| 1. INDONESIA: An Early Look at the 2004 Presidential Hopefuls |
| For the first time, Indonesia's next presidential election will see the president directly elected by the people in a two stage affair scheduled for July and September 2004. This will follow national legislative elections for the House of Representatives (DPR) the previous April in which over 30 parties and 145 million potential voters are expected to participate. | |
| The major presidential hopefuls are the following: | |
| Megawati Sukarnoputri | President Megawati Sukarnoputri: She is already assured of the nomination of her basically secular nationalist party the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia - Perjuangan). Most observers expect her to be re-elected. While her party is technically the governing party, it is not in the same position Golkar was during the Soeharto years. In those days, all members of the military and all public servants were obliged to vote for Golkar, while the military apparatus and all government departments and agencies were turned into Golkar electoral machines right down to the village level. Furthermore, the PDI-P will have to raise its own campaign funds, a task headed by Megawati's husband, Taufik Kiemas. The lastest polling says that Golkar will win more legislative seats than the PDI-P. | |
| Hamza Haz | Vice President Hamzah Haz: Haz is chairman of the Muslim-based PPP (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan) and it is expected that he will run as its presidential candidate. However, the PPP has been seriously weakened as a result of internal divisions and defections which give Haz little or no hope of being elected president. Given that, it is thought he will concentrate on negotiating a vice presidential slot with one of the leading presidential candidates. If Megawati wins, it thought that she will take Haz again as vice president as he represents the largest Muslim party in the country. However, there is opposition to this in some secular nationalist circles because of Haz's neo-Islamism and his close ties to radical Muslim figures including the jailed Jemaah Islamiyah leader, Abu Bakir Bashir. She might therefore select another prominent Muslim figure. | |
| Akbar Tandjung | Akbar Tandjung: Akbar is the Chairman of secular nationalist Golkar party and the Speaker of the House of Representatives (DPR). He is a very experienced and sophisticated, level headed politician. It is widely thought that he would make a very competent president and many people believe he could defeat Megawati. However, he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to three years in gaol by the Central Jakarta District Court for his alleged role in a Rp40 billion scandal involving the State Logistics Agency. He remains free pending his appeal to the Supreme Court. In late October, the Golkar Convention Committee delayed the party's national convention, which will choose its sole candidate, until after the DPR elections in April. This is seen as a move to help Akbar. If, as many observers expect, the Supreme Court clears Akbar he is expected to win the presidential nomination from six other prominent candidates who are commented upon below. Like the PDI-P Golkar will have to raise its own campaign money as it is no longer the party of the military and the governing apparatus. | |
| Wiranto | General (Ret) Wiranto: The former military commander is running an energetic campaign for the Golkar nomination. He is not popular among the elite and the educated middle classes, including most of the Golkar leadership, who fear the military, but he is very popular among the generally uneducated masses in some parts of the country where, among other things, he is some sort of pop star because of his best selling songs. He has significant support at the regional level and below and, most importantly, he has money. So he must be taken seriously. However, a President Wiranto would not be warmly welcomed internationally where foreign governments would find it difficult to accept him because of East Timor and the human rights reputation of the TNI (Armed Forces) generally. Our major criticism of him is that when it came to taking tough decisions concerning TNI officers in East Timor, he couldn't do it. More importantly, many Golkar leaders fear that should the party nominate any former military man, it might do irreparable damage to the party both electorally and internally. | |
| AbuRizal Bakrie | Aburizal Bakrie: Rizal Bakrie is a very prominent and competent businessman who has headed the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry with distinction and is seeking the Golkar nomination. He has a lot of support in Golkar at the provincial level and the country could a lot worse than elect him president. He is a businessman and a politician of sorts within business organisations who carefully listens to, and generally understands, advice in wider fields - a bit like George W. Bush. | |
| Jusuf Kalla | Jusuf Kalla: Kalla is currently the Co-ordinating Minister for People's Welfare within Megawati's cabinet. He is another candidate seeking the Golkar nomination. We hear a lot of good things about him, and some not so good. It is said in some circles that he would make a very acceptable president or vice president. However, it seems he lacks sufficient support within Golkar to secure the presidential nomination. | |
| Suryo Paloh | Suryo Paloh: Suryo is a media mogul with some significant support within Golkar but not enough, it is said. One of our respected sources commented that while he has a lot of money which will take him a long way, he is simply not up to being president of Indonesia. | |
| Prabowo Subianto | Lt. General (Ret) Prabowo Subianto: Prabowo, who is also chasing the Golkar nomination, is a long time rival of Wiranto's within the military and it now seems politically. He is an extremely intelligent, well educated and resourceful man, but, they say, he is not a democrat, but a military autocrat. Wiranto beat him during the in 1997-98 political crisis which saw the removal of Soeharto, when Prabowo made a serious play for power. He is Soeharto's son in law and a former head of Koppassus and Kostrad. It is said by some observers that his 'position' in relation to the 1991 Santa Cruz cemetery massacre in Dili and the 1998 student killings at Trisakti University in Jakarta have never been made clear. While he has plenty of money, it is hard to see either Golkar or the electorate agreeing with his ambitions. | |
| Sultan Hamengkubuwono X | Sultan Hamengkubuwono X: The sultan, who is the Governor of Yogyakarta, is also seeking the Golkar nomination but he lacks sufficient support. | |
| Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono | Lt. General (Ret) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: Susilo is the current Co-ordinating Minister for Politics and Security (Polkam) within the Megawati government. He is described by some people as being "competent" and by others as indecisive and therefore a poor presidential bet. But he is popular and currently running second to Megawati in public polls on the presidency. He and some friends have set up the small Democratic Party and it is said that he will probably run as the candidate of a group of small parties. His chances depend on what happens with other prospective candidates. They would be much improved if he could gain the support of a major party like Golkar. That might be beyond him, and there are suggestions that the PKB, a smaller party backed by the largest Islamic organisation in the country, Nadhatul Ulama (NU) might ask him to be its presidential candidate. | |
| Amien Rais | Amien Rais: Is the head of the National Mandate Party or PAN and also the Speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) which in the past used to elect the President. The general assessment of Amien is that while he has a lot to say, he has made too many mistakes and is distrusted by too many people, partly because of his association with Islamists in the past. PAN is expected to gain about 5% of the vote in the legislative elections. | |
| General Comment: | As the election will be won by a secular nationalist of one kind or another, one of the most important questions is which prominent Muslim the president-elect will choose as his or her vice presidential partner. | |
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| 2. REGIONAL AFFAIRS: APEC and ASEAN |
| Just when some so called experts and academics were declaring APEC and ASEAN to be dead or dying, they have both shown us that they and the vast network of support institutions, organisations and mechanisms they have set up throughout the region, remain highly significant and influential bodies. | |
| We don't wish to comment at any length on the various issues discussed and matters agreed upon at their respective heads of state meetings in Bangkok and Bali as they have been extensively covered in the media. However, we would like to say that we agree with the warnings issued by Professor Ross Garnaut of the Australian National University concerning the dangers of preferential and discriminatory bi-lateral free trade agreements. As Professor Garnaut points out, the interests of Australia, and indeed of all countries, are far better served by multilateral trade liberalisation agreements at both regional and global levels. It was pleasing to see that following the collapse of the Cancun WTO conference, APEC agreed to take up the cause of multilateral cop-operation where Cancun left off. This just might get things back on track again. | |
| ASEAN | While over the years the main areas of overt co-operation within both ASEAN and APEC have been economic, both organisations were created to serve grand strategic geo-political purposes - and continue to do so. | |
| ASEAN, which was established in 1967, emerged from the need for two things. One was a mechanism to reduce and manage conflict between the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia especially following Sukarno's confrontation of Malaysia. ASEAN continues to play this critical role, maintaining harmony among its member states. The importance of this should never be underestimated. The other need was to group together for protection against a Stalinist North Vietnam, backed by China and the Soviet Union, both of which were seen as expansionary communist states playing for major strategic stakes in the region. These Southeast Asian countries all believed in the domino theory which they rightly saw to a political probability theory and not the military inevitability theory so loosely caricaturised and sneered at in Western media and academic circles. | |
| Balance of power | APEC, established in 1989, grew out of a 1960s idea of economic, political and eventually military and security cooperation between Australia, an Indonesia leading ASEAN, Japan and eventually other nations including China and India backed by US economic and military power in the Pacific. This concept was called the Pacific Community and it was promoted among governments of the region by a little known and unique regional grouping called the Pacific Institute (of which B. A. Santamaria, a famous Australian political figure, was the chairman and our editor, Frank Mount, its secretary general). From the outset in the mid sixties it was said that the Pacific Community, and hence later APEC, was aimed strategically at providing a political framework to take in Japan and China so that they were welcomed and accepted as parts of the comity of Pacific nations and thereby prevented from dominating the region either individually or together or, if left alone, from feeling obliged to act as the sole balances to each other. In other words, they would be held safe from both the region and each other. Whatever else it does or does not do, APEC continues to play this essential grand strategic balance of power role. | |
| And it should be said that within this APEC framework, ASEAN itself, for all its various shortcomings, a key strategic role, for it sits on the sealanes of communication (SLOCS) running through the Indonesian archipelago between the Indian and Pacific oceans though which flows most of Japan and China's oil and most of Australia's trade. | |
| 4. AUSTRALIA |
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| When Dr. Jim Cairns, a former Deputy Prime Minister in the Gough Whitlam-led Australian Labor Party (ALP) government of the early seventies, died last month he was lauded for his opposition to the Vietnam War and for having led Vietnam Moratorium marches in 1970. It was said that he was "right about Vietnam". We strongly disagree. | |
| When Cairns argued and debated the war in the mid-late sixties some of his major points were the following:
Vietnam was a civil war or local rebellion within South Vietnam which did not involve North Vietnam and even less China and the Soviet Union. To say otherwise was "American propaganda".
The Vietcong and National Liberation Front NLF) were only partly communist and overwhelmingly comprised of and led by Vietnamese national democrats and agrarian reformers.
Vietnam had been divided by the Americans and the French in 1954 to prevent a total communist takeover.
Ho Chi Minh was an honourable Vietnamese nationalist who sought to bring "genuine independence", peace and prosperity to his people.
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| Not true | None of these things were true - as many of us knew at the time and all of us should know now. The North Vietnamese ran the Vietcong always and after it was destroyed during 1968 Tet Offensive (at the instigation of Hanoi), the so-called Vietcong guerrillas in the south were in fact North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars, even in the Mekong Delta. We now know from the archives that it was not the US, or even the French, who divided Vietnam at the Geneva Conference in 1954, but the Russians and the Chinese, both of whom were in favour of the permanent partition of the country, despite what the agreement they signed said. They each feared that a united communist Vietnam would come to be dominated by the other and therefore threaten their respective, and substantial, grand strategic interests in the region. In 1954, Ho angrily and rightly believed he been betrayed by the Russians whom he had worked for in Europe and China for nearly 30 years as a fully paid, secret Comintern agent. It is uncertain when, if ever, he severed this sort this relationship with the Russians. It seems he liked roubles and Camel cigarettes. He used to complain in Europe that he couldn't move from one town or city to another without clearance from Moscow. On returning to Vietnam in 1944 after a 30 year absence, he ruthlessly executed hundreds of close opponents both within and outside of the Vietminh. Later on, his regime massacred thousands of land owners (by definition evil) and peasants in order to consolidate Vietminh rule. | |
| The Americans | The Americans and their Asian and Free World allies did not fight the Vietnam war simply to save the South Vietnamese from the barbarous rule of a totalitarian Stalinist regime. That would have been reason enough but there were much wider stakes involved. | |
| The war was just one part of a grand, three way strategic regional conflict between the Soviet Union, China and the US and its allies for control of Southeast Asia and in particular the Indonesian waterways running between the Indian and Pacific Oceans which carried nearly all of the trade and oil between Europe, the Middle East and East Asia and most of Australia's trade. At the time of the US and Australian commitment to Vietnam in 1962-64, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was threatening to take over Indonesia, Soekarno was trying to undermine Malaysia and there were wars being fought against Soviet and Chinese backed communist revolutionary guerrilla movements in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines as well as Laos and Cambodia. Had South Vietnam gone communist in 1964-65, as it nearly did, the PKI would almost certainly have taken control of Indonesia and the whole strategic balance in the region stretching from India through Indonesia to Japan would have changed drastically. And that is what the domino theory postulated. | |
| Soviet Union | In this great battle for Southeast Asia, Jim Cairns and his various allies including 'peace activist' Sam Goldbloom, Bernie Taft of the Australian Communist Party, Tom Uren and various leaders of the trade union and ALP left worked, wittingly or unwittingly, in the interests of the Soviet Union. | |
| While we ultimately lost the war in South Vietnam for a variety of reasons having to do primarily with US military and bureaucratic incompetence, 'Vietnam fatigue' in Washington, Watergate and the fact that America's primary foreign policy focus was on Europe and not Asia, we won the much greater battle for Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War gave us ten years or so in which to defeat the PKI, finish the Malayan Emergency, negotiate the Five Power Defence Arrangements, build ASEAN, lay the foundations for APEC and develop liberal democratic movements throughout the region. Had we won the war, South Vietnam would today be another prosperous liberal democracy like Taiwan and South Korea. Instead, hundreds of schools, university institutes and free wheeling newspapers were closed, TV stations were taken over by the State, bars and night clubs were closed and then re-opened under secret police 'supervision', all financial institutions were 'nationalised' by the party, dozens of democratic and semi-democratic political parties, movements and trade unions were abolished with their leaders tortured and imprisoned for years, while all religions - Christian, Buddhist, Cao Dai etc - were repressed and many of their leaders incarcerated indefinitely. And, of course, the economy has never recovered. | |
| Strange | How far Cairns realised the consequences of his actions is, perhaps, debatable. He was a pleasant but complex man who sometimes gave the impression of being something that he wasn't. Bernie Taft, the Communist Party leader has said that when Cairns (the former Police Special Branch Officer) first came along, "he appeared to be too good to be true". In this respect, it is worthwhile noting the following points: | |
| Cairns strongly disliked and distrusted Whitlam, many trade union leaders and most of the younger, intense extreme left wing activists he encountered in the ALP and around the Communist Party, especially when, during the Whitlam government, they started gaining significant grass roots positions and talking about replacing local municipal councils with "people's communes". | 1 The Khemlani Loans Affair was the scandal in which the Whitlam Government attempted to obtain a vast loan on unusual terms, which played an important part in the Government's dismissal in 1975. The loan was to be brokered by the shady character 'Khemlani' and financed with Iraqi petro-dollars through the Moscow Narodni Bank.
- Trevor Stanley. |
| Cairns was a significant player in the Khemlani affair1 and the appearance of the man himself. (Where did Khemlani come from?) |
| Cairns always maintained friendly relations with the CIA in Melbourne. |
| By the time of the first Cairns led (but actually communist party organised ) mass Vietnam Moratorium marches or rallies in 1970, the Americans were already withdrawing their troops from Vietnam. US troop withdrawals from South Vietnam began in June 1969 and by February 1970, had reached 100,000 troops. So the impact of the Moratorium movement on the course of the war was probably negligible. |
| Cairns was never known to seriously criticise any Communist regime and certainly not the brutal Stalinist dictatorship than ruled in Hanoi and later Saigon. |
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| Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister of Australia following Gough Whitlam and, before that, a minister in Liberal Party governments that sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam. In fact, he held the positions of Minister for the Army and Minister for Defence in those governments. | |
| When Jim Cairns died, Fraser declared that Cairns had been right on Vietnam. This was an extraordinary comment for, in the way it was made, it betrayed a complete lack of understanding of the ideological and grand strategic issues involved in the war. But it was not all that surprising. When the war was raging back in the sixties, it was next to impossible to get any senior Liberal Party cabinet minister to participate in the debate. They simply did not know how to defend their own policies and decisions. It was pathetic. Now we know that even to this day Malcolm Fraser doesn't understand what the war was about. | |
| (By way of a footnote, students of that period of Australian political history might be interested to know that in the early seventies, B.A Santamaria declared that Malcolm Fraser would be the "saviour" of Australia and that "everything" had to be "sacrificed" for him including the Democratic Labor Party and, if necessary, Santamaria's own National Civic Council and especially its trade union wing.) | |
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| 5. BRIEFS: |
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| The following is quoted from Islam: A Very Short Introduction, by Malise Ruthven, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997: | |
| "This ideology, sometimes referred to as 'Islamic fundamentalism', is better described as Islamism: the Latin suffix attached to the Arabic original more accurately expresses the relationship between the pre-existing reality (in this case a religion) and its translation into a political ideology, just as communism ideologizes the reality of communism, socialism the social, and fascism the ancient symbol of Roman consular authority. Islamism is not Islam. Though the lines dividing them are frequently blurred, it is important to distinguish between them." | |
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| Currently, we are being told by the experts that the rapidly growing Chinese economy will in time come to dominate Asia and perhaps eventually even challenge the US. All sorts of predictions are being made about the possible consequences of this for the region, and indeed for the global balance of power. China is the future, it is said. However, we recollect that a dozen or so years ago, the futurologists told us just as confidently that Japan would be the future; that Japan would almost inevitably dominate the world and they asked, urgently, who could ever stop it? As we all know, Japan stopped itself due to what might called internal structural blockages and institutional sclerosis borne of more or less ancient forces at work (see APR 7 and APR 43, April 7, 2002). The same might happen to China. In the meantine, the US is recording remarkable productivity gains and its economy appears to be entering another period of sustainable growth. | |
