President Abdurrahman Wahid’s position was shaken after the Indonesian Parliament voted 393 to four to censure him for his involvement in two corruption scandals.
Wahid’s own party, the National Awakening Party (PKB), walked out before the vote. A censure motion could be the first step to impeachment and dismissal.
The vote came after months of investigation by a special parliamentary committee examining the disappearance of $(US) 6 million – $4m of it from the State Logistics Agency (BULOG) and the remainder a $2m donation from the Sultan of Brunei.
The money from BULOG had been extracted by a scam, with Wahid’s masseur and sometime business partner playing a major role. The Sultan’s donation, Wahid insisted, was personal to him.
In themselves such incidents of siphoning off state assets for personal or party use would not cause a crisis in Indonesia. President Suharto and his family, who was overthrown by mass protest in 1998, are under investigation for looting billions from state coffers during their decades in power.
Since then, ex-president Habibie and his GOLKAR party, currently the second largest in parliament, stole at least $50m in the Bank of Bali scandal to finance the party’s election (and bribery) campaign in 1999.
At the heart of the dispute is the major parties’ growing dissatisfaction with Wahid’s presidency. The coalition which brought Wahid to power has fallen apart and is now out for his blood.
Despite Wahid leading the largest Muslim organisation in Indonesia, the 35 million-strong Nahdatul Ulama, the PKB only achieved 10% of the popular vote in the June 1999 elections, compared with 35% for Megawati Sukarnoputri’s PDI-P. The PDI-P is the largest party in parliament with 153 seats, compared to the PKB’s 51.
Megawati was perhaps the most popular leader of the campaign to oust Suharto. Yet she was swindled out of the presidency by a coalition of Muslim parties, known as the “central axis”, acting in alliance with major factions of Habibie’s GOLKAR.
Soon afterwards, Wahid redistributed the spoils. Megawati was made Vice-President (but only after mass rioting by her supporters), Amien Rais, leader of the Muslim PAN, became the Chair of parliament, and GOLKAR received important cabinet positions, as did other parties like the Muslim PPP. But the parties that brought Wahid to power are now disillusioned and are jockeying for position in a future presidential race.
Wahid has presided over a deteriorating economy for the mass of the population. The enormous economic crisis that rocked the country, together with the rest of South East Asia, in 1997/98 has been followed by an austerity package imposed on the country by the IMF and the major imperialist “donor countries”.
Saddled with billions in debts from the Suharto period, with virtually bankrupt state corporations and banks, the Wahid government has swallowed the bitter pill of a neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programme.
Subsidies to fuel and electricity have been slashed, with prices jumping 12-20%, while wages of those lucky enough to work have been held down. Major universities are about to be “corporatised” and fees have rocketed as the government withdraws funding Expenditure on education in the current budget has fallen to 1% of GDP – a 30% cut on last year’s budget.
Between a quarter and a third of the government budget goes on debt repayments, while an estimated 30-40% of the population of 200 million remain unemployed or underemployed. The number of the population living in poverty, defined as less than $2 a day, has leapt from 31 million in 1996 to 56 million in early 1999.
Meanwhile, the IMF has targeted 60 state conglomerates that they want broken up and sold off to international corporations over the next decade.
With such policies producing growing resistance in the form of strikes, demonstrations and riots, it is useful for the bourgeois parties to try and divert the masses’ attention to corruption scandals and target the president.
More importantly, Wahid has failed to hold the nation state together. The loss of East Timor was not only an enormous blow to the army, the TNI, but also to the idea of Indonesia as a unitary state.
Wahid has desperately attempted to head off the growing independence struggles in Aceh and in West Papua (officially called Irian Jaya by the Indonesian state).
The President took personal responsibility for Aceh, a strongly Muslim province with a long history of struggle both against the Dutch and against the Jakarta government. He has also played a major role in dealing with West Papua.
In both cases his offers of greater autonomy have been spurned, not least because the army and police have continued their atrocities against the people of these territories.
The moves for independence now are stronger than when Wahid came to power, his policies are seen as a failure. The TNI, GOLKAR and the PDI-P, which takes a hard line in defence of the unitary state, are demanding tougher measures to crush the independence movements.
Whether the parliament will pursue the road of impeachment, which will take many months, or uses the censure to extract concessions from an autocratic President, depends on how much it will profit the different bourgeois parties and figures in parliament.
The masses have no interest or side to support in this parliamentary game, aside from needing to sweep the corruption of the old order into the dustbin of history.