“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” That’s what US Gen. McArthur said in a speech to Congress when he retired in 1951 after 52 years in military service. As someone who grew up under 32 years of oppressive, military, authoritarian rule by Soeharto’s New Order (1966-1998), I have long felt our own old soldiers weren’t fading away fast enough.
Yes, I confess to an anti-military bias — understandably so, I reckon, considering I was often on the receiving end of the New Order military’s intrusive Dwifungsi (dual function) role in non-military life, especially politics. Like many others, I blame much of Indonesia’s current problems on decades of military interference.
However, if Juwono Sudarsono, former defense minister (1999-2000 and 2004-2009) is right, I am being unfair. He has criticized “domestic and foreign analysts, particularly NGOs, incessantly find[ing] fault with anything and everything the Indonesian Military (TNI) do”, (see “Indonesian Military and Rights”, The Jakarta Post, June 28, 2006).
Juwono has a point. After all, not everything the TNI does is bad, and every country needs competent and effective armed forces. So, I decided I’d try to adopt a more balanced view, especially for Indonesian Armed Forces Day, which we celebrate every Oct. 5.
I thought I’d start with 1998. In the mayhem of Soeharto’s May 21 resignation, TNI Commander Gen. Wiranto didn’t take the obvious chance to make a Soeharto-like move himself. He chose not to launch a military coup like the one with which his boss displaced president Sukarno in 1966. This allowed a constitutional civilian process to develop.
In fact, Wiranto has even been labeled a “military reformist” for not resisting as the number of guaranteed TNI seats in the House of Representatives (DPR) were reduced, and then abolished altogether.
And, although President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has been spoofed as “Soslow Bimbang (dithering, hesitant) Youdontknow”, he also played an important role in military reform as chief of territorial affairs (1997-1998). Later in 2004, the DPR passed a law requiring the government to take over or close all TNI businesses by Oct. 16, 2009, and SBY backed it. Senior generals reluctantly complied.
The Indonesian Military has long relied on business activities to cover funding shortfalls, because no Indonesian government since the mid-1950s has been able to give them an adequate budget. So, it wasn’t surprising that divestment of military business wasn’t completed on time.
On Oct. 11, 2009, SBY issued a decree to keep the process rolling and the defense budget has since been augmented to Rp 65 trillion per annum (US$7.3 billion).
This is still well under the Minimum Essential Force (MEF) target for 2016 of Rp 120 trillion, while operational and maintenance levels for vehicles, ships and planes remain below minimum standards: 70 percent of Army, 60 percent of Navy and 55 percent of Air Force equipment are below par.
Divestment is nonetheless largely complete, although even that is not straightforward. Of approximately 1,200 registered TNI businesses, the combined ministries of defense, finance, human rights and state enterprises via their Interagency Panel verified only 20 as viable commercial enterprises, with a total book value of $300 million.
The rest were foundations and cooperatives that justify themselves as assisting low-ranking soldiers and their families (such as, photocopying machines, school book supplies). Most experts think some TNI business fronts still exist (particularly outside Java, where units still depend on outside-budget and in-kind support from local business partners), but this is, admittedly, a far cry from the massive military business empire built under Soeharto.
So, reform is happening, but it’s hampered by the huge challenges the military face. It’s amazing that in a country with a population of almost 246 million, overall military strength is just 230,000. That works out to 0.0009 percent of the population (a ratio of 1:1,069), and is extremely small given Indonesia’s huge territorial spread.
How about the Police? It’s bigger, at 470,000 (a ratio of 1: 523), but it has been plagued by problems of corruption and institutional weakness since it separated from the military in 1999 — and in trouble spots like Papua or Ambon, neither service have an impressive record, to put it mildly.
Real military reform also depends on political parties and the DPR. As we all know only too well, party consolidation is still weak and haphazard. There’s simply too much
infighting, to say nothing of continued parliamentary and party involvement in procurement kickbacks. The truth is that it is not likely that the army will ever clean itself up completely if politicians don’t!
In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where the army gets fed up with the antics of our civilian leaders and steps in, as happened recently in Thailand, and several times in our own past (1952, 1959, 1966, etc). There are already parallels emerging to the 1956-58 period when democracy became discredited and the president and the army forced “a return to the spirit of the 1945 Constitution”.
The military is probably not up to a complete takeover, but they could engineer a simplified system where nominal democratic government remains in place but where we return to a much stronger presidency that is closer to the men with guns. In fact, some business groups who enjoyed the benefits of New Order cronyism secretly hope this might happen sooner than later.
The anti-military bias that I confess to sharing with most pro-democracy groups is rooted in the liberal Western lexicon of “civilian supremacy”. The problem is if our civilian leaders don’t get their act together, then that supremacy might slip through their hands — and thus ours!
If “old soldiers never die, they just fade away”, they could fade back in too. Who’s to blame if that happens? Now there’s a question to ask next time you cast a vote.
The writer is the author of State Ibuism.
