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Letter: The military, the police and terrorism
I refer to the page 1 report in the Monday, Sept
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I
refer to the page 1 report in the Monday, Sept. 27 edition of The Jakarta Post, “Military vows to crush terrorist network”, on the recent statement of intention by the Indonesian Military (TNI) to crush terrorism. In the same report reference is made to the decision recently taken by the National Police to involve the TNI in its fight against terrorism.
The commitment of the TNI and the police to fight terrorism is, of course, gratifying and will, no doubt, be a source of comfort to many Indonesians. However, at the same time, these proactive initiatives by the TNI and the police must raise troubling questions about how far Indonesia has really progressed along the road to full democracy.
I was immediately struck by the fact that it was the TNI and the police that announced the initiative — apparently quite independently of any direction from the government and the cabinet. In a fully developed democracy, the military and the police have no independent existence or policy-making role, but rather are simply organs of the state charged with carrying out whatever tasks the government of the day assigns to them in terms of external defense (in the case of the military) and internal crime control (in the case of the police).
It would surely have been far more consistent with Indonesia’s democratic aspirations for either the President or the Minister responsible for the TNI and the police to announce that he had instructed the TNI and the police to be more proactive in combating domestic terrorism and, possibly, to cooperate with one another in so doing.
The TNI and the police in Indonesia clearly have a continuing problem accepting and internalizing the fact that, regardless of their positions during the New Order, they are no longer self-regulated and semi-autonomous institutions free to set their own objectives and determine which parts of the bureaucracy they will or will not cooperate with.
The TNI also seems to be far too ready to carve out for itself a major role in domestic crime prevention by classifying the recent and wholly reprehensible attack on the Hamparan Perak police station as an “attack on the state” and a “threat to the existence of the state”, thereby supposedly justifying TNI’s involvement in tracking down the perpetrators. Surely it was for this purpose that the police established Detachment 88. Why not just let Detachment 88 do the job it was established to do? One suspects that, at least in part, the TNI’s new found enthusiasm for combating domestic terrorism is more about ensuring its continued relevance and importance, in competition with the police, than it is about really seeing domestic terrorism as a disguised external threat to the state and, therefore, something the combating of which might be consistent with the traditional role of the military in a fully functioning democracy.
The government needs to be much more assertive in making sure that the TNI and the police do not overstep the boundaries of acceptable behavior for these institutions in a modern democracy. Yes, by all means, let’s crush terrorism in Indonesia but, at the same time, let’s do it in a manner that does not trample unnecessarily on democratic principles.
William A. Sullivan
Jakarta
