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Executions signal a return to Sukarno-style foreign policy in Indonesia

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In Brief

On 29 April Indonesia executed seven foreigners and one Indonesian for drug offences. The refusal of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) to offer clemency despite pleas from foreign leaders has been analysed in a number of ways. Most have interpreted Jokowi’s decision as that of a contested head of state in a fragile democracy heeding public opinion, which seems to overwhelmingly (86 per cent in a recent poll) support the death penalty for drug trafficking.

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But was his decision instead a deliberate act of public diplomacy, designed to send signals to those missing the Sukarno era?

Some background is important. Jokowi is the first Indonesian president not to be drawn from either the civil and military elite or the oligarchies that came to the fore during Suharto’s New Order from 1967 to 1998. As the former mayor of Solo and governor of Jakarta, Jokowi epitomises a new generation of politicians who are a product of decentralisation and have strong local roots. During the presidential election campaign, Jokowi’s opponent Prabowo Subianto, a cashiered former general, attacked Jokowi as being merely ‘a little boy from the kampongs’, not the strong martial leader that Indonesia ostensibly needs. Jokowi’s intransigence on the executions issue has been interpreted as an effort to belie this accusation. As Jokowi lacks a majority in the Indonesian parliament, he has had to govern by developing ad hoc coalitions to effectively advance his reform agenda.

Yet Jokowi’s actions cannot be understood without reference to the wider context of Indonesia’s foreign relations. Jokowi’s foreign policy represents a return to the guided democracy period of Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno. Certainly the ‘boy from the kampongs’ has a very different persona from the aristocratic Sukarno, yet both their direct charismatic appeal to the masses and their political philosophies have common features. Both view the international stage as being, above all, a means of advancing their domestic agenda. Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. This showed he understood that demonstrating the emerging power of the ‘world’s largest Muslim country and third largest democracy’ required being sensitive to Western norms. Jokowi, like Sukarno, would appear to have no such qualms.

Jokowi’s speech on 22 April 2015 at the 60th anniversary celebrations for the Asia–Africa (Bandung) conference demonstrated this philosophical lineage with Sukarno. While there was not the same lofty anti-colonial rhetoric, the thrust of the speech was the same — that is, the need to break away from the Western economic order. Is this mere rhetoric? Jokowi politically relies on the Indonesian Democratic Party, which is chaired by Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri. Two weeks earlier, on 9 April, Megawati lectured Jokowi at her party’s congress in Bali on the need to adhere to its economically nationalist party platform. But advancing an economically nationalist agenda has its limits: it is in contradiction with Indonesia’s need for foreign investment. Given such constraints, Jokowi has needed to prove his nationalist credentials in other areas, including by resisting foreign pressure on the application of the death penalty.

On the international stage so far Jokowi, like Sukarno for most of his presidency, is essentially his own foreign minister. Compared to her predecessors, Indonesia’s current foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, seems to be an intellectual lightweight. It would appear that Megawati pushed for her appointment for symbolic reasons — she is Indonesia’s first female foreign minister. However, to be fair, this novice foreign minister has not yet been given an opportunity to shine on the international scene.

This is in part the case because the foreign policy priorities given to Retno Marsudi also reflect a return to the Sukarno legacy. The first of these is the protection of Indonesia’s maritime sovereignty, which is frequently infringed upon by the current Australian government’s ‘turn the boats back’ policy. This preoccupation with maritime sovereignty is linked to the Indonesian sense of homeland tanah-air (the land and the sea) and was articulated during the Sukarno period in the principle of Wawasan Nusantara. Jokowi’s flamboyant Minister of Maritime and Fishery Affairs, Susi Pudjiastuti, is the most visible exponent of Indonesia’s maritime security. True to Sukarno’s praxis — and like the macabre executions of foreign drug traffickers — the protection of Indonesia’s sovereignty has been expressed in the most dramatic way to garner media coverage: the blowing up of illegal fishing vessels.

The second foreign policy priority given to Retno Marsudi — the much-needed defence of Indonesian workers overseas — appears to have had one happy consequence for the execution case. Partly as a result of a massive social media campaign in Indonesia itself, Mary Jane Veloso, a poor, clearly manipulated Filipino maid who was due to be executed with the seven other foreigners, was granted a reprieve. It appears that Jokowi’s support base felt empathy with someone who (to use Jokowi’s campaign slogan) was, in a sense, ‘one of them’. And as this was consistent with his Sukarnoist beliefs, political practice and domestic priorities, Indonesia’s president took note.

David Camroux is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher in the Centre for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris and co-editor of the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs.

3 responses to “Executions signal a return to Sukarno-style foreign policy in Indonesia”

  1. One doesn’t know where to begin.

    Jokowi’s foreign policy is not a return to Guided Democracy. Jokowi has established amicable relations with the Prime Minister of Malaysia, the federation that Sukarno tried to crush. Jokowi hasn’t set about crushing any foreign country. Though critical of the United Nations’ apparent inability to help the Palestinians, Jokowi hasn’t yet taken Indonesia out of the international body, as Sukarno did. Nor is he proposing to do so.

    Sukarno was not ‘his own foreign minister’; Dr Subandrio was Sukarno’s foreign minister and was not just a cypher as Retno Marsudi seems to be. Subandrio ran his own intelligence organisation, the BPI. He was hated in his own right by the 1966 student generation. He spent thirty years in jail. Retno Marsudi won’t.

    Where is Jokowi’s resurrection of the Pyongyang-Beijing-Hanoi-Phnom Penh-Jakarta Axis? When will he announce the new ‘Games of the Emerging Forces’?

    After taking up her post as Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi announced that her first priority would be defending Indonesia’s sovereignty
    tout court, not defending Indonesia’s maritime sovereignty.

    The Australian government doesn’t ‘frequently’ violate Indonesia’s maritime sovereignty. Over a year ago, on six occasions, Australia violated Indonesia’s territorial sovereignty by intruding into its twelve-mile zone. This seems to have been entirely accidental, though it is scarcely something to be proud of. It has not occurred again.

    There was an informal moratorium on executions during the Yudhoyono era, but this was probably because Yudhoyono was a relatively humane man. Executions did take place, such as those of the Bali bombers in November 2008 and later of three Catholic militants. Having a firing squad shoot Catholics is not unambiguous evidence of adherence to ‘Western norms’.

    If every leader who saw the international stage above all as the means of advancing a domestic agenda was a Sukarnoist, the world would be full of Sukarnoists.

    Tanahair is land and sea, not sea and land. The author should have written Wawasan Nusantara, not Nasuntara, a word that doesn’t exist in Indonesian.

    Jokowi is himself an economic nationalist. He made that very clear with all his early talk of food self-sufficiency and by complaining that the President of Vietnam had asked him in November 2014 when Indonesia would import more Vietnamese rice. He didn’t have to justify his thirst for foreign investment by executing drug traffickers. He came to believe that executing such people would help solve the drug problem. He announced this on 9 December. He didn’t deviate. He has, however, given clemency to other condemned men, such as a murderer who liquidated a shop-keeper and his son, being dubbed by the Indonesian press as a ‘sadistic killer’.

    M.Camroux would perhaps be surprised that the citizens of EU countries no longer have passports. At least this is what Jokowi told a Muslim student audience in Surabaya on 17 April. Presumably he had not read some briefing paper or other, a common failing of his.

    Unlike Sukarno, who was not, by the way, an ‘aristocrat’, the sad truth confronting Indonesia is that Jokowi, not just Retno Marsudi, is an intellectual lightweight.

    • Many thanks for these thoughtful and helpful comments, which deserve a lengthy response. On the bahasa issues you raised the necessary changes have been made to the blog online. Also I have had “era” changed to “style” in the title of the revised version. I agree the original title was a little misleading as it may have led readers, like yourself, to confuse style with substance.

      Obviously I am not suggesting that Jokowi’s velvet-gloved confrontational style will lead him to launch a new Konfrontasi with Malaysia and Singapore. Nor am I suggesting that rather mild anti-Western rhetoric will lead to the equivalent of Sukarno’s campaign in western New Guinea. What I am suggesting is the continuity of one of the three aliran (streams) on Indonesian identity first suggested by Clifford Geertz and masterfully examined in Robert Elson’s “Idea of Indonesia”.

      It’s something of a cliché to say all politics is local, and that, to paraphrase Clauswitz, foreign policy is domestic politics by other means. What I am arguing is that there is a particular approach by Jokowi that harks back to the Sukarno era. Paradoxically, this is possible because Suharto, with his ASEAN commitment, “absolved the sins” of Konfrontasi, and that post Reformasi presidents, particularly the underestimated Habibie and, for ten years, SBY, successfully moved Indonesia out of its semi-pariah status and made it a “good international citizen”, a member of the exclusive G20 club for example.

      Nor am I suggesting that the Sukarnoist turn is simply Jokowi’s and, perhaps, Megawati’s handiwork. Premonitions of it can be found in a two volume study published by the Indonesian State Intelligence Agency (BIN) in March 2014. The English language version of the report is entitled “Toward 2014-2019: Strengthening Indonesia in a Changing World”. While this may have been a ‘shot across the bows’ to demonstrate the military’s tacit support for Prabowo’s ‘authoritarian populism’, it is equally as conducive to Jokowi’s ‘technocratic populism’, to use the terminology of Marcus Mietzner.

      We both agree that Jokowi is an economic nationalist. My point is that, given the constraints in pushing too strong an economic nationalist agenda (how will the IMF, World Bank, ADB and AIIB, let alone foreign investors react?) it is behoven on Jokowi to prove his nationalist credentials in other areas, for example by snubbing his nose at Western appeals for clemency for drug traffickers?

      We also agree that Jokowi is uninterested in foreign policy, a judgement confirmed in Jakarta in conversations with his IR tutors who briefed him for the May-June 2014 television debates. I fear that, like members of the US Congress, only 22per cent of whom have passports, being ignorant of – and hostile to -the outside world could become a kind of badge of honour. One only has to look at Tony Abbott to see where such nationalist navel-gazing can lead a country.

      Several other points:
      a. I take your clarification on Dr Subandrio, indeed my original 1 400 word proposal mentioned the long leash given to him by Sukarno. However the basic point is to raise the question as to who is today articulating the Indonesian Weltanschauung to a foreign audience? There is no Alatas or Marty (to cite but two) in the present Indonesian arrangements.

      b. As for Sukarno his priyayi roots are stressed in most basic texts, and be that as it may, in his bespoke-tailored, womanising persona, he certainly projected himself as an aristocrat.

      c. On the European passport question Jokowi is at least largely correct: given the free movement of peoples within the EU, citizens of the 28 member states do not require passports to visit, or even work in, another European country. This is not only true of the Shengen area but also is the case, for the moment at least, for the marvelous offshore island of Great Britain.

      d. Agree that the use of “frequently” to describe the occasional entry of RAN vessels in Indonesian territorial waters was a an exaggeration. However perceptions in Indonesia count as, for example, in the Indonesian view that the appalling cuts in Australia’s ODA to Indonesia is some form of retaliation when, having been announced well before the executions, clearly it is not.

      Incidentally I would be interested to know if there was reaction from Canberra on the Indonesian navy employing on 12th May a similar ‘send the boats back’ policy in relation to a boatload of Rohingya refugees. At least hopefully they should make it to Malaysia, not a 21st century version of Port Arthur in Manus Island.

      • As I no longer work for the Australian government, I can’t answer your last question.

        Tanah air literally means ‘land and water’. I should not have written ‘sea’, which is ‘laut’ in Indonesian.

        Sukarno’s womanising may have been intended as a way of establishing an aristocratic persona, but his boasting about his conquests was, in genuinely aristocratic Javanese eyes, definitley not aristocratic. His indiscretions on this score became all the greater as he aged and presumably came to require considerable pharmaceutical assistance in order to maintain his prowess in the alcove.

        I don’t agree that Jokowi is now uninterested in foreign policy. He is just still terribly inexperienced. For example, when he alienated Brazil by executing a Brazilian (and later another), he obviously didn’t think that good relations with Brazil might be useful if ever Indonesia wanted to join BRICS.

        I am aware that EU citizens don’t need passports to travel to other EU countries—three members of my nuclear family hold EU passports— but that is not what Jokowi said.

        Although this didn’t come up in my first comment, my impression is that the Indonesian government has understood that the aid cut was not a form of retaliation. Even Hikmahanto Juwana, the University of Indonesia law professor who is one of Indonesia’s most prolific public commentators of a nationalist bent, seems to admit this.

        I’m afraid that I don’t accept your notion that Jokowi had to deny clemency to prove his nationalist credentials. I haven’t seen any reports of popular resentment at Jokowi’s seeking Chinese investment or Indonesia’s joining the AIIB. His nationalist credentials were not in doubt then and are not in doubt now.

        After all, Jokowi struck a nationalist note the day after he assumed office on 20 October. The Indonesian air force began forcing down aircraft that had intruded into Indonesian air space without appropriate permission, and Susi Pudjiastuti’s illegal fishing-boat-burning campaign started soon after. Vice-President Kalla has just criticised this ‘bakar-bakar’ (burning) policy, but Jokowi hasn’t so far, at least to my knowledge.

        Admittedly, Jokowi saw denying clemency as a way of ‘defending sovereignty’, but why deny clemency to a Vietnamese and to two Brazilians? This reeks of stubbornness and of the indifference to diplomatic consequences that is to be expected of a neophyte in foreign affairs. It doesn’t suggest any fear of having his nationalist credentials diluted or challenged.

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