Page 37 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

22 Chapter 1

Sinar Harapan ’s leak added insult to injury by usurping the president’s authority to
present the commission’s report in his own way. Lacking any legal basis for sanctions,
Suharto pressured the PWI to do what the courts could not—“discipline” the paper
for leaking a “state secret.” However, the conditions that would eventually make the
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PWI the “long arm” of the regime were not yet in place.
Little came of this pressure on the PWI. Yet Suharto continued where Sukarno
had left off in subordinating other sectors to the presidency. Rather than stifling
political activity through raw coercion, he co-opted competing centers of power and
reconfigured government institutions, including the parliament. In 1967, he claimed
the right to appoint one-third of the full parliament, or MPR, responsible for choosing
the president, and more than one-fifth of its lower house, the DPR. Explains Schwarz,
“[T]he idea was to restructure the political system in such a way that it could no lon-
ger compete with the executive office for power.”
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The new configuration allowed the regime to engineer elections to insulate itself
from political challenge. Testing the system’s efficacy, the country held its first post-
Sukarno elections in 1971. The new government party, Golkar, won a crushing 63
percent of the vote after the regime rigged the process, requiring all civil servants to
vote for Golkar, giving village and district leaders vote quotas, and promising develop-
ment funding to pro-Golkar districts. New official “rules of conduct,” which came to
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be known as the “Twelve Commandments,” advantaged the ruling party further with
severe restrictions on public speech during the campaign, barring candidates and the
media from criticizing the state ideology, the constitution, and anyone in government.
Any speech that might provoke religious, ethnic, or racial antagonisms and glorify
either Sukarno’s Old Order or the Communist party was also strictly forbidden.
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In the election’s aftermath, the regime concentrated power further by dissolving
all opposition parties to create two new, substantially weaker ones that were barred
from representing specific social sectors, thereby reducing representation of the coun-
try’s extraordinary diversity to just three political parties. While Suharto claimed that
he was preventing a return to the divisive politics of the past, the system produced
the pliant parliament he sought and turned elections into vehicles for the affirmation
of his agenda. “With one and only one road already mapped out,” he reasoned, “why
should we then have nine different cars?”
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Yet civil society remained unsubdued, leaving Suharto’s system incomplete. In
1973, Sinar Harapan leaked another government report. This time, Suharto found a
legal basis to suspend the paper’s license, charging it with “contempt of Parliament.”
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But he refrained from banning the paper outright because, notes Dhakidae, civil soci-
ety, through both the media and university students, could still unite to check execu-
tive power.
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The Malari Incident
The events that ultimately reversed this power relationship began in 1974 with
demonstrations culminating in what became known as the Malari incident. During
the months leading to these protests, students, intellectuals, and military factions
had been growing restive over continued corruption, particularly among senior army
offi cers, certain ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, and Suharto’s wife, Ibu Tien. At the
same time, the government was courting foreign investors, especially the Japanese,
with incentives to establish capital-intensive factories that were putting indigenous
companies out of business, provoking angry protests from displaced workers and