Invisible Indonesia
Article Summary and Author Biography
Reviews events in Indonesia since independence in 1945, noting the political cohesion of the archipelago and the economic down-turn, which led to devaluation and foreign debt. Despite this, the ruling GOLKAR won 73% of the vote in 1987, partly because of the authoritarian nature of the regime and partly because there was no satisfactory alternative. The test for GOLKAR will come when President Suharto leaves office. "The country's size and resources will in the long run guarantee greater awareness" of it among Americans.
Donald K. Emmerson is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Indonesias Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics.
Southeast Asia has been a costly reminder to Americans that the significance of a country and the attention it receives are separate matters. In the 1960s American commitments, losses and protests greatly inflated the importance of South Vietnam to the United States. Illustrating the opposite distortion in the 1980s is Indonesia, a vast and resource-rich archipelago that remains unknown to most Americans.
Indonesia’s visibility will increase in the years to come. Not because of prolonged headline-generating instability: Indonesia is not a Philippines in the making. Not because of rapid economic growth: Indonesia is less likely than Thailand or Malaysia to become, after Singapore, the second successfully industrializing Southeast Asian country. And not because of big-power ambitions: although it aspires to the status of a major power and occasionally feels constrained by the need to cooperate with its smaller neighbors, Indonesia is not preparing to abandon or override the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
What will make Indonesia better known is its success or failure in selecting someone to replace General Suharto, who has been president for nearly two decades and whose mandate is scheduled for another five-year renewal in March 1988. Indonesia must also adjust to the end of the OPEC-driven joyride in oil and gas, Indonesia’s main exports, whose slack prices have forced the government to devalue the rupiah, cut domestic spending and add to its already substantial burden of foreign debt. Meanwhile, autonomist groups in East Timor and Irian Jaya, regions that were coerced into joining Indonesia, and fundamentalist Muslims, who resent living in a heterodox society under a non-Islamic state, are testing the ability of the central government to implement the national motto, "Unity in Diversity."
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