Adil W Surowidjojo

 

 

After a relatively calm holiday season that was preceded by a year of heartening economic performance, the year has started with the same atmosphere as last year’s. That is, although the general economic climate is sending out reasonably positive signals, there is an undercurrent of worry that the current trend towards economic improvement will be broken if the wrong candidate wins in the upcoming elections (for example a return to an oppressive regime). Indeed, the media has been abuzz with reports that the common voter would prefer a return to an Indonesia under Suharto, if only to lift the burden of uncertainty that has been unfairly linked to reformation and democracy. Surrounding the elections this year are various pertinent issues that are perhaps not too significant now, but will undoubtedly become more so as events progress.

 

The Price of Good Governance

 

In Jakarta, the ‘bus-way project’ is a source of many rants near every water cooler, every warung, and every university canteen. Even as people question the necessity of it, amidst so many other infrastructure failures in Jakarta, some also view it as a platform that heightens the dignity of the common people. The bus-way project had been unquestionably designed to capture the support of those of lesser means, who number the majority of Jakarta’s citizens. Is the project then merely an elaborate (some observers would imply that direct bribery would be simpler and more effective) ploy to win the votes of Jakarta’s populace in the upcoming elections? Hopefully not; instigators of change do need to be realistic, but in order to start the process towards true reforms, the main actors need to believe that what they are doing will bear fruits. Hope is hard to come by these days, as people become increasingly more cynical: I have listened to the despair of co-workers at the bus-way project, which they see as another cash cow for the powerful that takes away from projects that should be taking place, such as better city planning to route floods out of the city once and for all; at a casual lunch with ethnic Chinese Indonesian friends, I was scandalized to learn that they plan to vote for Golkar this time around. Discounting my own rampant bias, by how much could that party have changed over the last couple of years to qualify them as the new Ratu Adil? When pressed, these friends explained that the result of the elections would be the same; whoever is elected would perpetuate the culture of tithes and bribery that has been going on for centuries. The stance my friends have taken could be the result of many factors: a gap of communication with their elders, who experienced first hand the oppression of the regime back then; a lack of effort to be informed of actual developments made by the KPU, or even the failure of the media to properly disseminate information; a hope that their party of choice would be well-connected enough to ensure that although it may have questionable morals, it would bring back the stability of that old iron regime, et cetera.

 

 If we shift our attention back to the bus-way issue, one could argue that although it may raise the dignity of the Jakarta working class in a comfortable-transportation sort of way, it would be callous to forget the scorched-earth campaign the city seemed to have adopted recently, the most recent (and striking) example being the dismantling of hawkers’ workspace in several areas while they are away for the Lebaran holiday, and the mysteriously opportune (for some) fire that razed Kampung Duren. Unfortunately, it seems that the right of Jakarta’s poor to a place to live have taken a back seat to real-estate projects. One thing that we should not forget is that it is always useful to don the glasses of economic non-sentimentality: yes, it’s true that massive urbanization has turned Jakarta into a whirlpool of discontent, with rural hopefuls barely eking out a living in the fringes of society. Yes, they are unsightly, and contribute significantly to Jakarta’s rising crime and drug problems. Yet, as aspirants of a working civil society, what right do we have to condemn them for having hope of a better future by coming to Jakarta, the durian-like city of bright fairy lights? What right do we have to demolish the communities where they have built upon for decades in the name of property rights, without any meaningful restitution?

 

The problem is that Jakarta’s city-scape is a classic tragedy of the commons: parts of the city had been fair game for anyone to use, be it squatters or hawkers, for so long that the costs to society have now risen beyond any benefits such habitation could possibly offer. In fact, most of those ‘common’ areas have been government owned land, or private land that the owner had no opportunity to develop, which when left alone for any significant amount of time will always attract habitation and commerce. It is this lack of coordination of opportunity-taking that perhaps has led Jakarta to its present form; now that people have awoken to the potential of land in a city of millions, of course we see clashes of interest in a playing field that has been left to random development for so long. Could the situation be reversed? Unfortunately not without the temporary displacement of many squatters, along with massive housing projects for the displaced (that would likely cost the city more than what it currently is able to support, housing that would probably be too expensive for those squatters in any case), and even more massive changes to the landscape of Jakarta to render it flood-proof and traffic jam-proof.

 

The situation above calls for long-term planning that needs to be wisely implemented in a concentrated manner. Indeed, Indonesia as a whole needs its government to be stronger, to exhibit a little more of that paternalistic attention that is characteristic of the ‘welfare state dream’.

 

The Chicago School of economic thought taught us that policymakers do not always create the best possible policies because they may have been captured by interests, and this is a problem when the resulting policies and their method of implementation do not reflect even a modicum of concern for the wellbeing of the general public. We would be wise to gain a deep understanding of this concept, because the interests of the recently homeless in Jakarta should not be pitted against the interests of big corporations. Both parties should be equally as important, albeit in different ways: businesses because they bring development that may contribute to the betterment of the living standards of those same homeless people, and the homeless because it is the purpose of a government to look out for members of its society that have fallen beneath the cracks communal life. In this regard, transparency, accountability, and efficiency in governance, along with a working civil society should be held as the most appropriate arbiter between interests, and this is something that still needs a huge amount of work in Indonesia.

 

What price must we pay before we can achieve these prerequisites of a healthy society? At present, it may be that our workforce will have to pay a price. A recent Ministerial Decision has rendered it more difficult for workers to initiate strike actions, as the Decision has set out in narrow terms the definition of illegal strike actions. With regards to efficiency, this may lead to greater productivity, if the workers do not become too disenchanted and decide that they don’t have anything else to lose anyway by initiating strikes. However, the accountability of the scheme may be, in practice, questionable. This is because the burden of proof has been shifted on the employees: it is their responsibility to ensure the legality of their strike actions, even if their acts fall on deaf ears. Also, due to the nature of the scheme, foul play will become harder to detect, as employees will be blamed for (e.g.) strikes that devolve into riots: another blow to accountability. In a country where the legal system is airtight, this system may be beneficial, but in Indonesia it may be an unbalanced law that will be used to further exploit an already beleaguered people. It would be wisdom to fine-tune this law further, so as to weed out the potential pitfalls. Hopefully our hard work in this field will bring about a better work-force, as improved labor conditions will enhance the efficiency and technical efficacy of our workers, which will benefit businesses nation-wide.

 

The Nature of the New Playing Field

 

The world is becoming more and more interesting each day, if one were dispassionate: for a human being ruled by emotions, it has become increasingly more confusing, frightening, and exhilarating. Day by day we are bombarded by information: on George Bush’s campaign for re-election, and how the rest of the world (read: the Middle East and the alleged Axis of Evil) are holding their breath for the results; in the European Union, member states cannot reach consensus on how the EU should be run, as they are beginning to understand the price they must pay in order to gain the economic strength of that institution; the terror network of Al-Qaeda may have been scattered, but the world is finding out that this is not a significant hurdle for them – in fact, by orchestrating attacks on soft targets across the globe, they are nearly achieving their targets of frightening the moderate Muslim majority into silence, creating a gulf between the Islamic and Western worlds (which will lead to their illusionary Last Stand), and discrediting the U.S. and Britain’s claim that the coalition has made the world safer by dethroning Saddam Hussein; meanwhile, technological wonders have made it possible for a man-made robot to roll on the red sands of Mars, for information to be disseminated indiscriminately to all willing and unwilling minds, and for infinitesimally small particles to allow us connectivity to cyberspace sans wires. Our ancestors would be baffled at how we live our lives today, not just at our technology, but also at how we think: how we’ve become more proficient in using diplomacy, the law, and compromise as tools that will lead to co-evolution, as opposed to the tribal methods of pillage and plunder our ancestors relied upon in their hunger for conquest. 

 

In addition to mastering the aforementioned tools, Indonesia must learn the knack of reading the flows of opportunity in the world – that is, we must quickly discard our culture of tithes and offerings (a.k.a. KKN) for western methods of good governance, which ideally will equip Indonesia’s decision-makers with the know-how and means with which to identify the nation’s true strengths and weaknesses.

 

            Today, terrorism has become a buzzword whose face shall not be gazed at. This is because people hold the mistaken view that terror is linked with (Indonesia’s version of) Islam: in Indonesia, senior clerics deny the existence of Jemaah Islamiyah because they think that the West invented JI to discredit Islam. Indeed, religion is an incredibly sensitive subject, especially here, in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. What people seem to forget is that, for centuries, Indonesia has been the cradle of a very moderate version of Islam, similar to those practiced by Ethiopia and Somalia, where the cultures of the indigenous population did not become totally submerged in the Arabic flavor of Islam. Indeed, we have forgotten that kejawen, for instance, coexists with Islam in Java: our concern for political correctness have dulled our sense of identity, and this is a dangerous situation that can be manipulated by those who hold more extreme views of Islam, views that attempt to submerge our sense of ‘Indonesian-ness’ in their glorified death culture. The point here is, as a method through which people attain a healthy spiritual life, Islam in its different incarnations in Indonesia works, and people are being told that our nation is falling apart because people are not devout enough, at a time when we need to turn to reason, knowledge, and tools of good governance to pull our nation back together.

 

The values of the West may not always be compatible with ours, and indulgences in Western vice have led to many broken families, failed marriages, and other unfortunate events that are still regarded as mortifying (i.e. so shameful you could die) in our present culture. However, it is every individual’s responsibility and right: to grow up – not just physically but mentally, to be able to internally judge the merits of imported ideas and things, to be able to make his/her own mistakes – to learn and benefit from experience, and most of all to know that there exists at least one of the frameworks necessary to support the processes of self-discovery: law, in the most secular sense of the word. There exists the illusion that multiculturalism should be simple, like extra software that simply need to installed in the hardware; governments all over the world are spending massive amounts of money in their attempts of fostering an institutionalized (read: homogenized) version of multiculture. I believe that these attempts will fail, or merely succeed in creating superficially harmonic societies where deep-seated differences will remain irreconcilable.

 

No, modern multiculturalism means work: it means exhaustive communication and extensive compromises between the incumbent culture and the imported cultures. If this argument thread starts to sound like an ideological war; this is exactly what is happening all across the world, for some it’s a war for the soul of Islam, for others it’s a war for the freedom of speech, and for others still, it’s a physical war for survival. Unfortunately, despite all of our unwillingness to face the issue head on, the current world situation in this regard will inescapably develop into one of the biggest conflicts of interests we have ever witnessed, and Indonesia will inevitably play a significant part in it.

 

Also important are other big conflicts of interests, including the argument of the nation state versus a supranational entity as sovereign, currently being fought by the member states of the EU. This year, the EU will see to the accession of ten new member states, even as its current roster cannot agree on the EU’s constitution: the cultural differences of all member states in May will add to the already daunting work EU policy-makers have had to contend with so far. Analysts critical of the EU project argue that there is a recent trend of the intellectual elite to underestimate the complexities of nation building, and by extension, supra-national institution building; in short, they are questioning the validity of the trading off national values with the more efficient centralized policy-making practiced by the EU. In practice, things have not gone as far as critics predict it would, as centralized policy-design in the EU is tempered by implementation that is up to the discretion of each member state, and even each region within a member state. The main problem is still accountability, as although economic decisions made by the EU may be allocatively efficient, they may not reflect the true desires of the people in its member states. This situation may become more striking as member states become more homogenized; as people lose the ability to vote with their feet, which is to move to other countries where the laws are to their preference, their voices will be overpowered by decision-makers in Brussels, who may or may not be in touch with the desires of their home country (or whose own voices may be undermined by the authority of representatives from more powerful member states). Opponents of the EU fear efforts a global institution that would be more effective than the United Nations, they dislike the notion of blurring the lines of cultures and traditions because of the violent aftereffects that may happen as unresolved cultural differences are manipulated by an opportunistic few (the middle east, the former USSR countries, our own Indonesia). The example set by the EU this year and in the near future will be useful for Indonesia to watch, just in case someone wants (and has the means) to create a pan-Asian economic consortium.

 

            Indonesia’s place in the global realm still hinges on the result of this year’s elections, and the reasons are multitude: as a nation where the majority of its 200 million strong inhabitants are Muslim, the elected leaders will fall under the scrutiny of the world, with regards to how committed they will be to eradicating terror in the region; as a lucrative market for the global economy, Indonesia’s new leaders will be faced with the need to accommodate foreign business interests tempered  by good governance and the equal need to improve Indonesia’s undernourished human resource. It is incredibly important for us to get it right this time around, to ensure that our new government will be stable, secure, and powerful enough to initiate long term change and finish what it starts. [aws]