rest of Southeast Asia under hard and soft authoritarian yokes, Indonesia has clearly emerged as the region's healthiest, most vibrant functioning democracy.
Eight years after launching a highly ambitious political reform program, Indonesia has surprised many analysts and academics by how quickly and smoothly the world's fourth-largest country has consolidated meaningful democratic gains. Indonesia has since 1998 overhauled every fundamental aspect of its former authoritarian state, including an amended constitution, a more powerful parliament and a reformed election system.
The country's first-ever direct presidential elections in 2004, in which former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected on a strong reform ticket, represented a democratic high-water mark. What's gone less noticed over that same period have been 250 or so different local-level elections, which are now contested down to the grassroots regent level.
Breaking with former strongman Suharto's top-down New Order regime, Indonesia's peripheral populations are now less captive to the interests and abuses of local political heavies, who under Suharto often inserted themselves as gatekeepers to financial and natural resources through central government authority. While many attempted to co-opt new democratic institutions to perpetuate their power, nearly 40% of local level incumbents have in recent years been booted from office at the ballot box.
In certain conflict-plagued regions, local democracy is even having a healing effect. According to a recent report in the Jakarta-based Van Zorge Report, head and vice head candidates, often representing respectively localities' Muslim majority and Christian minority populations, have frequently teamed up to beat competing candidates who ran on a one-religion ticket. That is, local-level democracy is rewarding politicians who form religiously inclusive, not exclusive, coalitions.
Since 2001, Indonesia has implemented one of Asia's – if not the world's – most ambitious decentralization programs, rapidly devolving decision-making authority and control of resources from the center to the periphery. Many pundits predicted that rushed decentralization would lead to violent Balkanization across the sprawling archipelago, where historically aggrieved, suddenly empowered populations straddling resource-rich areas would opt to secede rather than cooperate with Jakarta.
Yet only East Timor has so far moved to break away – and some would argue in the wake of recent civil unrest there to disastrous effect. The long-running rebellion in Papua province has recently lost steam as local-level democratic institutions take deeper root. And Jakarta's promise of more local autonomy for Aceh province has brought that grinding 30-year conflict to a democratic conclusion.
Michael Malley, an Indonesia expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, notes in a recent Van Zorge Report interview that no new breakaway armed insurgent groups have emerged since the promulgation of the 1998 decentralization reforms. Previously among the skeptics, he said: "Many have been surprised that such enormous change could take place without national disintegration."
More significantly, Indonesia's extraordinary democratic progress has put the lie to academic debates about whether Islam and democracy can peacefully co-exist. Predictions that dismantling Suharto's highly secular state institutions would lead to a coincident rise in Islamic fundamentalism have notably not panned out. Political parties that have campaigned on strict Islamic platforms fared poorly against more secular candidates at the 2004 parliamentary polls.
Fundamentalists elected on anti-corruption tickets that have since attempted to push Islamic-tinged legislation in parliament, including a controversial anti-pornography bill, have seen their popularity fall dramatically in public opinion polls.
Rapid transition
To be sure, the rapid transition from a highly centralized to a highly decentralized political system has been attended by growing pains, including widespread confusion about where real decision-making authority lies over certain jurisdictions.
Investors reportedly carp that they now must pay bribes not only to central government authorities, but also provincial and local-level officials to seal business deals. Provincial and local-level officials have quibbled over jurisdiction of tax revenues, which in turn has raised hard questions about responsibility for the provision of public utilities. Central government corruption has in many areas merely been replaced by local-level graft.
At the same time, democratization and decentralization are unmistakably leading to unprecedented rural empowerment – more so than Thailand's highly touted, fiscally unsustainable, top-down populist rural handouts, and streets ahead of the Philippines' unreformed feudal countryside, where a clutch of elite families still owns the majority of land. Indonesian democracy is paying broad dividends through greater political stability, a more equitable distribution of natural and financial resources to the local level and slowly but surely more reactive, inclusive local governance.
Those burnished democratic credentials are fast improving Western perceptions about Indonesia, which was widely viewed as a basket case in the chaotic aftermath of the 1997-98 economic crisis, and as a haven for international terrorism in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombing.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strongly praised Indonesia's democratic progress during her recent visit to Jakarta – though realpolitik motivations of counterbalancing China may have colored her upbeat assessment. Yet it was no surprise that Indonesia this month won in a landslide the right to Asia's revolving allocated seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Some viewed that as a reward for Indonesia's new strong democratic leadership role inside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), particularly in addressing member state Myanmar's worsening political and humanitarian crisis. And although criticized domestically for the US$43 million price tag, Jakarta's recent decision to send professional peacekeeping forces under the auspices of the UN to Lebanon speaks to Indonesia's desire to serve as an honest democratic broker between Islam and the West in the Middle East.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono deserves much credit for presiding over and not obstructing the latest phases of Indonesia's remarkable democratic transition. Yet he has been widely criticized in the local media for his slow, deliberate, consensus-building leadership style – particularly in relation to his management of the economy, which some Jakarta-based analysts contend needs a quick fiscal kick through accelerated infrastructure spending.
But good governance in a checked and balanced democratic system is often by necessity slow-moving. Much of the grumbling about Yudhoyono's deliberate decision-making arises from an increasingly marginalized political elite, who received more generous, less scrutinized government contracts and concessions under strongman Suharto. Meanwhile, Yudhoyono's anti-corruption campaign – though by no means as deep-reaching as it could be – has ruffled certain politically powerful feathers, down to the grassroots level.
Yudhoyono's party's small numbers in parliament has meant some of his more ambitious reform initiatives have been quashed by opposition forces, fairly or unfairly fueling perceptions about his ineffectual democratic leadership. But that check on presidential power also speaks to the significant decentralization of national power, recently devolved by law from the executive to the legislative branch.
It's no longer a question of whether Indonesia's elected politicians are truly democratic, but rather whether they are effective leaders and custodians of their respective national, provincial or local interests. As seen at the local and provincial levels, if national perceptions grow that Yudhoyono isn't performing up to expectation, Indonesia's newly demanding voters will replace him with a candidate perceived to be more able at the 2009 direct presidential polls. Pity the rest of Southeast Asia, which by comparison doesn't have that same democratic choice.
[Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia editor.]