In late May 2017, a Valdai International Discussion Club representative was invited to attend the Jakarta Geopolitical Forum, a new expert format for conference diplomacy sponsored by the National Resilience Institute “Lemhannas” under the patronage of the Indonesian president. The forum analyzed new security trends in the Asia Pacific Region and the role of ASEAN and certain individual countries in this process.
Apart from foreign policy issues, however, the forum discussions were strongly influenced by the domestic political background that took shape in Indonesia in April and May of 2017. This period was marked by a surge of interfaith tensions and sparked off debates on the country’s ideological and value policies, which involved the Indonesian president himself. Serving as a pretext were the controversial and resonant gubernatorial elections in Jakarta, the second tour of which was held on April 19.
The election campaign saw a major scandal involving the previous Jakarta governor, Basuki Tjarnaja Purnama, better known as Ahok, a Christian of Chinese extraction and a member of President Joko Widodo’s team (before his election, Widodo was a Jakarta governor himself). Ahok provoked a bitter dispute in the local Muslim community by saying at an election rally that there was no problem with Muslims not voting for him if they thought the Coran prohibited them from doing so. As a consequence, Ahok was accused of disrespect for Islam, with a powerful smear campaign launched against him in Jakarta and across the country. He lost the second tour to an Islamist, Anies Baswedan, but the story did not end there.
Criminal proceedings were started against him immediately after the elections and he was sentenced to a prison term for blasphemy only a few weeks later. This precipitous and tough verdict caused a new wave of civil tensions. Ahok’s supporters and political moderates declared that the state’s secular constitution and fundamental axiological principle, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity), was called into question. This led to stronger pressure being brought to bear on a radical Islamist party, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), which was instrumental in the campaign of judicial prosecution of Ahok. As a result, FPI leader, Rizieq Shihab, had to leave the country, at least temporarily. The Indonesian authorities also banned the activities of the extremist Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. In turn, these steps provoked an Islamic backlash.
As a consequence, supporters and opponents of Ahok held rallies in Jakarta almost every day while the forum was in progress, with both parties venting discontent with President Joko Widodo. Impeachment scenarios and other processes to remove the president from power were openly discussed in the city. This conflict was superimposed on his uneasy relations with a considerable portion of the “old” national elite. His unexpected victory in the presidential elections in 2014, when he was running against an establishment candidate, made him an outsider and dangerous to the former political and business elite. At the same time, he was supported by the electorate.
On one hand, the Ahok scandal brought about charges that Widodo without a fight let his closest ally be taken down by the judiciary and that he lost Jakarta as his chief electoral base. This also led to growing disaffection among his support groups and the erosion of his official supporters’ unity. On the other hand, the subsequent “tightening of the screws” directed against Islamic groups provoked their stronger discontent.
As a result, President Widodo made a number of strong public statements during the forum, which could be summed up as “Pancasila vs. Islamism.” The statements swayed the ideological and value foundations of the Indonesian state.
Pancasila (Five Principles) is a concept proposed in 1945 by the first Indonesian president, Sukarno, as the philosophical foundation of the new Indonesian state. These principles include a just and civilized humaneness; national unity; democracy directed by a reasonable policy of consultations and popular representation; and social justice. But in terms of religion, the first and particularly important principle was monotheism. By suggesting this, Sukarno sought to find an alternative to demands that the newly emergent Indonesian state be based on Islam. Since the Islamic political activists were an important force in the struggle for independence from the colonial power, the Netherlands, the Islamic discourse was very popular, making Sukarno strike a compromise by introducing the first principle that spoke of an abstract God. This was a precaution against clashes between the Muslim and Christian communities.
But in any event, Pancasila features religion as an inalienable part of the state system, which has left no room for atheism (or atheists) in the life of the country. But in Sukarno’s time, the Communist Party was an important political force that gained one-third of the vote in elections. Its patently atheistic ideology clashed with the first principle of Pancasila.
Relations between the communists and the authorities under Sukarno went through several mutually exclusive stages. In 1948, for example, these two forces were involved in an armed conflict, which in central and eastern Java degenerated into a full civil war. Later, however, relations were put on an even keel. In the latter half of the 1950s, Sukarno put forward a new political ideology, Nasakom (an Indonesian acronym for “nationalists, the religious (i.e., Islamic parties), and Communists), which consolidated the political unity and cooperation of the three main political forces.
Another key political concept proposed by the “latter-day” Sukarno in the second half of the 1950s was Manipol-USDEK which derived its name from his Political Manifesto on the basics of the country’s political system. One of its principles was “Indonesian socialism.”
Sukarno’s foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s was also an important factor promoting the constructive role that the Communists were playing in public life. This policy was launched at the famous Bandung Asia-Africa Conference that Indonesia hosted in 1955 at Sukarno’s initiative. The Bandung Conference was a forum for the new political forces awakened by Asian and African decolonization and gave an impetus to the emergence of the Nonaligned Movement.
Sukarno was skilled at maneuvering between Kennedy, Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, each of whom saw him as a partner. The high point in the USSR’s cooperation with Indonesia was awarding Sukarno the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960.
However, the Indonesian Communist Party was outlawed after a coup d’etat in 1965. The new president, Suharto, curtailed ties with the USSR and the PRC and reoriented itself toward the United States. Under Suharto, the first principle of Pancasila came to be interpreted as standing for institutionalized anticommunism. Not accidentally, the huge Pancasila Monument Suharto built in a suburb of Jakarta was linked to a museum of “Communist crimes.” The monument to this day constitutes an important symbol of state ideology and hosts official events dedicated to recurring anniversaries of the 1965 coup.
Since the Suharto period, Pancasila has been perceived as chiefly an anticommunist rather than anti-Islamic doctrine. A logical and highly indicative fact is that in his opening remarks at the Jakarta Geopolitical Forum, Cabinet Coordinating Minister (Vice Premier) Luhut Binsar Panjaitan made a point of mentioning anticommunism. He devoted much of his speech to prospects for Indonesia’s cooperation with China. President Joko Widodo had just returned from the Belt and Road Summit in Beijing. A sharp rise in cooperation with the PRC has become an important element of his foreign policy course. But his coordinating minister had to actually make excuses that anticommunist Indonesia was eager to be partners with a country where Communists rule. Luhut said directly that Communism was one thing and business was quite another. In the context of the anticommunist tradition of Pancasila, this formula was in fact an open challenge to its stereotyped perception.
On the same days, President Joko Widodo declared that Islamism was now Pancasila’s main enemy and that he would “crush” (his words immediately became the most quoted in Indonesia) all the Islamist enemies of Pancasila.
As a result, we are witnessing a dramatic reorientation of Indonesia’s official state ideology: what was anticommunism is now anti-Islamism. Naturally, this will only stir up the already restless civil society. It remains to see whether Pancasila will become an effective tool in the fight against radical Islamic extremism and whether President Joko Widodo will survive in this struggle.
