The following two articles are a product of the ongoing mutual exchange between different radical-left and democratic political actors and organisations active in the territory of the Indonesian state and the Kurdish Liberation Movement. Despite the geographical and historical distance, these discussions reveal common experiences under repressive and genocidal local regimes in collaboration with the global forces of Capitalist Modernity. But also the potential to build a genuinely democratic and free society if the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the peoples of these territories can be harnessed into an organised social movement.
The first part is a reflection of the history of militarism in Indonesia and how it interferes in the development of genuine democracy to this day. The second is a list of preliminary conclusions born out of the discussions among Indonesian political organisations and individuals regarding the ideas and history of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Liberation Movement.
Guns can’t talk about democracy: the history of militarism in Indonesia
by the Indonesia-Middle East Solidarity Network
The 1965 coup d'état changed the storyline of the Indonesian nation completely. The direction of the country's political economy, which was originally opposed to capitalism and imperialism, was reversed. Immediately after the coup, laws were overhauled to again give the red carpet to private capital. The red carpet was rolled out on top of the genocide of millions of people, which has so far gone unpunished. Some see the genocide as ideological annihilation. Nowhere in the world has genocide been more gripping than in Indonesia.
On the ground of the crackdown, military rule was built to secure the storyline of capitalism. Although the ideology of communism had been slaughtered along with its people, the Soeharto government revived them as ghosts to be watched and suspected every second. With its military power, all forms of resistance were labelled as the ghosts of communism that must be suppressed and silenced. Soeharto even sent soldiers to remote villages. They controlled and took over almost the entire running of the existing civilian government.
Not enough with the armed forces, the Soeharto government mobilized the apparatus of cultural violence to combat the ghosts of communism that they created. Every year the movie G30S/PKI was screened in villages to convince people that the ghosts were real. With Western support, they formed literary groups to counter communism and anti-government narratives. As a result, universal humanism as liberal literature became the dominant literary and cultural school in Indonesia. This literary school not only marginalized communism, but also distanced the nation's consciousness from the imagination of resistance and rebellion against injustice.In addition, the Soeharto government accelerated the development of capitalism in various sectors. These development programs were used as political tools to perpetuate its power. For example, the “green revolution” policy did succeed in increasing national rice production and was considered a success in realizing national food self-sufficiency. But in fact, it created dependency, environmental damage and inequality of land tenure in the villages. Likewise, the "electricity to the village program" is propagated as a program to improve the welfare of people's livelihoods. But behind that, electricity development is actually used to accelerate industrialization driven by capitalism.
Even so, Soeharto's developmentism did not succeed in creating stability in power. The New Order still had to maximize the apparatus of violence to silence criticism. Behind his suspicion of communist ghosts was basically Soeharto's ambition to create stability, as well as an excuse to suppress various forms of popular resistance. To slaughter and ensure the eradication of communism to its roots, Soeharto formed the Operation Command for the Restoration of Security and Order (Kopkamtib). Kopkamtib muzzled the followers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) who were considered the culprits of the G30S. Kopkamtib also screened and purged leftist civil servants and military personnel. Since June 1966, the screening carried out by Kopkamtib even extended to campuses.
Apart from the crackdown on communism and its sympathizers, there were many incidents of state violence and repression against the people during Soeharto's rule. The Malari incident in January 1974, for example, was a response to the crisis of capitalism that led to very high inflation. Anger among students boiled over and caused chaos. Their demands included an immediate halt to foreign investment as the culprit of the economic crisis at the time. However, to quell the chaos, Soeharto arrested over 750 demonstrating students.
In other cases, Soeharto did a lot to silence freedom of speech. Many newspapers were silenced and banned. Development projects during the New Order forcibly displaced people's homes and lands. Soeharto also seized many forest lands that were the source of livelihood for upland farmers to be converted into timber businesses. These authoritarian actions are enough to prove the failure of Soeharto's government in the welfare of the people.
But by the 1990s, the trend of dynastic leadership, including the New Order regime, was no longer relevant to capitalism. Consciousness about good governance began to strengthen globally, and experiences of repression during the New Order government, especially among students, sparked anger in many places. During the 1998 crisis, this anger peaked. Student demonstrations took place in almost all cities in Indonesia with Jakarta at the center. They demanded immediate power reform. To quell the economic chaos and demonstrations, Soeharto ordered the arrest of thousands of students in Jakarta. Many of them were disappeared without trial. But Soeharto's repressive measures were not enough for them and eventually decided to give up power.
Only after Soeharto stepped down did the euphoria of Reformasi(1) spread everywhere. Successor president BJ Habibie was not enough to satisfy the students as he was deemed incapable of carrying out reform demands. After Abdurrahman Wahid's ascension to the presidency through general elections, ABRI(2)'s dual function, which allowed the army to play a role in civilian spaces, was abolished. Various other laws that became tools of Soeharto's authoritarianism were dissolved.
Still in the process of building, Abdurrahman Wahid was ousted for threatening the map of capitalism's reorganization of power in Indonesia. The euphoria of Reformasi at the time did not capture the reality of the power shift from Soeharto to new capitalists. Reformasi in Indonesia was just one of a global trend of removing authoritarian governments as they were deemed no longer relevant to the capitalist system after recovering from the Great Depression after the Second World War. In this sense, Reformasi paved the way for neoliberalism, which sought to unleash state intervention against market forces. Structural adjustment policies gradually intensified, marked by a wave of increased foreign investment and privatization of state enterprises.
In civic life, reform was also unable to significantly guarantee a democratic order. Evictions are becoming more numerous all the time. Especially after the 2007 crisis, capitalism demanded more structural adjustments. At the end of SBY(3)'s reign, the crisis of global capitalism requires Indonesia to change and reorganize the country's territorial landscape into interconnected economic corridors to accelerate the recovery from the crisis of global capitalism by opening up new spaces of capital accumulation throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The consequence is that the deprivation of living space will become more massive and grow much faster than in any previous regime in Indonesia. Therefore, an iron fist government is needed to realize this global urge.
Joko Widodo, who had been portrayed as a mild-mannered president who would be able to create a healthy civilian government, turned out to be no different from the New Order government. The realization of the accelerated expansion of capitalism requires Jokowi to practice iron fist governance. Since the military's dual function still has a bad image from the New Order, Jokowi's government is using the police to enforce his authoritarianism. In this way, Jokowi has become the most successful government in accelerating capitalist projects. A lot of projects that were stalled in the previous government were successfully passed in his era, such as infrastructure projects, industrialization and new cities. As a result, cases of deprivation of living space and criminalization of the people are increasingly widespread.
Like the New Order, Jokowi's regime prepared various iron fist instruments. They created the ITE (Information and Electronic Transactions) Law that can ensnare anyone who fights back. Even just a few agrarian activists, students and local communities who reject government policies are considered criminals. All forms of resistance and actions that interfere with national strategic projects, which clearly only serve the interests of capitalism, are considered treason and must be imprisoned. Criticism of public officials can even be considered hate speech ostensibly directed at their person, and labelled as criminals as well.
At the end of his administration, Jokowi even restructured the law in the most irresponsible way of any country in the world. For example, the national anti-corruption agency was stripped bare. Not long after, Jokowi overhauled hundreds of laws to cater to foreign investment and legitimized their repressive actions in just a few months. Most recently, the Jokowi administration has shamelessly undermined and trashed the constitution that is the cornerstone of national democracy. By all means, Jokowi put his son into the vice presidency to cement his position in the national political scene. Many activists and academics see this as an attempt to start a dynasty.
Moreover, Prabowo Subianto, who has a track record of gross human rights violations, won the Indonesian election in 2024. The image of his violent past has been ignored. There is considerable concern among activists and the middle class about a return to militaristic and authoritarian rule. But perhaps these fears have little basis, as Indonesia has never really been free from authoritarianism since the rise of the New Order until now. It is important to realize that the struggle to uphold social democracy is a long one.
The struggle for democratic socialism has to start now, and there is no excuse for it. We cannot dream of democracy being truly realized if armed authoritarianism continues to influence the system. Armed rule and democracy will never be compatible. Democracy is a system built on a bunch of people talking to each other. While there is not a single story in the history of the world where guns can talk!
Preliminary conclusions towards the implementation of Democratic-Confederalism in Indonesia
1. Self-criticism and evaluation of theory is fundamental. Whether Anarchist or Marxist, if we ourselves believe blindly in them, they cease to be science and become dogma. If we do not dare to challenge their relevance or update them theoretically in accordance with the reality of society's needs step by step, it is clear that they will be increasingly abandoned.
2. If you want to establish a Party, but are still state-oriented like the mainstream trend of Marxist-Leninism, you are destined to fail. It is important to learn from the PKK about party reconstruction, to become a party that supports democracy, women's liberation and ecology, which Marx and Lenin failed to put into practice until their deaths.
3. The state cannot be eliminated by immediately destroying it (anti-state approach), nor by seizing the state. The state can only be transcended: eliminated or minimized in its dominance by the gradual growth and implementation of democracy, meaning Direct Democracy that starts at the neighborhood, village, district, and city levels.
4. Socialism is not something that is imposed, Ideology must be part of the daily social reproduction of society. Rojava's success was in getting people to join in the Revolution through direct voluntary participation.
5. Rêber Apo clearly put into practice what Marx said: that the emancipation of the working class can only be done by themselves. This success can be seen in that, even when the leader of the revolution was put in prison, the flame was not extinguished. This was due to the goal of promoting true democracy so that the tendency towards authoritarianism disappeared.
6. The collectives we build must be able to see individuals as people with multiple identities. Rêber Apo has succeeded in analysing this issue to a degree that we have failed to do, his most notable success being in getting religious communities of the Middle East to agree on the importance of emphasizing gender equality and Women's Liberation.
7. The use of excessive power in social matters is another fatal mistake that we often make. Societal problems should be solved through democratic discussions to find peaceful solutions and with the aim of rehabilitation and re-education. The collective should be a place of learning and popular organization, it should not become an iron-fisted police-like authority.
8. Communities must be brave enough to re-examine their history as a people and their culture. The nation-state and Capitalist Modernity, which are destroying our identity, should be further critiqued, so that we can get to know each other better.
9. It is important to create common political education agendas, and further localise Democratic Confederalism in Indonesia.
1 Reform process in Indonesia initiated with the resignation military dictator Suharto in 1998 and which supposedly is transforming the country into a Western-style liberal democracy
2 Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia
3 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, retired army general who served as the sixth president of Indonesia from 2004 to 2014
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