The Gerindra Party chairman, who is once again aiming for the presidency next year and is said to have secured support from President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, insisted instead that the current legislation is effective enough and has served as a guide for soldiers to work professionally.

“The TNI Law has been implemented for a long time now and has worked out for us. We have managed to prevent any ‘leakages’ and corruption,” Prabowo told reporters in Jakarta, as quoted by state news agency Antara.

“The President himself wants strong oversight, and I think that has also panned out pretty well,” he said on Thursday.

His remarks were made in response to the emergence of a draft proposal to revise the current legal framework, which is being devised internally by the TNI’s legal division.

In a presentation document seen by The Jakarta Post, the proposed revisions would allow for active military officers to occupy positions in 18 ministries and government agencies, nearly double the current number of 10 stipulated in the prevailing law.

The revision would also introduce a passage describing the TNI as “a state tool in the field of defense and state security”, which early analyses suggest could potentially overlap with the authority of the National Police.

According to the document, this passage would replace another provision in the current law that explicitly requires the deployment of the TNI for any military operation to be made under the president’s command. Rights activists and defense analysts are concerned that this would allow for “military insubordination toward civilian leaders” to apply.

Additionally, the new draft legislation would raise the retirement age for high-ranking officers from 58 years to 60 years in extraordinary cases, particularly “soldiers who have special abilities, competencies and expertise”.

A TNI spokesperson has confirmed the veracity of the presentation documents but said that the proposed revisions were still being internally discussed.

Blast from the past

The proposed changes have raised the specter of militarism, which was true for most of the nation’s modern history up until the fall of the New Order in 1998.

This concern has added weight given the current political climate, critics have pointed out, with the 2024 elections looming just around the corner.

The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), a group set up in 1998 to investigate forced disappearances and violence allegedly carried out by the Soeharto regime, has called on the government and lawmakers to scrap the proposed revisions altogether.

It said that the changes, if approved, could make way for the return of the military into civilian affairs, one of the hallmarks of the authoritarian New Order regime.

“We consider the planned revision of the TNI Law, which has been in the works since 2019, as a form of regression in the security sector’s reform agenda. [It] has the potential to strengthen the grip of militarism,” said Andi Muhammad Rezaldy, a Kontras activist, in a statement.

Separately, Anton Aliabbas, an analyst from the Center for Intermestic and Diplomatic Engagement (CIDE), said that raising the retirement age would only add to the current redundancy among middle- and high-ranking officers.

“Past experience has shown that raising the retirement age in the TNI Law has created a bottleneck that affects a soldier’s career and leads to the rise of jobless officers,” he told the Post on Friday.

“If we reflect on the need for fit, alert and agile soldiers, we should have more active soldiers who are young and productive. Consequently, the retirement age limit should be lowered, not raised,” Anton argued.

The proposed overhaul of the law also indicates that the military is seeking to reassert its autonomy, by suggesting that the defense minister no longer provide administrative support to the military institution, and that budget proposals should be submitted to the Finance Ministry rather than the Defense Ministry, as per prevailing rules.

“In many democratic countries, military institutions are placed under the management of civilian ministries, in this case, the Defense Ministry. And it should be remembered that placing the TNI under the Defense Ministry was an achievement of TNI reforms,” Anton said.

“The position of the Defense Ministry should instead be strengthened, so that civilian supremacy is made even more visible.”

As a former army general, Prabowo has spent the best part of the Jokowi administration’s second term quietly shopping abroad for arms and striking pacts to modernize the nation’s arms and improve its defense capabilities.

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