By the end of the morning of May 21, 1998, Habibie felt like the most isolated man in the world. Two months after being appointed as the latest in a long line of ceremonial vice presidents—a clear signal that Suharto had no intention of stepping down or anointing an heir apparent—Habibie found himself in charge. After Suharto announced his resignation on national television, he left for his private residence. Habibie was at the palace as head of state and head of government.
The state was in chaos. Despite the IMF rescue package (or because of it, in some eyes), the economy was in a state of collapse. Inflation was to reach 65 percent for the year, and gross domestic product was to shrink by 16.5 percent in a year. The rice harvest had been hit by drought the previous year, and millions in formal sector enterprises had been laid off. More than half the population was below the poverty line. The heart of Indonesia’s commerce, the Kota district of Jakarta, was a smoldering ruin after the military-inspired anti-Chinese riots. Students and other activists were swarming over the parliament building in triumph at Suharto’s removal and were demanding an immediate session in which root-and-branch reform could be initiated.
Habibie was an accidental president. Suharto had openly doubted his qualifications to take over during the days preceding his resignation, saying, “There is a question of whether he is capable.” A few hours before resigning, Suharto had given the armed forces commander, General Wiranto, a letter authorizing him to restore order and political stability. It closely resembled the letter of March 11, 1966, the famous Supersemar that three of Suharto’s generals had forced Sukarno to sign. Wiranto was thus the designated successor.
But a simple constitutional barrier stood in the way. As Habibie had conferred with Suharto on May 20 about the formation of a new cabinet, the president had informed him he would resign as soon as it was sworn in. Habibie later recalled that he then asked, “What is my position as vice president?” Suharto replied, “What happens, happens.”
Although Suharto at no time spelled it out, it became clear later what was meant to happen: Habibie should have resigned too, clearing the way for the MPR to make a provisional appointment of a third figure to the presidency, just as it had done in 1967. The newspaper editor Endy Bayuni described the moment thus:
In response to Soeharto’s statement ‘I am going to step down tomorrow’, Habibie could have answered either A: ‘So, I’m going to be the next president?’ or B: ‘I had better step down with you, Pak [Sir]’. He picked A. Had the German-trained aerospace engineer answered B, then he would have paved the way for a military takeover with Wiranto in charge, but with Soeharto no doubt continuing to pull the strings. Post-Soeharto Indonesia would have taken a greatly different historical path. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one stands, Habibie was not well-versed in Javanese tradition, where courtesans are expected to know, or at least guess, the correct response to a king’s questions from his body language.*
Was it because, as a half-Makassarese who had spent much time out of Indonesia in Germany, Habibie had simply missed the message, in what commentator Wimar Witoelar has called a moment of “unbelievable naivety”? Was it because, as a research engineer, he was used to working logically from theory?† Or was it because his instincts were those of a “German liberal,” as suggested by his longtime colleague in the ICMI and former minister, Adi Sasono? Was he irked by Suharto’s disparagement? Whatever the mixture of reasons, Habibie chose to follow his constitutional duty, and his decision was a pivotal one for Indonesia. Fifteen years later, Indonesians were watching Egypt’s failed transition to democracy and thinking: That could have been us.
Even so, Indonesia’s was a fraught transition. In Singapore, the elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew gave Habibie’s presidency a couple of months. His first big test—of the army’s loyalty—came on his second day in the job.
Overnight, he had been putting together names for his new cabinet. One place remained to be decided: the combined post of armed forces commander and defense minister. The alternatives in the very senior ranks to the incumbent, General Wiranto, included officers with backgrounds in the tainted Kopassus Special Forces and one who’d been involved in violent suppressions of protest; all the rest were political unknowns. Habibie decided to stay with Wiranto and called him at 6 a.m. to tell him.
At 7:30 a.m. a military aide, Major General Sintong Panjaitan, came to see Habibie at his home. The Kopassus commander Major General Muchdi Purwopranjono, and a senior Kostrad officer, Major General Kivlan Zen, were outside with a letter signed by the Kostrad commander, Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto, and the retired father of the army’s “dual function” doctrine, General Abdul Haris Nasution. The aide suggested that Habibie receive the letter in person and read it, which he did at the door to his office. It advised that Prabowo be made chief of the army and that the incumbent, his close former Kopassus ally, Lieutenant General Subagyo Hadisiswoyo, be moved up to armed forces chief.
The two generals then asked for “instructions” from the president. Habibie said, “I have read the letter.” They pressed him again. “I have read the letter,” Habibie repeated.
“Give us instructions,” the two generals demanded.
Habibie gave the same answer and went into his office. The tactics of Supersemar had failed this time.
But the matter was not over. At 9 a.m., as Habibie drove to the palace on the north side of Merdeka Square, masses of troops and armored vehicles filled the streets and nearby parkland. His motorcade diverted to a side gate. Wiranto was waiting on the palace steps and took Habibie aside.
He reported that troops from outside Jakarta, under the command of Kostrad, had moved into the capital and taken up positions, concentrating on the presidential palace and Habibie’s house. This had been done without the permission of the armed forces commander, Wiranto. Habibie ordered Wiranto to replace Prabowo as Kostrad chief and Muchdi as Kopassus commander “before sunset,” and that they recall all their forces back to base.
Wiranto moved to carry out the orders, scheduling a formal replacement ceremony for 3:00 p.m. Shortly before that time, Prabowo arrived at the palace and asked to see Habibie. Apprehensively—Habibie knew Prabowo well from the Suharto and Islamic studies circles and was aware of his hot temper and schooling in applied violence—the president agreed.
With Habibie’s military aides hovering on the sidelines, Prabowo walked in—without his customary sidearm, to Habibie’s relief. “This is an insult to my family and my father-in-law’s family,” Habibie recalls Prabowo declaring, in English. “You have fired me as the Kostrad commander.”
“You are not fired; you’re being replaced,” Habibie said, explaining the reason was the unauthorized deployment of Kostrad troops in Jakarta.
“I intended to ensure the president was safe,” said Prabowo.
Habibie replied that that was the duty of the presidential guard, which came directly under the armed forces commander. “It is not your job,” he said.
“What kind of president are you?” Prabowo retorted. “You are naive!” After attempting to bargain for an extension of his term, citing the reputation of the Sumitro Djojohadikusumo and Suharto families, and after trying to call Wiranto on his mobile phone, Prabowo was ushered from the room by Panjaitan, an old rival in the Kopassus hierarchy. Habibie says he hugged Prabowo in farewell and sent greetings to his father and father-in-law.‡
The episode marked the beginning of a tacit partnership between Habibie and Wiranto. Suharto’s decades of control had created a highly obedient military machine. Officers could make money, murder and torture activists who challenged the regime, terrorize civilians via murderous paramilitaries, and massacre perceived Islamic extremists at Tanjung Priok or Lampung, but they would defer to commanders up the line. The killers among the generals were balanced with “palace” officers, who were steeped in the nuances and balances of power in Jakarta.
Wiranto was one of these palace generals. To him, disobeying or overthrowing a constitutionally installed president was barely thinkable, although opportunities did present themselves in the first half of 1998. Prabowo denies intending to carry out a coup d’état that day, and that’s probably true. The style of the Indonesian army, as pioneered by Suharto, was the “creeping” coup. The first stage was to overawe the sitting president, and the next was to steadily gather executive power from the footing of the army command.
With Habibie concentrating on political reform and economic rescue, Wiranto was left to manage a strategic retreat from the military’s most egregious political involvement, though it was not without violent insubordination when it came to East Timor. Prabowo, Muchdi, and others were drummed out of the military later in 1998, and eleven Kopassus officers and soldiers faced a court-martial for their involvement in the Tim Mawar (Team Rose) abduction, torture, and disappearance of student activists over 1997–98, and some were given short jail terms.
Habibie’s ties with Suharto were already cut, as he soon discovered. The new president made several attempts to reach out to his predecessor and repair their relationship by asking for his guidance, he told US ambassador Cameron Hume in 2007. Suharto declined the approaches. Finally, after nearly three weeks, on Suharto’s birthday, June 8, Habibie called Wiranto while the defense chief was at Suharto’s house and asked to be put through. When Suharto came to the telephone, Habibie wished him a happy birthday and asked to be allowed to come and see him to hear his advice. Suharto refused and said that, for the good of the country, the two should never meet again. Habibie should focus his energies on his job; Suharto would “remember Habibie in his prayers.”
The two never spoke again. Even a decade later, when Suharto was dying, Habibie was turned away. It was another example of Suharto’s cold, self-centered personality freezing out a trusted acolyte who showed independence and criticism. Habibie wrote that Suharto “treated me as though I never existed.”
In fact, it was fortunate that the old general retreated into his shell, as Habibie was freer to follow both his instincts and the tide of sentiment outside parliament. A week after taking office, he appeared before the parliament, the DPR, and agreed that a special session of the MPR be convened by the end of 1998 to formulate new rules for free and fair parliamentary elections the following year, which would be followed by an MPR session to elect a new president. Habibie declared that the old rules about political parties were to go: “Anyone at all may form a political party.”
New parties quickly formed outside the previously authorized trio of Golkar, the PPP, and the PDI—though until elections were held, they were outsiders to the halls of parliament, where Golkar members held a majority, with Habibie now the party chairman. The chairman of the modernist Islamic movement Muhammadiyah, Amin Rais, formed the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN, National Mandate Party), which pushed a liberal agenda and opened its ranks to non-Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid likewise decided against turning the NU into a political party again and formed the more widely inclusive Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB, National Awakening Party).
Habibie made no move to remove those leaders of the PDI who had been installed through the machinations and violence of the later Suharto years. Megawati Sukarnoputri thus remained distant, and in October she defiantly called a party convention in the Bali hotel built by her father with Japanese war reparations money. It took place after mass rallies outside, attended by thousands of mostly young supporters who waved red and black flags. Inside, the thousand delegates gave Megawati full powers to appoint her own council for what became the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia—Perjuangan (PDI-P, Democratic Party of Indonesia—Struggle). Her style of populism was relaunched. Motherly in her approach, she had none of the oratorical flair of her father, but her speeches declared the “Indonesian people” to be sovereign and implicitly asserted that she was now their mouthpiece.
With these main parties in the van—Golkar, PDI-P, PAN, and PKB—Indonesia moved toward the elections of 1999, its first free elections since 1955, and their respective leaders—Habibie, Megawati, Amin Rais, and Wahid—emerged as leading candidates for the presidency. Apart from Habibie, in the highly compartmentalized technology sector, none had any experience in government. The latter three had spent their entire political careers testing the limits of criticism and opposition under Suharto, sometimes in favor and sometimes not, receiving at different times blandishments, threats, and repression. Uncertainly, in alliances and rivalries that varied from day to day, they pushed their ambitions in a political theater where many of the screens and gags of the previous three decades were suddenly removed.
In his first month, Habibie revoked the 1984 decree allowing the Ministry of Information to cancel the publishing licenses of newspapers and magazines and lightened the obligation for private television networks to carry government news bulletins. He also revoked the draconian 1963 antisubversion law that had been used by Suharto’s government in its last years as a catch-all weapon against critics, such as the trade unionist Muchtar Pakpahan and the Islamic liberal member of parliament Sri Bintang Pamungkas. Although powers to suspend publications and ban books remained, the changes removed the threat of immediate censorship and closure, which freed up the media’s coverage of politics.
Habibie also ordered the release of many political figures. They included Sukarno’s former foreign minister Subandrio and the 1965 coup plotter Colonel Abdul Latief, and both elderly figures emerged to fill in some details of those events for an avid media audience. Three months into his presidency, Habibie also reached out to the shattered and fearful ethnic Chinese minority, banning the use of the distinction between pribumi (indigenous) and non-pribumi. Later steps authorized the practice of Taoism, allowed the use of Chinese writing, and eased the burdensome proof-of-citizenship requirements.
Although in Jakarta there was excitement and optimism among the educated elite, elsewhere on the archipelago long-suppressed ethnic and religious antagonisms were bursting out. In Kalimantan, the Dayak headhunters were again slaughtering hundreds of transmigrants from Madura. Across Java, local Islamic groups attacked and destroyed several Christian churches and places of allegedly sinful behavior. Mobs killed scores of individuals during a rumor-fed panic about black-clad ninja killers carrying out assassinations of dukun (mystical practitioners and faith healers). Crowds of supporters of Amien Rais and Wahid clashed at political meetings in East Java.
In Java and its cities, new groups of fundamentalist Muslims emerged, often dressed in Arabic-style garments. One was the Front Pembela Islam (FPI, Islamic Defenders Front), which had been set up by an Indonesian of Yemeni descent, Habib Muhammad Rizieq Syihab. It specialized in preman-style attacks on minority places of worship, on bars selling alcohol, and on demonstrations for religious tolerance. Another was the Laskar Jihad (Soldiers of Holy War), led by another from the Hadramaut community descended from migrants from that Yemeni region, Ja’far Umar Thalib, a former volunteer fighter in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. When clashes broke out in two places where Christian and Muslim numbers were closely balanced, Ambon and the central Sulawesi region of Poso, thousands of Laskar Jihad volunteers boarded interisland ferries to join the fight. By early 1999 both places were in a state of civil war, with thousands killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes.
In Papua—still officially known as “Irian Jaya”—a crowd of indigenous people in Biak raised the “Morning Star” flag of the banned independence movement. After calling in reinforcements, the army and police attacked and killed scores of protesters. Dozens of survivors were taken out to sea by the navy and dumped overboard to drown.
East Timor had been slipping out of control since army troops had fired on a crowd commemorating the death of an independence activist at Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991, with scores killed and dozens “disappeared.” The capture the next year of the guerrilla leader José Xanana Gusmão, and his subsequent twenty-year jail sentence, installed him as a new symbol of resistance.
A new generation of youthful activists tested the limits of expression. The arrival of the Internet, mobile phones, and smuggled satellite telephones helped them get their stories out. The once-divided Timorese exiles formed a new political front and began more effectively putting the case against Indonesian rule. Prabowo and other officers from the Kopassus side of the military responded by recruiting and arming militias with fanciful patriotic names, which were then ordered to seek out and attack independence supporters. Ali Alatas, foreign minister for the last eleven years of the Suharto government, would later say that Santa Cruz was the “turning point” at which international support for Jakarta’s rule in Timor started to wane.
Within the ICMI, the Islamic intellectuals’ group founded by Habibie, the position of East Timor had been debated, says Adi Sasono, a member whom Habibie made his minister for cooperatives and small business. They concluded that East Timor was not an intrinsic part of Indonesia, having been outside the successor state to the Netherlands East Indies that was declared in 1945, and had only been incorporated as a result of Cold War pressures from the United States and Australia. It remained a “high-cost” burden for Jakarta, with the government constantly on the defensive over human rights abuses.
Through the remainder of 1998, this thinking seeped into the Habibie government’s exchanges with foreign governments. Australia’s government, under Prime Minister John Howard, became particularly alarmed at the possibility of Indonesia suddenly exiting East Timor, says Sasono. “They were saying: ‘Please do not leave in a hurry. It will be an Australian burden.’”
In December 1998 Howard sent Habibie a letter, suggesting that Indonesia offer the Timorese a period of political autonomy for a decade or more, followed by a referendum on independence. This was based on the model used by France in its Pacific territory of New Caledonia. The proposal did not appeal: aside from the invidious comparison with a European colonial power, it offered Jakarta a long and expensive cultivation of the Timorese with the high probability of a slap in the face anyway.
Habibie decided to use Australia’s switch away from outright support for Indonesian jurisdiction of East Timor as a reason to cut the territory loose. Indonesia had been in long and inconclusive talks with Portugal and the United Nations about an internationally recognized act of self-determination in Lisbon’s former colony. Now Jakarta resolved to agree to such an act. Sasono recalls long and agonized discussions in the cabinet, with the military arguing that the sacrifice of 2,100 soldiers and police, plus 1,500 Timorese auxiliaries, should not be thought of as wasted. “Will we add more?” Sasono recalls Habibie responding. The decision to hold a referendum in 1999 was announced at the end of January that year by Habibie’s information minister, Lieutenant General Yunus Yosfiah (who, coincidentally, was a former Kopassus soldier who had fought in Timor as a member of the original covert cross border attacks in late 1975).
The events of 1998–99 in Indonesia’s regions of conflict showed the ambiguous nature of the military’s bargain with Habibie, and Wiranto’s ambivalence. On the one hand, the armed forces supported the constitutional rule of the Habibie presidency, notably by abstaining from a coup d’état and by suppressing direct attempts by military figures, such as Prabowo, to overawe the civilian leadership. On the other hand, army elements were arguing that they should continue applying forceful solutions to conflicts. Thus, Wiranto announced troop drawdowns in both Timor and Aceh in August 1998, only to have it revealed that the “withdrawn” units were secretly deployed elsewhere in the two regions. Likewise, the formation and dispatch of Laskar Jihad groups to Ambon and Poso received assistance from local military commands in Java, and certainly they were not impeded from boarding ships in Surabaya en masse to sail to the conflict zones.
In East Timor, preparations for the August 30, 1999 referendum under UN supervision proceeded, with the Indonesian army simultaneously “guaranteeing” security and yet standing back as militia groups brazenly carried out murderous attacks. It emerged that a network of mostly Kopassus officers, directed at the top by Lieutenant General Feisal Tanjung (from the normally weak position of coordinating minister for politics and security), was running this campaign of intimidation. In the end, it failed: 78.5 percent of the population of East Timor voted for independence.
In a final, disgraceful exercise, the military supervised the sacking and burning of Dili and other towns. With logistical assistance provided by the minister for transmigration, A. M. Hendropriyono (another ex-Kopassus lieutenant general), vast numbers of the local population were forced across the border into West Timor, in an effort to show that the Timorese were voting with their feet for Indonesia and that the UN-supervised ballot was therefore fraudulent. On September 12 Habibie agreed to let an Australian-led force take over security in East Timor under a UN mandate.
While this mayhem continued, the form of a new and more democratic Indonesia was taking shape. Initially, Home Ministry officials proposed that the parliament (the DPR) have 495 elected members: 420 from single-member electorates and seventy-five chosen by proportional representation (with fifty-five of those appointed from the armed forces). A further eighty-one regional delegates and sixty-nine group delegates would join them to form the wider legislature that would appoint the president, the MPR. The single-member system had the advantage of connecting voters with their representatives, rather than letting parties choose their parliamentary numbers, often after murky payments.
Golkar was keenest on this system, having numerous governors, bupati, mayors, and other officials—people well known in their districts—to run as candidates. An outcry from the other parties and students at this possibility forced a reversion to a mostly proportional system of representation and a reduction in the military ranks to thirty-eight seats in a DPR of 500. The eligibility rules set stiff requirements for each party to have a nationwide organization, thereby to avoid a plethora of regional parties setting up. Elections were set for June 1999, and forty-eight parties fulfilled the criteria. With voters given a ballot paper containing only party symbols, not candidate names, electioneering became a matter of linking party leader with symbol.
But who was running against whom? It was clear that Megawati and her PDI-P were challenging the dominance of Habibie and Golkar, and that they expected to prevail. But who were her allies? Muslim parties wavered on whether Islam allowed a woman leader, especially one suspected of being a part-Balinese “Hindu.” Wahid, or “Gus Dur,” was proving especially hard for her to pin down. Never in good health, he had been felled by a massive stroke early in 1998, which had left him nearly blind and with erratic judgment. He had been Suharto’s wiliest critic and then had embraced his desperate last-minute plan to save his presidency. One moment he was Megawati’s best friend, insisting her gender was no barrier, and the next he was casting doubt over whether she was acceptable to the majority.
The election was raucous, marked by large-scale motor cavalcades and mass rallies, but it was largely free of violence and fraud. In the result, Megawati indeed emerged with the largest vote, 33.8 percent, while her PDI rival virtually disappeared. Golkar came second with 22.3 percent, Wahid’s PKB gained 12.6 percent, the Suharto-created Muslim party, PPP, won 10.7 percent, and the PAN of Amien Rais a disappointing 7.1 percent. Megawati’s sense of entitlement to the presidency grew, but she neglected the reality that the system still required a president to win more than 50 percent of the votes in the MPR, where her party held only 185 of the 700 seats. Instead of cultivating the minor parties, she remained aloof.
Amien saw an opportunity for a third player and began pushing an alliance of Islamic-based parties called the “Central Axis,” with Wahid as its presidential candidate. Wahid, meanwhile, kept professing that he supported Megawati for the presidency, and the leader of his PKB parliamentary block maintained that the Central Axis was “not serious” about proposing Wahid. When the MPR met, Wahid forced his own party to break a deal with the PDI-P about appointments to the powerful positions of speaker in both the MPR and the DPR. Amien Rais got the MPR chair, and Golkar’s Akbar Tanjung the parliamentary speakership. With Amien and Tanjung out of the way, Wahid could now work on an alliance with Golkar, if Habibie was not running.
Even after the Central Axis and other parties nominated Wahid for the presidency, Megawati continued to believe that he would swing in behind her. Then the other shoe dropped. Habibie delivered his “accountability” speech (his formal report on his presidency) to the MPR, and it was rejected in a 355–322 vote. The establishment could not forgive him for “losing” East Timor. He then announced he would not be standing again. The same day, Wahid was elected president by 373 votes to Megawati’s 313 votes. She accepted an invitation to run for the position of vice president, winning a vote handsomely and immediately calling on her supporters to remain calm.
If Habibie’s seventeen months as president had been tumultuous, the twenty-one months of Gus Dur’s presidency became increasingly wild. He showed a contemptuous attitude to Megawati, frequently making remarks to visitors about her mental capacities and several marriages. The same attitude extended to the parties that had backed his candidacy. In early 2000 he dismissed two of their most respected figures from his cabinet for alleged and unspecified “corruption,” though the finger of suspicion about financial misdealings had been pointed at Wahid himself by at least one of the ministers concerned. This was over the allocation of $1.2 billion in loans from a state bank to a struggling conglomerate whose owner had donated heavily to NU.
In mid-2000 the DPR used its previously unexercised right of “interpellation” to call Wahid before it to explain. He reluctantly appeared, made a statement that explained little, and struck a belligerent stance, declaring that the government of Indonesia was “a presidential system” in which the president was “not accountable to the House.” He later withdrew this remark, acknowledging the DPR’s right to question the president.
Wahid continued to travel frequently and to make startling suggestions. Some drew praise. He changed the name of Irian Jaya (in western New Guinea) to Papua, and introduced special autonomy laws. In Aceh he floated the idea of a referendum on autonomy but then hastily withdrew it, instead offering Syari’ah law in the context of wider autonomy. He proposed abolishing Suharto’s 1966 ban on the teaching of Marxism but then quickly backed away from that, too, in the face of opposition from Islamist and military circles. General Wiranto was made coordinating security minister but sacked after a report on the violence in East Timor gave him formal responsibility for it.
Two new scandals emerged. First, it was revealed that Wahid’s masseur had received a loan of Rp 35 billion ($3.5 million) from the state logistics body, Bulog, which was charged with food price stabilization. And second, a donation of $2 million from the Sultan of Brunei had gone into Wahid’s personal funds. The cases consumed the DPR. In February 2001 it voted to accept an investigation, which concluded that Wahid had been involved in these untoward transactions, and declared him to have violated his oath of office by failing to uphold laws and indulging in KKN (korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme—corruption, collusion, nepotism).
This was the first stage in a process that could end in a special session of the MPR and the dismissal of the president. Wahid attempted to forestall the vote by asking his senior military assistant, the coordinating security minister Lieutenant General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to declare a state of emergency and thereby dissolve parliament. The military, or at least Yudhoyono, refused.
Wahid responded to the DPR’s resolution in March 2000, declaring that he had no knowledge of or involvement in the Bulog loan, and that the Brunei money had been a personal gift and was therefore not state funds. This was plausible—the misuse of a superior’s name is common enough in Indonesia—but the DPR was incensed by what it perceived as Wahid’s wider failings of leadership and was increasingly drawn to Megawati’s conservative approach to national security issues. It censured Wahid again.
Finding the president’s response unsatisfactory, the DPR then summoned a special session of the MPR. Over June and July 2001, Wahid again and again suggested he would use his emergency powers, and he dismissed the reluctant Yudhoyono from the cabinet. The MPR brought forward its session, and Wahid issued his emergency decree, only to have it declared invalid by the Supreme Court. The MPR convened on July 23 and voted 591–0 to dismiss Wahid and elevate Megawati to the presidency.
While the short presidencies of Habibie and Wahid were marked by turmoil and reform, the three years of Megawati’s presidency were characterized by inertness and complacency, although reforms already in train continued to be implemented. In her first National Day speech to the DPR, she said she had called her family together and made them give a “solemn pledge” not to give the smallest opportunity for KKN. Those in the audience might have glanced over at her husband, Taufik Kiemas, a PDI-P representative, whom the US embassy was describing in its secret cables as “notoriously corrupt.”
Megawati also showed a fondness for the Indonesian military, despite having herself been a victim of its capacity for brutal political intervention. Back in March 1999 she had told a Singapore audience that she believed firmly in civilian supremacy, but also that “our archipelagic state, which takes the form of a unitary state, very much requires an effective and professional military.” As vice president, she had shown a much less sympathetic attitude to the Papuans than Wahid. “It is sad that after all this pain and struggle to be part of Indonesia, then you emotionally declare your independence,” she told a Papuan gathering in September 2000.
Four months after Megawati became president, the leader of Papua’s main political movement, Theys Eluay, was ambushed and strangled to death after leaving a dinner at a Kopassus base. Six Kopassus soldiers were tried and given light jail sentences of twenty-four to forty-two months. Megawati’s army chief, General Ryamizard Ryacudu, whom she was to promote to armed forces chief in the dying days of her presidency, commented, “For me, they are heroes because they murdered a man who was a rebel, the leader of rebels.”
In September 2002 she reappointed the retired major general Sutiyoso, a former Kopassus officer, as governor of Jakarta, despite his having been the Jakarta garrison commander who had organized the 1996 attack on Megawati’s own party headquarters, an incident in which five of her supporters had died and twenty-three others had been disappeared. Victims’ families were given envelopes of money and told to be quiet. Amid bitter protests that were dispersed by water cannons, her delegates in the Jakarta assembly endorsed Sutiyoso. Megawati claimed, “It was not because of me.”
Two former Kopassus-graduated generals with shadowy reputations from the later Suharto years and the 1997–9 transition, A. M. Hendropriyono and Muchdi Purwoprandjono, became director and deputy director of the Badan Inteligen Negara (BIN, State Intelligence Agency). Their organization would cap Megawati’s term in office by orchestrating the assassination of the human rights activist Munir Said Thalib in September 2004.
As we will see, Megawati returned to an attempt at a massive military solution to Aceh’s rebellion in May 2003. Within two years of her presidency, fourteen people had been sentenced to jail terms of up to three years under laws that made it an offense to show “deliberate disrespect” toward the president or vice president, laws adapted from the lèse-majesté codes of the Netherlands East Indies. By November 2006 she was bemoaning her endorsement of the 1999 political reforms, which she now said had fatally handicapped her presidency. Perhaps it was just as well. Her mental reversion to the populist rule of her father seemed complete.
The Indonesian political system had indeed changed. Four sets of amendments to the 1945 constitution between 1999 and 2002 had greatly altered its balance of powers. The legislature had shown its teeth, using its interpellation powers to summon, question, rebuke, and dismiss the president. Two had fallen in the MPR in the space of just two years. The president now had to give an account of his or her policies virtually every year and was limited to a maximum of two terms, though the balance was tilted back with the commencement of direct presidential elections in 2004.
Also that year, the military’s representation in the parliament was ceasing. The police had now been separated from the armed forces and put under civilian command. A constitutional court operated alongside the Supreme Court and showed a willingness to strike down legislation. A new judicial commission aimed to depoliticize the appointment of judges. The central bank, Bank Indonesia, had been given an institutional independence outside the cabinet. The national audit body was giving fearless reports on the bureaucratic misuse of funds.
Perhaps most dramatically, a decentralization law enacted under Habibie that took effect in 2001 saw substantial responsibilities and revenue flows devolved to the provinces (which now numbered thirty-three) and the kabupaten (regencies) and urban municipalities (which numbered 502). All now had direct elections for their executives and legislatures. Having been a state in which the public involvement in politics was no more than a ritual, within five years Indonesia was now almost constantly engaged in electoral contests at one level or another.
Notes
*Endy M. Bayuni, “How Soeharto Schemed and Habibie Botched It,” The Jakarta Post, October 9, 2006.
†R. E. Elson, “Engineering from Within: Habibie the Man and Indonesia’s Reformasi,” SAIS paper, March 2007.
‡B. J. Habibie, Decisive Moments (Jakarta: Ilthabi Rekatama, 2006); “Habibie’s Book of Problems,” Tempo, October 9, 2006.