Deepening Democracy in Indonesia?: Direct Elections for Local Leaders (Pilkada)

14. THE RETURN OF THE SULTAN? Power, Patronage, and Political Machines in “Post”-Conflict North Maluku

303 The Return of the Sultans 303 14 THE RETURN OF THE SULTAN? POWER, PATRONAGE, AND POLITICAL MACHINES IN “POST”-CONFLICT NORTH MALUKU1 Claire Q. Smith “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks PROLOGUE Let me start with a snapshot of the Ternate monarch, Sultan Haji Mudaffar Shah II, in July 2005. The Sultan sat in the cool yellow reception room of his fading tropical palace, perched on the slopes of Gamalama volcano, with a breeze flowing in from the Maluku Sea. Elderly male servants in sarongs approached silently on their knees, as is the style in an Indonesian kraton (palace), to serve tea and cakes on antique Dutch china. Outside, from the palace gardens, the cries from his wife’s political campaign team at a rally boomed from huge loudspeakers to a gathered mob of supporters. In 1999, the Sultan launched an active campaign to return North Maluku to the preindependence governance system of the Sultanate. Putting forward his wife to 303 14 DeepeningDemocracy Ch 14 1/15/09, 11:22 AM 303 304 304 Claire Q. Smith run for mayor — a position too lowly for the Sultan himself — was the latest step in the kraton’s campaign. According to the Sultan, The Ternate Sultanate is over 1,000 years old. The problem here now is that the system of government has become so centralised, so Javanese. TheTernate community is very confused with that.They don’t understand the terms of government. If we can return to traditional values this can unify the people, because the people understand these values, they are their values.2 As it approached midday, Boki (Queen) Nita, the Sultan’s fifth and youngest wife, returned from her campaign rally to accompany the Sultan to lunch. The Queen was about to fly to Jakarta, where she had meetings with the national press to discuss alleged corruption in the Ternate elections. Although she had just lost the local elections by over 25 per cent of the vote to the popular incumbent, Syamsir Amas, a long-standing local bureaucrat, Boki Nita would not accept the result. This Javanese princess, now a North Malukan Queen, was determined to take up her seat in the Mayor’s office by September 2005. As she departed, she said, “I am the Queen of Ternate and I will be Mayor, these are the true facts.” Unfortunately for the Queen, this was not to be the case. This chapter is based on fieldwork carried out in 2005 in North Maluku, Eastern Indonesia, home of the Ternate Sultanate. One of the aims of the study was to examine whether the local aristocracy in North Maluku had successfully relaunched themselves as a political force since the transition to democracy. In a series of articles entitled “The Return of the Sultans”, to which the title of this paper alludes, van Klinken (2004, 2007) identified North Maluku as a key location in the post-New Order revival and reinvention of the old Indonesian sultanates. Van Klinken argued that the collapse of centralized one-party rule, combined with structural changes to local government and elections, had led to a revival of the old aristocracies in politics. In the late 1990s, a discourse on the revitalization of the Indonesian sultanates and other “traditional” local leaders, along with the demand for greater regional autonomy, sprouted across the country (Bowen 2003; van Klinken 2004). The devolution of government through the implementation of regional autonomy laws in 1999 and decentralization laws in 2001 was, in certain respects, the formal recognition of these regional political demands for local autonomy (Erb et al. 2005, pp. 6–8). North Maluku was also one of five provinces in Eastern Indonesia consumed by communal violence following the fall of Soeharto in 1998. The combined rise in ethnic, “traditional”, and religious politics — witnessed in 14 DeepeningDemocracy Ch 14 1/15/09, 11:22 AM 304 305 The Return of the Sultans 305 both violent conflicts and non-violent political movements — signalled significant transformations to the dynamics of local politics in Eastern Indonesia. The rise of “identity” politics and the emergence of apparently non-state actors into the political arena — including the former aristocracies — supposedly heralded a new era in Indonesian politics. Freed from the political constraints of the New Order regime and with the fresh promise of regional...