D

o you like coffee? Many Indonesians do. The country happens to be among the world’s top coffee producers and exporters. So it stands to reason that Indonesians who not only love coffee, but who are also proud of it, should sport a T-shirt with “Pecinta Kopi Indonesia” (Lovers of Indonesian Coffee) printed on it.

So why were Adlun Fiqri and Supriyadi Sawai, two guys in Maluku, arrested for wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the initials PKI and a cup of coffee? Well, because PKI are also the initials of the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party.

Admittedly, there were the images of a hammer and sickle inside the cup of coffee instead of spoons. So just a bit of harmless satire, right? Not according to the authorities, who promptly threw these two young activists into jail.

Surely this is the height of paranoia! After all, there’s been a spate of satirical takes on the hammer and sickle that reflects very much Indonesians’ penchant for tongue-in-cheek humor (see “When hammer-and-sickle symbol becomes funny memes”, The Jakarta Post, May 13).

But that seems to be our prevailing mood these days – paranoia and panic against the perceived threat of the reemergence, if not of the defunct PKI itself, of communist ideas.

For example, Gen. (ret) Kivlan Zen, former head of the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad) accused Budiman Sudjatmiko, a lawmaker of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), of attempting to revive communism.

Budiman was responsible for overseeing the redistribution of land in Garut, West Java, and Batang in Central Java, which Kivlan said smacks of past communist programs and propaganda.

Budiman, former head of the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), which has a democratic socialist platform, obviously denied the accusation.

He stressed that it was an official program of the Agrarian and Spatial Affairs Ministry, attended by Minister Ferry Mursyidan Baldan himself, as well as the governors and regents of the two regions. Budiman himself was invited as a member of Commission II of the House of Representatives. “If working as an MP defending the interests of farmers is considered the revival of the PKI […] I refuse to respond to these lack-of-quality statements.”

He added that if all land distribution activities are linked to communism or the PKI, then logically all his commission colleagues, officials and the minister himself are part of the PKI. How about that?

These old, ex-New Order military guys must be getting pretty desperate: They’re resorting to the most absurd accusations. Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu went so far as to describe the movement to defend LGBT rights as an attempt by Western nations to undermine Indonesia’s sovereignty.

It would be hilariously funny if it weren’t so scary. I mean, this guy is the current defense minister and he talks like he’s from La La Land.

Much has been written about the recent crackdown on events related to communism.

In this year alone, up to the end of March, there were at least nine incidents of closures.

These writings all talk about the return of the New Order style of repression, but none say why.

It’s because the New Order never left!

After Soeharto stepped down on May 21, 1998, Indonesians started calling it the reform era, when all that was happening was that we stopped having the Smiling General as our president.

But the three main pillars of the New Order — the Golkar Party, the military and the bureaucracy — remained pretty much intact.

The New Order didn’t die. It didn’t even fade away. It just morphed, like the shape-shifting Mystique, the character played by Jennifer Lawrence. At least Mystique’s transformations were totally convincing, whereas the New Order’s are not.

Let’s take a stroll down 18 years of Memory Lane, shall we?

The so-called “regime overthrow” in 1998 was incredibly “thin” or superficial. In most cases where a surge of mass participation brings down a dictator (e.g. Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio
Somoza Garcia in Nicaragua, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Nicolai Ceaușescu in Rumania, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya), the deposed leader is either jailed, exiled, or killed.

Instead what happened with Dictator Soeharto? He just calmly went home, reclused himself in his family compound in Central Jakarta and watched soap operas in his living room until he died in 2008 of natural causes.  

By 2004 his daughter, Siti Hardiyanti “Tutut” Rukmana, was running for president and so was Gen. Wiranto, the chief of his army. A general (Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono) then held the presidency for 10 years, after which another of Soeharto’s generals (Prabowo Subianto), the one everyone, even inside the Indonesian Military (TNI), viewed as an outright murderer and torturer, nearly won, but was ultimately defeated by a nobody mayor (Joko “Jokowi” Widodo) from Surakarta who immediately surrounded himself with notorious Soeharto-era generals, such as Kivlan and, yes, Ryamizard.

And all along, Soeharto’s name keeps getting put forward by Golkar to be awarded the title of national hero. They just did it again and the most the National Awakening Party (PKB) could muster as a response — in classic Indonesian bagi-bagi (sharing) style — was that they would agree if Abdurrahman Wahid (their former head and Indonesia’s fourth president) was also named a hero.

So, is it surprising that all these clamp-downs on freedom of expression and communist phobia are reminiscent of the New Order? It’s because it is still the New Order!

The only new thing since the New Order’s formal change is that Islam is playing a much larger social and political role, which hardly helps. This is a case when two “rights” (political right-wingers, that is) make a very big wrong.

At a time when Indonesia — finally, with the support of the government — is attempting to heal its wounds from the tragedy of 1965 and 1966, the actions of the New Order oldies are counterproductive to the healing of the nation. In the New Order, they would have called it subversive.

Eventually the old New Order (including military) die-hards will die off, but they’re desperately hanging on and won’t give up without a struggle and in the meantime they are doing a lot of damage.

What Indonesia is facing now is not a Red Scare, it’s a Green Scare: both that of the military and of Islamic conservatism. Let’s fight to keep Indonesia Red and White!
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The writer is the author of Julia’s Jihad