CRAFTING ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY: THE NEW ERA OF POLITICAL ISLAM

It must be emphasized from the outset that although PKS does not explicitly refer to Islam in its name, it claims to be an Islamic party. PKS was established in 1998 under the original name Justice Party (Partai Keadilan, or PK) by university-based dakwah activists from the so-called Tarbiyah (literally, “religious education”) movement. At the time the party was established, Tarbiyah was a closed movement whose members were carefully selected and inducted into a programme designed to inculcate religious pietism. PK was founded by some of the leaders of the Tarbiyah movement following the downfall of Soeharto's New Order regime in 1998. Much of its support came from campus-based Islamist groups and young graduates who had been active in Tarbiyah circles.

According to Anthony Bubalo and Greg Fealy, the decision of some Tarbiyah leaders in 1998 to form PK(S) was as a reaction to the post-Soeharto lifting of politically repressive measures and the belief that it was now time to move into a new stage focused on formal politics and popular appeal. The exclusivity of Tarbiyah thus gave way to a more inclusive and outwardlooking approach. By the time of the 1999 election, PK claimed to have about 60,000 members. When the party announced its re-formation under the name PKS in mid-2003, it already had more than 300,000 members. The party consciously recruited members from a non-Tarbiyah background to broaden its appeal and, in the 2004 election, fielded more than thirty non-Muslim legislative candidates.

While Tarbiyah members regarded the Islamization of society, the economy, and the state as a cornerstone of their struggle, PKS downplayed these issues in the 1999 and 2004 elections, emphasizing instead “secular” and popular themes such as fighting corruption, socio-economic equality, and the need for clean and good governance. Party leaders made clear that their stance on these issues was informed by Islamic norms, but they usually conveyed their electoral messages in religiously neutral rhetoric. This is not to say that PKS leaders had abandoned their earlier commitment to Islamist causes; rather, they argued that it was premature and ultimately counterproductive to take such issues to the broader electorate.

CONCEPTUALIZING DEMOCRACY IN THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT

Defining democracy in the context of Indonesia is an arduous task. One of the main reasons is that Indonesia has long shown a somewhat idiosyncratic response towards external influences, including Western political concepts such as democracy. This is not to suggest that in order to understand democracy in this country one should be engaged in exceptionalist theories about the cultural uniqueness of Indonesia, for culture — as briefly discussed in the previous part — cannot be assumed to determine the level of hospitality to democracy or good governance in any one society. The extent to which Indonesia is more or less receptive to democracy cannot be attributed solely to cultural factors; other variables such as global and national political configurations should be taken into account. For sure, a single theoretical perspective will not be helpful in understanding the trajectory of democracy in the world's largest Muslim-majority country. We may be reminded of what Ghassan Salamé pointed out in his Democracy without Democrats, namely, that there may not be many democrats in the Muslim world, but that does not render the idea of democracy irrelevant or indefensible.

At this point, let us assume that Indonesia is still in a transition towards democracy. The transition is a long and winding road; nonetheless, to approach this as a transition is to see the likelihood of Indonesian democracy as just a matter of time, on condition that the country can pass successfully through several critical phases. Viewed from this perspective, it is widely believed that Indonesia is now in a historical period of transition from authoritarian rule to democratic political governance. Although the new era has brought about destructive excesses such as ethnic and religious conflicts and regional separatism, the transition to a more democratic order has also opened up unprecedented freedoms, giving the Indonesian people a choice to elect their own leaders for the first time since the 1950s and the liberty to organize themselves based on their own preferences.

DEFINING ISLAMISM IN THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT

For a long period of time Indonesian Islam has enjoyed the reputation of being a distinctive and tolerant variant of Islam compatible with democracy, human rights, civil society, pluralism, gender equality and other traits of modern civilization. One of the main reasons for this positive reputation is that Islam was introduced to the country in a relatively peaceful way, even though it is undeniable that military expansion accompanied its institutionalization. Sufism also played an important role in the expansion of the new faith. In this region, Islam has flourished as an entity enriching a deep cultural web of local cultures and beliefs, converting the indigenous people without necessarily remaking them according to the Middle Eastern model of Muslims.

This rosy assumption is being challenged by the upsurge of Islamist activism in Indonesia, particularly since the resignation of Soeharto. The rapture accomppanying the rebirth of democracy, the withdrawal of antisubversion laws and the Azas Tunggal regulation, which had prescribed Pancasila as the sole ideology for all mass and political organizations, and the release of political prisoners by then president B.J. Habibie all provided unprecedented and propitious ground for Islamists to openly exercise their activism. A large variety of radical Islamist groups came to the fore. While some focus on campaigning peacefully for the enforcement of the Islamic Shari‘ah, others have resorted to violent methods such as conducting sporadic raids on night spots and carrying out jihadist self-martyring operations. The crisis was employed as a rationale for the Islamists in promulgating the return to “pristine” Islam as the only solution.

Even though there has been an obvious decline in support for the establishment of an Islamic state in the country since 1945, the shift to a more democratic regime paved the way for radical elements to express their Islamist views more blatantly in public. The rise of Islamist activism culminated in such violent acts as the Bali bombing in 2002, the Marriott Hotel blast in 2003, the car bombing in front of the Australian embassy in 2004, the second Bali bombing in 2005 and the second Marriot blast in 2009. Some observers have argued on the basis of these events that Indonesia has become a hotbed of Muslim terrorists.

THE EMERGENCE OF PUBLIC ISLAM

The emergence of Islamism in post-New Order Indonesia in one way or another signifies the emergence of public Islam. In contrast to what Hefner categorizes as “Civil Islam”, which tends to denote civil society, “public Islam” in the context of Islamism refers to the Islamist struggles to put Islam at the centre of the public domain. Central to the notion of “public Islam” is the Islamists’ quest for the implementation of Shari‘ah law, believed to be the quintessence of Islam, in the public sphere, either by means of existing political structures, namely the state and its apparatus, or non-political structures, that is, society at large. As far as Indonesian Islamists are concerned, there will always be deliberate efforts by the Islamists to champion Islam as the only blueprint for the whole society amid the various public discourses over what constitutes the common good.

Following Eickelman and Salvatore, the term public sphere refers to “the site where contests take place over the definition of the obligations, rights and especially notions of justice that members of society require for the common good to be realized”. This definition assumes the participation of all segments of society, including Islamists, along with the process of defining the common good. However, the concept of the public sphere has commonly been conflated with the concept of civil society. According to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,

In an attempt to delineate the difference between public sphere and civil society, Simon Chambers maintains that the public sphere provides a broad arena for action, while civil society provides the “site of resistance and emancipation”.

THE ISLAMISTS’ CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY

The Islamists’ conception and understanding of democracy cannot be separated from the tightly knit, dialectical relationship between what they presume to be “pure Islam” and its supposedly external elements. Historical experience and the imagination of the past play a crucial part in the ceaseless forging of an Islamic identity. The sanctification of the pious deeds of their predecessors is recalled with a great deal of intensity in Islamists’ memories. Islamists would undoubtedly regard their pious predecessors (salaf al-salih) as normative models for their own beliefs and actions in the future. Nevertheless, this condition leads to the intermingling of normative texts with normative historical deeds, each of which occupies the Islamists’ minds as supreme references in generating discourses on democracy. In other words, Islamists are preoccupied with the idea of an imagined identity derived from the imagined combination of sacred texts and their historical past. This in turn feeds into the process of their identification of “self ” and “other”. In this context, it is not surprising that democracy tends to be defined by utopian Islamists within this Manichaean conceptual framework. As a result, democracy will never mean merely the “self ” without also implicitly mirroring the “other”. This bipolar frame of thinking is adopted by Islamist groups in order that the purity of the “self ” might be preserved from the ceaselessly corrupt, wicked, and evil “other”.

Thus, it is understandable that the Islamists feel themselves enmeshed in a never-ending battle to defend what they claim as the authentic self and to repudiate what they refer to as the inauthentic other. They are at times caught up in overwhelmingly xenophobic attitudes towards anything outwardly new. As a result, Islamists are tremendously selective, if not overly protective, in their cultural, political, and social encounters with anything perceived as “strange” or “alien”. This is because they are afraid that their sanctified identity will be torn apart. This is why Islamists are always quick to say “no” to democracy, particularly as this word is derived from the “un-Islamic” West and is not explicitly spelled out in their sacred texts. Nevertheless, this negative response is usually followed by a fairly prudential consideration of democracy. However, Islamists argue that the precise meaning of democracy cannot be grasped unless one refers to the Western tradition as its origin.

Since 2004, Indonesia has conducted more than 490 elections for heads of local government at both the provincial and district levels. Although the introduction of direct elections for local government heads (pemilihan kepala daerah, or pilkada) has created opportunities for women to run as candidates, their level of participation has been extremely low. By the end of 2009 only nine women had been elected head of a regional government in direct elections: seven as district head (bupati); one as mayor (walikota) of an urban municipality; and one as the governor of a province. Indonesia also had one female deputy governor and 14 women serving as deputy mayors or deputy district heads. These very low numbers are far from ideal for a country that says it is serious about promoting gender equality in political life.

There have been some genuine efforts to increase women' political participation in Indonesia since the beginning of the democratic transition in 1998. At the national level, these have included the introduction of a 30 per cent quota for female legislative candidates in 2004 and the adoption of a ‘zipper’ system for candidacy lists in 2009. Under the zipper system, political parties had to include at least one woman among the three candidates they placed at the top of their lists, thus giving women candidates a real chance of being elected. These efforts have produced a slight improvement in women' representation in the national legislature, the People' Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR). In elections for local government heads, however, even weak affirmative action measures have been conspicuously absent, and there has been no serious policy consideration of how to reduce the gender gap in local government leadership positions.

In this chapter I examine the factors confronting women who want to be nominated as candidates in local executive elections. Beyond the absence of positive discrimination measures, one key challenge for women is that they still have difficulty convincing party leaders and other political elites of their electability. Women also tend to lack the financial resources and political networks necessary to achieve political success in regional Indonesia. While local political and religious leaders are often hostile towards women candidates, there are indications that voters will support capable women candidates if given the opportunity.

The experience of many post-authoritarian regimes suggests that judicial reform usually faces huge obstacles and cannot be achieved quickly. The courts had been integral components of the authoritarian regime with the role of serving its needs. Among their main functions were the provision of a cover of legitimacy for political repression while ensuring that regime leaders and their supporters enjoyed a large degree of impunity from the working of the law. Political oversight of the courts was the norm and most judges absorbed the values of the system. In many countries, the “justice sector”, including judges, prosecutors and police, was no different to the rest of the bureaucracy in that it was poorly paid and characterized by pervasive corruption.

Although the fall of the New Order opened the way to substantial democratic reforms, reform of the courts proved difficult, as indicated especially by their initial failure to tackle ubiquitous corruption that was increasingly exposed in the new democratic environment. In addition to the demand for democracy, one of the main slogans of the post-1998 reform movement called for the end of “KKN” (Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme: Corruption, Collusion, Nepotism). As we shall see, very little was attempted during the early post-authoritarian years to curb corruption. Soeharto's centralized network was partly dismantled, but its fragmented remnants formed their own networks around sections of the bureaucracy, the newly liberated political parties and regional governments. Much of the post-1998 political and economic elite, therefore, had been deeply involved in the practices of the Soeharto regime and had no enthusiasm for a campaign against KKN.

It could hardly be expected, in these circumstances, that the courts would reform themselves. The courts during the New Order had never been insulated from the corruption of the regime and the majority of judges had been integrated quite comfortably into the system. Of course, some judges had preserved their integrity under authoritarian rule and others, even if they had succumbed to the pressures of the past, at least aspired to restore public respect for the judiciary in the new circumstances. The critical impetus for judicial reform, however, had to come from outside the judiciary itself from freely elected governments and legislatures, as well as the press and NGOs, backed by public opinion.

obj-d>Ever since the introduction of democratic elections in 1999, observers have engaged in intense debate about the factors that motivate Indonesian voters when going to the ballot box. Some analysts believe that Indonesians are still primarily driven by their ethnic, religious, social or regional affiliations, as in the country' first democratic polls in 1955 (King 2003; Baswedan 2007). Others have emphasised the importance of ‘money politics’ in electoral behaviour. According to this view, Indonesians mostly vote for political patrons who offer them cash or other forms of material inducements, including jobs (Sulistyo 2002). But an increasing number of scholars contend that Indonesian voters are becoming more rational, critically evaluating politicians’ leadership qualities, the performance of the incumbent government and the media advertisements presented during the campaign (see, for example, Mietzner 2009 and Mujani and Liddle in this volume). Obviously these highly divergent views on electoral behaviour have led to equally differing assessments of the state of Indonesia' democracy: while those who stress the significance of primordial attachments and material inducements generally see Indonesia as being at a very early stage of democratisation, the proponents of the view that the electorate is becoming more rational maintain that the country has made considerable progress.

Many of the studies mentioned above are based on national survey data or analyses of Jakarta-based newspapers and magazines. While this is a useful (and perhaps inevitable) approach to the regionally frag mented landscape of post-Suharto politics, it often misses nuances and details that only grassroots research can capture. Therefore, this chapter offers a local perspective on the 2009 presidential elections, evaluating from a close distance the key drivers of voting behaviour in one of Indonesia' most remote islands. The observations presented here on the elections in Morotai, an island off the north coast of Halmahera in North Maluku province (see Map 16.1), are not meant to establish more generalised claims about electoral patterns in other parts of Indonesia' vast archipelago. They do, however, present important insights into the workings of Indonesia' democracy in an area far off the journalistic and scholarly track.

The presidential elections in the district of Morotai were a quiet, orderly exercise in civic duty, marked more by a quiet cynicism that nothing would change than excitement over the candidates.

Indonesia has been a latecomer to democracy during the historic ‘third wave’ of global democratisation. It was not until a quarter-century into this wave—in 1999—that Indonesia became an electoral democracy. By then the third wave of democracy had already crested, though levels of freedom in the world continued to improve for some years thereafter. The democratic transformation of East Asia had already largely occurred. The Philippine transition took place in 1986, South Korea' in 1987 and Taiwan' during the period from 1987 to 1996. Mongolia also became a democracy in the early 1990s after the collapse of communism. By 1995, three-fifths of all the states in the world were electoral democracies—in the sense that they could choose and replace their leaders in free, fair and meaningful (multi-party) elections (see Table 2.1). The wave of democracy that began in the 1970s in southern Europe and then spread to Latin America had by the mid-1990s gone well beyond East Asia to incorporate most of Central and Eastern Europe, some of the former Soviet Union and, surprisingly, much of sub-Saharan Africa—by the count of Freedom House, fully half of the 48 states in that region. At that moment in the mid-1990s when the third wave essentially crested, Indonesia seemed as stably authoritarian as it had ever been during the three-decade period of Suharto' authoritarian ‘New Order’.

Observers did not realise it at the time (and many still do not), but the scope of democratic expansion in the world essentially came to a halt in the latter half of the 1990s. Since 1995, the extent of democracies (both in number and as a proportion of all the world' states) has been in an equilibrium. Some transitions to democracy have occurred in the decade-plus since then, but they have largely been offset by transitions away from democracy, back to authoritarian rule, in other countries. As a result, there has been only very modest oscillation in the overall number of democracies, and since 2006 the number of democracies has been steadily (albeit modestly) in decline.

Oddly, it has been in this period that Indonesia has emerged and developed as a democracy. As the remainder of this chapter shows, Indonesia in this period—its first full decade of democracy—has become in many ways a surprising political success story.

As discussed in Chapter 4, the fall of the Soeharto regime was followed by rising assertiveness in the regions outside Java that resented what they saw as excessive central domination while the weak Habibie government, challenged on all sides, was aware of its limited capacity to repress outbreaks of resistance to central rule. Indonesian leaders, including senior military officers, were alarmed by what seemed to be parallels with the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia while public debate began to touch on what had previously been “unimaginable” — the disintegration of the republic. The leading candidate for secession was, of course, East Timor, where Indonesia's occupation since 1975 continued to meet with armed resistance within the territory and widespread condemnation among the international community. In a dramatic effort to settle the East Timor problem once and for all, President Habibie proposed the holding of a referendum in East Timor which led, in 1999, to an overwhelming vote in favour of independence, a massacre of supporters of independence by pro-Indonesia militias and the withdrawal in chaotic circumstances of the Indonesian administration and military. The referendum resolved the East Timor issue but it stimulated further demands in Papua and Aceh — the next two most probable candidates for secession — for their own referenda.

In fact, there was no realistic prospect that the Indonesian government would agree to release Aceh from the republic. Indonesia's national ideology, Panca Sila (Five Principles), formulated by Soekarno and upheld by Soeharto, portrayed Indonesia as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural nation in which all ethnic and religious communities have a recognized place. The government saw itself as the successor of the Netherlands East Indies and therefore the inheritor of all its territory, including Aceh (but not East Timor). It argued further that the people of Aceh had identified with the nationalist struggle against Dutch colonialism and were an integral part of the Indonesian nation. In the wake of the collapse of the New Order, this vision was challenged by ethnic and religious violence leading to heightened fears of national disintegration, especially after the secession of East Timor. Indonesia's self-image, encapsulated in the national motto Bhinekka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity), would be further devastated if one of its original regions were to follow East Timor's example.

Indonesia was in a parlous condition in 1998. Only a few years earlier, in the mid-1990s, it had often been portrayed as one of the Third World's success stories. President Soeharto's military-backed New Order was certainly authoritarian but it had underwritten political stability for almost three decades since the bloody upheaval surrounding the collapse of President Soekarno's Guided Democracy in 1965–66. Over the next three decades, that political stability had provided the foundation for average annual economic growth of 7 per cent that had raised per capita income to over US$1,000 and transformed Indonesia by the mid-1990s into a “near-NIC” on the brink of achieving Newly Industrializing Country (NIC) status. But the Asian Monetary Crisis — spreading from Thailand in July 1997 — brought rapid growth to a sudden halt. Tied to a maze of patronage networks, the Soeharto regime had been much less able than other regional governments to take the firm measures necessary to avert the crisis or at least mitigate its consequences. Indonesia's economy was in disarray with a virtual halt to investment and sharply rising unemployment — aggravated fortuitously by the impact on agriculture of drought caused by El Nino climatic conditions. As beggars re-appeared in large numbers on the streets of Jakarta and other cities, crime rates rose and looting became commonplace, while anti-Chinese rioting spread through Java and on other islands. Finally, massive student demonstrations triggered two days of anti-Chinese rioting in Jakarta in May 1998 that forced the resignation of President Soeharto and marked the end of his New Order.

The timing of the collapse of Indonesia's authoritarian regime was clearly not a direct result of domestic social and political change driven by economic growth but rather the opposite — the sudden interruption and indeed reversal of that growth in response to unexpected external factors. The Indonesian case, however, did not mean that the level of economic development is unimportant for understanding the fall of an authoritarian regime and transformation in the direction of democratization. As argued by Rueschmeyer, Stephens and Stephens, “An agrarian society before or in the incipient stages of penetration by commercial market relations and industrialization is unlikely to gain or sustain a democratic form of government.”