In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

283 Conflict and the Growth of Democracy in Manggarai District 283 13 CONFLICT AND THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN MANGGARAI DISTRICT Maribeth Erb and Wilhelmus Anggal1 “The essence of democracy is that the process itself is more important than the outcome of any single poll”, Leigh 2005, p. 23. On 12 April 2006 the National Court (Pengadilan Negeri) in the town of Ruteng, capital of Manggarai district, awarded a settlement of over 2 billion rupiah to two pairs of contestants from the 2005 electoral race for regent: Anton Bagul Dagur, who had been the incumbent, and his running mate, Pius Kandar, and Gabriel Thody Wajong and his running mate, Wilhelmus Nanggur. Their claim was that the results of the Manggarai local election for regent (pilkada), were invalid because the election process had been plagued with numerous irregularities; they made their claims both against the KPUD (the Local Electoral Commission), and the winning pair, Christian Rotok and Kamelus Deno, popularly referred to by the acronym “Credo”, a very appealing appellation in the predominantly Catholic district. Although the district-level court awarded these damages, the provincial-level court (“The High Court” — Pengadilan Tinggi), had earlier, in July 2005, dismissed any claims of electoral irregularities. Thus the inauguration of the new regent had taken place in mid-2005. The losing candidates and several civil society organizations had continued to dispute the results, however, and had finally won a positive judgement in regard to their accusations from the local court. 283 13 DeepeningDemocracy Ch 13 1/15/09, 11:21 AM 283 284 284 Maribeth Erb and Wilhelmus Anggal This case in Manggarai was one of many examples of accusations of irregularities in the local electoral process across Indonesia, inaugurated in June 2005, when a large percentage of these first district head elections were held (see Pratikno, Chapter 3, this volume). What we find particularly interesting about the Manggaraian election, and the objections over the results that continued for at least a year after the installation of the new head, was that the civil society organizations that disputed the election results along with the incumbent regent from the 1999–2004 period, were the same groups who had been fiercely opposed to that same incumbent when he was in office. What we will argue, then, is that the situation in Manggarai is an interesting case of conflicting ideas about the meaning of democracy, and the role of the electoral process in its growth and consolidation. We suggest that the Manggarai election calls into question what the meaning of “free and fair” actually is in the context of an election. There are two interesting interrelated issues that emerged in the Manggarai pilkada that have to do with emerging democracy. The first is the oftenmentioned attitude that elites have towards common village folk in Indonesia (who still constitute the majority of the population) that they are ignorant of politics and should be “servile and obedient” (Antlov 2004, p. 6). During the New Order this was supported by a regulation which stated that the population was a “floating mass”, which could not be directly involved in politics, except at election time (ibid). The only “political party” which had any access to them at the “grass-roots” level was the government party Golkar. We have found that even after the end of the New Order this attitude on the part of elites tended to remain, and was widely voiced in the early reform period by use of the expression “SDM rendah” (sumber daya manusia rendah), or “low human resource quality”, as a way of denigrating the common folk. In conjunction with this, elite expectations of villagers during the election period were that they would be easily swayed by “tradition”, both traditional relationships through kinship as well as traditional ways of assessing leadership through “aristocratic” ties, as well as wealth, partially demonstrated by the giving of material gifts, or “bribes” (see also Schiller, Chapter 7, this volume). This attitude towards village “ignorance” was summed up in the commonly held elite notion that the common folk are “not yet ready” for democracy. The irony, as we shall show in this paper (and as comes out in some of the other case studies in this collection), is that while elites tried to use these tactics of “tradition” to their advantage, when the common folk chose leaders who they judged would deliver on issues that were important to them, such as infrastructural development, education, and health improvements, there were always some elites who...

Share