Gerry van Klinken : Out of Africa: Colonial roots of Indonesia's ethnic conflicts

Inside Indonesia (www.insideindonesia.org/digest/digindex.htm )
Digest 95 [This article appears in Asian Analysis, January, 2001]

Political scientists often compared Indonesia's New Order to Latin American
countries like Brazil or Chile. The buzzword 'state corporatism' referred to
an orderly politics in which interest groups made deals weighted in favour
of the state. However, such orderliness made the disorder that followed seem
to come from nowhere. Now some observers are looking to Africa. The chaotic
way in which Suharto departed in 1998 reminded them more of an African
dictator than of a technocratic Latin American general. The dictator relates
with interest groups not in corporatist ways but by means of patronage
('neo-patrimonialism'). In the absence of proper institutions to manage
competition, ethnic conflict breaks out when rival elites mobilise followers
along ethnic or religious lines. We are now also seeing this common African
pattern in Indonesia.

However, overly simplistic comparisons ignore variety and history. The
Africanist Mahmood Mamdani does better with his suggestion that there are
actually two Africas, moreover each shaped by its own history. Using
apartheid-era South Africa as his model, he portrays one, democratic, Africa
that traces its history to 'direct' colonial rule, and another,
authoritarian, Africa once ruled 'indirectly'.

The strength of Mamdani's analysis is that he refuses to place politicised
ethnicity in some pre-colonial tribal past. Ethnicity is not a remnant being
mopped up by modernisation. Instead, it was locked into the very shape of
today's state by the European colonial powers who created that state.

Mamdani's ideas are relevant to Indonesia. The system of indirect rule was
invented in Asia. The Netherlands Indies, later Indonesia, was a highly
developed example. Its essence was deliberately to avoid building a
democratic modern state, with all the citizenship rights that implied, but
rather to build a distorted state, which would produce revenue but not
empower the people.

The key was to coopt and greatly increase the power of 'traditional'
indigenous aristocrats. Like aristocrats in Europe before the French
Revolution, these people were often interested in myths of ethnicity to help
preserve their rule. Indeed they learned much about racism from nineteenth
century European conservative thought. Not only the Dutch relied on these
aristocrats - so did the Japanese, and the Republic of Indonesia, especially
in rural areas and especially outside Java. These are today the areas of
continued Golkar dominance as well as of ethnic conflict.

According to Mamdani, the job for democratisers, as in apartheid South
Africa, is to challenge this 'bifurcated state'. This is good advice for
Indonesia too. Alliances must be built between urban democracy movements and
those living in the rural despotisms of Maluku, Kalimantan, Poso, and even
(especially!) in 'separatist' areas like Aceh and Papua.

Gerry van Klinken (editor[at]insideindonesia.org) edits 'Inside Indonesia'
magazine. This appears in Asian Analysis
(www.aseanfocus.com/asiananalysis/).