The Boston Globe
By Joshua
Kurlantzick
Globe Correspondent / September 13, 2009
At times this summer, much of the Muslim world seemed at war with itself. In
Iran, protesters furious over what they viewed as a stolen election spilled into
the streets and were met with a brutal security crackdown. In Pakistan, powerful
Taliban-type militant groups battled the army. In neighboring Afghanistan,
opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah and local tribal leaders accused President
Hamid Karzai of stealing the national election.
Farther south, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, received far
less attention. Yet what happened there in July ultimately could prove far more
important than the meltdowns in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran. Some 100
million Indonesians, spread across a vast archipelago, went to the polls, and in
a free and fair vote, they reelected president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, leader
of the secular Democrat Party. Hard-line Islamic parties fielded candidates as
well, but they barely registered at the polls, gaining less of the vote than
they had in the previous national election five years ago.
Yudhoyono’s reelection was only the capstone of a triumphant decade for
Indonesia. Despite its vast size and remote terrain - it is the world’s
fourth-largest nation by population, its 240 million people spread across
thousands of islands between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific - Indonesia has
become a rock of political stability in a turbulent region. After decades of
military dictatorship, and the threat of Islamism in the late 1990s, Indonesia
is today ruled by a coalition that mixes secular and moderate Islamic parties
and protects minority rights. And at a time when countries from Japan to
Singapore are struggling, Indonesia posted some of the strongest growth in Asia
this year. The nation’s occasional terrorist attacks haven’t succeeded in
destabilizing the government, which has steadily built a reputation for good
governance and an effective battle against militant groups.
“If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women’s rights
can coexist, go to Indonesia,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on a trip
to Southeast Asia earlier this year.
Though Indonesian leaders themselves are hesitant to lecture other countries,
their model could offer lessons for nations from Pakistan to Morocco. It has
managed to create a stable political system without using its military to
guarantee secular rule, as does Turkey. The militant Islamic groups that once
seemed to threaten the country’s future have been crushed or co-opted. And it
has adopted modern anti-terrorism techniques that appear to be working. In its
success, Indonesia also offers the United States, constantly seeking ways to
help build stable societies in the Arab-Muslim world, a model for cooperation
and moderation.
Just a decade ago, few would have seen Indonesia as
a model of any kind. The country was an economic and political basket case,
riddled with graft from the era of its longtime dictator Suharto. Its heavily
export-dependent economy collapsed in the Asian financial crisis of the late
1990s, plunging the country into political chaos.
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Riots
constantly blocked the streets of Jakarta, with many protests targeting
the ethnic Chinese community. Warfare erupted in outlying provinces
like Aceh, which long had wanted to secede. Hard-line Islamist groups
preyed upon this unrest, promising cleaner government against the
corruption of Indonesia’s traditional political parties. Islamic
schools, known as pesantrens and similar to madrasas, expanded to fill
the void left by underfunded public schools. Some of these became
notorious for promoting militant Islam, according to an analysis by the
International Crisis Group, developing into feeders for the terrorist
organization Jemaah Islamiah.
In
the late 1990s and early 2000s, this and other expanding militant
groups seemed on the verge of threatening the government’s control of
parts of the country, a situation similar to Afghanistan or Yemen today.
In 2002, Jemaah Islamiah masterminded a bombing in Bali that killed
over 200 people, and then allegedly bombed the JW Marriott hotel and the
Australian embassy in Jakarta, among other sites. Indonesia seemed on
the verge of disintegrating, torn apart by separatist movements and
inter-ethnic battles.
By the
time of Yudhoyono’s reelection, this past summer, many of these fears
had vanished. The economy had recovered, the archipelago no longer
appeared on the verge of fragmenting politically, and terror groups had
been prosecuted and weakened. The country had held three successive free
elections.
How did
Indonesia develop into a success, while countries such as Egypt,
Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia still struggle just to build the fundamentals
of democracy? For one, Indonesia’s presidents have not allowed sharia
law, the religiously derived legal system that prevails in numerous
Muslim countries, to gain a foothold, except in a few isolated regions.
Neighboring Malaysia, by contrast, allows several of its states to apply
sharia to many issues of family law and other civil cases - a system
that can alienate non-Muslim minorities, undermining the principle that
democracy protects minority rights. (Recently, the Malaysian blogosphere
has been fixated on the case of an Indian Hindu woman who, under sharia
law, has been sentenced to caning for drinking beer.) In Indonesia,
where an ethnic Chinese minority coexists warily with an ethnic Malay
majority, the assurance of minority rights is critical to preventing the
kind of internal violence that has racked other Muslim nations, from
Pakistan (Shia vs. Sunni) to Yemen (northernerns vs. southerners).
Assurance of minority rights boosts the economy, too, since the ethnic
Chinese, though a minority, control an outsized percentage of powerful
companies in Indonesia.
Unlike
many other Muslim countries, Indonesia’s leaders have also resisted the
temptation to use the national treasury to promote their preferred
version of Islam. Yudhoyono and his two predecessors, Megawati
Sukarnoputri and Abdurrahman Wahid, took pains to emphasize that there
was no state-preferred mosque or spiritual leader. This strategy stands
in sharp contrast to Saudi Arabia, where the government plays a major
role in overseeing clerics - or even to Pakistan, where former
president Mohammad Zia ul-Haq used the power and the purse of the state
to institute laws consistent with sharia and pack the courts with Muslim
scholars he considered allies.
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