On the Armed Forces
Loren Ryter
Department of Government
Cornell University
After the 2004 national elections in Indonesia, the Indonesian armed forces will be formally out of politics for the first time since the return to the 1959 constitution in 1945. For the first time nearly 50 years, the armed forces will have no reserved seats in national or regional parliaments.
This change is certainly among the most significant achievements of the reform movement in Indonesia. And yet it also represents a pragmatic adjustment that the armed forces has itself made to changing political circumstances, in particular the growing significance of the parliament and the party system.
The concession reflects the reality that the armed forces can no longer easily unite behind a single party platform, and therefore reflects the reality of significant divisions within the armed forces. Such divisions have of course long existed, but during the New Order they tended to play out in terms of competition for position and office in the bureaucracy and in the armed forces structure.
Now, officers can and will also rely on the party system to express competition. At the same time, party leaders recognize that the success of their party will depend on backing from influential retired officers. All of the parties seriously contesting the election have retired officers in senior leadership positions and/or are actively recruiting them to join the combined presidential-vice presidential tickets each must put forward after the April parliamentary election results are in.
Retired officers maintain significant patronage networks and in general are capable of rapid mass mobilization through their regional clients. Some questions that arise from this state of affairs include: Will Indonesia begin to look more like Thailand and the Philippines, where violence tends to be directed more towards elite rivals for office than against radical social groups? Similarly, will we tend to see more demonstrations for or against candidates rather than the familiar New Order color-coded party floods? How blatantly will regional officers act to “secure the success” of their patrons?
Given the complexity of the ballots, deliberately confusing voters might well be a subtler tactic than outright violence or intimidation. The armed forces as an institution has publicly disallowed such practices, but we should recall that it always proclaimed its neutrality during New Order elections and this clearly meant nothing.
The armed forces as an institution has nothing to gain at this point by supporting a single party, and in fact has much to gain by letting the competition between the two major parties with the most vast bases of patronage, that is the PDI-P and Golkar, play out as it will. A victory for either party is hardly likely to further erode the influence of the armed forces, much less so a victory for a combined ticket representing both. It therefore seems the current electoral competition is win-win for the armed forces as a whole, and win-lose for particular officers. Is the armed forces institutionalizing a system that could be detrimental to its position in future election cycles, however?