Army's Reform Vows Fall On Sceptical Ears

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday June 1, 1999

David Jenkins

Indonesia's defence chief says the army won't take sides in next week's poll, and there are signs it may give up some political clout. But it's not about to march back into barracks, writes Asia Editor David Jenkins in the second of a three-part series.

I T is a sweltering Saturday morning in Jakarta and 1,700 retired generals and colonels have taken their seats in a hall named after General Sudirman, the revered Indonesian guerilla leader who died of TB in 1949.

The audience is made up of men who are mostly in their seventies, with a few in their eighties, each wearing a batik shirt and black velvet piji, the rimless cap so often favoured by Indonesian men on formal occasions.

Most are veterans of the 1945-49 independence struggle, men who took up arms, sometimes only a sharpened bamboo stick, to fight against Dutch colonialism.

They believe, for the most part, that the army has earned the right to play a permanent role in Indonesian political life, an idea given formal expression in the army's dwifungsi (dual function) doctrine.

But they are anxious, too, that the army should remain strictly neutral in the June 7 general elections. They don't want soldiers helping to round up the vote for the ruling party, as they have done in each of the past six elections.

To their obvious satisfaction, the keynote speaker, General Wiranto, who doubles as Defence Minister and Commander of the Defence Force (TNI), is providing just the sort of assurances they have come to hear.

"The TNI and the national police," says Wiranto, to murmurs of approval, "will no longer play practical politics."

Indonesian defence chiefs have been promising for decades that the army won't take sides in the political process, a promise that has almost always gone unfulfilled.

This time, there is reason to believe that the army means what it says, if only because men like Wiranto are aware that in the post-Soeharto era the Indonesian people won't stand for anything less.

There are also signs that the army is willing to give up some of the political power it accumulated under Soeharto, an eternally watchful man who used the army as a political enforcer.

That doesn't mean, however, that the army is about to march back to the barracks. Wiranto and his fellow generals may have made a number of concessions in the 12 months since Soeharto was forced to stand down. But their promises of far-reaching reform and renewal are still viewed with scepticism in many quarters.

"It is old wine in new bottles," says Jusuf Wanandi, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Jakarta think-tank which was set up by two of Soeharto's "political" generals but which has since distanced itself from the Government and the army.

"They are giving the impression that they have changed but they have not changed. As long as they still kill people the way they did before, they have not changed. In Aceh they killed boys and children and women. They said they were being overrun, the bastards. You cannot do that!"

Retired generals and colonels are equally sceptical.

Many say the army cannot hope to regain public trust until it court-martials officers who last year kidnapped and tortured a number of political activists. They point in particular to Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto, the self-exiled son-in-law of Soeharto.

"The army does not have the confidence of the people," complains Colonel Alex Kawilarang, 80, a graduate of the pre-war Royal Dutch Military Academy in Bandung who went on to fight in the anti-Dutch independence struggle. "We had the confidence of the people until 1955 but not now."

To regain that confidence, says Colonel Kawilarang, "all these officers who know about the kidnapping have to be arrested".

That sentiment is echoed by Lieutenant-General Kemal Idris, a former commander of the Army Strategic Reserve. "High-ranking officers like Prabowo should be court-martialled," he says. "People blame Wiranto for that. That's why the popularity of the armed forces has vanished.

"We are all wondering - the people who have been in the army and the common people - why does Wiranto hesitate? Why is it that only the lower ranks are punished? They did only what they were ordered to do. That is why the reputation of the army is going down."

Indonesians are dismayed, he says, to see the army "beating young people who have no weapons". The actions taken by the army are "very rough".

Despite this volley of criticism, the TNI has introduced a number of significant reforms in the past year, a period in which its resources have been stretched to breaking point by nationwide unrest. Four in particular stand out.

First, the national police force has been hived off from ABRI (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia), which reverts to the name Indonesian Defence Force (TNI), consisting of army, navy and air force, although the police remain, for the time being, under the Defence Ministry, which still has control of the police budget.

Many old army officers are unhappy to see the police force go its own way. The police themselves are as pleased as punch. "There is tremendous enthusiasm on the part of the police to put the past behind them and make the best of it," says a military source in Jakarta.

Senior police officers know that the force is held in low esteem. They know that they are woefully under-resourced and their men under-educated.

They know they need state-of-the-art riot-control equipment if they, not the army, are to have primary responsibility for internal security. They are grateful that countries like the United States have been willing to provide some of this, despite the political risks involved in helping an institution with a reputation for breaking heads.

Second, there has been a reduction in the number of military officers sitting in the parliament and in the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), the body that elects the president.

Under Soeharto, 100 of the 500 parliamentary seats were reserved for military men, to "compensate" them for the fact that soldiers have no vote. That was, by any accounting, a generous compensation package, awarding soldiers and police (who account for only one quarter of 1 per cent of the population) 20 per cent of the lower house seats.

The number of military MPs, which was reduced to 75 in the later years of Soeharto's New Order, has now come down still further, to 38. Wiranto says the military will have no seats in the legislature by 2004.

Third, it is no longer possible for military men to serve in key civilian posts, as so many did in Soeharto's time. Under the so-called kekaryaan system, as many as 21,000 Indonesian officers were assigned to positions in the civilian bureaucracy, where they served as members of parliament, judges, ambassadors, department heads, provincial governors and managers of state-owned corporations.

This system had a number of virtues as far as the regime was concerned. It allowed Soeharto to keep close tabs on the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. It provided a "soft landing" for officers who might otherwise have been at a loose end, perhaps becoming a nuisance to the regime.

But there were drawbacks, too.

One was that the army tended to lose control of officers after they served for a long period in an outside job. Another was that it became increasingly difficult for the services to fill all the kekaryaan slots once the initial backlog of "surplus" officers had been taken care of.

Worse still, the program became irredeemably corrupt, with many officers posted to civilian jobs plundering the system for all it was worth.

Nor was it just the mid-career appointees who stuck their hands in the honey pot. Some of the most promising new officers saw these postings, with all their associated perks, as infinitely more attractive than the command of, say, a battalion out in the provinces. "They didn't want to command Kostrad [the Army Strategic Reserve]," says a military source in Jakarta. "They wanted the bupati's job or the governorship because that was the way to make a fortune."

At the same time, the system denied plum positions to civilian bureaucrats, a significant number of whom were better qualified than the colonels or generals who gained preferment.

The Indonesian foreign service is a case in point. No fewer than nine of Indonesia's 17 ambassadors to Australia have been military men. In the 30 years to 1991, Indonesia sent us nothing but superannuated generals and air marshals.

The number of officers assigned to kekaryaan tasks, which had been coming down for some years, was around 3,000 early this year. Under a decree issued by Wiranto, these men have been given three choices: return to military duties, remain in civilian jobs and resign from the military or resign from both positions.

Finally, there have been changes in TNI doctrine, or at least in the presentation of the TNI position.

Indonesia's current military leaders know that the public is no longer prepared to put up with the army playing a central role in national life.

In a document issued late last year, they admitted that the dwifungsi had been used in the past to justify excessive military intervention in public life. Soeharto, they said bluntly, had used "the social-political role of the Indonesian armed forces for his own interests".

Under Soeharto, the armed forces had believed that it had to take responsibility for "all aspects of national life". What was needed now was "a new paradigm". In future, they promised, the army would play a smaller role, with "no involvement in practical political activities".

In the words of Major-General Agus Wirahadikusumah, Assistant for General Planning and one of a new crop of "reform-minded" generals, the performance of ABRI (the old name for the armed forces) over three decades is not something one can be proud of.

"ABRI took part in controlling social and political life," he said in a recent speech in Jakarta. The term ABRI had become synonymous with authoritarianism, centralisation and repression, in conflict with the virtues of democracy, humanitarianism and justice.

Agus Wirahadikusumah is not alone in making this kind of criticism. The ranks of the reformers include Lieutenant- General Agus Widjojo, Commandant of the Armed Forces Command and General Staff College in Bandung, Lieutenant- General Agum Gumelar, the head of the National Resilience Institute, and Lieutenant-General Bambang Yudhoyono, the influential chief of Territorial Affairs. F OR all that, this is reform at a fairly measured pace. The army has no intention of giving up its influence at the village level. And while it recognises the importance of the civilianisation process at the national level, it does not intend to march off the field until it is convinced the civilians can cope.

Moreover, the army will be back with a vengeance if anyone even thinks of "changing the basis of state identity", by which it means it will never allow Indonesia to become an Islamic state, a remote possibility in any case.

It does not want Soeharto to be put on trial, although it may not object if a future government decides to go after his exceedingly acquisitive children. Nor does it want General Prabowo to be put on trial. That, it feels, would be too "disruptive".

In the meantime, old practices die hard.

The Indonesian Army still keeps close tabs on civilian society. It is still willing to employ lethal force in pursuit of its objectives, in Aceh, in Irian Jaya and in East Timor, among other places.

The armed forces may have lost half of its seats in the legislature and more than 3,000 plum jobs in the civilian sector. It may have lost control of the police force.

But it still has its all- important "territorial" structure, a parallel bureaucracy which provides the army with political influence at every tier of society, down to the village level.

Not even the most reform-minded generals have suggested that the army scrap the territorial system, although they may have a surprise in store if Dr B. J. Habibie gets back as president following next week's general elections.

In an interview in which he claimed credit for "triggering" the recent overhaul of the defence forces, Habibie was asked about the territorial structure and whether it, too, would be reduced or phased out.

"Give me time, my dear friend!," he answered. "I wish one could do it by simply saying, `Sim salabim!' Cannot! Cannot!" Asked if that meant he would like the see the territorial system amended, he said: "Of course!"

That is the first time that anyone at the top has canvassed wholesale change of this kind and it is easy to imagine the gasps of horror down at the officers' mess.

In short, the army remains an important institution in Indonesia. Nor should it be supposed that the Indonesians, having just got rid of one over-staying general, are in no hurry to allow another general into the presidential palace.

There is already speculation that Wiranto could be Indonesia's next vice-president. What is more, some senior officers are said to think that if Indonesia begins to slide out of control, a worried middle class will again turn to the army to provide stability.

As one Cabinet minister puts it: "I think what they are banking on is that the public will judge that this [process of] civilian politics will come into paralysis in the next few months."

In those circumstances, says this source, the public might welcome another military president, someone who puts an end to "bickering and deadlock and squabbling".

The problem, of course, is that any such development could trigger a quite different kind of paralysis, with students and others bringing Jakarta to a standstill with anti-military demonstrations.

The only way to deal with that would be to give ground or to go down the Burmese road, with the army shooting whole concourses of people, turning Indonesia into a pariah state and robbing it of the foreign capital it so desperately needs.

There is a great deal at stake.