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
