The following article looks at Indonesian leadership since independence and asks what sort of leadership Indonesia needs if it is to succeed in its transition towards a more democratic state. Julia Suryakusuma is a sociologist and social commentator based in Jakarta, whose writings appear in a variety of national and international publications. She was formerly the founder and Executive Director of Almanac of Indonesian Politics Foundation, which published the Almanac of Indonesian Political Parties (1999) and the Indonesian Parliament Guide (2001). Paige Johnson Tan has just completed the requirements for her Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia in the US. Her recent dissertation is on the role of political parties in the consolidation of democracy in Indonesia.
It is commonly bemoaned in academic and intellectual circles, even among members of the public at large, that Indonesia is currently experiencing a crisis of leadership. Are Indonesia’s politicians just leading the country on, the same old faces perpetuating the same old ways? How can one evaluate leadership in the Indonesian context?
According to academic and intellectual circles, there is a widely perceived crisis of leadership in Indonesia.
Harry S. Truman thought that ‘progress occurs when courageous, skilful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better’. The idea of changing things for the better is also captured in contemporary theories of leadership, such as Harvard’s Ronald Heifetz’ conception of leadership as “adaptive change.”[1] According to Heifetz, a trained psychiatrist, leadership is a process much like modern therapy in psychiatry. A country’s people (the patients) are helped by the leader (the therapist) to confront their problems and experience a breakthrough that allows them to come to terms with realities, problems, and truths about their lives and the state of their country. In the case of a nation, this “adaptive change” involves addressing underlying and difficult problems that hinder political, economic and moral progress. This type of leadership is inclusive, supportive and truthful. As Truman would have recognised, Heifetz’ leadership is intended to change the country for the better.
Using the thinking on leadership of Heifetz, leading a country towards a better future may require a leader who has the characteristics of a psychotherapist for the nation.
How can Indonesia’s leaders be seen to have performed? Working with Heifetz’s framework, a number of interesting points about Indonesia’s past and present leaders arise. From Sukarno to Megawati, leaders can be seen to have failed to diagnose the country’s problems correctly. Slogans and mobilisation have taken the place of thoughtful participation and have provided an easy path for Indonesia’s leaders to provide the illusion of leadership. The harder path of true leadership, according to Heifetz, would involve guiding Indonesians to confront their most deeply held differences and to develop a mechanism for resolving those differences.
Based on Heifetz’s framework for effective leadership, Indonesian leaders from Sukarno through to Megawati appear to have failed to understand the country’s problems.
Leaders can be seen to be products of history, culture, institutions and their own personal characteristics and choices. In Indonesia’s case, historical models of leadership include divinely ordained kings and sultans. The example of Dutch colonialism is not any more positive when it comes to crafting a modern democratic system of government. Culture, which can be a quicksand of analysis, certainly seems to impact on Indonesians’ desires for harmony (lack of discordant opinions) and strong leadership. Institutions allow certain leaders to emerge and others to be submerged. In the 1950s, the weakness of democracy allowed Sukarno to step to the fore to save Indonesia from what he diagnosed as “the disease of parties”. The military, Indonesia’s most powerful institution, allowed Soeharto to rise to power. Personal factors matter, too, though. Sukarno was bombastic and charismatic. Soeharto, on the other hand, wore the quiet and satisfied smile of the permanently powerful. In terms of charisma, he was the anti-Sukarno. The personal characteristics of each man were seen to “fit” the idea of leadership in Indonesia (and they were crafted to “fit”).
Both Sukarno and later Soeharto seemed to ‘fit’ the idea of leadership in the Indonesian sense.
Using Heifetz’ framework to look at Indonesia’s past leaders, we see that Sukarno and Soeharto both led the country through important changes and re-orientations, but in only some ways were these changes the positive, adaptive change that would have been favoured by Heifetz.
But while both Sukarno and Soeharto led Indonesia towards change and re-orientation, only some of these changes were positive and adaptive.
Sukarno’s revolutionary romanticism united the disparate territories of the Netherlands East Indies and, together with other nationalists, created the idea of modern Indonesia. This was a profound and important accomplishment that helped a people who in some cases had been colonised for over three hundred years to stand up and take pride in the accomplishment of their revolution. As a leader, however, Sukarno was too weak to design the system of his choosing. He was not an all-powerful president. At first, he was eclipsed by the parties and parliament. With Guided Democracy and Sukarno’s assumption of a more direct governing role in 1959, he still shared extensive power with other forces in society, such as the military and the communists.
Although Sukarno created modern Indonesia, he was too weak to design his own system of governance.
After independence, Sukarno did not make a good national therapist. He was perhaps too attentive to his own historical role as leader of the revolution and his own vision of himself as the embodiment of the Indonesian people. There was little need to engage in adaptive change if Sukarno was the Indonesian people and Sukarno was in charge. In the end, Sukarno had inspired and united, but his system played on many of the worst elements in the population. Rather than forcing Indonesians to confront their own problems, Sukarno blamed nekolim, neo-colonialists and imperialists, and their lackeys for the fact that the country had not achieved its promise after the revolution was won. Sukarno mobilised people rather than consulted them, forced people to subscribe to his ideas of Manipol/USDEK, and galvanised the people by creating an enemy in Malaysia. Sukarno’s nationalism was intended to unify the country’s disparate forces, but it failed to resolve the tensions between the seemingly mutually irreconcilable powers of the military, the communists and political Islam.
Sukarno failed utterly to help Indonesians confront their own problems of internal power groups. Instead, he preferred to use nationalism to galvanise people and project internal problems by blaming them on ‘neo-colonialists and imperialists’.
In the end, Sukarno’s system failed to institutionalise any means of understanding among the different power centres in Indonesia’s population. There was no means of cooperation outside of the ideas and programmes defined by Sukarno himself. Indonesians did not learn to agree to disagree. The winner-takes-all nature of competition among different groups guaranteed that Sukarno’s passing from the system, however that happened, would be bloody.
Sukarno’s failure to teach Indonesians to ‘agree to disagree’ led to his violent removal from power.
Soeharto substituted force for Sukarno’s revolutionary rhetoric to attain popular agreement; although, when force is involved, perhaps it is more like acquiescence than agreement. Rather than Sukarno’s revolutionary goals, Soeharto turned the entire mass of Indonesia toward the task of economic development (and, of course, the enrichment of himself and his own family). While the negative side-effects of the New Order development model are everywhere to be seen in the existence of conglomerates, the legacies of collusion, corruption and nepotism, and the excessive wealth of New Order-favoured individuals, can some positive elements of leadership be seen in Soeharto’s strategies?
Soeharto replaced Sukarno’s rhetoric with force and focused attention of the goals of economic development.
One thing Soeharto forced Indonesia to do was, after twenty years, to take responsibility for the country’s own level of economic development. Rather than blame nekolim for the country’s failure to achieve its economic promise after independence, Soeharto’s model turned the country outward, using aid, loans, foreign investment and exports to generate economic growth, raise the standard of living of the Indonesian people and reduce poverty. The country relied heavily on extractive industries, such as oil, forestry, and mining, but in other areas new industries were created where none had existed before.
At least Soeharto pushed Indonesians to take responsibility for their own economic development.
But Soeharto’s system of rule-by-force could not help the population to grow, to think, to mature. People were deliberately excluded from politics and the regime followed a conscious policy of pembodohan (stupidisation) of the people. The people were depoliticised as the “floating mass”, and central rule was enforced over them. Soeharto’s strategy also relied heavily on the old precept of divide and rule (divide et impera). Playing on people’s fears and fostering inter-group hostility would not be recognised as good leadership by Heifetz. Instead, this type of leadership perpetuates what is the worst among us.
But Soeharto’s reliance on force failed to help Indonesians grow politically. Instead, they were depoliticised by using divide-and-rule strategies that perpetuated fear and hostility—hardly signs of positive leadership in the Heifetz framework.
To sum up, Sukarno and Soeharto are popularly considered to have been “true” leaders, but an examination of their tenures reveals playing on divisions in the population and in some cases cultivating those divisions in order to perpetuate personal power. While each leader had significant accomplishments, weaknesses such as vanity, greed, self-aggrandisement and most importantly, a failure to institutionalise a system of managing Indonesia’s differences that could outlast their persons, created a politics in which the leader was primary. In Soeharto’s system, he was at junctures the only political player of note. The leader had to be primary. Everyone else had been bulldozed out of politics.
While Sukarno and Soeharto were considered by many Indonesians to have been ‘true’ leaders, this perception is quite erroneous.
What about leadership since Soeharto? The ideals of reformasi promised a politics that was newly inclusive, democratic and responsive to the wishes of the population. Has leadership in the reformasi period adhered to those precepts? Have Indonesia’s leaders since Soeharto helped the nation to undergo the kinds of substantive changes that would be needed to realise democratic politics? What we are seeing is that leadership is still closed and that the most fundamental wishes of the population have been side-stepped by the political elite. The styles of B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri are ill-suited to leading the country on a path of adaptive change. They have been, thus far, just leading the country on.
Since the fall of Soeharto, Indonesia’s three subsequent presidents have failed to deliver substantive change that would be needed to create democratic politics.
Habibie was the accidental president. He was foisted on to the country by Soeharto in what seemed to be a practical joke played by a leader who had been in power far too long. But, the accidental president did a fairly good job in extremely chaotic circumstances of at least setting out the institutional path for a democratic transition. When Habibie first assumed the presidency, segments of the student movement and urban intelligentsia saw him as merely “New Order, Chapter II.” In fact, this was not the case (although, of course, the students’ continued pressure was invaluable in assuring that Habibie stuck to the promises of reformasi).
Habibie was an accidental president, but the pressure upon him forced him to deliver on important reforms.
Habibie talked to the Indonesian people. He talked to the press. He talked to everyone within earshot about the difficult course of change in which the nation was engaged. Perhaps Habibie was the therapist who talks too much during the session, and therefore unable to let the patient make his or her own breakthrough. It is true that under Habibie’s presidency, with the legislature and courts still stacked as they had been during the Soeharto years, that popular involvement in actual decision-making increased little. But, Habibie’s presidency was a time of getting ready for the Indonesian people, a time in which they could prepare to participate in their own governance. Political parties with contending visions blossomed with the promise of the June 1999 parliamentary elections. Would the parties and the people finally be able to agree to disagree? Would democratic mechanisms enable Indonesians to resolve their own conflicts? The 1999 session of the People’s Consultative assembly (MPR) was the first test.
Habibie failed to be a good therapist to the Indonesian people, but at least Indonesians could prepare for real parliamentary elections.
The 1999 MPR session showed that Indonesia’s different political forces could cooperate in order to achieve peaceful political change. There were setbacks, such as threats (later realised) of rampaging by Megawati supporters. Still, the peaceful transfer of power from Habibie to Abdurrahman Wahid was a significant milestone.
The transfer of power in October 1999 was proof that Indonesians could cooperate to achieve peaceful political change.
Once Wahid had been elected to the presidency, however, the feel-good unity of the first days was quickly jettisoned. People were often heard to say that Wahid was not a politician. Therefore, he did not know what to do upon assuming the presidency. In fact, this is just wrong by half. Wahid had long been craftily engaged in politics under the New Order regime as head of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the nation’s largest religious organisation. Upon coming to power in 1999, faced with strong forces resistant to change, Wahid reverted to the lone-wolf style that had been his trademark at NU in order to overcome political impasses. But, as Wahid went out on his own the coalition of parties that had supported his accession to the presidency grew increasingly frustrated. Ministers began to drop like flies with little explanation to the ministers’ party sponsors as to why they had been sacked. Government policy seemed to be increasingly concentrated in Wahid’s hands; that is, such policy as there was.
But once Wahid won the presidency, he reverted to a lone-wolf style of leadership of his New Order NU days, with the result that his coalition began to crumble.
Wahid had some notable accomplishments. He took the case to the world that Indonesia was a democratising society and he engendered support for that effort with his genial, unpretentious approach to governance. He was the anti-Soeharto at a time when the country perhaps sorely needed an anti-Soeharto. He also took on powerful figures in the military and made himself few friends in that quarter; this cost him later as the military refused to enforce any elements of his emergency decree, thus allowing the president’s easy impeachment by a special session of the MPR in July 2001 (the easy impeachment, of course, followed chaotic and torturous months of political stalemate, demonstrations and counter-demonstrations).
Nonetheless, Wahid did try hard to change the status quo. But his attempt to take on the military was to cost him dearly in 2001.
Despite his moves to institute change in Indonesia’s politics, Wahid signally failed to provide the nation with a description of his stratagems. Where was the country heading? What was the mercurial, napping president doing? Surely, Wahid was leading, but no one seemed to know where he was going; this is the essence of the lone wolf. As Wahid grew more distant from his coalition allies, he failed to consolidate his leadership by fostering new allies elsewhere. The economy seemed to dither from crisis to crisis, and this was a travesty as opinion poll after opinion poll had shown that fixing the economy was the population’s primary preoccupation by a wide margin. Regional rebellions in Aceh and Papua, as well as inter-communal bloodletting in Maluku, showed Wahid to be out of touch and not in control of the most fundamental problems rending society. This made his leadership easy pickings for the impeachment forces.
But Indonesians could never understand where Wahid wanted to take them. Increasingly, Wahid appeared to be out of touch with the fundamental problems of Indonesian society.
Megawati Soekarnoputri has been president for just under one year at this writing. Her leadership was denigrated even before she came to power by those who insinuated that she was too quiet and too easily manipulated by powerful advisers, or her husband, or that she was not educated enough to understand the complex problems the country faced.
Megawati was much maligned before she took over the presidency.
Perhaps others were jealous of the relative ease with which Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) attracted supporters, finishing first in the 1999 elections with more than 33 percent of the national vote. Perhaps they experienced the happy sensation of schadenfreude when PDI-P was unable to turn its plurality victory in the parliamentary elections into a Megawati presidency in the October 1999 session of the MPR. Whatever others thought of Megawati and PDI-P, over the course of 2000 and 2001, clearly Megawati became the preferred option among the powers in parliament to the lone-wolf Wahid. In July 2001, with Wahid’s impeachment, Megawati rose to the presidency that she and her party believed was her due all along.
But Wahid’s self-destruction meant that there were no other choices available but to replace him with Megawati.
Whatever one thinks of Megawati’s capabilities, it is the observed actions of her leadership that concern us here. In some ways, Megawati has come out in favour of reform. But, her efforts often seem undercut by missteps and the continuing power of New Order forces. Megawati tried to set an example of herself and her family being corruption free. She exhorted ministers to exhibit simplicity in their dress and lifestyle. But at the same time (at the end of 2001), the president flew herself and a giant entourage of people to Bali and missed a scheduled visit to the troubled province of Irian Jaya/West Papua. Megawati’s government has put Tommy Soeharto and Akbar Tandjung on trial. Still, bribery, lying, political murder and misappropriation of funds have shown themselves to be influential political and judicial strategies in these cases. During the election campaign in 1999, Megawati described herself as being anti-militarism without being anti-military. Her cabinet is replete with military men and, since 2001, the military can be seen to have staged a strong political comeback. In Megawati’s government, compliance with IMF dictates seems to mask as a domestic economic policy.
In terms of leadership, Megawati’s presidency is full of contradictions.
Megawati’s quietness impacts on her ability to lead the country on a path of adaptive change. Similar to Wahid, Megawati fails to articulate a national vision on which the Indonesian people can travel with her. Instead, she prefers to make progress when and where she can; retreating where and when she cannot move forward. This is probably sensible. Over the longer term, however, going forwards and going back will leave one standing still.
As with Wahid, Megawati has failed to articulate a national vision.
Megawati has shown herself unable to lead the country on a path of adaptive change because she has demonstrated repeatedly a willingness to opt for the easy slogan (reform, unity) rather than the tough process of political dialogue with the Indonesian people in general and with organised social and political groups in particular. As her father Sukarno did before her, Megawati prefers an illusion of harmony and national agreement embodied in the person of the leader—even when it is manifestly clear that such harmony and national agreement do not exist. Muslim forces seek a greater role for Islam in the state. Scholars suggest that the United Development Party (PPP) will run in 2004 on the issue of an Islamic state. This will be fought strenuously by secular-nationalist forces and promises greater polarisation for the future.
Megawati has also failed to show that she is capable of entering political dialogue with the people. She prefers the illusion of harmony and national agreement, ignoring the real tensions that are building up in society.
The idea of the Islamic state reflects a real and fundamental difference in the population between Islamists and secular-nationalists. A leader in the Heifetz mould would help Indonesians to confront their disagreements, create a safe and peaceful environment in which those differences could be articulated and debated, and participate in crafting a compromise among the various political forces. This leader would not engage the muscle of demonstrators, party militia, or preman (political gangsters), to make his or her weight felt in the political system. Megawati has shown no signs of being this leader who could guide Indonesians through their disagreements to a better future.
A therapeutic leader is needed to confront and work through some of the fundamental disagreements in Indonesian society, for example the Islamist secular-nationalist dichotomy. Megawati shows no sign of being such a leader.
Megawati’s government has also not been significantly proactive in empowering the people to participate in their own governance. As a party that is run on a hierarchical and charismatic basis, PDI-P is a poor testing ground for democracy in Indonesia. If all decisions must be referred to ‘Ibu Mega’ how can the people learn to participate in their own governance? As with PDI-P, so with the other top parties. Top-down leadership, use of charisma and traditional leadership networks and violation of internal rules characterise the parties more than democracy, consultation and consensus-building. Factions and splits are symptoms of the parties’ weaknesses.
Megawati and her party have also failed to empower the people to participate in their own governance.
Conditioned by history, culture and top-heavy institutions, Indonesians continue to look to leaders to solve their problems. This is natural. Why else would one have leaders if not to see leadership, especially the national leadership, and more specifically the presidency, as being a primary factor in leading Indonesia out of its manifold problems? However, plaintive calls that leaders need greater integrity or that the country is undergoing a moral crisis miss what true leadership in the Heifetzian mould in the Indonesian case would require; this is a leadership that empowers the people to solve their own problems. This is the adaptive change needed to set the mechanics of democratic governance in motion. This is what has been missing in the past. This is what is still missing today.
Indonesia needs a new type of leadership: one that empowers the people to solve their own problems. This has been missing in the past and is still missing today.
[1] Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership without Easy Answers, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).