Indonesian Regime Prefers Obscurity to Unsettling Winds of Democracy

No large country is more invisible to Americans than Indonesia. With 180 million people, it ranks fifth in population. Its islands--about 13,700 of them--form a strategic turnstile for sea traffic between Europe and East Asia. It has oil, gas, minerals, timber and other resources in abundance. From 1965 to 1986 it ranked among the 10 fastest-growing economies tracked by the World Bank.

Why, then, have most Americans never heard of Indonesia?

A major reason is that Indonesia has been relatively quiet. Despite their many languages and religions, Indonesians have for the past generation escaped communal strife of the kind that keeps India and the Soviet Union in the news. Though ruled by an authoritarian government, Indonesians have not suffered a crackdown of the sort we saw televised from China.

Politically, Indonesia has been, from a journalist’s viewpoint, boringly stable. President Suharto, a retired general, is the longest-serving professional military head of government in the world. His regime, which still calls itself a New Order, is 23 years old and going strong, like Suharto himself, who is 68.

Last June, while Deng Xiaoping was smashing the pro-democracy movement in Beijing, Suharto was in New York accepting a United Nations award for his country’s success in slowing the growth of its population, a goal to which the president has long been committed. The American press ignored the occasion.

Suharto himself prefers a low profile. On the June visit he met briefly with President Bush, passed up the chance for a press conference and left the White House hurriedly through a side door.

At a bilateral conference in August in Bali (the one Indonesian island many Americans have heard of), several Indonesians expressed impatience with their country’s invisibility in American eyes. Surely a nation as big and promising as theirs deserved more American attention--and more military aid.

Other Indonesians, and I among other Americans present, disagreed. Would visibility be worth upheavals of sufficient size and violence to be deemed newsworthy by Western media?

Consider the sad prominence of Indochina. While we traded views quietly in Bali, a highly publicized conference in Paris meant to settle the long Cambodian war deadlocked and broke up, unable to reconcile the intransigent public postures of its delegates.

Higher profiles draw more fire. So long as the Indonesian government remains authoritarian, it risks being condemned in the United States as undemocratic, and the better-known it becomes, the higher the risk. At the meeting in Bali, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) unintentionally made this point clear to his Indonesian listeners when he lauded the “wind of democracy” blowing through Asia.

More than a few Indonesian generals would prefer to shelter their country from the damage such a wind can do. Democracy in their view is not worth disorder. A ranking security official in Jakarta is said to have privately criticized Deng Xiaoping, not for clearing Tian An Men Square but for waiting so long to do so.

A more visible Indonesia might also be less friendly to the United States. For instance: The authorities in Jakarta do not want their counterparts in Washington to remove U.S. bases from the Philippines, at least not precipitously. They fear that the consequences could destabilize the region. But Jakarta also does not wish to be put in a public position of seeming to side with Washington, for that would belie the independent foreign policy in which Indonesian leaders take pride. A low profile allows some things to remain constructively unsaid.

There are signs that Indonesian invisibility may be coming to an end. Though the next selection of a president is not due before 1993, speculation on the succession has already begun. As the government takes steps to deregulate the country’s economy, students, professionals, and some entrepreneurs--the new “middle class”--are trying to deregulate the political system as well. Suharto himself has contributed to the ferment by inviting proposals for a new election law. (The current one heavily favors the regime.)

As they observe this delicate, uncertain and reversible process toward less repressive rule, American policy-makers should encourage the trend, but discreetly, without ideological fanfare, be aware that Indonesians themselves must decide the outcome.

It is always easier to crack down in the dark. But a different kind of obscurity--one that implies a lack of newsworthy violence and a modesty of bilateral demands and expectations--can be a valuable asset in Indonesian-American relations, especially in transitional times of the kind Indonesia is preparing to face.