Controlling the Military: Conflict and Governance in Indonesia's Consolidating Democracy

Summary

My military friends say that they would bow under civilian supremacy only when civilians are of supreme quality.

This book has presented a detailed account of Indonesia's civil-military relations during and after the downfall of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998. It has portrayed the ups and downs in this relationship, both from the perspective of internal military developments and the dynamics within civilian politics. In very broad terms, the discussion has distinguished between two highly diverse periods in the country's transitional civil-military affairs: first, the phase between 1998 and 2004, when deep divisions between civilian groups allowed the armed forces to extend some of their privileges into the new democratic, but unstable polity. By contrast, the period of democratic consolidation after 2004 witnessed firmer government control of the military, facilitated by the stabilization of civilian politics and, more specifically, a significant decline in the level of conflict between key societal forces. By 2008, the Indonesian military had come a long way from its past as the regime-stabilizing instrument of Suharto's repressive rule or, subsequently, the mediator between rival civilian groups in the early transition. Although they retained some of their social and political privileges, the armed forces were no longer a “veto player” (Tsebelis 2002) in Indonesia's consolidating democracy; their power to determine the course of political affairs had diminished considerably.

The following conclusion assesses the role of the armed forces in post-Suharto politics on the basis of the analytical tools and empirical material presented in this book. It will begin with an evaluation of the extent to which the Indonesian armed forces after 1998 intervened in the four classic areas of military interests. The discussion of the military's involvement in political institutions, the economy, the management of its internal affairs, and the socio-cultural sector confirms that the position of the armed forces in the democratic transition was, in Larry Diamond's terms, of a “hybrid” character (Diamond 2002). On the one hand, the military was largely extracted from formal politics and lost its status as the country's most dominant sociopolitical force. On the other hand, however, the armed forces maintained a elatively privileged position in social and political life, enjoying impunity from legal investigations and continuing their practice of self-financing through TNI's territorial structure.