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5. Indonesia’s New Order 1986–1998: Transnational Advocacy and Human Rights Change
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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5 Indonesia’s New Order 1986–1998: Transnational Advocacy and Human Rights Change On November , , the Indonesian military massacred civilians in Dili, the capital of East Timor. The world watched in shock. On television, we saw Indonesian soldiers shooting at unarmed East Timorese civilians. We saw these civilians fleeing through a graveyard and hiding behind gravestones. We saw them shot by soldiers who followed them into the graveyard. Documented by two journalists, Alan Nairn and Amy Goodman, the massacre became instant international news. It mobilized people and governments around the world. In many Western and Australian cities, people took to the streets to demonstrate against the Indonesian government. The European Community, whose member governments were then convening in Noordvijk, Sweden, promptly issued a declaration condemning the massacre. Several Western states withheld financial assistance to the Indonesian government. Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Ali Alatas once described allegations over human rights violations in East Timor as a pebble in Indonesia’s shoe. By the late s, this pebble would become a major rock that the Suharto government could no longer ignore and would influence domestic politics. Following the St. Cruz massacre, another name for the Dili massacre, the Indonesian government introduced several measures to improve its human rights record. Among others, it established a national human rights commission that quickly gained a reputation for its relatively strong criticism of the military. For the next three years, the number of political activists detained under a so-called Anti-Subversion Law would drop substantially. In , the Indonesia’s New Order 1986–1998 131 government dissolved a controversial security agency that had been accused of conducting arrests and detentions in a highly arbitrary way. What explains these unprecedented moves by the Suharto government toward accountability for human rights violations? Why did Suharto initiate reforms that would ultimately make his military-backed government crumble and give way to a process of democratization? A well-established literature argues that, in the early s, the Indonesian military had become dissatisfied with its political role and that it allowed public criticism, within limits, to undermine the political power of Suharto and thereby enhance its power. The military relaxed repression and did not intervene, for example, in the student protests of the late s because these students articulated a direct critique of President Suharto and his family. In response (and to counteract the growing influence of the military), Suharto started to strike back and introduced human rights reforms that exposed the military as a human rights violator and contained the military’s political influence. The self-destructive forces of intra-elite battles provided civil society organizations with political space and initiated the games of transition that no elite group could fully control. Human rights were a convenient tool that political actors could use to further their narrow political power goals by challenging the political legitimacy of their political opponents (Aspinall : chap. ; Bertrand ; Honna : ; Robison , ). Little evidence indicates that Suharto or the military introduced human rights reforms solely out of domestic concerns. The account does not explain why student protests posed a challenge to which the military reacted. Nor does it explain why human rights issues could be used as a tool to discredit an political opponent. It leaves unexplained why Suharto and the military were not able to control political dynamics when the human rights pressures threatened their very political survival. This becomes especially apparent in comparison to Indonesia in the s, as discussed in Chapter , which demonstrated that the New Order government was able to contain human rights pressures. An alternative explanation is that Suharto ultimately fell prey to its own success. He initiated a political liberalization. The main goal of military-led modernization had been achieved. It had created a stable polity with spectacular economic growth rates and a stable middle class; however, that role was disputed among scholars (Heryanto ; Robison ; Tanter and Young ). The Asian financial crisis of – ultimately wrecked the Suharto government, as it exposed the nepotism and corruption at the highest levels (Ganesan ). I do not argue that these explanations are wrong. I argue [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:12 GMT) 132 Chapter 5 that this structural explanation ignores agency, the comprehensive political activities that contributed to Suharto’s fall and pushed Indonesian politics in an unprecedented direction toward human rights and democracy. In this chapter, I argue that the change of human rights policy under Suharto cannot be explained without considering the activities of transnational human rights advocacy. In...