04.06.1998

Indonesia: The will to win?

As the thunder of burgeoning revolution echoes throughout Indonesian society, as all forces assess the implications of Suharto’s resignation, the framework for the next phase of social upheaval is being set.

While the clash between the old and new seems for the moment to have subsided, the most democratic and determined sections of the mass movement refuse to water down their demands.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald (May 30), about 400 students returned to the parliament building last Friday (May 29), where protests by tens of thousands of students had forced Suharto to resign the presidency. Tanks and soldiers barred entry as student chanted, “Bring Habibie down right now.”

On university campuses students hung banners saying, “Habibie is the protégé of Suharto, reform has not yet begun”, and at the prestigious University of Indonesia they announced new protests after a one-week lull. In the key industrial centre of Surabaya about 3,000 students have been occupying the grounds of a government building for days, calling for an extraordinary session of parliament to be convened immediately.

The thirst for justice has gripped the mass. The most widespread manifestation of this comes in the form of popular demands for the prosecution of the Suharto clan and the expropriation of their ill-gotten wealth. President Suharto’s richest son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, resigned from the board of his Bimantara business empire last Friday, as scores of protesters outside the company’s headquarters demanded trials for the Suharto clan.

This is a correct and revolutionary demand. It is picking at a loose thread that threatens to unravel the entire project of the reform-minded ruling elite. They are acting in the narrowest interests of pure class self-preservation, in collaboration with the US state department.

At great risk to his own highly privileged position president Habibie has made concessions in this direction by hinting at an investigation into corruption and nepotism. British imperialist interests have been the first to be hit by the review of contracts negotiated with the all-embracing Suharto family business empire. Her majesty’s government was the first to send a ministerial representative to meet with the new Habibie cabinet. The junior foreign affairs minister is trying to rescue the Thames Water contract. No doubt ‘ethical’ businesses, like the Body Shop, which has a Jakarta store, will be nervously examining their own relations with the discredited Suharto clan.

Pressure is mounting both inside and outside Indonesia for retribution for the nepotism and corruption which handed relatives and friends of former president Suharto commercial opportunities during his 32-year rule. International capital hopes a clearly regulated business regime will provide a stable environment for its more efficient operation. A state department spokesperson said the US government was considering an inquiry into the Suharto family’s assets in the United States.

Few of the hundreds of Suharto family-owned companies are publicly traded, forcing analysts to guess at their total worth. Two years ago, SocGen-Crosby Securities estimated the family’s business assets in Indonesia at about 11 trillion rupiah, or $5 billion at the 1996 exchange rate. An estimate from the Central Intelligence Agency puts the family’s total wealth at about $30 billion.

Thirty years of graft, corruption and greed on the backs of the oppressed masses is being undone. The very fact Habibie has been forced to give ground shows the pressure the masses are still exerting on the incoming government, which almost all view as a continuation of Suharto’s ‘new order’ regime. But it is not only Habibie who is beholden to Suharto. Twenty of the 36 ministers in his ‘reform’ cabinet served in the former president’s last administration.

Yet where can Habibie draw the line? If he concedes an inquiry with limited powers to confiscate even a fraction of the Suharto billions, the masses will call for expropriations to be carried much further. This will surely spill over to include not only the complete stripping of the Suharto family fortune but the expropriation of the Habibie family wealth and all those who benefited from cronyism, corruption and nepotism. Calls for criminal proceedings will not stop at the Suharto clan.

In such a situation, the contradictions between the desire to defend individual interests and the need to stabilise a political system which is able to defend the bourgeoisie as a class will become more and more pronounced. The role of the military in this until now Bonapartist society remains crucial.

Reports in the Far Eastern Economic Review this week (June 4) indicate that factions within the military nearly came to blows during the transfer of power. This was triggered by the sacking by armed forces chief and defence minister Wiranto of Suharto’s son-in-law, lieutenant-general Prabowo Subianto. According to the Review,

“By all accounts, he took his demotion badly - at one point strapping on a sidearm, summoning several truckloads of troops and confronting guards at the presidential palace as he tried to win an audience with new president Habibie. He left empty-handed - but the incident may nevertheless have been the closest Indonesia came to its nightmare scenario: confrontation between military units with competing loyalties.”

The same source points out that Suharto’s resignation did not proceed as smoothly as it may have seemed. The Far Eastern Economic Review (June 4) claims: “First, Suharto toyed with the idea of imposing martial law, and even had decrees drawn up for this purpose, according to senior officials involved in the process.”

The splits in the ruling elite are beginning to take a more explicit political form. The ruling Golkar party, Suharto’s power-base, showed its first signs of crumbling with the announcement that one faction has broken away to form a separate party. One of Golkar’s founding elements, the MKGR, has split under the leadership of the former minister for women’s affairs, Mien Sugandhi, who said: “We established the MKGR party to anticipate change brought by the reform campaign and the planned establishment of new laws on political parties.”

Anticipating ongoing upheaval, the IMF is set to renegotiate its $43 billion rescue package. “We have to recognise that the economic measures will only work and be really effective if there is political stability,” said IMF Asia Director Hubert Neiss. He returned to Jakarta on May 26 to explore ways of reviving the rescue programme.

It is clear that the students, together with the other potentially revolutionary sections of Indonesian society, are demanding far more that the government is prepared to give. For example, after a 90-minute meeting with Habibie and members of his Cabinet, the speaker of the parliament announced that an extraordinary session of the 1,000-member People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) would be called to draft political laws ahead of fresh general elections. But even this was not planned until the end of this year, or early next year

Most of the radicalised sections of society are demanding an immediate extraordinary session of the MPR. This demand is shared both by those who want change to prevent change and by revolutionaries. Islamic leader Amien Rais, as well as the reactionary anti-revolutionary clot that is the Peoples Council, has made this call. But so has the Peoples Democratic Party (PRD). There is a clear danger that the revolutionary wing of the democratic movement will be effectively liquidated under the slogans of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.

As part of the campaign to develop solidarity with the Indonesian masses in Britain, we need to expose the British government’s role in supporting the dictatorship politically, economically and militarily. The struggle against the Indonesian ruling clique and British imperialism is one and the same. Further, a movement in support of full political freedom, concentrating on the release the prisoners of the Indonesian democratic movement and the struggle for East Timorese self-determination are key.

Imperialism will be pulling out all the stops to stabilise Indonesia. The mass movement could act as a spark for revolutionary conflagration across a very fragile region. While it may be possible for the uni-polar New World Order to enforce a relatively peaceful transition from Cold War dictatorship to neo-liberal bourgeois democracy, it has yet to be secured. Everything is still up for grabs.

The question posed for the forces of international revolution is the one that echoes across the century from another democratic revolution. It is the question posed by Lenin in 1905: “Dare we win?”

Marcus Larsen