I'm not even going to begin to make excuses for the unseemly lag in blogs to this site. Hopefully this will serve to restart my engines (aye, where have we read that before, Papa Grinch?)
Michael Buehler's fascinating article below appeared in Inside Indonesia this week.
http://www.insideindonesia.org/stories/angels-and-demons-22042912
It is probably too "inside" for most tastes but for observers of the reform process here, development issues and the blind adulation afforded the current SBY administration by (most recently) David Cameron, Ban Ki-Moon and the Obaminator, it serves as a clear-eyed evaluation of the efforts of so-called reform champions and the emergence of a new class of Raptor as (highly!) unlikely defenders of democracy.
Angels
and demons
Sunday, 22 April 2012 11:05
While a famous ‘reformer’ tries to undermine Indonesia’s local democratic
institutions, the predators come to the rescue
Every year, the development industry in Jakarta churns out ‘update’, ‘stock-taking’
and ‘rapid appraisal’ reports about the progress of democratisation and
decentralisation in Indonesian local politics. Often these reports deal with
the great complexity of their topic by focusing on the behaviour of individual
politicians. Virtually every report picks out a few ‘reform-minded’ individuals
and portrays them as leaders who are both ‘responsive’ and ‘responsible’ to
citizen demands. These heroes of reform are then celebrated as pushing forward Indonesia’s democratisation
and decentralisation against the interests of ‘old elites’ and ‘entrenched
interests’.
In provinces, districts and municipalities that have been blessed with such
‘good leadership’ change is happening, so the story goes. In localities where ‘bosses’,
‘little kings’ and ‘predatory forces’ rule, in contrast, progress is depicted
as stagnating. In this context, multilateral organisations have outdone each
other over the past decade in their praise for half a dozen so-called reformers
running the executive government of places such as Gorontalo (Sulawesi),
Jembrana (Bali), Solok (West Sumatra), Sragen and Kebumen (both Central Java).
Frequently discussed in the expatriate bars in Jakarta but rarely visited for in-depth
research, these places loom large in the minds of development consultants.
Stories abound of how the executive government heads in these few regions place
the will of the people above everything and offer ‘best practice’ examples to
other politicians scattered across the archipelago.
The simplicity and naiveté of such a Jesuit worldview, in which ‘good’
fights against ‘evil ‘, have been exposed by developments that have quietly
unfolded in Indonesian local politics over recent months. Suddenly, one of the
good governance heroes has advocated dismantling a pillar of local governance
reform, while the predators are proving to be more interested in defending
democracy.
The reformer who became a conservative
In late 2009, only a few weeks after he was appointed Interior Minister,
Gamawan Fauzi proposed to abolish direct elections for governors. Such
elections had been introduced in 2005 as a way to empower citizens. They have
shaken up the way local politics works. Now, Gamawan Fauzi argued, direct
elections for governors were too costly due to the rampant money politics and
vote buying associated with these races. At the same time, such direct
elections would facilitate the establishment of local dynasties, he claimed.
The new minister suggested reviving the system that was in place before 2005 in
which provincial parliaments elected governors.
Ironically, Gamawan Fauzi owes much of his stellar rise in Indonesian
politics to these direct elections, and for a long time he was the poster boy
of the development agencies, lionised as the main example of the new breed of
local leaders winning their way to power by delivering good governance and
reform. Appointed district head of Solok in West Sumatra
in 1995, he won (indirect) elections in 2000. In 2005, people elected him as
Governor of West Sumatra province, a post he left a few years later to become
interior minister.
In past years, I sat through countless meetings and workshops in which donor
agency folks busily constructed a narrative about Fauzi’s meteoric rise to the
inner circles of the Yudhoyono administration. The main story line was that
Gamawan Fauzi’s pro-democracy attitude and successful good governance programs
had gotten him re-elected as district head, then governor and finally
catapulted him into Yudhoyono’s cabinet. He was, in other words, a messianic
figure whose exemplary behaviour showed ‘old elites’ that support for democracy
was being rewarded.
Only a few people dared to say that Fauzi’s shallow reform programs in Solok
collapsed soon after he had moved on to greener pastures. Fauzi could not fire
many of the corrupt bureaucrats in the local administration since they were
protected by Indonesia’s
decrepit civil service law. Hence, such bureaucrats simply waited for Fauzi’s
departure to regain control. Most development consultants were also unaware of
the fact that governor Fauzi had re-introduced an older form of local
administration that goes back to pre-colonial times called the Nagari system,
which excludes women from political decision-making processes by restricting
participation to male clan chiefs. Finally, the fact that Gamawan Fauzi was
also one of the most prolific local executives in Indonesia with regard to the
adoption and implementation of discriminatory syariah local regulations
received no mention at all in development industry circles.
Good-looking, as comfortable donning a Western business suit as wearing a
traditional khaki civil service uniform, fluent in English and well-versed in
development-lingo thanks to some exposure to development industry seminars
early on in his career (his résumé notes participation in such grandly-titled
events as ‘The Role of Local Government in Implementing APEC
Declaration’(1995); ‘Reinventing Government’ (1995); ‘Civil-Affair and Civil
Military Operation’ (1999); ‘Implementing Integrity Pacts’ (2003)), Gamawan
Fauzi became the darling of the development industry soon after the fall of
Suharto in 1998.
Rarely a major donor workshop on decentralisation went by in Jakarta without Gamawan
Fauzi speaking in his capacity as a ‘reformer’, or a ‘democracy-minded
politician’. Finally a local executive head who said exactly the kind of things
the donor community was craving to hear from Indonesian politicians. Fauzi’s
recent U-turn suggests he was but a well-trained parrot, or simply a shrewd politician
who knew what kind of rhetoric would raise his profile in democratising Indonesia and
eventually pave the way for a career in national politics.
Predators to the rescue
In the face of Fauzi’s proposal to wind back local democracy, support for the
country’s local democratic institutions has come from unexpected quarters. In
April 2012, Syahrul Yasin Limpo the head of the Provincial Government
Association (APPSI) and South Sulawesi Governor publicly lambasted Fauzi’s
proposal as undemocratic and accused the Interior Minister of trying to ‘take
away rights from the people’. Limpo, of course, is no stranger to observers of
Indonesian local politics since he too has frequently been in the news over
past years, although for altogether different reasons than Gamawan Fauzi.
District head of Gowa between 1993 and 2003, Syahrul Yasin Limpo made
national headlines when he was busted in a 2002 drug raid together with a
prostitute. Others may have seen such an incident as a setback to their
political career, but Syahrul not only managed to become the head of the
provincial Anti-Drug Commission and a prolific anti-drug columnist in a local
newspaper soon afterwards but also ran as deputy governor in 2003. In his
successful campaign for governor a few years later, his official campaign
slogan conveyed a simple and apt message to the electorate: ‘Don’t look back!’
In 2012, he launched his re-election campaign for a second term as governor.
Driving around one of Indonesia’s poorest provinces in various high-end luxury
cars with a number plate that consists only of his initials SYL while
commanding several private security forces and hundreds of thugs, Syahrul Yasin
Limpo lords over South Sulawesi precisely like one of the ‘little kings’
mentioned in donor agency reports.
Flanking Syahrul Yasin Limpo during the press conference in April 2012 in
support of local democracy were several other notorious governors such as Awang
Faroek Ishak from East Kalimantan province, who was named a suspect in a
corruption case surrounding the divestment of PT Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC) shares
in 2010, Teras Narang from Central Kalimantan, who had come up on the radar
screen of the Financial Transactions Reporting and Analysis Centre (PPATK) for
suspicious payments into his bank account in 2009, and last but not least, Ratu
Atut Chosiyah from Banten, scion of one of Indonesia’s most corrupt families
that has run the local construction industry in a criminal fashion for decades
with the help of tens of thousands of thugs organised in martial art
associations. In short, the politicians that stood up for democracy were hardly
the kind of types one would see attending donor meetings and democracy
workshops at swanky Jakarta
hotels.
Heaven versus hell?
The emphatic criticism of Fauzi’s plan, which is now awaiting approval in
the parliament, by these governors who are surrounded by a taint of illegality
and figure in the public mind for their run-ins with the law rather than their
democratic credentials, is interesting for various reasons.
For starters, it offers a rare glimpse into centre-periphery tensions in Indonesia, a
topic that is grossly understudied by academics and practitioners alike.
Various efforts of national level politicians to re-centralise power both
within state institutions and the party system in past years have gone
unopposed. Arguably, the absence of any resistance is due to the fact that the
institutional powers transferred back to the centre were not very substantive.
Likewise, the re-centralisation within the party system did not matter to
sub-national politicians because their careers do not depend on the
dysfunctional parties anyway but on their personal networks and connections.
So why then does Fauzi’s proposal aggravate local executive heads? Above
all, their reaction shows that democratic institutions have become a viable
power base for politicians who a few years back seemed least likely to have any
interest in them. Many of these governors are rich enough to bribe national
politicians and officials to protect themselves from becoming corruption
suspects but lack the financial and political connections to influence national
party headquarters. Gamawan Fauzi’s plan would empower the national party
headquarters, all of which have adopted regulations in recent years that concentrate
power at the national level when putting forward candidates for local executive
head elections.
Most of these governors are also local figures who have established networks
in their respective constituencies, sometimes over decades. Fauzi’s proposal
would render such ‘social capital’ – consisting of connections with groups from
vote-canvassers, local notables, leaders of prayer groups through to criminal
networks – worthless and therefore constitute a threat to local politicians’
prospects of winning political power.
There is no doubt that Limpo and his colleagues had first and foremost
themselves in mind and not the people when they publicly attacked Fauzi’s plan
in April. After all, governors’ offices provide legal and illegal access to
resources, the possibility of implementing predatory taxes and levies or simply
the chance to embezzle state funds. Given the riches that come with an
executive post, it is not surprising that many of the aforementioned figures
are running for a second term, including Syahrul Yasin Limpo whose entire
political program once again consists of a single sentence: ‘Don’t stop,
Komandan!’
The contradiction between these figures’ pious rhetoric and their worldly
motives for defending democracy is not a reason to abolish direct elections for
local executive heads, however. As the eighteenth century German philosopher
Immanuel Kant showed in his treatise
Zum Ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace)
there were always people who believed that ‘a republic would have to be a
nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable
of a constitution of such sublime form.’ Kant refuted this position: ‘The
problem of organising a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for
a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.’ The key thing is for those
devils to ‘establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private
intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public
conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.’ In other words, the
right institutions can constrain the personal agendas of even the very worst
politicians, and force them in new directions.
Direct elections for local executive heads in Indonesia are an approximation to
the system Kant described. In the old days of President Suharto’s authoritarian
New Order regime, recruitment, promotion and retirement mechanisms for public
officials were upward oriented and ultimately regulated by Suharto.
The introduction of direct executive elections in the context of decentralisation
created a more competitive environment for political elites. My research shows,
for instance, that there are more than two ‘effective candidates’ in almost all
local executive head elections conducted in Indonesia since 2005. In other
words, in most races, there are at least two candidates with a good chance of
winning and relatively equal strength with regard to the number of votes they
obtain. The domination of provincial, district and municipality executive head
elections by an all-powerful single figure is rare in contemporary Indonesia.
At the same time, it seems that although extensive family-based political
networks exist, local Indonesian politicians struggle to establish enduring
dynasties. Although one may say that it is too early to come to such a
conclusion since dynasties have not yet had the opportunity to accumulate power
through a series of elections in the same locality, we can equally say it is
too early to come to Gamawan Fauzi’s conclusion that Indonesia needs to abolish
such elections in order to prevent local dynasties.
The competitive nature of local electoral politics has disrupted ties within
the political elite. As competition re-ordered the relatively stable political
structure of the New Order years, political elites have faced new challenges to
stay in power. To find allies and support for their battles with one another,
political elites who could afford to ignore citizens during the New Order
period have now started to ‘reach-down’ in the political arena. Consequently,
new alliances have emerged between political elites and ordinary citizens in
the context of direct executive elections.
The creation of such alliances may have allowed elites to defend their
political position overall, but concessions made during these struggles with
one another have come to limit them in new and significant ways. Most
importantly, local politicians have become dependent on ordinary citizens to a
degree unthinkable during the New Order and therefore have to go to great
lengths to obtain support from the electorate. For instance, every candidate
serious about running for local executive head office has to spend an extended
period of time on the campaign trail, travelling through villages and small
towns for months on end. In addition, politicians have to buy votes and deliver
favours to the electorate prior to elections, which has allowed communities to
press for at least some sort of service delivery, however crude.
It’s relationships that count
In short, it is the relationships within elites, not the personal character
traits or the behaviours of individual politicians, that shape power dynamics
in contemporary Indonesian local politics. By competing against each other,
‘predatory forces’, ‘little kings’ and ‘entrenched elites’ have pushed
state-society relations in more democratic directions – in spite of themselves.
Direct elections for local executive figures assure such competition. Hence,
Gamawan Fauzi‘s proposal to end direct elections for governors would deal one
of the most severe blows of recent years to Indonesia’s democratisation
efforts. Against this backdrop, foreign democracy crusaders may want to read,
if not Kant’s treatise, then at least Dan Brown’s less highbrow novel Angels
and Demons that introduced a broader public to the world of ambigrams that play
an important role in Christian mysticism. Ambigrams are words that, when read
from another viewpoint or perspective, reveal a word that is different from the
original. Such an alternative viewpoint on who are the forces in favour of and
against local democratisation in Indonesia may be useful when
putting together the guest lists for future development industry workshops.
Michael Buehler (michibuehler@gmx.net) is an
Assistant Professor in Political Science at Northern Illinois
University.
