By Sunanda Creagh

Just over a decade ago, Indonesians took to the streets to protest. Now they can make themselves heard without even leaving home.

A Facebook group supporting two senior officials from the anti-corruption agency, who many people think have been framed, has attracted almost half a million members in just four days.

This digital people power may well be one reason why on Monday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono launched a probe into the case.

It’s the second time Facebook has played such an important role in a public debate in Indonesia. Earlier this year, thousands “rallied” online in support of a woman who had been charged with defamation for complaining about her treatment in hospital.

Indonesia is the world’s seventh-biggest user of the social networking site, according to Inside Facebook, and 8.23 million of its 8.52 million Facebook addicts joined up in the last year. The new information minister, Tifatul Sembiring, is a daily user of microblogging site Twitter, and says he wants to use it to seek policy ideas.

After decades of authoritarian rule, Indonesia is now a flourishing democracy yet many individuals still feel frustration that their voices and opinions are seldom heeded by politicians. So will online social networking sites contribute to Indonesia’s political future or is this just a passing fad?

PHOTO CREDIT/REUTERS/Beawiharta

By Sara Webb

It takes India weeks to complete an election and it never passes without flashes of violence.

But the much younger democracy of Indonesia voted calmly for their president on Wednesday and got the voting over in five hours with a good indication of the result — a second term for the reformist ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono — out just a couple of hours later.

“Faster, Better,” was the racy campaign slogan of Jusuf Kalla, one of Yudhoyono’s challengers. He trailed in a distant

third, but his rally cry somehow seems fitting for the country’s remarkable journey since the chaotic coda of President Suharto’s authoritarian rule a decade ago.

And yet if you talk to many Indonesians, they’ll tell you that the whole campaign, which kicked off in January and encompassed parliamentary elections before Wednesday’s vote, has been one long bore.

The series of televised debates by the presidential and vice presidential candidates were so polite and deferential, so Javanese really, that it was hard at times to believe that here were three teams actually competing against each other. Perhaps it’s unfair to mention it on his victory day, but Yudhoyono himself has been known to send listener’s off to sleep with his speeches.

Maybe “boring” is good, a sign that democracy isn’t a novelty anymore — just a fact of Indonesian life.

Still, there were moments during the election campaign when things got a little bit edgier in this predominantly Muslim country, where religion is increasingly a sensitive subject.

There were snide remarks about whether the wife of Yudhoyono’s running mate, Boediono, was a Catholic (she is Muslim), and whether the wives of Yudhoyono and Boediono ought to wear a headscarf, like the wives of their opponents.

And while Wednesday’s vote was an illustration of how much Indonesia has changed in the 11 years since Suharto’s ignominious exit, there were many reminders of that less glorious past.

Yudhoyono’s rivals, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Kalla, picked Suharto-era generals with terrible human rights records — Prabowo Subianto and Wiranto — as their running mates.

Prabowo, who was married to one of Suharto’s daughters, was responsible for the kidnapping and torture of some of Megawati’s supporters in 1998. Now, the two are the best of friends and Prabowo, a rousing speaker, most likely has his eye on the 2014 election.

“I think Indonesia needs a decisive military man. SBY? He is so Obama. When he speaks, he sounds exactly like Obama!,” said Lilik S. Wardi, a housewife in Surabaya after she had cast her vote. “So I chose Prabowo. I didn’t want a president who copies Obama’s style.”

By Dean Yates

(The author lived in Indonesia from 1992-1995 and 2000-2005, with various assignments in between)

It was not that long ago that Indonesia was lurching from crisis to crisis, even drawing some (misplaced) predictions it could go the way of the former Yugoslavia and break apart. These days it rarely makes the front page. It has a steady president in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, probably the freest press in Southeast Asia and political violence appears to be a thing of the past. The last major bomb attack blamed on Islamic militants was in 2005.

It’s worth recalling how bad things were in Indonesia as this country of 226 million people prepares to vote in parliamentary elections on Thursday, which will set the stage for the more important presidential poll in July. The parliamentary election will be the third time voters in the world’s most populous Muslim nation have elected their representatives at a national level since the downfall of former autocrat Suharto in 1998. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on April 8, Indonesia
shows that democracy and Islam aren’t mutually exclusive.

All this progress seemed so unlikely early in 1998 when the country’s economy was in freefall. It’s hard to imagine a currency losing 85 percent of its value, but that’s what happened to the rupiah when the Asian financial crisis savaged Indonesia. I remember stunned Indonesian colleagues in the Reuters Jakarta bureau, their hands on their head, as the rupiah crashed to a low of 17,000 to the U.S. dollar. Months before, one U.S. dollar bought 2,500 rupiah. Food prices soared and the “wong cilik”, or little people, rebelled. Food riots hit markets. Protests escalated. Students demanded democratic change. Then Suharto — under pressure from the International Monetary Fund — hiked fuel prices on May 4, 1998. A week later, violence exploded, killing 1,200 people in Jakarta. Suharto was forced out a few days later.   

After three decades of authoritarian rule that combined rapid economic growth with political repression and breathtaking corruption, Suharto’s “New Order” government had collapsed. It was replaced by a vacuum. Communal animosity that had simmered for years in the eastern Moluccas, an idyllic group of islands evenly split between Muslims and Christians, erupted. Thousands
were killed. President Abdurrahman Wahid, an affable moderate Muslim cleric with a penchant for cracking jokes, was toppled in 2001 in an impeachment vote, effectively for incompetence.

International perceptions of Indonesia, already pretty grim, got worse in 2002 when Islamic militants bombed two nightclubs in Bali, killing 202 people, mostly foreign tourists. As I stepped over debris the following morning, bits of flesh still under twisted metal, all I could think of was why? Why Bali? Why this beautiful island? The answer was obvious of course — kill holidaymakers enjoying themselves on one of the world’s most famous islands and you will get the world’s attention.

And then came the Asian tsunami. A massive undersea earthquake of 9.15 magnitude unleashed giant waves that smashed into the Indonesian province of Aceh in December 2004, killing around 170,000 people. The toll was unbelievable. Bodies lay rotting for weeks. I still remember Adnan Ibrahim, who had spent days searching refugee camps in the local capital Banda Aceh for his son, Syawaluddin, 17. “The boy is very smart. He is good with computers,” said Ibrahim, before breaking into sobs. I am sure he never found him.

Beside elections of that year — which brought Yudhoyono to power — the tsunami was a turning point for Indonesia. In the early days after the disaster, Yudhoyono decided to allow foreign militaries and aid workers to descend on Aceh to help with rescue and recovery efforts. He had opened the door to a province that until then was virtually sealed off to foreigners, scene of a vicious conflict between the Indonesian military and separatist rebels that had killed 15,000 people over the past 30 years. The tsunami was a catalyst for a peace deal between the government and the rebels in 2005. It confounded sceptics who predicted it would never last. Former rebels will even run for local office in the elections on Thursday.

Few thought Indonesia would make such strides and be where it is today. Democracy is well entrenched — “taken root and flourished” — in the words of the Economist in its April 2 edition. Sure there are problems. It’s a huge, unwieldy place to govern. Corruption is still a major problem and the country’s infrastructure needs an overhaul. And it is still poor. But compared to a little over 10 years ago, Indonesia has done pretty well. It has a huge civil society. Think of any issue and there will be an NGO in there fighting for justice and accountability. Indonesians are a people of great warmth, humour and openness. They deserve the international praise that now comes their way.

As journalists, we spend a lot of time watching politicians and policies to guage their impact on financial markets and economies. Now, as recession takes an inexorable hold in the Asia-Pacific region, we’re watching for the impact on politicians themselves.

 So far there has been no repeat of the political upheaval triggered by Asia’s economic crisis a decade ago, which culminated in the ignominious resignation of President Suharto in Indonesia and the ouster of Thailand’s prime minister (see previous blog). There are no food riots as there were back then, and Asians are not crowding at  banks’ doors to rescue their savings.

The Economist magazine argues this week that Asia’s economic downturn will be milder than the one it endured a decade ago, when Asian governments begged households to be hand over their jewellery to be melted down to bolster official reserves.

That seems to be the consensus view. The president of the Asian Development Bank, for instance, argued in a speech this month that the region was well positioned to weather the global downturn and predicted that it should “avoid a full-fledged financial crisis”.

So can the region’s politicians breathe easily? Probably not.

In New Zealand earlier this month, Helen Clark’s nine-year-old Labour government was bounced from power by voters. Analysts reckon she was always heading for defeat at the hands of an electorate ready for change, but any hopes that she would make a last-minute comeback were dashed by the economy’s slide into recession.

In India politicians too face a tough year, with national elections due in early 2009 after a difficult 12 months, first of soaring inflation and now of global economic turmoil. Jobs are disappearing, factories are putting expansion plans on hold and even the country’s tourism boom is coming to an end.

For more on India, take a look at Reuters’ investment summit stories this week.

The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in 2004 after its “India Shining” message of economic liberalisation and growing corporate confidence failed to connect with the millions of voters for whom a first car, apartment or refrigerator is once again moving out of reach.  Will Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party face a similar fate? There’s a test of the political waters in the central state of Madhya Pradesh this week.

Indonesia also goes to the polls next year. Will voters reward Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a respected reformer who has brought the economy back from the brink, by re-electing him as president? Or could the financial crisis, which has savaged the rupiah, bring his rival, Megawati Sukarnoputri, to power again?

Could the economic downturn even have a political impact on Singapore, which last week published figures confirming the city-state is in recession? The Financial Times’ take was that the downturn may prompt Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to call an early election “in case economic pain leads to a backlash against the People’s Action party that has ruled Singapore for 50 years”.

It even speculated that “the severity of the downturn could determine the continued durability of the Singapore model, seen as a pioneer of authoritarian capitalism, in which the public gives up some civil liberties in return for economic prosperity”.

That may be over-stating the case. 

But for sure Asia’s political landscape could look very different when the current economic downturn is over.