Global Issues
When Asia Put Some Dictators Behind
As Egypt takes tentative steps to replace ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade authoritarian rule with a democratic culture, its political planners may want to look halfway across the world to the most populous Muslim country for lessons on how to prevent a return to strongman rule.
Indonesia ousted the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, and has since launched a slew of legal reforms that respect human rights, promote political competition and a multi-party democracy, and cultural plurality. These, says Rafendi Djamin, Indonesian commissioner in the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), have been at the heart of his country’s success story. ASEAN is the Association of South-east Asian Nations, a 10-member regional bloc of all South-east Asian nations, including Indonesia.
'It will be very, very difficult for the return of a Suharto-type rule,' he told IPS. 'But we need to be vigilant for possible setbacks to our democracy with still unfinished reforms in the security sector, the administration of justice, and corruption.'
Another light that guided Indonesia out of the dark years under Suharto, a strong U.S. ally to the very end just like Mubarak, was the explosion of media freedom, earning it praise from media rights watchdogs for having the freest media culture in the region.
The last general election in April 2009 saw the flowering of political change in post-Suharto Indonesia. Thirty-eight parties nominated 12,000 candidates to vie for the 560 seats up for grabs in the national legislature. This marked a dramatic increase from only three political parties that were at one time permitted to participate according to the dictates of the Suharto regime, in polls often rigged to favour the strongman and his allies.
Such change was achieved following the slow and protracted attempts to dismantle the system Suharto had put in place to keep a tight grip on the country. In that system, the 400,000-strong Indonesian armed forces played a substantial political role.
When a new and expanded parliament began its sessions in late 2004 following a general election that year, the noticeable absentees were the unelected military officers who were guaranteed 20 percent of the seats in the legislature.
Suharto, who had grabbed power in a 1965 coup, set about militarising Indonesian politics with his military nominees in the early 1970s, ensuring them 100 seats in the 500-member parliament.
'The military was identified with Suharto and it was discredited,' says Dewi Fortuna Anwar, director of research at the Habibie Centre, a respected Indonesia think tank. 'It became the object of reform.'
'This was a fundamental requirement for change in Indonesia,' she said during a telephone interview from Jakarta. 'There was public acceptance that the military had no place in the political reform process.'
But stripping Indonesia’s body politic of military presence and reaching a level of stability that ensured greater civilian control was a 'long, winding and rocky road,' she noted. 'We only started to stabilize in 2003 and had our first presidential elections in 2004.'
A country with an even older story of political transition that has a sobering narrative for Egypt’s political architects is Indonesia’s neighbour, the Philippines.
Filipinos overthrew another strongman, Ferdinand Marcos, who was also a U.S. ally during his two-decade rule. Marcos was overthrown in what many regard as the moment when people power was born to topple oppressive regimes.
The triumph of this Asian story of non-violent protest in 1986 saw up to two million Filipinos gather for days at the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, also known as EDSA, in capital Manila to force Marcos to step down.
Yet, as the Philippines prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the EDSA Revolution from Feb. 22 to 25, some analysts rue that the promise of EDSA has still to achieve all its expectations in eradicating the culture of political abuse and corruption of the Marcos era.
Against the positive achievements of a more vibrant democracy, regular elections and the 'unlikelihood of another Marcos regime because of the many political checks and balances' is the still continuing bias 'towards the country’s political dynasties,' says Joy Chavez, head of the Philippines office of the regional think tank Focus on the Global South.
'The political reforms in the constitution guarantee more popular participation in political life and the right to freedom of information to serve as a check on those in power, but the enabling laws have not been put in place,' she told IPS.
A third of the population currently lives below the poverty line and the hope of economic policies favouring them has also not been achieved 25 years after EDSA, says Walden Bello, a first-time congressman and leading civil society activist. 'Political transformation has not been followed by economic and social transformation to redistribute income and economic power.'
But the choices that the Indonesians and the Filipinos made in the political transition following the ouster of their respective dictators prevailed in a climate that already sets them apart from Egypt, where the military has assumed control of the reform process.
'Some hard choices lie ahead for the Egyptian army, and will test its commitment to the full democracy it said it will promote and protect,' noted an editorial this week in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. 'When the people’s protesting zeal turns into a determined hunt for Mubarak’s riches, or into an assertive demand for an accounting of the repressive security forces, or into an unstoppable presidential draft for a candidate it cannot abide, will the army meekly, modestly, step aside?'
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service