A Nation Seeking Its Own Direction

More than 100 million Indonesians will vote today in the sixth managed election held since President Suharto established his authoritarian rule in the 1960s. Although the run-up to this year’s election of a quasi-parliament was unusually violent, with at least 250 people killed in clashes between the regime’s opponents and defenders, it can be safely predicted that the ruling party will win and economic growth will go on.

It is tempting to see in the increased opposition to Suharto, who will turn 76 on June 8, the advent of a democratic future: to believe that the regime will go down with its founder, enabling a liberal polity to arise in its place. From this sanguine point of view, the recent preelection violence shows that Indonesians reject authoritarian rule, yearn for political choice and insist on democracy now.

The ideology of American foreign policy is particularly conducive to such a view. Hasn’t the Indonesian economy been growing long and fast enough to create a middle class? Isn’t that middle class now doing in the archipelago what its counterparts have done ever since the American and French revolutions--demanding and thus ushering in democracy?

Perhaps a democratic scenario will unfold someday, although the resulting system is almost sure to be less liberal than many Americans would like. In the short term, however, such optimism seems unwarranted.

The developmental performance and repressive capacity of the present regime are two obvious reasons to question the imminence of its collapse. But even if collapse occurs, Indonesia’s middle class is poorly equipped to fashion a democracy from the debris of autocracy.

The private sector has burgeoned. But for many entrepreneurs, whom you know still matters at least as much as what you know, and many of these “whoms” are state officials or people with access to official favors. For most businesses, the economic price of seeming to oppose the regime is still too high to pay.

The disproportionately ethnic-Chinese makeup of the middle class makes political acquiescence more likely. This minority has long been vulnerable to use by “native” Indonesians as a scapegoat and a milch cow. Far from emboldening them, their wealth makes ethnic-Chinese entrepreneurs wary of political causes for fear of being squeezed for money and blamed for disloyalty at the same time.

Nor are Americans and Indonesians likely to draw the same lesson from the riots and deaths that marred this year’s election season. Americans are likely to see the violence as heroic, proof of Indonesians’ determination to be free of oppressive rule. But middle-class Indonesians know from experience that political violence, if it spreads, can jeopardize their incomes, property, even their lives. More than a few who live in communities marked by the recent bloodshed may be thankful not that democracy is in the offing but that elections are not held more often.

I first visited Indonesia in 1967, when Suharto was only acting president. Over the ensuing 30 years, U.S.-Indonesian relations were never so bad as they have been in the 1990s. In Washington, the old Cold War-related reasons to back Suharto’s anti-communist regime and downplay its occupation of East Timor have disappeared, with no clear policy replacing them. In Congress, blue-collar-job protectionists and liberal human-rights defenders line up against pragmatists who know that alienating Suharto’s Indonesia could damage important American economic and security interests in Southeast Asia. And the scandal surrounding private Indonesian contributions to his reelection campaign has shrunk the president’s freedom to influence Jakarta’s leaders.

Washington cannot single-handedly democratize the world’s fourth-most-populous country. It is highly unlikely that, between now and the scheduled renewal of Suharto’s presidency next March, the violence will escalate enough to overthrow his system. And should such a cataclysm occur, it could unleash more fear than freedom.

Spiraling violence could persuade Indonesia’s middle class to put stability first and postpone freedom. Nor should Americans watching CNN’s coverage from thousands of miles away be too quick to dismiss such a failure of nerve as cowardice.

The likeliest parent of a sustainable shift in Indonesia toward a more open system with fewer violations of human rights is evolution, not revolution.

Heirs to the American revolution, politicians in Washington take on faith the absolute superiority and intrinsic appeal of liberal democracy: “We take these truths to be self-evident. . . . “ But it is not the hectoring of high-minded, low-budget American politicians that will shape Indonesia’s future. That will be done by Indonesians acting from their own motives, including a growing desire for less repressive rule.