Opposition Parties Unite for Indonesia Election; Egyptian Artifacts Shown in Hong Kong, Singapore

By John Gee

Since the downfall of President Suharto in May 1998, Indonesia has been in turmoil. For 33 years, this Southeast Asian country of over 200 million people (90 per cent of whom are Muslims) had lived under a regime dominated by soldiers and ex-soldiers. In the national parliament, 75 seats were reserved for army appointees (following reforms earlier this year, 38 of the 500 seats still are), but the chief instrument of military influence there was Golkar, an organization created by the army and one of only three parties permitted to function under Suharto’s rule. Golkar could always count on winning in the past, but it went into Indonesia’s most recent general election fighting to retain enough seats to be able to bargain for a place in a coalition government.

Of the 48 parties participating in the election campaign, only half a dozen or so were serious national contenders. They fell into two broad categories: parties which appealed to voters as Muslims, and those which took a more Indonesian nationalist line. The one thing all could agree upon was a desire to put the Suharto era behind them.

In the past year, Golkar, too, has attempted to distance itself from the old regime. Leading spokesmen, notably Deputy Chairman Marzuki Darusman, have spoken self-critically about the party’s past, but few voters seem to be convinced.

Golkar’s adoption of President B.J. Habibie as its candidate in the presidential election later this year only confirmed public doubts about its claims to have had a change of heart: Habibie was General Suharto’s right-hand man during his last years as president.

Before the election campaign officially began, three major opposition parties came together in an alliance to defeat Golkar and Habibie. They were:

The National Mandate Party, led by Amien Rais. Rais (who did a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago, specializing in the Middle East) is leader of the 28-million strong Muhammadiyah movement and was a vocal critic of Suharto in the months leading up to his downfall.

The National Awakening Party is led by Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as Gus Dur). Gus Dur is also leader of the Nahdatul Ulama, a Muslim organization claiming a membership of 20 million.

The Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-Struggle), led by Megawati Sukarnoputri. Megawati is the daughter of the late Ahmed Sukarno, the charismatic nationalist who led Indonesia to independence from the Dutch in 1949 and who remained as its president until ousted by Suharto in 1966. The original PDI split when a government-backed faction ousted Megawati from her position as PDI leader. However, she took most of the organization with her into a new party and added the word “Struggle” to its name to distinguish it from its rival. The PDI-Struggle is a nationalist organization and is expected by many observers to emerge as the largest single party from the upcoming elections.

The National Mandate Party has subsequently made a second “tactical” alliance with two other Muslim organizations—theUnited Development Party (PPP), which was legal and close to Golkar under Suharto, and the Justice Party. The survival of these alliances appears unlikely, given the different aims of their nationalist and religious-based components. Yet such are the problems faced by Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, that, in the absence of a convincing win by one party, the establishment of a coalition government bringing together diverse political forces seems to offer the best prospect for stability in the near future.

The new government will face the challenge of consolidating Indonesia’s transition to democracy, which would include working toward the full withdrawal of the armed forces from politics. The government also will have to tackle the country’s economic problems as a matter of extreme urgency.

The recession which has shaken East Asian economies throughout the past two years had a particularly serious impact in Indonesia. Last year, the country’s GDP fell by 14 percent.

The recession also compounded existing problems. Economic growth during the Suharto years went side by side with rampant corruption (at the center of which was the Suharto family and its cronies), increasing disparities in the distribution of wealth and a huge growth in the national debt, which is now $100 billion.

The most difficult issue will be that of the national divisions within Indonesia, which were exacerbated by Suharto’s policies. The largest ethnic group within Indonesia are the Javanese, living in the eastern portion of Indonesia’s most populous island. Javanese are regarded by the many other ethnic groups as the dominant national group in the Indonesian state.

Contentious Transmigrations

Under Suharto, and Sukarno before him, the government supported the transmigration of people from the densely populated islands of Java and Madura to more sparsely populated regions. This provoked the resentment of the indigenous populations, who felt that the newcomers were being given part of their lands in order to strengthen Jakarta’s hold and Javanese dominance.

Some of the worst violence since Suharto’s downfall has taken place in areas where migrants were settled, most notably in the West Kalimantan region of the island of Borneo. In the ninth round of clashes in the last two decades, indigenous Dayaks and Malays combined forces in February against Madurese settlers, driving them out of most of the province.

Transmigrants also were sent to East Timor, a former Portugese colony, and to Irian Jaya (West Papua), which remained under Dutch control longer than the rest of Indonesia. In both places there are movements actively seeking independence.

East Timor was occupied by Indonesian forces in 1975 following the withdrawal of the Portugese colonial administration. It was annexed to Indonesia in 1976, but the annexation was never accepted by most of the world and the territory’s resistance became a lasting embarassment to Jakarta.

In February of this year, President Habibie announced that Indonesia was prepared to let East Timor go its own way, if that is what its people choose in an August referendum to decide its future. Some Indonesians fear that if East Timor wins its independence, secessionist movements will be encouraged on other islands.

Indonesians therefore want East Timor to be seen as a special case. An autonomy law has been passed which devolves more power to provincial governments, but how far that will satisfy other discontented regions like Aceh, in northern Sumatra, remains to be seen.

A factor complicating efforts to overcome these problems is the resistance of elements of the old regime. They have been accused of having inflamed Muslim-Christian tensions on the island of Ambon, leading to intercommunal riots, and are suspected of complicity in a bomb attack near one of Jakarta’s main mosques. In East Timor, too, groups within the army have created and armed anti-independence militias.

The tasks facing the new government are daunting, but at least it should be able to count upon popular support and considerable international sympathy as it begins its work.

The official results of Indonesia’s June 7 elections are only expected to be made known at the end of the month.

Egypt in the East

When London’s British Museum closed part of its Ancient Egyptian galleries during remodeling, it decided to make exhibits normally kept there available to a small number of museums overseas. Some 120 Egyptian artifacts traveled to Hong Kong and then on to Singapore, where they were shown at the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) from Feb. 10 until May 30. Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Minessy, Dr. Morris Bierbrier of the British Museum and Dr. Kwenson Kwok of the ACM opened the “Eternal Egypt” exhibition.

The items on display were arranged according to theme, rather than chronologically, so that visitors were able to form a better impression of how the ancient Egyptians lived and what they believed. At the exit, display boards provided a chronology up to the present day. All too often, those viewing Egyptian galleries are left with the impression that there is no continuity between the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Islamic Egypt.

A special program of events for children in which they could dress as ancient Egyptians and learn to write their names in hieroglyphs proved popular.

In the whole of East Asia, only Japan has significant collections of Egyptian artifacts. This was the first time an Ancient Egyptian exhibition had been shown in Singapore and it attracted great public interest. By the time it ended, 102,000 people had seen “Eternal Egypt”—a figure all the more impressive given that Singapore’s entire population numbers only 3 million.

John Gee is a free-lance writer based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: Israel and the Palestinians.