Juwono Sudarsono, Jakarta – The most urgent issue facing Indonesia today is poverty reduction. Measured in terms of income, poverty affects 48 percent of Indonesia's total population of 220 million. The government's Medium Term Development Program aims to reduce poverty from 18.2 percent in 2004 to approximately 8.4 percent by 2009.
When the plan was announced in President Yudhoyono's first Cabinet meeting in late October 2004, no one could predict the various domestic and international crises that have severely disrupted the trajectory of poverty reduction strategies.
Following the tsunami in late December 2004, there have been earthquakes, landslides, a mudflow disaster, rice price hikes, international oil price increases and a host of residual social and ethnic conflicts throughout the archipelago arising from the economic crisis of the late 1990s.
These disasters depleted the government's resources to alleviate poverty at the scope and speed originally targeted in October 2004.
In its landmark report Making the New Indonesia Work for The Poor (November 2006), The World Bank's Jakarta office makes a clear case for the urgency that, in addition to income-poverty, Indonesia still faces a long and difficult journey in pursuing programs to reduce non-income poverty. Examples are malnutrition among a quarter of all children below the age of five, high maternal mortality rates (307 deaths in 100.00 births), weak education outcomes (among 16-18 year olds from the poorest quintile, only 55 percent complete junior high school), limited access to safe and clean water (43 percent in rural areas, 78 percent in urban areas for the lowest quintile).
What do all these issues have to do with the Department of Defense and the Indonesian Military (TNI)? The answer is clear: plenty.
The Ministry of Defense and the TNI are committed to providing an effective and accountable delivery system in support of a still essentially weak civic governance and civil competence at all levels. Governmental capability, especially outside Java, still needs the support of a carefully measured and calibrated role of the military in support of civic governance. Political stagnation, economic collapse and social unrest resulting from the financial crisis in 1997-1998 led to violence among marginalized groups deprived of jobs, livelihoods and hope.
Between 1998 and 2003, drastic and immediate political openness in an environment of mass poverty, unemployment and fear of an uncertain future led to paroxysms of "the virility of violence" which gave rise to sectarian, ethnic and intra-regional enmity.
With respect to the TNI as a people's force, the TNI has always been true to its historical mission to assist those most deprived from access to basic human needs. Since the early 1950s the Army, Navy and Air Force have been actively engaged in support of people-centered projects at ground level. These include constructing simple village housing, building dams and irrigation channels, setting up affordable health care through various medical units assigned in villages and sub-districts and non-commissioned officers standing in as teachers of Bahasa Indonesia and basic numeracy. In short, the TNI has long been involved in the projects that international donor agencies focus on in regards to non-income poverty, particularly in rural areas.
Although poverty by itself does not directly relate to terrorism, the number of both income poor and non-income poor in Indonesia strengthens our determination to wage war against the three main sources of domestic terrorism.
The first is inequity in development. With nearly half of Indonesia's population living below the poverty line, there is an urgent need to speed up programs that overcome disparities in income and access to basic human needs. Those who earn between US$2 per day and $1.55 per day fall into a category where young men or women disenfranchised economically may resort to desperate measures or be attracted to radical ideologies that justify civil violence.
The second is poverty eradication. A people's defense force can only be credible if it true to its mission of caring and sharing with those who are yet to be lifted from abject poverty. Equally important, the TNI realizes that striving for a just and egalitarian society supports the notion of total defense. Social and economic justice is a nation's best defense.
The third is anti-corruption. The Ministry of Defense has completed a two-year program in transferring assets of all units of cooperatives, foundations and businesses to an inter-agency panel incorporating the Ministries of Defense, Finance, State Enterprises and Law and Human Rights.
Past military abuses have been identified with large-scale corruption and pervasive repression. Having successfully pioneered an anti-corruption drive within is own house, the Ministry of Defense and the TNI have staved off critics of the decades-old political ammunition about "a pervasive octopus-like" military business complex.
Indonesia's war against poverty and terrorism has a long way to go. There will be glitches over the next ten to fifteen years until more and more poor people climb up the social ladder.
But the overall plan will remain on course. There are now firmer grounds for optimism that Indonesia's war against poverty will give greater substance to the notion that to be really tough against terrorism, tougher measures against the sources of terrorism should be maintained in the years ahead. The Ministry of Defense and the TNI are leading the way.
[The writer is Defense Minister of Indonesia. This is a personal view.]