Page 100 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Five

Media in Retreat

It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.
—Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Two weeks after Indonesia’s first free elections in forty-four years, in a Jakarta
ballroom once packed with hundreds of reporters, a lone journalist rose to ask a ques-
tion. In the euphoria immediately after millions had cast their ballots, both domestic

election officials and international observers had crowded this same space to proclaim
the elections “free and fair.” But now, after the observers had returned home, this last
reporter from the Jakarta Post asked, “At what point does the mounting evidence of
fraud invalidate the elections?”
1
In Indonesia’s dramatic first year of transition, the culminating event was this
June 1999 election of a new parliament that would select the next president, making
its integrity critical to the nation’s future. As Indonesians registered to vote, expecta-
tions were high that these elections would produce a fresh start under a new slate
of leaders. The earliest returns showed Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of
Struggle (PDIP), leading the incumbent, Golkar, encouraging a surge of optimism. But
during the subsequent six-week count, Golkar’s position steadily improved until it
became clear that the ruling party, although losing the popular vote, would dominate
parliament and, through coalition-building, likely retain the presidency. Through sys-
tematic manipulation, the country’s first “free and fair” elections in over four decades
saw the old guard reconsolidate power and produce an electoral outcome more art-
fully engineered than any under Suharto. Indonesia’s June 1999 elections and their
aftermath revealed a reality facing democratic transitions worldwide—an inherent
inclination toward reversal.
With election monitors and international observers lulled by peaceful voting and
the opposition’s unprecedented lead, those best positioned to expose Golkar’s manip-
ulation were the domestic media. Yet in this critical test of a newly empowered fourth
estate, most news outlets failed, downplaying signs of fraud and emphasizing the
acceptability of the outcome over the integrity of the process, bringing Indonesia close
to an effective reversal of the country’s transition.
Preceding, and underlying, the drama of these elections were two legislative ses-
sions, one public and contested and the other closed and consensual, that would
greatly influence the future character of electoral contestation. Events unfolded in
three stages, beginning when the Habibie administration commissioned a group of
academics to draft new laws governing the transition and then convened a special
parliamentary session in November 1998 to ratify their rules. During that session,
reformers mobilized to eliminate the most formidable cog in the old guard’s rul-
ing machinery—the bloc of seventy-five appointive military seats (15 percent of the
DPR) that reliably voted with Golkar. Activist students and their supporters seemed
most fearful of the long-term consequences of compromise on this issue. After mass
demonstrations and violent repression, a negotiated resolution reduced but did not