BY MAX LANE
Despite the humiliating forced resignation of Indonesian President Suharto in May 1998, the political machine that he built during his 33-year reign has remained virtually intact.
Suharto's son may be on the run from a prison sentence and his daughter summonsed for corruption, but the party organisation he created, Golkar, steams along often being able to seize the political initiative and embarrass the incumbent president. In fact, Golkar is poised to make a comeback.
What lies behind Golkar's strength and what is at after?
Of course, Golkar is supported by the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI), the senior bureaucracy and the big crony conglomerates. But perhaps more importantly, Golkar has retained, reasonably intact, a social base of support that it developed during the 33 years of Suharto's rule.
This social base is made of at least three elements. The first and least stable is the middle-class professionals. The second and more stable is the wealthy and prosperous middle peasants and land owners, especially outside Java where lucrative export crops are grown.
The third element in Golkar's social base is the biggest and the most stable, at least in a majority of provinces. This is the horde of hundreds of thousands of petty bureaucrats that inhabit the state machinery.
During the Suharto period, much emphasis was placed by its opponents on the role of the military, including its political role right down to the village. A central aspect of this political role was to back the despotic rule of local bureaucrats, who acted and still try to act as virtual petty lords in the provinces, districts and villages.
This is a centralised bureaucracy that extends into every village and into every aspect of life. Its resilience as a social force stems from a number of factors.
First, it has centuries of tradition behind it and at least 150 years of institutional continuity in many provinces.
Legacy of 'oriental despotism'
Before colonisation by the Dutch most parts of the Indonesian archipelago, where there was some form of state, were ruled by tribute-collecting despots based on the system of production-property relations that Karl Marx described as the "Asiatic mode of production", the political superstructure of which is often described as "oriental despotism".
Within such socioeconomic formations, the most famous of which were the agrarian empires of ancient Egypt and China, an absolute ruler farmed out the right to collect tribute from peasant villagers to a hierarchy of provincial petty officials, who also had responsibility for organising the construction and maintenance of extensive irrigation works, upon which agricultural production was dependent. Extorting tribute from village communities became the universal mode of enrichment by the ruling class of military-priestly nobles.
As the Dutch capitalist colonisers gradually spread their administration into the "East Indies", they subordinated this hierarchy of tribute-collecting bureaucrats to their colonial administrators, many of whom also adopted or adjusted to this tribute-extorting way of life.
The Dutch colonial rulers multiplied many-fold the number of permits and documents needed by peasants, artisans and traders, thereby also multiplying both opportunities for extortion as well as extending the reach of the local bureaucrats into more and more aspects of the daily life of the rural villages. A massive army of extortionists and petty despots was created.
During the period of revolutionary struggle against Dutch colonialism between 1945-49, this tribute-extorting state apparatus came under attack. In some areas where the mass struggle radicalised quickly, the local despots were deposed by popular uprisings and often executed.
However, when the right-wing of the national independence movement seized the initiative after 1948, following the bloody suppression of the left, the tribute-extorting bureaucratic state machine maintained by the Dutch became the new "civil service" of the independent Republic of Indonesia.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the despotism of this state machine was constrained to a certain extent by the growth of the Communist and other left parties and the explosion of popular struggles against the imperialist exploitation of the Indonesian masses. But the total defeat, including the physical extermination of the left during army general Suharto's CIA-backed military coup in late 1965, meant that during the Suharto regime, the horde of little lords of the provinces, districts and villages, was free to rule as it pleased.
Backed by the army's terror against political dissent, local bureaucrats became the main instrument of rule for the Suharto autocracy.
These "civilian" bureaucrats, like their military partners, wore uniforms and held varying ranks. The permits and documents, rules and regulations, which citizens were subject to multiplied even further. This included the need for "a letter of clean circumstances" that certified that an individual, as well as the whole of the individuals' extended family, were free of any connection to the left before 1965.
Thirty years of extended opportunities for extortion with each letter or permit issued, swelled the private wealth held by this social layer. In addition, since the Dutch colonial period, the chief village bureaucrats automatically received village rice land as their own on their appointment to office.
It was not surprising, therefore, that for three months after the overthrow of Suharto in May 1998, there were mini-revolutions in hundreds of villages throughout Indonesia where village bureaucrats were deposed. Sometimes they were physically attacked, their houses burned downed or trashed. Localised and without a broader political perspective, these actions petered out after three months.
The huge social layer of local despotic officials is very conscious that reformasi total, as demanded by the students and sections of the urban masses, threatens their very existence. In fact, they also resent even partial reformasi in so far that it has opened up the political space that
allows common citizens to organise opposition to these officials' arbitrary rule and the extortion that is this layer's chief source of income.
A majority of this social layer has been absorbed into Golkar and gives Golkar access right down to the village level. A minority, in specific locations but not as a national phenomenon, has also been absorbed into Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P). The combination of support from the crony conglomerates, including the press, the TNI and the huge numbers of petty despots and extortionists means that Golkar remains a potent, counter-revolutionary force.
Billions in tribute
During the Suharto era, this army of official extortionists not only operated at the local level, but also at the very top of the state machinery.
Special mechanisms were introduced which gave the ruling Suharto clique incredible power for the collection of a modern form of tribute. The key mechanism was a special presidential decree which ensured that all government tenders had to be approved by the office of the cabinet secretariat. This practice began with large-scale government-funded projects but gradually extended to virtually all publicly funded projects.
In addition to the cabinet secretariat, the Logistics Board (Bulog), which controlled the marketing and distribution of rice and many other staples, was also another source of tribute collection. The state banking system was rorted into bankruptcy by its officials, mainly Golkar members. The court system, dominated by the so-called "court mafia", was also a lucrative source of tribute for judges as well as a means whereby the bigger crony capitalists could buy judgements against lesser cronies or smaller businesses.
Since Suharto's fall, Golkar has been struggling to keep or, where it has lost official positions, regain access to these sources of giant tribute. At stake is control of billions of dollars of tribute.
The International Monetary Fund's deregulation policies have reduced Bulog's overall power, but it remains a central body regulating the distribution of key commodities. President Abdurrahman Wahid has appointed an official from the Indonesian Panca Sila Young Generation, a Golkar front, to the head of Bulog. This appointment has been the target of attack by a number activist and NGO coalitions.
There has also been a massive struggle over the appointment of the next chief justice of the Indonesian Supreme Court. Whoever is appointed to this position will have the power to restructure the whole court system. Golkar, in alliance with the right-wing Muslim Central Axis parties, has been pushing for former Suharto cabinet minister and Golkar official, Muladi, to be appointed to this position. So far Wahid has been holding off on making this appointment, but he has been unable to gather parliamentary support for an alternative candidate.
A new institution that is up for grabs is the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA), formed by the government after the 1997 Asian economic crisis to take over bankrupted banks and many corporations that owed money to these banks. The IMF has assessed that IBRA holds assets worth US$58 billion, about half the equivalent of the country's gross domestic product.
IBRA's task is to sell off these assets to private sector buyers. There have already been controversies where IBRA has tried to sell back to "bankrupt" cronies their former assets at cheap prices. Indonesia's biggest crony capitalist, Sudomo Salim, actually tried to buy back cheaply some of his assets until the controversy forced the government and IBRA back down. At the moment, IBRA is in the hands of Coordinating Minister for the Economy Rizal Ramli, a non-Golkar Wahid appointee.