Page 118 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media in Retreat 103

The one opposition leader who took a stand, Abdurrahman Wahid, did not get far.
A few days after the June 7 vote, the Singapore-based Straits Times reported that Wahid
had met secretly with the army chief, Wiranto, on the eve of the elections to accuse
the military of interfering in the balloting. The report said that soldiers “had insisted
on accompanying the ballot boxes to their tally centres at various districts in and
out of Java,” violating election rules banning both “military and civilian bureaucracy”
from any involvement. Wahid then argued that because “Special Forces (Kopassus)
soldiers were ‘meddling’ in the vote-counting process” on Golkar’s behalf, the ruling
party needed to be removed from power and an emergency government established.
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In the following weeks, Habibie’s government made it clear that it would not
tolerate such challenges, particularly by people contesting election results on the
streets. After the foreign press and most international monitors had departed, those
who remained noticed the reappearance in Jakarta of the barbed-wire barricades, army
tanks, and anti-riot troops that had all but disappeared after the November 1998 par-
liamentary session.
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Daily protests began outside the KPU, at first met with only light security. But
on July 2, a group of students, joined by the People’s Democratic Party, squared off
against dozens of riot police outside the KPU’s complex. Mobilizing to prevent rigging
of the country’s elections, they demanded that Golkar “be disqualified for . . . cheating
by rigging the vote count and using its . . . cash reserves to buy votes in the outlying
provinces.” In response, police began firing into the crowd and beat protesters back
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from the building with rattan riot sticks.
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As the count dragged into July, cynicism over the delays rose, along with unease
among PDIP supporters who had, like much of the media, equated a win of the popu-
lar vote with an eventual Megawati presidency. Even Desi Anwar (RCTI news anchor
and sister of Habibie’s spokeswoman Dewi Fortuna Anwar) admitted, “It is fortunate
that . . . Indonesians are getting used to dashed hopes and unfulfilled promises,” since
“with every delay,” the democratic process was further “usurped by Machiavellian
political intrigues.”
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When the KPU announced the final results after six weeks, over half the election’s
forty-eight parties refused to sign off on the final tally, citing 120,000 “unresolved
violations,” while much of the media treated the complaints as politicking by small
parties disgruntled by their failure to win seats.
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The KPU responded by handing the election results to President Habibie, who
issued a decree validating the final outcome, and thus the allocation of seats among
parties. On August 9, Indonesia’s poll supervisory committee, Panwaslu, seconded
the president’s decision, stating that the decree “should be considered as a collective
validation that the election was relatively free and fair.” In effect, Habibie’s decree
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ended the popular phase of the elections and shifted focus to parliament, where del-
egates would elect the next president.
Adding to Golkar’s advantages in the maneuvering that followed, there was another
MPR block likely to be weighted in the party’s favor—the two hundred appointive
representatives with seats in the seven-hundred-member body that would elect the
president. These would consist of 135 Utusan Daerah, or provincial representatives,
and 65 Utusan Golongan, or delegates from interest groups representing “non-political”
sectors of society, such as women’s organizations, “youth and students,” civil
servants, and various religious blocs. Theoretically, the Utusan Daerah and Utusan
Golongan blocs would “comprise personalities . . . not involved in political parties,