dari artikel THE ECONOMIST
The Indonesian example Remember 1998 Feb 7th 2011, 8:44by N.O.
AS PRO-DEMOCRACY protests in Egypt enter their third week, and President Hosni Mubarak's hold on power seems to grow weaker by the day, some pundits are telling us not to celebrate too soon. We've been here before, they say, pointing to the Iranian revolution in 1979, when demonstrators toppled an American-supported autocrat only to see his rule replaced by a theocracy, led by the West-baiting Ayatollah Khomeini. True enough. But not all protest movements end badly. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, offers a more sanguine precedent. The scenes unfolding on Cairo's Tahrir Square are not dissimilar from those that occurred in Jakarta in May 1998: thousands of protesters, mostly educated middle-class students, occupied the city's sprawling parliament complex to demand the resignation of Suharto, who had ruled as a dictator for 32 years—nearly the same period that Mr Mubarak has held power in Egypt. (Before Egypt and Indonesia were brought into the American camp by Sadat and Suharto, they had been two of the four founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement.) Surrounded by soldiers, women in hijab protested side by side with their male classmates, chanting anti-Suharto slogans, denouncing “corruption, collusion and nepotism”, and calling for a full-fledged democracy. The Asian currency crisis had brought the country's once-booming economy to its knees, and the price of basic goods had rocketed. Indonesians in 1998, like the protesters at Tahrir Square today, had had enough. Jakarta's protesters soon got their way: Suharto resisted at first but, when it became apparent that he had lost the support of the army, he stepped aside, surrendering power to his own deputy, B.J. Habibie. A year later, in June 1999, the country held its freest elections in more than 40 years, ushering in a period of far-reaching constitutional reform that has made today's Indonesia, if not a perfect democracy, then at least one of the Muslim world's most promising exponents of Western-style liberal governance. So much so, in fact, that American officials often cite the country as an example of tolerance and moderation to be emulated by Arab governments across the Middle East. It was not so many years ago that America was propping up the staunchly anti-communist Suharto in much the same way that it has backed Mubarak. It certainly found Suharto more palatable than his predecessor, Indonesia's demagogic founding president Sukarno, who had treated Western commercial interests in his country with about as much respect as did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who nationalised the Suez canal. In the late 1990s Indonesia's transition from dictatorship to democracy was far from assured. Three decades of repressive authoritarian rule had crippled civil society. Golkar, the political party sponsored by Suharto, had a national reach not matched by either the United Development Party or the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), the two other parties tolerated by his regime as a figleaf for the rubber-stamp parliament. Discounting the discredited Golkar, only two other organisations could claim national support at that time: Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, both of them Muslim mass-membership organisations founded at around the same time as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and running similar social-welfare programmes. When Indonesians went to the polls in 1999, around 56% of them voted for secular parties, with the PDI's successor party, the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P), emerging as the largest party in parliament, with 33.7% of the vote. The National Awakening Party (PKB), closely affiliated with NU, polled better than any other religious party, but it won only 12.6% of the vote. Eventually the PKB's founder, Abdurahman Wahid, ended up becoming president—as a result of some messy coalition horse-trading—but then he shared power with the PDI-P and his government oversaw the democratisation of Indonesia. The parallels between Indonesia in the 1990s and Egypt today could be overstated. And of course Indonesia's transition to democracy was traumatic: the country's very existence as a unified nation-state was called into question by the bloody separation of East Timor and by waves of ethnic, religious and separatist killings that swept across Aceh, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Maluku. But, at a time when we are told that Egypt's protests are destined to be hijacked by fearsome, basiji-type religious extremists, it is worth remembering that there are more inspiring examples of what popular protest can achieve. Indonesia is one of them.
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Post time 19-9-2015 01:12 PM
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