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In memoriam: Arief Budiman, architect of the democracy movement
In the 1980s and 1990s, Arief became an authority among the intellectuals who shaped the rise of Indonesia’s democracy movement. He had two priorities: first, to foster a new generation of critical students who rethought the past, and second, to support the victims of authoritarian development and to promote alternative paths via NGOs that could give rise to organized political actors.
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Arief Budiman (Kompas/Hasanuddin Assegaf )
I
n the early 1980s while concluding my doctoral thesis on why the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had failed, senior editor Joesoef Isak told me that if I really wanted to follow up by studying democratization– even though very few deemed this an option for Indonesia at the time – I must meet the scholar Arief Budiman in Salatiga, Central Java.
Upon reaching Arief’s temporary house on the grounds of Christian Satya Wacana University, it was raining torrentially and the roof was leaking. The television was working fine, however, and an important sports tournament was in progress. So without the polite Javanese manners of which both of us were less inclined, Arief greeted me by shouting happily from inside that, while it was good to finally meet, political discussions must wait until the match was over. Meanwhile, I should squeeze in between him and his wife Leila and watch carefully because, he smiled, “Badminton is what Indonesia is good at, despite Soeharto.”
So, first things first. And then we talked, and the conversation was an easy one. We both approached Indonesia from a comparative perspective. Arief was interested in the Global South as a whole, especially Southeast Asia. But we also exchanged our similar insights on India, South Africa and Latin America.
And then there was social democracy, including the Swedish system. When visiting us, he was also fond of a particularly tasty kind of ice cream and Nordic romantic music.
Yes, in between debates, Arief was a romantic and a most warm-hearted person. He lived with his beloved psychologist wife Leila, and his immediate circle included friends, students and activists in the egalitarian way he strived for in society. Humorous, listening and never preaching. He read Jean-Paul Sartre’s combination of Marxism and humanism as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. He watched pioneering films but also enjoyed an American hamburger. Religion was not important to him, but ethics was. He even offered drinks to the bored, plainclothes cops outside his house. And he kept aggressive geese in his garden for security, as keeping watchdogs was less appropriate in a Muslim community.
Some say Arief was not a theorist, which is true. He was beyond that. Throughout his life, he identified hypotheses and arguments and then tried them out in both theory and practice.
In the 1960s, when Soe Hok Djin, alias Arief, as young student of psychology fought “Guided Democracy” to gain freedom, activists were influenced by political scientist Samuel Huntington’s theory that modernization would not generate liberal democracy without “politics of order”. And when this failed with the massacres and a dictatorship, Arief with fellow activists tried in the early 1970s to reform the New Order based on the belief that students constituted a “moral force”. But this, too, failed.
