4 - Divided Against Suharto: Muslim Groups and the 1998 Regime Change

Summary

One of the main arguments of this book is that developments within the civilian political realm are as crucial for the shape of transitional military politics as the internal dynamics within the armed forces themselves. More specifically, I submit that the level of military participation in political affairs tends to rise and fall proportionately to the intensity of intra-civilian conflict. Accordingly, after the previous chapter discussed the role of leading military officers in negotiating a regime change that left the fundamental infrastructure of the New Order state intact, it is now necessary to examine the extent to which disagreements between civilian groups contributed to this intra-systemic transfer of power in 1998. Using the analysis of Muslim affairs as a case study in order to emphasize general patterns of civilian politics during the events leading to Suharto's fall, the following chapter argues that divisions between key civilian leaders and constituencies impacted significantly on the nature of the 1998 regime change and the format of Indonesia's post-authoritarian civil-military relations.

The intra-civilian fragmentation during the political upheaval in 1997 and 1998 had two important consequences for the democratic transition and the character of the post-New Order polity. To begin with, the inability of oppositional civilian forces to unite and form a powerful coalition against the weakening regime led to their exclusion from the first post-Suharto government. Stepan (1993, p. 67) asserted that “a crucial task for the active opposition is to integrate as many anti-authoritarian movements as possible into the institutions of the emerging democratic majority.” Indonesia's “active opposition”, if there was a movement worthy of that name, did not achieve this goal. Consequently, groups opposed to Suharto gained almost no executive and legislative positions in the early post-authoritarian state, leaving most decisions of structural reform to politicians (and military officers) associated with the New Order. The second crucial impact of the civilian infighting during the crisis related to the ability of military officers to exploit the weakness of their civilian counterparts and engineer a transition that protected their interests. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (1996, p. xxiv) suggested that “unity of democratic purpose among civilian political elites” is crucial to ending military intervention in politics and creating democratic civil-military relations in political transitions.