The country’s littlest citizens can perhaps be forgiven for looking askance at the chief executive’s post. The memory of Sukarno’s jetting around the world with one arm raised in defiance and the other wrapped around a shapely stewardess has long faded. By all accounts Suharto and his family pocketed dizzying riches during his 32-year reign, but he was deeply loathed and ousted ignominiously. Indonesia’s current president, Abdurrahman Wahid, has spent most of his brief tenure putting out violent brush fires across the country or fighting parliamentary efforts to impeach him. More than one Indonesian, young and old, have been prompted to wonder why the man bothers.
Indonesia, as should be obvious by now, is a country of 17,000 islands and a thousand potential flashpoints. The nation is riven by religious divides that have devastated the once spice-rich islands of the Moluccas. Ethnic resentments have exploded into orgies of murders and beheadings in Kalimantan. Political frustrations are expressed in noisy street demonstrations in Jakarta–and mob violence in outlying provinces. Vast income gaps have sparked anti-Chinese riots; corruption and desperate poverty have prompted the clear-cutting of forests. Whole provinces like Aceh and Irian Jaya are fed up with having their natural resources siphoned off by Jakarta and are tugging at the threadbare fabric that just barely holds Indonesia together.
These troubles are partly the fault of history: the Dutch forcibly and quite unnaturally cobbled together a nation from far-flung island kingdoms. Differences were papered over, as one Dutch governor general said, with “the whip and the club.” Only in the waning years of their rule did the Dutch attempt to build a trained civil service or a legal and educational system. Indonesia’s first university didn’t open until the 1920s. “We didn’t come away like India with 100 years of British administrative tradition and functioning institutions,” says presidential spokesman Wimar Witoelar.
The independent nation’s first two presidents only deepened the country’s fault lines. The admittedly beloved Sukarno nearly bankrupted the country. Suharto oversaw phenomenal economic growth. But he kept simmering tensions between the country’s myriad ethnic, linguistic and religious groups in check not through intercommunal negotiations and confidence-building measures, but through the barrel of a gun. He single handedly appointed generals, judges, top bureaucrats, parliamentarians and party officials. He neutered institutions other than the military, and the voices that now seem so clamorous were not exactly quiet then, only muzzled.
With his downfall, the Pandora’s box lies open for every future president to face. “The pendulum [has] swung from one extreme to the other,” says Jusuf Wanandi, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. “Today’s anarchy is the natural result of 50 years of dictatorship.” The disorder is only likely to grow. The Army has generally acknowledged that it neither can nor should simply clamp down on disturbances any longer. Parliament, after so many years of toothless irrelevance, is rambunctious. The instability has begun to devastate the economy, which is inflating the population of the poor and disgruntled and dangerous.
Indonesia’s fundamental problem is an injustice so rooted that most citizens despair of knowing any other way of life. So-called separatist provinces only want a greater share of the revenues generated by their resources–and an end to the military repression they have endured. What hobbles the economy even more than the lack of foreign investment is an all-pervasive corruption. Suharto cronies and military brass continue to escape conviction, and those cases that do make it to court are won by the highest bidder. Even most so-called tribal disputes, however primal-seeming, usually stem from a feeling that others have arbitrarily received advantages that render their straits a little less desperate.
Restoring a sense of justice is a tall order for any one man or woman. And perhaps that is the point: this is not a job for a single person. What Indonesia really needs are just, equitable, functioning institutions–from an independent and incorruptible judiciary to a Parliament that is invested in serving its constituencies to a central bank free from arbitrary interference, down to petty bureaucrats who don’t demand favors or bribes from citizens in order to perform their duties. The volcano that is often used to describe Indonesia will not then disappear. But perhaps its rumblings can be quieted long enough for a president actually to govern.
