Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali

Trouble with Protection

Andrew Vandenberg, Nazrina Zuryani, Andrew Vandenberg, Nazrina Zuryani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811558474
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811558481
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on how diverse developments are reflected in the rise of the security groups in Bali, Indonesia. Bali's security groups pose many interesting questions. Why did they put up so many huge posters around the streets of southern Bali promoting themselves? Are their claims to represent the community plausible or are they "gangs"? How are they shaped by Indonesia's violent past? How does Hinduism affect their gender politics? Do they promote illiberal populism or ethnic and religious tolerance? Does their central role in money politics prevent local democratization?

Rather than write bottom-up history or bring the state back in, this collection as a whole draws on the ideas that circulate among leaders. These circulating ideas construct contemporary politics around both reinterpretations of old practices and responses to problems around tourism, gender, populism, religion, and democracy.

© The Author(s) 2021

A. Vandenberg, N. Zuryani (eds.)Security, Democracy, and Society in Balihttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Trouble with Protection

Andrew Vandenberg¹

(1)

Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia

Andrew Vandenberg

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

… the word “protection” sounds two contrasting tones. One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, “protection” calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage – damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver. The difference, to be sure, is a matter of degree… Which image the word “protection” brings to mind depends mainly on our assessment of the reality and externality of the threat. (Tilly 1985: 170–171)

Some of Bali’s security organisations do offer protection from genuine threats to people’s livelihoods and this is appreciated by the local community. In the north of the island, for example, one organisation of transgender guards provides genuine protection for sex workers and clients around gay and transgender bars near the port. They also promote tourism, offer counselling, and promote campaigns for HIV awareness and anti-homophobia (see Zuryani and Erviantono Chapter 10). Similarly, in the south, village authorities (banjar) in Seminyak hire supposedly traditional guards (pecalang) to patrol the streets and ensure public safety around a string of gay and transgender bars. The Seminyak bars cater to a small but lucrative niche in the Western tourist market that can obviously attract trouble from all manner of homophobes or violent religious extremists. However, matters are less clear when it comes to the big three security organisations—Laskar Bali, LB (“Soldiers of Bali”), Bali Baladikan, BB (“Balinese Army”), and Pemuda Bali Bersatu, PBB (“Bali Youth Union”).

These much larger groups garner community support through offering “social services”, such as makeshift housing for internal migrant workers from north and eastern Bali and around Indonesia, blood donation centres, help with ceremony costs, help with the cost of their children’s school clothes and books, and conducting searches of greater Indonesia immigrant neighbourhoods to check for Bali residency permits. For newcomers looking for work in the tourist areas, they offer a sense of community—keluarga besar, literally a “big family”, according to their motto—in the form of work contacts, associates, and friends (see Erviantono Chapter 7). Obviously, this sense of community is a weak, modern, and urban substitute for the strong community “at home” among the extended family and childhood friends of village life, but it is still valued. They also offer low-paid work for marginal members of Balinese communities (Santikarma 2007). The big security organisations do wield their power responsibly. A senior informant¹ from one of the big three organisations told us about authorities complaining that his organisation had taken work as security guards for a newly opened prayer room run by a militant Islamist . The informant accepted the criticism, ended the contract, and saw to it that the other organisations would not do the work either. Given the obvious risk to public safety and the Western tourist industry, everyone agreed that the Muslims should look after themselves. Without local guards, the prayer room could not attract adherents and closed. On an island of three million residents, and presently almost six million tourists annually, LB has around 40,000 members, BB around 30,000 and PBB around 10,000. A dozen or so smaller local security organisations have between a couple of hundred and a few thousand members. All up, these are small membership numbers compared to the much bigger comparable groups in Java and Sumatra but they are certainly much bigger than the political parties and large enough to be significant actors in the community and in local politics.

The protection offered by the larger groups is not always obvious or entirely genuine because they allegedly also run protection rackets around their guards maintaining order in large bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. In the same vein, it is said that the security organisations take a cut from the gambling around cockfights, buffalo racing, and card games (see Ali Azhar Chapter 7). In another form of gangsterism, they have allegedly threatened violence when they assist local property owners in dispute with international investors (Bachelard 2014) and visit news rooms in person to intimidate journalists reporting their activities in ways they dislike. Further cause for concern is the extensive engagement of the large security groups in politics. Particular security-group leaders support particular politicians who give them bekking—from the English “backing”—in the form of public-sector jobs, junkets, and security contracts (Barker 2001: 52; Hadiz 2010: 141). In return, the groups ensure big crowds at their campaign rallies, ensure people turn out to vote for their backer, and allegedly harass voters supporting their backer’s rivals (Lipson 2019). More controversially, several of their members and some of their leaders have been convicted of smuggling and trafficking street drugs. The groups’ leaders insist that only particular individuals have committed crimes and their organisations on the whole are not organised-crime gangs. Nonetheless, the leaders of LB and BB were called into help their members among the prison guards and end rioting between their young members (and former members) serving sentences in the heavily over-crowded Kerobokan prison in 2012 and again in 2015–2016 (Harvey 2015; Topsfield and Rosa 2015). LB and BB are alleged to control the trafficking of drugs in the prison but they have fulfilled a promise to ensure no more rioting among the inmates because bad media reports about violence in Bali harms the tourism industry. More recently, an increase in the number of Balinese convicted of drugs-related crimes prompted an incoming Inspector General of Police to launch a campaign against preman narkoba—drug gangs (see Zuryani Chapter 6; Mahangga and Vandenberg Chapter 9). Consequently, two successive Governors have declared they will withdraw the big three security organisations’ licences to operate as community organisations, if any of them are proven to have been involved in any forms of gangster violence, extortion, damage to any public infrastructure, or disruptions of public order.

Given this diversity in the implications of what “protection” means, there are of course a range of approaches to understanding these security organisations and similar groups around Indonesia and the world. This chapter surveys primordial, instrumentalist, and constructivist schools of thought on collective violence (Tilly 2017 [2003]), reflecting on various authors’ views about: the security organisations’ relationship with their social and cultural context; their relationship with the state; what they do rather than what they are; and finally, what to call them.

Primordial Collective Violence—Culture and Society-Oriented Accounts

Approaches to understanding collective violence based upon tribalism, communalism, extended kinship, race, language, region, religion, custom, or any combination of such ties presuppose that primordial violence challenges modernity. Primordial violence challenges the legitimate violence of the police, courts, and military following the rational rules and due procedures of a modern, bureaucratic nation state. In his early work, Geertz surveyed a wide range of forms of primordial identities that can undermine the “quest for modernity” (Geertz 1963). Within Indonesia, regional identities provoke tensions between the Javanese and the other islands and Balinese custom certainly diverges from Javanese custom and so might be a source of tension, but he thought it notable that Bali suffered no “sense of primordial discontent at all” (Geertz 1973 [1963]: online, unpaginated). A 1973 postscript to that comment (from 1963) noted that in 1965 “extraordinary popular savagery” targeted communists in Java, Bali, and parts of Sumatra. The postscript followed the Suharto regime’s account, attributing the violence to Javanese villagers massacring other villagers “mainly along …primordial lines – pious Moslems killing Indic syncretists” with some anti-Chinese massacres but mostly Javanese massacring Javanese and Balinese massacring Balinese (Geertz 1973 [1963]: online, unpaginated). Writing in the same period, Benedict Anderson (1996) concluded that the mass killings in 1965–1966 had been largely orchestrated by nationalists in the armed forces purging communists within their ranks and then within society at large. When he published this view, Anderson was denied a visa and barred from entering the country. Subsequently, the CIA (Associated Press 2017; Central Intelligence Agency 1968), historians (Cribb et al. 1990; Robinson 2018), and international jurists (International People’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Trouble with Protection
• 2. The People Answer Back: A Case Study in the Balinese Asserting Their Opinion About the Ormas
• 3. The 2015 Billboards Campaign: What Was That All About?
• 4. The Historical Construction of Bali’s Security Groups
• 5. “A Combination of Extortion and Civic Duty”: A Comparative Criminological Perspective on Informal Security Organisations in Bali
• 6. Paradise Fabricated: Networking of Local Strongmen in Bali
• 7. The Transitional Democracy Trap: Democracy, Complexity, and Local Oligarchy in Bali
• 8. The Internal Governance of Civil Militia
• 9. Power and the Security Organisations in Bali: Drug Gangsters, Neighbourhood Watch Groups, or What?
• 10. Gender Dualism as Degendering Cosmic Multicultural Tolerance of Wargas: Community Security Practices in North Bali
• 11. Digital Activism in Bali: The ForBALI Movement
• 12. Elected and Non-elected Representative Claim-Makers in Indonesia
• 13. Contesting Indonesia’s Democratic Transition: Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Civil Society
• Correction to: The Transitional Democracy Trap: Democracy, Complexity, and Local Oligarchy in Bali
• Back Matter