Go Indonesia Go

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who appears to have been re-elected yesterday in a cakewalk, presides over a townhall-style meeting.

During the years the United States has been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a third country accused of hosting terrorists, which was Indonesia, transformed itself into a democracy. It transformed itself into the kind of democracy the US was failing to build elsewhere by force. Today the chain of islands stretching from Thailand to the South Pacific is one of the world’s largest free countries. Only the United States and India have more voters (or citizens). It is also the country with the greatest Muslim population in the world. In 2004 it held the largest election in modern history and elected a President by direct vote after thirty years of dictatorship. Yesterday, they held the second direct election since the dictatorship’s end, and it was so peaceful, it barely made the news outside Southeast Asia.

This could easily come as a surprise. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the lack of surprise: that a huge Muslim state that was disintegrating suicidally five years ago, is now holding elections so lacking in drama they can’t make the news. Imagine if Pakistan held an election like this in 2014.

It’s possible, apparently. Just a few short years ago, it was more common to hear that the world had succumbed to a “clash of civilizations.” It was common to hear discussion of whether different groups were compatible with democracy. That was mostly a matter of perception – even propaganda — we now realize. We had overlooked some facts. By the 21st century the world’s largest democracies all represented different religions. The world’s largest democracies are India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil — which are also, respectively, the world’s largest Hindu, Protestant, Muslim, and Catholic countries. With that one fact in mind, it’s hard to see how beliefs about democracy could ever be seen to have depended on beliefs about God. Unfortunately — rather than cause us to question the paradigm earlier — that geography, those basic truths of demographics, went overlooked.

Perhaps in the future when we read the story of our era, the obscurity of those sorts of facts will seem more important than it does today. I certainly didn’t notice them without having them thrown in my face. Somewhat by happenstance, I lived in Indonesia at various points during its transition, including during the end of the dictatorship in 1998, during the growth and subsequent quelling of violent extremism earlier this decade, and off and on during a string of natural disasters beginning with the Indian Ocean Tsunami in late 2004-2006. If one applies the logic that was so common elsewhere in those days — nation building is too complex to work; Muslim cultures are not very good at resisting authoritarian rule; terrorism has to be defeated by overwhelming force — you’d be hard pressed to explain yesterday’s peaceful election of a West Point-educated ex-General and a Wharton-educated economist to run the world’s largest Muslim nation. Yesterday’s election only makes sense if you accept that on the day the United States invaded the Muslim heartland bringing Democracy, the largest Muslim countries (Indonesia, India) already had it.

It is easy to imagine our descendants puzzling over our failure to see that. I don’t imagine that part of the story will get less important over time. Rather I suspect, someday, Indonesia’s story will be an important part of answering questions about what’s gone wrong since 2001. At minimum, Indonesia is an example of a country that has done almost the complete opposite of what the US and its allies have counseled, and with now five years to examine the results, it seems the Indonesian strategy worked, and ours remains a subject of debate.

What did they do differently? Most obviously, they fought terrorism firmly and lethally, but with police and courts, not military prisons and cluster bombs. They countered the arguments of extremists with the arguments of sectarians, not with censorship or strongly-urged talking points or switching every TV in the executive palace to the equivalent of Fox News.

They concentrated (if imperfectly) on giving an overwhelmingly young population jobs and education, rather than just exporting the best of them and trying to manage the frustrations of the remainder. And they owned up to the worst cancer on their society — corruption — and have tried, if still haltingly, to clean up their act, and shamed the foreign partners who benefited just as much from the dirty deals into doing same.

Poll workers circulate a voting box in a Semarang, Indonesia maternity ward (Photo: Jakarta Post).

Perhaps that kind of program only could have happened in a place so large, so obscure in the rest of the world, and so hard to grasp (”the place where anthropology goes to die,” an anthropologist quipped to me once; she’d abandoned her PhD) that the larger world really had no choice but to ignore it and let the experiment run its course. If not, things might have gotten messy. Indonesia could, with the right rhetoric, be made to look a lot like Pakistan. Particularly in 2003. “Terrorist training camps;” “dead enders;” “foreign fighters;” “madrasahs;” “franchises of the al Qaeda network;” it had all that. Over two years time Indonesian terrorists murdered hundreds of foreigners in the October, 2002 Bali disco bombs, the 2003 Marriot Hotel attack, and the 2004 Australian embassy suicide attack. Members of terrorist groups and dirty security forces murdered thousands more of their own people in those attacks, plus the 2000 Christmas bombings, civil wars in the provinces of Poso and Moluku, and the horrific poisoning of a well-known civil rights figure, a man named Munir, during a flight to Amsterdam. Five years ago, Indonesia was a scary, scary place at times.

And Indonesia had every reason to fail – and failure would have been a horror. “A thousand Bosnias,” a western diplomat spat, memorably, to the newswires, as far back as 1998. “If Indonesia goes bad, it will go spectacularly bad,” Paul Wolfowitz, then the American Deputy Secretary of Defense (and former US ambassador in Jakarta) said a few years later, in 2002.

Most efforts at “nation building” were failing then. While Indonesia was emerging, similar projects in Somalia, Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the Sahara, and parts of the Balkans and the ex-Soviet Union had all come to disarray and violence — to name only a few. The challenges of making a state are famously complex. The forces of entropy – hunger, financial desperation, jealousy – are very strong. In Indonesia’s case the challenges were often greater than “nation building” normally requires. It was simply a bigger job than anyone had faced before. Indonesia is an enormous place – it has more people than Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, all of Western Europe, Russia, Brazil, or Bangladesh. Its quarter billion citizens live in hopeless crushes of slum in unaccountable mega-cities, or splintered over a half million square miles of tropical ocean, in two hemispheres. The country has so many islands and so many citizens that no one agrees how many of either exist. It’s hard to get things to work in such a place. The mail has to get to the right address, the trains have to run, jobs and schools and gasoline and vaccinations have to exist. The government has to reflect the country’s desires. Everything has to start working before everyone’s patience runs out.

An Indonesian child poses in a scavenger's cart. By day the family moves the cart around the city gathering plastic bottles, which it sells to recyclers. At night the cart is a home, complete with stereo. The girl's grandfather, background, drew the cartoons on the side for the child. Driven by limited opportunities in smaller villages, millions of Indonesians immigrate to regional capitols and the national capitol Jakarta, and live in improvised housing while trying to save the money for a room. Jakarta, where this photo was taken, is home to 12 million people officially, but many estimates run as high as 22 million. With no fixed address, the people in this photo were not likely counted in the last census. (photo: Foreign Correspondents)

Add to that the challenges of a part of the world that regularly explodes – physically. By dint of bad geographic luck, Indonesia sits on one of the most earthquake-prone, volcanic, hostile bits of the Earth that any human community happens to occupy. During the transition to democracy a string of natural disasters occurred – starting with the Indian Ocean tsunami, but continuing on to a second tsunami, two major earthquakes, and a volcanic eruption. More than one hundred and seventy thousand Indonesians died in the December, 2004 tsunami, only two months after the country had placed its first freely elected President, the same Yudhoyono apparently re-elected yesterday, into office. The rash of terrorist bombings occurred during the transition from a dictatorship. So did 9/11 – and with it the huge crash in international business and travel, which were important to Indonesia’s financial health. Then came Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Avian Flu. A drought began, killing the crops. Planes crashed with alarming frequency. Ferry boats sank with hundreds lost at sea. For years it seemed like the country simply would not catch a break. Every reasonable thing the Indonesians did led to another unspeakable tragedy. The country felt cursed. Imagine Katrina, plus 9/11, plus Mexican flu, plus the financial crisis, at the same time, in the America of 1780 or the Russia of 1989.

Countries have succumbed with less urging. But today few expect Indonesia to ever return to dictatorship. And, this all happened very quickly – in less than ten years. By comparison, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia was backsliding. Four years after a peace treaty, the Congo still isn’t peaceful. Ukraine struggled with a fragile democracy. Iraq is a disaster. Afghanistan’s 2010 elections are very much a question mark, and Pakistan’s government may or may not be in charge.

To be certain, Indonesia still has some truly awful problems. Despite everyone’s best efforts, corruption is still crippling: police steal donated medicine from children all the time, for example, either to sell it or to bring it home to their own families, which cannot survive on a public service salary. About half the country still doesn’t have plumbing and lives in homes with dirt floors. Indonesia is an immensely frustrating, unpleasant, unsafe place to accomplish daily tasks. The drains don’t work. No one collects the garbage. The local courts are crooked. It’s surprisingly inexpensive to hire a hit man and not everyone gets prosecuted for extra-judicial score settling. Few have insurance — so if you lose your house in one of the country’s famous disasters, you are out of luck. If you bend a fender in an auto accident, the people riding in the car with the larger number of passengers just beats up, more often than not, the passengers of the other car, and calls it even. The national currency, the Rupiah, is nearly worthless, nearly fifteen years since it first crashed in the long-ago Asian Financial Crisis. This is all to say that while they have done remarkable things, the people who live in Indonesia are not out of the woods yet by a long shot, and will tell you so without much urging. Life there is of a sort that most people reared in North America, Europe, or Northern Asia would simply not be able to tolerate for very long. The people born there don’t often like tolerating it either, and many would leave if they could, but visas are hard to come by.

Still, one can see an upward path. Yesterday’s election was a big step along it, and coming when it has, is perhaps more important than it would be at other times. Indonesia’s story, I’d like to argue, rebukes the idea that places just fall apart sometimes, a natural consequence of humanity’s frailty, and there’s nothing to be done about it. The Indonesians have erected a retort to that – to the idea that history’s forces are larger than people’s ability to resist them, and all we can do is try to limit the damage. Yesterday, they may well have proven that “nation building” can work. They may have provided the world, in a quiet way, a model for success – one that’s worth considering where are own plans have gone so badly awry.

If a country can overcome  three decades of dictatorship, a financial crash as bad as the Great Depression, volcanoes, a tsunami killing nearly 200,000 people and destroying much of an entire province, three civil wars, and terrorism, in less than a decade, and emerge too gloriously boring to bother discussing, then there’s hope.