Chapter 4 The Problem of Local Order: A View from the Kampung
The previous chapter traced how the problem of state building in Indonesia has been solved historically through a mixture of coercion and local autonomy. The reliance on coercion peaked during the height of Suharto’s New Order regime, followed by a restraining of the state’s coercive capacity and a circumscription of its role as Indonesia transitioned to democratic rule. This chapter shifts from the bird’s eye view of the problem of statecraft down to the village-level view of the problem of local order amid alternating periods of building and constraining the state. Whereas threats to state dominance and territorial integrity formed the state’s security priorities, the more parochial concerns of crime and intercommunal conflict were left to local communities to solve themselves. In this chapter, I will explore how the state’s priorities, transmitted through its formal institutions, have shaped local security environments over time.
A Historical Reliance on Informal Institutions of Governance
Before the Dutch imposed formal bureaucratic governing structures, local rulers had long used their own strategies to achieve order in their kingdoms. As discussed earlier, the Dutch built the colonial state first by forging alliances with local kingdoms that continued to carry out the task of maintaining order themselves. Over time, the Dutch elaborated a hybrid, ethnically based system of law that provided one legal system for European colonists and certain nonindigenous Asians and another separate system for indigenous Indonesians.1 Under this arrangement, the colonial government transplanted the Dutch civil law system to regulate interactions involving Europeans and nonindigenous Asians. Indigenous persons were subject to the edicts and norms of the many and heterogeneous systems of customary (adat) law associated with different ethnic groups in the archipelago.2
During the colonial period, the manifold customary legal systems were grouped into nineteen regional systems of adat law, each of which had a superior court to adjudicate disputes. If a dispute could not be resolved by the adat courts, it would be referred to the civil law courts. Penal law was the one area in which the civil code had jurisdiction over indigenous Indonesians. In practice, however, for the vast majority of native Indonesians, especially the poor and rural populations, adat institutions were used to adjudicate disputes. Although there was a push in the early twentieth century to unify the law under a civil code, this was defeated by a vocal set of Dutch legal scholars led by Cornelius van Vollenhoven who argued for the preservation of adat, which he believed was more relevant to the everyday reality of Indonesians.3
The reliance on adat law enabled the Dutch to remain unencumbered by the problems of arbitrating disputes and enforcing the law. The Japanese largely maintained the hybrid legal system so that, at independence, Indonesia was left with an ethnically based system of law. To many of the leaders of the revolution, however, the ethnically based legal system was a relic of the colonial past. Civil law, therefore, was made to apply to all individuals, regardless of ethnicity. Although adat law was seen as anathema to the modern program of bureaucratic statecraft, it was impractical to eliminate adat law because most of the population was still governed at least partially by these informal systems. Furthermore, replacing adat law required expanding the formal judicial and law enforcement systems at a time when the state’s resources were strained by the costs of establishing a new state. In the midst of economic crisis and simultaneous rebellions, the nascent Indonesian state lacked the resources to provide many public goods. As a result, many aspects of social and political life in postcolonial Indonesia continued to be regulated by adat law and other informal institutions as they had been for centuries.4
Power in the Village during the New Order
To understand how the fluctuations in the capacity and role of the state at the macrolevel affected security at the local level, it is necessary to examine how these changes reconfigured the distribution of local power. Throughout Indonesian history, three archetypal figures have played key roles in shaping and enforcing both formal and informal institutions at the local level: state agents, customary leaders, and strongmen. By the New Order, the state had established a local presence. Among state agents at the village level, the village head typically played a central role in the business of the village or urban neighborhood.5 Other local state agents included the village secretary, police officers, and noncommissioned military officers (babinsa).6 Customary leaders include adat leaders, religious leaders, youth leaders, shamans (dukun), and other titleless persons of influence. In addition to state agents and customary leaders, strongmen (jago)7 have also played an important role in various local contexts.8
These archetypal figures each had an ability to shape and enforce local institutions through sanction and persuasion. State agents, customary leaders, and strongmen drew primarily upon the state, social institutions, and coercion, respectively for their influence. State agents drew their influence from their ability to mediate how villagers navigated state bureaucracies, the legitimacy conferred by the state, and ultimately the backing they had from the military. Customary leaders drew their influence from their ability to control social structures and the legitimacy conferred by cultural and religious traditions.9 Strongmen drew on their reputations as superior fighters (often with training in martial arts such as pencak silat) or as wielders of magic. The fear engendered in society and among other toughs by their fighting skills and reputed supernatural powers allowed jago to coerce others in both the underworld and in proper society.
As the state expanded deeper into society from the colonial period to independence, it subsumed many of the functions that had long been the realm of local traditional leaders. Whereas the state was initially content to govern its territories by indirect rule, it would later use its increasingly powerful military to establish direct rule throughout the archipelago. By the end of the New Order, the Indonesian state had established a presence down to the village level. At its onset, the New Order promised stability and economic growth underwritten by the unapologetic threat of force. As a result, a historical reliance on informal institutions for local governance was increasingly displaced by a much more statist approach that would result in a far-reaching transformation of social life at the village level. This entailed both a reconfiguration of power in the village and the adoption of informal security institutions that were increasingly dependent on the state.
With its powerful and repressive military, the New Order conferred unprecedented influence in village life on state agents, while marginalizing the influence of customary leaders and strongmen. For village heads, this influence stemmed from the fear of the military-backed regime and their role in facilitating and denying access to state resources and services. The military’s Petrus campaign (pembunuhan misterius or mysterious killings), which resulted in the assassination of thousands of individuals labeled as criminals in the early 1980s, made local toughs reluctant to cross agents of the state. Gangsters subsequently retreated to the shadowy interstices of society out of the reach of the state. The army’s dual-function policy, which gave the military a central role in both military and civilian spheres, provided village heads the coercive backing to implement the regime’s policies at the village level. Recalcitrant villagers could be labeled troublemakers and subjected to monitoring by Kopkamtib, the regime’s feared domestic intelligence apparatus. Cowed by the repressive military, ordinary citizens therefore remained pliant and gangsters maintained a low profile.10
Village heads also derived significant influence from their power to facilitate or block access to the state bureaucracy. Villagers were dependent on village heads for their role in issuing recommendation letters necessary for a range of government-related activities such as applying for the armed forces, civil service positions, and high schools, as well as for purchasing land and obtaining a marriage license. Documents issued by the village head such as a “letter of good behavior” (surat kelakuan baik) served as a means by which the authoritarian regime could deter subversive behavior and monitor the activities of the population.11 Village heads also could help steer development monies or recommend households for government assistance for poverty-reduction programs. Moreover, in rural areas, village heads had influence over the use and appropriation of communal lands, providing them with further leverage over fellow villagers. In short, village heads determined whether their fellow villagers would be seen in good stead in the eyes of the state, thereby controlling their access to a wide range of state resources.
Despite the ascendancy of state agents, the relevance of customary leaders, such as adat leaders and religious figures, was not completely subverted during the New Order, especially as they were still of significant use to the state. Rather than displacing them, the state circumscribed their authority, allowing them to retain an assortment of powers such as allocating traditional lands, permitting marriages, and resolving disputes. In some communities, such powers and traditional legitimacy allowed customary leaders to maintain significant influence. Similarly, although strongmen were not eager to rouse the ire of the repressive military, they still played a role in enforcing informal contracts, settling disputes, and mediating the security and insecurity of their territories where they could operate without attracting undue attention from the state.12
Formal and Informal Approaches to Local Order during the New Order
Under constrained resources in a newly independent state, the military had received priority over the police with the logic that the military was more central to the survival of the state. The Suharto regime allocated significant attention and resources to defuse potential threats to regime stability, while leaving other security concerns relatively neglected. In particular, communal violence remained a state concern, while crime was largely a community responsibility. In a 1982 military document entitled “Regional Security Management” outlining its security doctrine, the government provided an explicit ranking of its priorities through a classification system categorizing tribal, racial, and religious opposition and serious criminal activities as heavy threats, nonviolent labor disputes and demonstrations as moderate threats, and low-level criminality as a light threat.13 With the memory of numerous regional ethnic and religious rebellions of the 1950s, the New Order regime viewed communal tensions as a potential threat to the regime’s stability and sought to suppress destabilizing spirals of ethnic violence. The Indonesian military’s strategic plan in 1988 delineated a policy to combat ethnic and religious strife, motivated by a view that “extreme groups . . . would try to use extra-constitutional means – instigation of mass riots, for instance – to further their political interests based on racial and separatist motivations.”14 By demarcating the aspects of local security into which the state would intervene and which aspects would remain for communities to attend to themselves, the state delineated the parameters of the problem of local order faced by communities.
The delegation of crime management to communities was a continuation of a historical reliance by the state on informal institutions as a primary means of maintaining local security. Throughout Indonesian history, the lack of a central state presence in many parts of the archipelago led communities to rely on customary leaders and informal institutions to maintain local order. A senior police official in charge of community policing explained the relationship between the police and informal security institutions:
“Every village has its own village policing system because the police are limited in their reach at the local level . . . If local security is good enough, then they just rely on community policing [systems] . . . Only if informal policing is not enough, do we put police posts up . . . [Police] posts are there for prevention and preemption. Sometimes they also arrest people, but mainly they are for prevention and then reporting to headquarters if problems warrant.”
In this way, the local presence of the police can be largely seen as having a monitoring rather than a law enforcement role since the state would only intervene in local security issues when bigger security threats, including communal violence, could not be resolved by communities themselves. Minor problems such as ordinary crimes were left to communities to solve. Thus, communities during the New Order could not count on the state to deal with crime, but they could potentially expect the state to intervene against communal violence. These policies shaped local security environments across the country; thus, communities adopted informal institutions that were adapted to the policies of the state and the capacities of the communities. Specifically, they encouraged communities to take crime prevention into their own hands, except insofar as they threatened to escalate into communal violence.
Crime
While the military was a feared organization during the New Order, police capacity was weak, both relative to the military and compared to other police forces worldwide. In 1999, the police-to-population ratio was roughly only 1:1,200, which was at the low end of world police ratios.16 Moreover, the Indonesian police, a centralized institution, was subsumed as a subsidiary branch of the military hierarchy. The military’s mandate of maintaining internal security overlapped with the traditional role of the police in maintaining civil order and law enforcement. This allowed the regime to neglect the development of police capacity because security problems that the police were unable to deal with, such as outbreaks of communal violence, could be quelled by the military.
Only when crime overwhelmed the police and informal security institutions threatened stability did the military intervene to reestablish security. In the early 1980s, a wave of rampant gang-related crime gripped the country. In response, General Benny Murdani launched the Petrus (Pembunuhan misterius – Mysterious killings) campaign (1982–3) in which between 5,000 and 10,000 suspected criminals, labeled as recidivists, were killed and their mutilated bodies were laid out in the streets. The killing of local toughs is notable for the fact that Suharto’s Golkar party often also utilized thugs to intimidate locals to support the regime. By targeting the local toughs, some have suggested that the Petrus episode can be seen as a further attempt at consolidating state power at the local level. In this interpretation, village justice was seen as the jurisdiction of village authorities, whereas Petrus represented the state’s further intervention in village justice and imposition of order through military force.17
In the absence of an effective police force to deter and punish crimes, the regime relied on communities to provide for their own security and to continue the centuries-long practice of vigilantism (main hakim sendiri). In this practice, communities police their own neighborhoods to monitor, punish, and deter crimes, especially those committed by outsiders. One of the most visible manifestations of the communal provision of local security is the night watch, known as ronda. Found in the vast majority of villages and urban neighborhoods in Indonesia, ronda have been used throughout Indonesian history by local communities as a means of preventing thefts, particularly at night.18 Reflecting the general nature of this informal institution, ronda have also been developed independently in other contexts where the state could not be counted on to provide security, as for example in Peru in the form of rondas campesinas, which served to repel both Sendero Luminoso and government forces.19
In Indonesia, ronda are organized by village or hamlet leaders who enlist young men from village households to participate in the night watches on a rotating basis. Night watch posts are set up in a village’s key locations, such as the central intersection or the outer edge of the village to monitor the entrance of outsiders. When thefts occur, ronda guards ring a wooden percussion instrument that summons villagers into the street to chase after the thieves. If the thieves are captured, a common response is for villagers to lynch the accused thieves. It is not uncommon for their faces to be beaten beyond recognition or for such thieves to be killed and their bodies mutilated. The severity of the beating serves to deter future crimes with punishment disproportionate to the crime while compensating for the fact that some thieves inevitably are able to flee without being caught.20
The lynching of individuals suspected of crimes or other transgressions has long been sanctioned by the state, both explicitly and implicitly. Beginning in 1622, the Dutch East Indies Company decreed that killing a thief at night was permitted if he fled or resisted arrest. Similar indigenous norms stipulating that civilians were allowed to kill thieves were codified by colonial authorities in Java, Malacca, Rejang, Aceh, Bali, Makassar, Sumba, and Timor in the nineteenth century. Although colonial authorities formally disallowed the killing of thieves in the penal code of 1918, the practice has continued de facto as the law enforcement by the state remained tepid.21 In practice, the implicit sanctioning of lynching by the state meant that, if a thief was caught and lynched, police often simply made note of the original crime that provoked the lynching, but did not investigate the lynching itself. During the New Order, the implicit sanctioning of lynching continued with the police largely viewing the practice as a cost-effective means to prevent other crimes in the context of constrained state resources. Participants in such violence were rarely prosecuted, and the police themselves were generally reluctant to intervene against a mob.22
Communal Violence
Related to the lynching of criminals is the practice of retaliation for transgressions committed by outsiders. Conceptually, retaliation overlaps heavily with the lynching of criminals in that perceived wrongs committed by outsiders require members of a group to use violence to punish them.23 Like lynching, retaliation is used to punish and deter unwanted behavior by outsiders. Despite the fact that vigilantism and retaliation are subclasses of out-group punishment practices, they have an important distinction. Whereas vigilantism describes violence that is specifically targeted against those alleged to have committed crimes, retaliation entails violence that is directed at members of an entire out-group for transgressions committed by their members, regardless of individual culpability. There may be a number of identity cleavages along which members of a community may choose to demarcate the targeted out-group; this may change as conflict evolves. In Indonesia, salient identities are typically defined by boundaries separating villages or subdistricts, ethnicity, religion, and migrant or indigenous status.
Out-group punishment practices, such as lynching and retaliation, form the building blocks of communal violence in Indonesia, which often follows an archetypical sequence. Communal violence in Indonesia typically begins with a catalyst, often a seemingly minor crime, scuffle among youths, or offensive action, which can set off norms of lynching by one group. In turn, this can trigger retaliatory norms by the community of the lynching victim and subsequently a cycle of retaliatory violence. Once a retaliatory cycle has begun, violence that begins as an intervillage feud sometimes escalates when the salient identity cleavages demarcate larger groups such as subdistricts or ethnic groups.
With its prioritization of communal violence as a major threat to regime stability, the New Order regime prohibited retaliation by communities of people lynched for committing crimes due to the possibility that retaliation could spiral into communal violence. This policy contrasts with the regime’s sanctioning of the practice of lynching those accused of crimes. The enforcement of this policy depended in part on the ability of the regime to monitor the population for incidents of retaliatory violence. State agents were able to stay informed of potential incidents that could lead to communal violence through Kopkamtib, the regime’s massive domestic intelligence apparatus. Specifically, noncommissioned soldiers, police posts, and others in the domestic surveillance apparatus would report “unusual social conditions”24 that could lead to communal violence to subdistrict territorial commands.25
When state agents became aware that communal violence broke out or threatened to do so, they had a number of tools with which to prevent or suppress the outbreak of violence. At the crude end, local soldiers and police officers were sometimes called upon to separate communities in conflict and use violence as a means of suppressing communal violence. When local police or soldiers were insufficient for containing the violence, the state could draw upon territorial military commands at the subdistrict, district, or regional levels that were successively more powerful, depending on the scale of the violence. That is, although low levels of coercive force were sufficient to contain most incidents, the state could potentially deploy forces that were capable of putting down large-scale conflagrations.
Not only did the New Order regime have the capacity to produce high levels of violence, it had developed a reputation for using violence that made the threat credible. This reputation of a regime that was unrestrained in its use of violence started with the military countercoup at the dawn of the New Order that brought Suharto to power. It was accompanied by the military-orchestrated mass killings of between a half million and a million alleged communists, regime opponents, and ethnic Chinese. This reputation was further reinforced by the violent counterinsurgency campaigns in East Timor and Aceh, the repression of opposition activists, the antigang Petrus campaign, and the violent repression of religious groups viewed by the regime as extreme in Tanjung Priok in 1984 and Lampung in 1989.26
Although deploying the military was an effective, if crude, means of containing even the most volatile communal violence, it was also costly. Many incidents could be contained with the mere threat of state coercion, made credible during much of the New Order because of the state’s reputation for using overwhelming violence to maintain order and its interests. Indeed, the regime’s credibility in using violence to maintain security undergirded the other means by which state agents could contain communal violence. In addition to the threat of violence, local state agents could use their ability to blacklist people from benefits associated with the bureacracies, labeling them as troublemakers and placing them under the watchful gaze of the state’s feared Kopkamtib intelligence apparatus. With these instruments of coercion as a cudgel, even badly outnumbered local authorities could invoke the heavy hand of the state to dissipate mobs. State agents could coerce erstwhile rioters to demobilize with the threat of state exclusion, arrest, surveillance, or violence.
The Problem of Local Order during the Transition
Throughout the years of Keterbukaan during the New Order and the early years of the Reformasi period, the military became increasingly constrained in its ability to use force, and this in turn indelibly transformed the problem of local order that communities faced. Whereas the increasing constraints placed on the security forces would serve to trigger the nationwide spike in violence, the regime’s policies during the preceding years of the New Order made communities more dependent on state intervention for intercommunal security and therefore more vulnerable to increasing constraints on the security forces.
Greater Dependence on the State during the New Order
The unprecedented penetration of the state as well as the regime’s policies regarding crime and communal violence had important implications for how communities managed local security during the New Order. As the capacity of the state increased, the state took on an expanding role in managing local security in priority areas of the regime, which displaced local security capacities and rendered communities increasingly dependent on the state to maintain security. On the one hand, the privileging of state agents weakened the relative capacities of informal sources of authority. However, the more interventionist policies of the New Order also shaped the informal institutions by which local communities managed their security.
The New Order’s security policies, which reflected its prioritization of communal violence to the neglect of crime, encouraged the development of out-group punishment institutions. Because the state allowed the lynching of criminals while prohibiting retaliation, there was an incentive for many local communities to lynch criminals because it might help to deter crimes by outsiders while not incurring the costs of retaliation by the communities of the lynched. That is, with a powerful military that was sensitive to escalations of communal violence, but unwilling to allocate sufficient resources to police crimes, many communities concluded that lynching was an effective deterrent whose potential risks from retaliation were mitigated by the state.27 Moreover, existing structures of intercommunal security such as intervillage alliances called pela gandong (in Ambon) and hibua lamo (in North Maluku) were displaced as a result of state policies. In an ethnography of the institution of pela gandong in Ambon conducted in the 1970s, Pieter Bartels observed that these cross-cutting institutions, which had been used to manage intercommunal violence, were weaker and less prevalent during the New Order as migrants without these traditions settled in the area and as the state increasingly displaced traditional sources of power in the village.28 Similarly, the practice of hibua lamo also declined during the New Order as the population of migrants in North Maluku grew.29
Under the New Order, lynching was widely practiced and communities had increasingly come to rely on the state to tamp down on retaliatory spirals of communal violence. Indeed, this policy of intervening against communal violence, but not crime, incentivized the adoption of lynching as a means of deterring crimes. As long as the security forces continued to intervene against communal violence effectively, lynching would not be expected to lead to communal violence. However, if the security forces intervened less or became less effective in dispersing crowds, lynching could trigger a retaliatory spiral of communal violence. In this way, the out-group punishment institutions that had been encouraged by the state’s security policies provided intercommunal security only as long as the state continued its policies and were not robust to changes in state security policies.
Constraining the Security Forces
The constraints placed on the security forces due to increased scrutiny of their human rights records exposed communities that had grown dependent on New Order intervention to maintain intercommunal security. But how did greater attention to human rights at the macrolevel affect security at the microlevel? One way to gauge changes in local-level security is to examine how specialists in violence involved in local protection perceived those changes since their business requires that they be atuned to changes in the security environment. One of my respondents, Haji Mukri, the leader of a powerful mafia in Lampung Province, described to me how the increasing scrutiny of the human rights records of the security forces affected the problem of local security:
“Now that it’s the Reformasi era, everyone thinks they have the freedom to do whatever they want . . . [The police and military] have to worry about human rights and such things. So criminals and demonstrators are not scared since the worst that can happen to them is that they are sent to jail.”30
Haji Mukri explained that during the New Order, the security forces were quick to use violence to achieve local security, but they were constrained during the transition period by an increased enforcement of human rights that was being transmitted to security forces on the ground from the national level. This view of tepid responses to communal violence by security forces is reflected in accounts by international human rights advocacy groups, such as Human Rights Watch and International Crisis Group, of security force responses to communal violence in West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Maluku, North Maluku, and Central Sulawesi.31 The accounts by these human rights groups highlight that under the New Order, the security forces were trained to use violence and intimidation to establish security, but they were ill-trained for crowd control in a context of greater respect for human rights. As Angel Rabasa and John Haseman have described, “For a young commander . . ., the choices available in the event of major civil disturbances are bleak: Shoot rioters or allow the violence to run its course.”32
Although low-ranking soldiers in the field previously had considerable discretion in the use of force, during the Keterbukaan and Reformasi periods, as human rights entered the national discourse, they became more sensitive to disciplinary repercussions for using force that could be construed as excessive. As a result, field soldiers increasingly deferred to their superiors to be commanded to use force. In the case of Maluku and North Maluku, the ambiguity over the sanctioned use of force was resolved only when President Abdurrahman Wahid declared a civil emergency that allowed security forces from outside to more vigorously combat increasingly organized armed groups that had not been brought under control by local forces responding tepidly and in some cases partially.33
The greater constraints on the security forces were felt by locals most acutely precisely when they hoped for and anticipated their intervention. A Muslim resident who later joined an Islamist militia in Poso, Central Sulawesi, highlighted this choice in an interview recounting what occurred in May 2000 when a Christian mob bent on retaliation began sweeping across Muslim villages. When he begged a local military outpost to use their guns to stop the oncoming attackers, the local commander rebuffed him, saying such a use of force was no longer possible due to human rights.34 In the cases examined in Chapters 6 and 7, I present further evidence of the perceptions among locals in a number of provinces that the security forces had become more constrained. As I will demonstrate in those specific cases, locals became aware of less interventionist security forces just as violence began to escalate, precisely at the point when they desired state intervention.
The ascendance of state agents over customary leaders and strongmen during the New Order was predicated on a repressive military that shadowed the civilian government at every level down to the village level through the regime’s Dual Function policy. But when the military was restrained, the state weakened the influence of village heads and other state agents at the village level. Thus, a small number of state agents could previously effect obedience from village masses by threatening to blacklist, but as the military became restrained they were no longer able to garner the same obedience with less onerous consequences for disobedience. A local official who had the potential coercive muscle of the authoritarian state could previously threaten to take names to dissipate communal violence. After the military was restrained, that official was transformed from someone who could credibly wield the coercive power of the state to a simple mediator, cajoling angry mobs that were no longer intimidated by the state.
The Search for New Sources of Authority
The shifting center of gravity of local power led to new approaches to local security that drew from customary and de facto sources of power. In this way, the restraints placed on the military opened up opportunities for customary leaders and strongmen to reassert themselves where they had previously deferred to state sources of authority. The loosening of the coercive grip of the state has allowed for a revival of adat and religious movements. Although village heads are still influential in many communities, customary leaders have become increasingly influential in some areas of local governance. Thus, the decline and demise of the New Order regime altered the capacities of the actors that could shape and enforce institutions. That is to say, the constellation of local power that had generally come to revolve around local state agents such as village heads, soldiers, and police officers was now in flux during the transition from authoritarian rule, and existing institutions that were predicated on such sources of power could no longer be counted on to be enforced as they had been in the past.35
The incremental constraining of the military over the 1990s also coincides with the rise of strongmen and criminal gangs. As the state’s coercive capacity weakened, demand rose for strongmen with the capacity to guarantee private security, resulting in a proliferation of gangs.36 The increasingly restrained military also had the unintended consequence of an increasing reliance on proxy militias that could carry out repressive activities with a plausibly deniable connection to the military.37 Certainly the reliance on military-sponsored thugs during a crackdown on Megawati’s campaign headquarters reflected some aversion to the overt use of repression and the convenient lack of accountability for militias and gangs. In East Timor, given the sensitivity to international pressures, military-supported militias were used to supplement the military’s official forces and terrorize civilians, which resulted in thousands killed during the insurgency (1975–99) and the rampage during the military’s withdrawal.38
With the removal of the repressive military, customary leaders and strongmen began to reassert themselves, resulting in a struggle for local power that has further complicated the ability of communities to alter their institutions to be adapted to the newly constrained security forces. In some contexts, state agents such as village heads continued to enjoy the prestige and influence over community affairs that they did during the New Order. But in others, their influence has deteriorated in favor of customary leaders or strongmen. In some contexts, the consolidation of local power has occurred swiftly, while in others, the process of reconfiguring power over new poles has been more fraught, resulting in the fracturing of power along multiple poles. In turn, this has led to greater uncertainty within communities regarding which actors are most capable of enforcing institutions. In the context of mismatched institutions that have emerged after the withdrawal of the military, this uncertainty over enforcement may have prolonged the process by which communities adjust their institutions to fit the new environment. In other words, fractured and uncertain leadership that has resulted from the withdrawal of the military from society may also have impaired the capacity of communities to adopt new institutions. The changes in local power have disrupted institutions that were enforced by state agents. Existing institutions for preventing crime and communal violence could no longer rely on state agents for enforcement. New institutional arrangements that could rely on what state agents were now capable of doing and the newer sources of authority and coercion by customary agents and strongmen were required.
Conclusion
This chapter has characterized the problem of local order and how it changed over time. The New Order’s policies on domestic security incentivized vigilantism and lynching as a means of preventing crimes by intervening against outbreaks of communal violence. Increasing constraints placed on the security forces during the late New Order and into the Reformasi period transformed the local security environments, removing the heavy shadow of the military that structured informal institutions as well as the distribution of local power. The next chapter will assess the observable implications of the theory in the context of these changes on statistical evidence.
1 The Regulation of 1854 formally affirmed an ethnic basis of laws.
2 Hooker, Adat Law in Modern Indonesia, 9–17.
3 , “Colonial Dilemma: Van Vollenhoven and the Struggle Between Adat Law and Western Law in Indonesia,” in The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism, ed. and (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 61–3; Hooker, Adat Law in Modern Indonesia, 16–7.
4 Hooker, Adat Law in Modern Indonesia, 20–4.
5 Kepala desa are the heads of rural villages (desa), while lurah are the heads of urban neighborhoods (kelurahan).
6 Although adat administrators and judges were accorded official status within the colonial period, they have since been removed from any official position within the state.
7 Strongmen are also sometimes referred to as jawara, preman, or pentolan.
8 , “Negara Beling: Street-Level Authority in an Indonesian Slum,” in State of Authority: The State in Society in Indonesia, ed. and (Ithaca, NY: SEAP Publications, 2009), 49; Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries, 19–20.
9 Adat leaders are called tokoh adat, religious leaders are called tokoh agama, youth leaders are called tokoh pemuda, and shamans are called dukun.
10 , “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order,” in Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, ed. (Ithaca, NY: SEAP Publications, 2001), 33–7.
11 , “Village Leaders and the New Order,” in Leadership on Java: Gentle Hints, Authoritarian Rule, ed. and (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1994), 80–1.
12 Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries, 19–21; , “‘Petrus’: Patterns of Prophylactic Murder in Indonesia,” Asian Survey25, no. 7 (July 1, 1985): 745–59; , “Traditional Leadership in Rural Java,” in Leadership on Java: Gentle Hints, Authoritarian Rule, ed. and (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1994), 33–9; , “‘Shadow State’? Business and Politics in the Province of Banten,” in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, ed. and (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 203–8.
13 , “The Totalitarian Ambition: Intelligence Organisations in the Indonesian State,” in State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. (Clayton: Monash University Press, 1990), 239.
14 Honna, Military Politics and Democratization in Indonesia, 90–1.
15 Interview, May 23, 2007, Jakarta, Indonesia.
16 The typical range of police-population ratios is 1:250 to 1:1000. See , “Police as Military: Indonesia’s Experience,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management24, no. 3 (2001): 425; Barker and van Klinken, “Reflections on the State in Indonesia,” 35.
17 Barker, “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order,” 30; Schulte Nordholt, “Violence and the Anarchy of the Modern Indonesia State.”
18 In the 1970s, the New Order government attempted to exert greater control over the ronda by registering and formally co-opting them into the Siskamling system (Neighborhood Security System). The establishment of Siskamling served to increase coordination between the informal night watches with police operations and to improve the state’s ability to carry out surveillance of its citizenry. Despite these changes, the basic function of ronda continued in the New Order as before, to monitor and deter crime. See Barker, “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order,” 24–6; , “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Explaining the Unexplainable: Amuk Massa in Indonesia,” in Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), 293.
19 , Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
20 , Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 39–50; , “Against Community, Beyond Humanity: Grasping ‘Violence’ in Java,” in Violence and Vengeance: Discontent and Conflict in New Order Indonesia, ed. and (Saarbrucken, Germany: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik, 2002), 16–8; Barker, “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order,” 43–5.
21 , “Maling! Maling! The Lynching of Petty Criminals,” in Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective, ed. and (Leiden: KITLV, 2002), 315–7.
22 Van der Kroef, “Petrus,” 748–50; Siegel, Solo in the New Order, 40; Colombijn, “Maling! Maling! The Lynching of Petty Criminals,” 313–9; Braten, “Against Community, Beyond Humanity: Grasping ‘Violence’ in Java,” 17.
23 While lynching is sometimes used to punish transgressions by in-group members, it is an instrument of punishment to which outsiders resort more quickly due to fewer nonviolent instruments of punishment available beyond community boundaries.
24 Tanter, “The Totalitarian Ambition: Intelligence Organisations in the Indonesian State,” 225.
25 , “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds,” Security Dialogue36, no. 3 (2005): 282.
26 Honna, Military Politics and Democratization in Indonesia, 90–1.
27 Van der Kroef, “Petrus,” 748–50; Siegel, Solo in the New Order, 40; Colombijn, “Maling! Maling! The Lynching of Petty Criminals,” 313–19; Braten, “Against Community, Beyond Humanity: Grasping ‘Violence’ in Java,” 17.
28 Dieter Bartels, “Guarding the Invisible Mountain: Intervillage Alliances, Religious Syncretism, and Ethnic Identity Among Ambonese Christians and Moslems in the Moluccas” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).
29 , Ethno-religious Violence in Indonesia: From Soil to God (New York: Routledge, 2008), 101–2.
30 Interview, Haji Mukri, Bandar Lampung, July 29, 2003.
31 ICG, Communal Violence in Indonesia: Lessons from Kalimantan; , Communal Violence in West Kalimantan (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997); , “The Violence in Ambon,” Human Rights Watch11, no. 1 (1999); , “Breakdown: Four Years of Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi,” Human Rights Watch14, no. 9 (December 2002); , “Indonesia: Overcoming Murder and Chaos in Maluku,” ICG Asia Report no. 10 (December 19, 2000).
32 Rabasa and Haseman, The Military and Democracy in Indonesia, 20.
33 Ian D. Wilson, “The Politics of Inner Power: The Practice of Pencak Silat in West Java” (Murdoch University, 2002), 168; ICG, “Overcoming Murder and Chaos in Maluku,” 12; , “The Other Maluku: Chronologies of Conflict in North Maluku,” Indonesia80 (October 2005): 78–9.
34 Interview, Mujahidin KOMPAK fighter, Central Sulawesi, February 22, 2006 (A).
35 and , “Introduction,” in The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism, ed. and (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 13–8.
36 , “The Privatization of Public Order: Relying on the Satgas,” in Violence in Indonesia (Hamburg: Abera Verlag Markus Voss, 2001), 152–67.
37 This is obviously not to say that the military ceased to directly carry out acts that could be classified as human rights violations, but rather that their use of force was restricted. Certainly the assassination in 2004 of Munir, a human rights lawyer who investigated missing persons and human rights abuses by the military, points to nefarious military intervention. Acts of repression in Aceh and East Timor point to the military’s capability to carry out repressive actions.
38 Ryter, “Pemuda Pancasila: The Last Loyalist Free Men of Suharto’s Order?”; Hidayat, “‘Shadow State’?”; , “Criminality and the Political Economy of Security in Lombok,” in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, ed. and (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 281–304; Schulte Nordholt, “Violence and the Anarchy of the Modern Indonesia State,” 49.
