Activists in Transition

Progressive Politics in Democratic Indonesia

Thushara Dibley, Michele Ford, Thushara Dibley, Michele Ford

• Publisher: Southeast Asia Program Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501742484
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748301
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Activists in Transition examines the relationship between social movements and democratization in Indonesia. Collectively, progressive social movements have played a critical role over in ensuring that different groups of citizens can engage directly in—and benefit from—the political process in a way that was not possible under authoritarianism. However, their individual roles have been different, with some playing a decisive role in the destabilization of the regime and others serving as bell-weathers of the advancement, or otherwise, of Indonesia's democracy in the decades since. Equally important, democratization has affected social movements differently depending on the form taken by each movement during the New Order period. The book assesses the contribution that nine progressive social movements have made to the democratization of Indonesia since the late 1980s, and how, in turn, each of those movements has been influenced by democratization.

CHAPTER ONE

STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND INDONESIA’S DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION

Yatun Sastramidjaja

When Suharto resigned on May 21, 1998, amidst massive student protests, the student movement was widely acclaimed as the catalyst of this historic event. Suharto’s reign had become untenable due to a string of political crises, exacerbated by the Asian financial crisis. Yet the public attributed his fall to the student movement, which had emerged as the heir to a long tradition of student struggle in Indonesia. This view resonated with historical memories of student political vanguardism that are lodged deep in the national consciousness. In 1998, these memories fueled the students’ mobilizing power, and as students continued the struggle for “total reform” (reformasi total) in the following years, the public invested its hopes in their ability to push through the promise of structural change. Five years later, however, the students had lost their position in the limelight to other actors that were better equipped for the game of politics. Democratization had made the student movement irrelevant, and what remains of it has since struggled to forge a new identity for itself.

Not only in Indonesia, but throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the role of students has long been recognized as one of political vanguard due to their prominent role in national liberation movements and their subsequent prominence in political reform movements against repressive regimes. Especially in authoritarian societies, where failing political institutions and muted civil societies created a political vacuum, students were often seen as the most suitable group to fill this vacuum due to their relatively privileged status, skills, and social capital, as well as the militancy seen lacking in older political and intellectual actors, who were often co-opted into the establishment and seemed too far removed from the common people (Baud and Rutten 2004; Emmerson 1968; Altbach 1989; Weiss, Aspinall, and Thompson 2012). As Weiss (2009, 517, 501) notes with regard to Southeast Asia, students are “ expected to take a stand, and are respected for doing so by dint of their status as students,” since their collective identity “bears a presumption of activism: the default in this case is for students, organized as such, to mobilize.” For this reason, students can be specifically targeted for direct or indirect political suppression, although this further enhances their reputation as a potentially formidable political force.

Conversely, however, student movements generally lose their political influence once democratization sets in, as new freedoms of expression and organization reduce the need for students to speak out and act on behalf of “the people.” Across Asia, a “real paradox of student mobilization,” then, as Aspinall and Weiss (2012, 290) observe, is that “democracy may provide less fruitful a backdrop for its emergence and expression than authoritarianism.” Yet, it is too soon to conclude, as Aspinall and Weiss (2012, 205) do, that the political role of students was “a product of particular political and social conditions that have now passed.” Recent upsurges of student mobilization in Asia—such as the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, and the mass participation of students in the Bersih Movement in Malaysia—suggest that students still envisage and claim a national political role for themselves. In Indonesia, too, students continue to mobilize around various issues, although these student protests remain scarce and scattered and show few signs of consolidating into a national mass movement as in 1998. However, democratization did have an impact on the type of activism that students are drawn to, as the memory—and the myth—of student political vanguardism recede further into the past.

THE STUDENT VANGUARD

“Indonesia’s student movement,” writes Aspinall (2012a, 156), “was a child of authoritarianism, as much as it was its destroyer.” Not only did it emerge and radicalize in response to authoritarianism but its nature and scope of action were the product of an authoritarian political culture that celebrated the student struggles of the past and delegitimized student activism in the present. While the “idea that students constituted a discrete political force, able to act as a cohesive unit . . . in defense of the nation, was always a myth” (Aspinall 2012a, 176), this myth was nurtured by the New Order regime and students alike. Provided they conformed to their historically recognized role, students had a limited license to voice the people’s concerns, or so the euphemism for student protest went, “at least to a specific limit whose boundaries [were] never clear” (Heryanto 1996, n.p.); crossing these unclear boundaries subjected students to the same harsh repression as any other group in New Order society. This apparent contradiction between repression and recognition reflects the ambiguous relationship between the student movement and the regime, which can be traced to the birth moment of the New Order in 1966.

While students had played a key political role in Indonesia since the early twentieth century, it was the 1966 student movement that established “the idea that students represented an important political category with the capacity to save the nation in times of crisis” (Aspinall 2012a, 164). The 1966 student movement, like its successor, was born of authoritarianism, emerging from the deeply politicized and polarized climate of Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. A key aspect of Sukarno’s discourse was the revolutionary potential of students, which he framed as a historical duty to heed the “message of the people’s suffering” (Sumohadiwidjojo and Mas 1988; Sastramidjaja 2020). While this discourse was meant to unite the postcolonial student body behind Sukarno’s mass politics, it exacerbated tensions between the leftist students close to Sukarno and the allegedly “antirevolutionary” students of the Islamic Indonesian Student Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia, HMI). HMI and other student organizations that felt marginalized by Sukarno’s leftist politics had their revenge soon after the foiled coup of September 30, 1965, when they formed the anticommunist Indonesian Student Action Front (Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia, KAMI). For months, KAMI staged aggressive mass demonstrations, attacking the Communist Party and its affliates, then leftist elements in Sukarno’s government, and finally Sukarno himself. The heroic image of this student struggle, against what they called the “tyranny” of Sukarno’s government (Anwar 1980), provided the army, under Suharto’s leadership, with the moral legitimacy to take power. In turn, the example of KAMI—with its tactics of creating an urban spectacle of protest, with masses of students wearing colorful campus jackets, marching through the city’s arteries, yelling slogans, chanting songs, and waving university flags and banners—came to provide the performative repertoires and narrative script for future student movements.

Although KAMI was not only anticommunist but also antiauthoritarian, HMI’s dominance in it, and the co-optation of its leadership in Suharto’s government, effectively stifled any radical potential. As the story of the “1966 Generation” thus became the founding story of the New Order, the idea of student struggle was reconfigured into a historical myth about past achievements, implying that that struggle was completed. This myth was enshrined in the government-sponsored book Indonesian Youth in the History of National Struggle, published in 1984, which paints a heroic vision of the patriotic struggle of youth from the early twentieth century until 1966. As Suharto wrote in his preface, this history served as a lesson for the present—a reminder that youth had brought Indonesia independence and had given birth to the Order of Development, but also that they should learn from past mistakes to prevent a repeat in the future (Sastramidjaja 2020). The past mistakes to which he referred were the disruptive politics exemplified by the Communist Party and its allies and offspring, which had no place in the New Order.

These offcial accounts were instrumental in what Weiss (2009) calls the “intellectual containment” of student activism. But unlike the Malaysian case she refers to, where “normative delegitimation” of student activism was effected through its “historical erasure,” in Indonesia the status of students in political mythology precluded complete silencing. Rather, the delegitimation of student protest occurred indirectly through allegations of impurity. While the regime claimed to acknowledge the moral integrity of students in voicing their concerns qua students, it also claimed that this integrity was readily diluted by manipulation by hidden nonstudent actors. This allegedly caused the “initially pure intentions” of students to degenerate into “anarchist” or “extremist” forms of disruption, aiding “subversive” or “communist” agendas, which justified repression (Sastramidjaja 2020).

It was to counter such allegations that students, following the lead of disaffected members of KAMI, presented themselves as a moral force. Students, they held, must remain “uncontaminated by the dirty and corrupting world of politics” (Aspinall 2012a, 154) in order to guard their capacity to take action against any ruler when needed. The moral force principle became an essential part of the collective identity of students, providing a persuasive legitimating frame for student protest by positioning students as “loyal critics” rather than opponents of the state (Budiman 1978; Sastramidjaja 2020). However, in declaring the students’ distance from politics, it also legitimated the regime’s contention that students should indeed steer clear from “practical politics,” the New Order euphemism for activism. The student movements of the 1970s thus made themselves vulnerable to repression by remaining within the “moral” frame of student struggle, which precluded any form of activism outside the role of “loyal critic.” They remained a child of the New Order—locked in a symbolic battle with the state within a self-centered bubble from which other actors were barred, as “the moral force idea also implies student separatism: the notion that students should not build alliances with other social or political groups who might pollute the students’ agenda with their own interests” (Aspinall 2012a, 154). This affected the issues they championed, their repertoires of action, and the scope and permissible bounds of their struggle, which was easily repressed once students attacked the main pillars of the New Order: the development policy, its military power base, and Suharto himself.

The regime’s intolerance of student activism was demonstrated in its violent repression of student protests against wasteful government spending in 1972, and more dramatically in 1974 and 1978, when major student movements organized by university student councils criticized the government’s development policy and, more boldly, in 1978, condemned the military dominance and Suharto’s authoritarianism, calling for his resignation. The 1974 protests ended in massive riots, which effectively deterred street protest for years to come by affirming the regime’s claim that protest incites anarchy. It also reinforced the separation between students and the under-class “masses” that were easily provoked. In 1978, the protests were quashed by overwhelming military force, with troops raiding and occupying the most active campuses. Hundreds of students were arrested, student leaders received lengthy prison sentences, student journals were banned, and student councils frozen. In the aftermath, a series of policies were implemented to curb political activity on campuses and generally keep a check on the student population through close surveillance.

This repression dampened overt student protest for a decade. But it had the unintended effect of driving student activists off campus and underground, where they began experimenting with alternative forms of activism. In the 1980s, informal discussion groups began to mushroom as an alternative channel for student criticism, where students discussed social, economic, and political issues based on banned leftist literature. Many students also became involved in grassroots NGO campaigns, which deeply affected their perceptions of their relationship to “the people,” engendering a populist orientation that laid the basis for an emergent student Left. Meanwhile, campus-based proselytizing (dakwah) groups also began to flourish, representing a budding Islamic student movement that took advantage of the activist vacuum on campuses to take over student representative councils and generally increase their influence among the student population. But it was the student Left that pushed the long transition to democracy.

PUSHING THE LONG TRANSITION

Indonesia’s political transition did not start in 1998, with Suharto’s resignation, but in 1989, with the rise of student radicalism as an integral part, if not the engine, of a budding opposition movement. It ended around the 2004 elections, with the consolidation of a new status quo that signaled the student movement’s decline. The transition began with a policy of “openness” (keterbukaan) launched in 1989 in response to domestic and international pressures for economic and political liberalization, which coincided with an intraregime conflict that created further opportunities for the reemergence and quick acceleration of student protests in the following years (Aspinall 1995). By the early 1990s, students in virtually all university towns were mobilizing around social justice and human rights issues, organizing themselves in ad hoc action committees that escaped campus controls (Aspinall 1993).

Student action in this period focused especially on land disputes in defense of disenfranchised communities, exemplified by the famous case of Kedung Ombo in Central Java where thousands of villagers had to make way for a prestigious dam construction, provoking a vigorous campaign by students and NGOs that lasted for two years (Aditjondro 1993). Such high-profile mobilizations contributed to the popularization of mass action among students and the populations they defended. Their populist orientation furthermore led students to develop new repertoires of activism, such as the “live-in” strategy of sustained community organizing, in which middle-class students lived among the communities they defended for periods of weeks or months—an experience that supposedly entailed “committing class suicide”—although this remained restricted to the most radical populist groups (Aspinall 1993; Sastramidjaja 2020). Other groups began attacking the regime more directly by staging small but bold demonstrations at the parliament or other government sites, targeting not only development projects that involved army interests but also New Order militarism. The more radical these protests became, the more they met with repression, including lengthy prison terms for some student activists. This not only further radicalized the students, but also helped to bring the student movement back into the spotlight.

This issue-based activism gave rise to solid activist organizations, but not all of them survived the end of the openness policy in 1994, especially where they relied on alliances with elite actors. For example, the Indonesian Student Action Front (Front Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia, FAMI), which allied with Sri Bintang Pamungkas, a politician from the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP), disappeared when Pamungkas was sidelined and the student leaders were jailed. Affliated groups continued to exist, but since their network was broken they could no longer engage in headline-grabbing action. Increasingly harsh repression—including the risk of abduction and torture by intelligence agencies, as happened in 1993 after a joint action with farmers in East Java—confronted other radical groups with the dilemma of whether to avoid provoking the regime further or to expand the strategy of mass mobilization (Lane 2008). In 1993, students favoring the latter strategy formed the Indonesian Student Solidarity for Democracy (Solidaritas Mahasiswa Indonesia untuk Demokrasi, SMID), which evolved into the People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik, PRD), founded as a multisector union in 1994 and declared as a political party in 1996 (Miftahuddin 2004).

With its multisectoral strategy—including the mobilization of factory workers in a manner unprecedented in the corporatized New Order field of labor (Lane 2008; Ford 2009)—its controversial political demands, and its bold use of communist discourse and symbols, the PRD presented itself as a revolutionary force for systemic change, greatly transgressing the permissible bounds of student identity. At the same time, it precluded political marginalization by simultaneously pursuing a strategy of coalition building with reformist groups. By 1996 it was at the front of a major opposition movement, formed around its alliance with the Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, PDI) under the leadership of Megawati Soekarnoputri, Sukarno’s daughter and the symbolic leader figure of the opposition. To the PRD, the PDI seemed an attractive partner for its loyal mass support base; to the regime, this alliance seemed dangerously explosive. On July 26, 1996, a regime-orchestrated leadership crisis in the PDI led to riots in Jakarta, which were instantly blamed on the PRD and landed key figures within its leadership in prison and further provided a pretext for the suppression of all opposition. Heightened surveillance on campuses further nipped all student protest in the bud.

Underground, though, student activists connected to the PRD and the former FAMI networks continued to consolidate their movement against Suharto’s regime (Sastramidjaja 2020). Around the May 1997 elections, they managed to mobilize massive popular rallies against the state party Golkar and for Megawati and Sri Bin-tang Pamungkas (representing the PDI and the PPP, the only two other legal political parties) as alternative candidates for the presidency and vice ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Terms
• Introduction: Social Movements and Democratization in Indonesia
• Chapter 1 Student Movements and Indonesia’s Democratic Transition
• Chapter 2 Democratization and Indonesia’s Anticorruption Movement
• Chapter 3 Indonesia’s Labor Movement and Democratization
• Chapter 4 Movements for Land Rights in Democratic Indonesia
• Chapter 5 Urban Poor Activism and Political Agency in Post–New Order Jakarta
• Chapter 6 Reformasi and the Decline of Liberal Islam
• Chapter 7 The Women’s Movement and Indonesia’s Transition to Democracy
• Chapter 8 The Unfulfilled Promise of Democracy: Lesbian and Gay Activism in Indonesia
• Chapter 9 Democratization and Disability Activism in Indonesia
• Conclusion: Social Movements, Patronage Democracy, and Populist Backlash in Indonesia
• List of Contributors
• Index