Indonesia’s Critical Hour Approaches

The recently elected president of an emerging democracy, now in Europe on a mission to raise confidence and foreign investment, is due to return home next week to a nation ruled until last year by a corrupt, military-backed authoritarian regime. When he returns, will he face an adoring public or a military coup? This is the momentous question for Indonesia, Asia’s newest democracy and potentially one of the world’s most important ones. A political drama of exceptional dimensions is unfolding, with direct implications for this new century’s world politics.

Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, tapped for the job last year through a complex but honest election process, is a Muslim cleric long in opposition to the discredited regime. The Indonesian people, fed up with the corruption, fully support Wahid’s high-profile effort to show the door to the country’s foremost military man, Gen. Wiranto. Ensconced in a comfy civilian Cabinet post, the general has so far refused to go, even though Wahid has promised to pardon Wiranto for any war crimes.

This tense military-civilian drama in Southeast Asia is playing out against the larger tableau of roiling regional politics. Indonesia, a long-troubled nation unnerved by the Asian financial crisis, is now trying on democracy for size. All the big powers of Asia are watching warily on the sidelines, especially Japan. It has sunk enormous sums into Indonesia. If that investment were to come back to life, it could benefit not only the stalled Japanese economic recovery but also the region’s.

Why has the military been such a big factor in Indonesia over the years? Under any circumstance, this nation would be a monster to keep together: Its Muslim and Christian people are spread out over countless islands that are, in many instances, separated by daunting distances, and the national population of about 210 million exceeds that of all other countries except China, India and the United States. Over the years, the country’s armed forces, facing many hair-raising twists and turns in the nation’s history, served as the order-keeping electromagnet. Not ideal political engineering, to be sure, but in many respects the military proved more capable than the average ham-handed junta, notwithstanding last year’s vengeful repression of East Timor separatists.

Yet now the military is being asked to climb down to make way for the new civilian leadership. Some officers are taking the request better than others. Wahid, the historic transition figure for Indonesia, is a worldly, moderate Muslim cleric who, in some respects, compares to Kim Dae Jung, the South Korean president who emerged from the opposition in 1997 to lead his own democracy forward. Wahid’s Islam is a cosmopolitan sort: Though his followers reside largely in less-educated, rural areas of Indonesia, the blunt-speaking cleric is a well-traveled religious figure who identifies with democratic ideals and religious tolerance and who supports secular values, such as the rule of civilian law. Indeed, if there is one nation whose Islamic bent should cause the fewest qualms in the West, it has to be Indonesia.

The best way for the West to show it is not predisposed against Islam is to work positively with this, its best and brightest incarnation. It must expunge the precedent of Algeria, where in 1992 the military, as the United States looked the other way, forcibly canceled parliamentary elections that an intolerant, anti-Western Muslim party was on the verge of winning. That’s not the situation in today’s Indonesia, where both the process and the result are unthreatening. Yet now, as in the months prior to the last military takeover in 1965, coup rumors are again surfacing in Jakarta. Can the West do anything--without seeming to lean too heavily on Indonesian sovereignty and triggering a nationalistic backlash over the foreign-influence issue?

Certainly, immediate pledges of new Western investment would help. We should follow the lead of Singapore, which is concerned about being on the primary receiving end of an overwhelming refugee problem should Indonesia come apart. It has been giving Jakarta gifts of new investments. A congressional freeze on U.S.-Indonesian military cooperation, understandably imposed after last year’s East Timor repression, now should be reversed.

Why should the U.S. bother at all with Indonesia? The answer is that the world is an ever-shrinking globe, and a nation as large and economically central to Asia can smash regional stability--and even sink the region’s economy into a new recession. The U.S. was spared the worst effects of the last Asian crisis. Would it be so lucky next time?

Consider, too, the enormous precedential value of a democratic and stable Indonesia. Imagine three of the four most-populated nations enjoying democratic systems, with China the lonely holdout.

The West, in nobility of purpose and in its own national interest, should reach out to Wahid and his government and be there when it counts. That moment may now be approaching.