Indonesian President Joko Widodo ignored the advice of his vice-president, as well as the man who he defeated for the presidency, and almost certainly his predecessor as president as well, when he decided to press forward with the executions of two Australians and six others this week.
President Jokowi, as he is widely known, narrowly defeated former general, Prabowo Subianto, at last year’s presidential election. Prabowo wrote to Jokowi twice, offering to support the president if he would “indefinitely postpone” the executions.
Jusuf Kalla, the Vice-President, also argued for a stay of execution. His concern was that it looked as though proper legal procedure had not been fully followed.
Many Australian contacts asked the former president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to intervene on behalf of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. The former president sent back the message that while he was sympathetic to Australia’s concerns, he supported the death penalty in principle and did not feel he could interfere.
However, Jakarta sources tell Inquirer that SBY did communicate a message to President Jokowi that the thought it would be better to handle these matters more sensitively.
Prabowo privately wrote to Jokowi twice on the executions. It is difficult to gauge Prabowo’s motives precisely. He has on a couple of occasions sought to help Jokowi, and in particular give him some ballast against former president Megawati Sukarnoputri.
At the same time, Prabowo has spent years rehabilitating his image to that of an international statesman. He contrasts this with what he sees as Jokowi’s provincialism and narrowness.
Jokowi is in a remarkably weak position for a newly elected president. Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, drew attention to this during the week with a surprisingly candid assessment: “I think we face a situation in Indonesia where we have a president who is in the weaker situation, and sometimes people in weak situations take action which they think maybe exhibit strength.”
Andrews’ view is now very widely held.
After the executions, the Abbott government withdrew the Australian ambassador to Jakarta for consultations, an extremely high level of diplomatic protest which Australia has only engaged in a few times before, and never with Indonesia. The Abbott government has also suspended ministerial level contacts.
But so far Jakarta’s response to all this, post the executions, has been thoughtful, and constructive.
When Indonesian leaders such as the Attorney General and even the president himself, have played down Canberra’s actions, this is not a sign they are treating them with contempt, but rather a sign that they don’t want this dispute to get out of hand.
Similarly, a remarkably conciliatory statement from the Indonesian ambassador to Australia, Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, in which he said that Indonesia understands Australian views and expresses sympathies to the families of Chan and Sukumaran, was cleared at the very top in Jakarta and represents a serious Indonesian effort to mend fences.
Australian sentiment remains bruised, however, and there is a serious danger posed now by a kind of foolish emotionalism on the part of numerous Australian elites.
The popular film and television actor, Brendan Cowell, in a statement of sublime idiocy and gross irresponsibility, before the executions urged Tony Abbott to “grow some balls” and go to Indonesia and bring back the Australians.
This kind of statement is inflammatory, offensive and would not normally be made by a person with an IQ above room temperature. The same type of person would undoubtedly condemn Abbott and Julie Bishop unreservedly if they actually provoked a serious confrontation with Indonesia.
But even normally sensible Australians seemed to lose all common sense in responding to this matter. Greg Craven, the Vice-Chancellor of Australian Catholic University, announced two new scholarships for Indonesian students in honour of Chan and Sukumaran, To be eligible, Indonesian students would have to submit essays on “the sanctity of human life”.
This was an astonishingly ill advised and foolish thing to do.
All Australians were moved by the plight of Chan and Sukumaran and the dignity with which they conducted themselves in prison. The fact remains that they were convicted of the extremely serious crime of trafficking more than eight kilograms of heroin. Craven expressed himself surprised when a student emailed him to ask where were the scholarships named for the victims of the Lindt cafe killings.
Craven’s brain snap will be portrayed in every Islamist website in Indonesia as Australian universities glorifying drug trafficking and requiring Indonesian students to undertake a humiliating denunciation of their nation’s policy to receive Australian handouts.
From every point of view imaginable, this is a foolish, counter-productive and potentially dangerous piece of symbolism.
There is no need for anyone to feel hostility to the Indonesian people or the Indonesian nation because the Indonesian government has behaved very badly in this one distressing episode.
Australian elites would serve their country, and the cause of common humanity, much better if they calmed down and took a breath.
Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have struck the right note, gravely expressing Australia’s deep disappointment and disapproval of the executions and the way they were carried out, but still hoping that Australia and Indonesia can eventually resume a friendship.
Frankly, this is not only good policy it is good morality.
So, the questions that arise most urgently out of these executions now are: what is the future of the Jokowi presidency and what does this mean, can the Australia Indonesia relationship continue functioning, what more will the Abbott government do and what does the Australian community expect?
As ever with Indonesia, the situation is complex and full of cross currents.
Jokowi is in an almost unimaginably weak position for a newly elected president. How can this be, when Jokowi was just a few months ago seen as the very embodiment of Indonesian modernisation, liberalism, anti-corruption, a breath of fresh air domestically and internationally?
Australian commentators used often to lament that all of Indonesia’s presidents had come from the old political elite.
Right round the world, political elites have a bad name just now. But there’s one thing about political elites. They normally know how to operate a political system.
Jokowi was more an Indonesian version of a celebrity candidate. He had been a good mayor of Solo, a small Javanese city. He then won an upset victory as governor of Jakarta. But he held that post for only a short time before he ran for the presidency.
He had great popularity throughout Indonesia and several parties were courting him to be their presidential candidate. He ran as the candidate of PDI-P, the party of Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno.
Mega had been president and wanted to be again. But she decided to let Jokowi run instead. Jokowi started the campaign with a massive lead but only just beat out Prabowo, who ran on the basis that he could govern decisively.
Jokowi thus entered the presidency with no independent political base. His situation was a little like the very unflattering description of Kevin Rudd’s in the Labor Party, that his base was the Newspoll. Jokowi is proving an ineffective president and already his popularity has plummeted.
Far from being an anti-corruption champion he has been forced by PDI-P heavyweights to nominate senior officials, even to the police force, who are subject to grave corruption allegations and investigations. The only really strong national institution Indonesia’s new democracy has created is the Anti-Corruption Commission and Jokowi is seen as not defending it and allowing all its attackers a free rein.
Worst of all, Jokowi is not seen as being his own man. Before the recent party conference of PDI-P, Megawati publicly scolded him for delaying the executions, including of the two Australians.
But the humiliation of Jokowi at the PDI-P conference itself was unprecedented. Mega, who was re-elected as the head of PDI-P, described Jokowi as a “party cadre” and told him he was to toe the party line and if he didn’t like that he should get out. Jokowi had prepared a speech but was not allowed to deliver it at the conference.
The only grace he was given was that he was not actually attacked from the conference floor.
Indonesia is a young democracy, but this treatment of a president is absolutely unprecedented.
Nonetheless, it is not quite right to attribute the executions entirely to the will of Megawati. Jokowi in his presidential campaign promised a war on drugs. The Indonesian public is rightly concerned about the effect that drugs, especially methamphetamines, are having on its young people.
The death penalty enjoys a great deal of acceptance, even wide support, within Indonesia. SBY had approved the executions of the Bali bomb terrorists and then in effect had a moratorium on executions for several years until he allowed a small number to go ahead not long before he left office.
Jakarta sources suggest SBY had serious moral misgivings about the death penalty. He was not quite strong enough to abolish the death penalty but he could put it off almost indefinitely. Something similar to this has happened in Indonesia’s neighbouring countries Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
So far this year, under Jokowi, Indonesia has executed 18 people, 12 of them foreigners. Another 50, the majority foreigners, are on death row.
If Indonesia goes ahead with all these executions, it will have done itself catastrophic harm in terms of its international standing. Indeed it is important for Australians to realise that our nationals have not been singled out in these matters. With the exception of one Filipina woman, no foreign nation has been able to secure clemency, even temporary clemency, for any of its nationals.
There are five Chinese nationals on death row in Indonesia. Beijing has made it clear to Jokowi that it does not want them executed and Jokowi so far has been very deferential to the Chinese.
But it was Jokowi himself, not Megawati, who decided that there was nothing worth reading in the clemency pleas of any of the people on death row and that he didn’t need to give each case consideration on its merits.
In this, Jokowi was breaking with the practice of his presidential predecessors.
Canberra repeatedly asked that Jokowi at least look at the clemency pleas of Chan and Sukumaran. This was refused. Similarly, the Indonesians said that even the allegations of corruption against the sentencing judges, and the challenge in the constitutional court to establish that the president should look at the clemency pleas, were irrelevant because they could not affect the sentence itself. Canberra argued that they were factors, however, that Jokowi should take account of in considering the clemency pleas themselves.
Jokowi has now told confidantes that he feels that he did not get satisfactory advice from within the Indonesian system and that not everything was as he was told it was.
The whole incident also demonstrates the lack of influence, for the moment at least, of those senior Indonesians who do value international engagement and international good opinion.
The foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, is a competent diplomat but not a commanding figure and with almost no traction in Indonesian politics.
The Defence Minister, Ryamizard Ryacudu, is a Megawati loyalist.
Once Jokowi had made his public commitment to the executions, and this was further boxed in by Megawati’s public comments, his position was too weak to change. Not only that, while the president has been criticised by liberal newspapers and NGOs, the executions themselves are not unpopular and are one of very few things Jokowi can point to as, in some weird paradoxical fashion, decisive action by him.
Where to now?
It is possible that Jokowi will now slow down on executions. They can be delayed indefinitely.
But the strain of nationalism in Jokowi himself is quite real. Similarly Megawati inherits some of the nationalist fervour of her father.
But nationalism has always been a factor in Indonesian politics. Competent presidents can manage it.
There have not been many successful presidents. After Suharto’s 32 years in office there was considerable presidential instability. B.J Habibie as vice-president succeeded to the office when Suharto was over thrown, but Habibie was too weak even to run for president when the remainder of Suharto’s term expired. Abdurrahman Wahid was elected president but impeached a couple of years into his term. Megawati as vice-president succeeded but she was unable to secure re-election, losing to SBY, who gave us ten successful and stable years.
The contrast between SBY and Jokowi is instructive. SBY, a former general, was a long term and successful cabinet minister. He was very popular. He resigned from Mega’s cabinet in order to run against her. He founded his own political party which won substantial representation in the parliament. These were all tough and in their way courageous decisions. They meant that when he came to office he had substantial institutional foundations of support.
Jokowi has none of this.
A weak Indonesian president could well lead to considerable political instability in Indonesia and pose many and serious problems for Australia.
Australia’s interests with Indonesia are enormous. They involve counter-terrorism organised crime, people-smuggling, trade, strategic stability in Southeast Asia, free passage through Indonesia’s archipelagic waters. And there is no country other than a super power which could do Australia more damage if it wanted to, such as by destabilising the border the Papua New Guinea, or with East Timor, where we effectively provide security guarantees.
This does not mean that a good relationship with Jakarta trumps all other considerations. But a good relationship does embody key Australian interests.
The Abbott government does not intend to take further punitive measures against Indonesia. To do so would be foolish and perhaps dangerous. Bill Shorten should be careful not to exaggerate his rhetoric and continue irresponsible calls for more actions. That territory is well occupied by the Greens.
Because of cuts to the aid budget already announced, there will be cuts to aid for Indonesia from Australia. The Abbott government is likely to give big priority to aid for the Pacific, and to disaster relief where our aid is essential.
The truth is that Indonesia is very ambivalent about our aid. Another big country, India, doesn’t take Western aid any more. Australia’s $600 million is a drop in the ocean in Indonesia’s growing economy. Scaling it back, but not connecting this at all to the recent executions, is sensible.
The Abbott government will need to negotiate the wave of community feeling which the funerals of Chan and Sukumaran will bring on and it will need to negotiate the discussion of the matter when parliament resumes, and the inevitable inclination of fringe players to grand stand.
So far, the Abbott government has handled this very difficult matter well. It needs to continue to do so. And other leading figures in the community could make an effort to be constructive, and to calm down. Righteous anger has its place, but it is no basis for ongoing policy.
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