All posts tagged Indonesia

Indonesia’s Elections Offer Some Light in the Recent Gloom

The past couple of weeks have delivered plenty of terrible news, so I thought I would take a moment to call out a significant positive development: Indonesia held a presidential election early this month; there were no coup attempts and little violence associated with that balloting; and the contest was finally won by the guy who wasn’t threatening to dismantle democracy.

By my reckoning, this outcome should increase our confidence that Indonesia now deserves to be called a consolidated democracy, where “consolidated” just means that the risk of a reversion to authoritarian rule is low. Democracies are most susceptible to those reversions in their first 15–20 years (here and here), especially when they are poor and haven’t yet seen power passed from one party to another (here).

Indonesia now looks reasonably solid on all of those counts. The current democratic episode began nearly 15 years ago, in 1999, and the country has elected three presidents from as many parties since then—four if we count the president-elect. Indonesia certainly isn’t a rich country, but it’s not exactly poor any more, either. With a GDP per capita of approximately $3,500, it now lands near the high end of the World Bank’s “lower middle income” tier. Together, those features don’t describe a regime that we would expect to be immune from authoritarian reversal, but the elections that just occurred put that system through a major stress test, and it appears to have passed.

Some observers would argue that the country’s democratic regime already crossed the “consolidated” threshold years ago. When I described Indonesia as a newly consolidated democracy on Twitter, Indonesia specialist Jeremy Menchik noted that colleagues William Liddle and Saiful Mujani had identified Indonesia as being consolidated since 2004 and said that he agreed with them. Meanwhile, democratization experts often use the occurrence of one or two peaceful transfers of power as a rule of thumb for declaring democracies consolidated, and Indonesia had passed both of those tests before the latest election campaign even began.

Of course, it’s easy to say in hindsight that the risk of an authoritarian reversal in Indonesia around this election was low. We shouldn’t forget, though, that there was a lot of anxiety during the campaign about how the eventual loser, Prabowo Subianto, might dismantle democracy if he were elected, and in the end he only lost by a few percentage points. What’s more, the kind of “reforms” at which Prabowo hinted are just the sorts of things that have undone many other attempts at democracy in the past couple of decades. There were also rumors of coup plots, especially during the nerve-wracking last few weeks of the campaign until the official results were announced (see here, for example). Some seasoned observers of Indonesian politics with whom I spoke were confident at the time that those plots would not come to pass, but the fact that those rumors existed and were anxiously discussed in some quarters suggests that they were at least plausible, even if they weren’t probable. Last but not least, statistical modeling by Milan Svolik suggests that a middle-income presidential democracy like Indonesia’s won’t really be “cured” of its risk of authoritarian reversal until it gets much wealthier (see the actuarial tables on p. 43 in this excellent paper, which was later published in the American Political Science Review).

Even bearing those facts and Milan’s tables in mind, I think it’s fair to say that Indonesia now qualifies as a consolidated democracy, in the specific sense that the risk of an authoritarian reversal is now quite small and will remain so. If that’s right, then four of the world’s five most populous countries now fit under that label. The democratic regimes in India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil—roughly 2 billion citizens among them—all have lots of flaws, but the increased prevalence and persistence of democracy among the world’s largest countries is still a very big deal in the long course of human affairs. And, who knows, maybe China will finally join them in the not-too-distant future?

3 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on July 23, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Democratic Consolidation, Democratization

Tagged Indonesia

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on July 23, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/indonesias-elections-offer-some-light-in-the-recent-gloom/

A Faith-Based Initiative of Another Kind

According to AP, the U.S. government is considering deepening its ties with Myanmar’s military again, to include a re-up of the human-rights training programs American soldiers and lawyers do with scores of other countries and have done in Myanmar before.

With the backing of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, U.S. defense legal experts last week made their second trip to Myanmar in two months, scoping out what help they can provide on teaching about human rights and the rule of law…

With a quasi-civilian government in place and national elections due in 2015, the Obama administration argues that talking “soldier-to-soldier” with Myanmar on issues like military justice and military-civilian relations can encourage reform and help the U.S. build ties with a military it knows little about…

Priscilla Clapp, a former U.S. charge d’affaires in Yangon, says standing on the sidelines doesn’t serve U.S. interests. “We need to reach into the organization of the military and help educate people and expose them to new ideas,” she said.

The idea that these training programs deepen the recipient military’s commitment to democracy and human rights is essentially a matter of faith. As a GAO report referenced in the AP story makes clear, we have no idea how effective these programs are because we haven’t really tried to measure their impact.

Since 1976, the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has provided education and training to foreign military personnel. The program’s objectives include professionalizing military forces and increasing respect for democratic values and human rights…

State and DOD’s ability to assess IMET’s effectiveness is limited by several weaknesses in program monitoring and evaluation. First, State and DOD have not established a performance plan for IMET that explains how the program is expected to achieve its goals and how progress can be assessed through performance measures and targets. Second, State and DOD have limited information on most IMET graduates, due to weaknesses in efforts to monitor these graduates’ careers after training…Third, the agencies’ current evaluation efforts include few of the evaluation elements commonly accepted as appropriate for measuring progress of training programs, and do not objectively measure how IMET contributes to long-term, desired program outcomes.

Even in the absence of rigorous monitoring and evaluation, a cursory review of relevant cases makes it hard to accept the premise that these programs are having the presumed effect. Egypt’s military has been the beneficiary of these programs (and much, much more) from the U.S. for many years, and they’ve just perpetrated a coup and a mass killing in the span of a single summer. As the Washington Post reported last year, the leader of Mali’s 2012 coup, then-Capt. Amadou Sanogo, “received military training in the U.S. on ‘several occasions’,” as did many of his compatriots. A high-profile murder trial underway right now in Indonesia involves a dozen troops from a special-forces unit that received training and assistance from the U.S. for many years, even as they were committing gross human-rights violations. So far, I haven’t even mentioned the School of the Americas. The list goes on and on and on.

And, of course, there’s the profound irony that the U.S. did exactly this kind of training in Myanmar before, for eight years. As that AP story notes,

The U.S. financed $4.7 million in military sales delivered to Myanmar between 1980 and 1988, and trained 167 officers at American military schools under [IMET].

Why did those sales and training suddenly stop in 1988? Oh, yeah…

Near the start of this post, I claimed that American officials’ and officers’ belief in these programs’ effectiveness is a matter of faith. A cynic might point out that effectiveness depends on the goal. If the goal is to discourage military partners from intervening in their home countries’ politics and committing gross human-rights violations, the litany of historical counter-examples makes it hard for a civilian social scientist like me to understand how that faith is sustained. If, however, the goal is to provide a fig leaf for partnerships our government pursues for other reasons, then IMET seems to be working just fine.

8 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on September 5, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democracy Promotion, Foreign Policy

Tagged Egypt, IMET, Indonesia, Mali, Myanmar, School of the Americas

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on September 5, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/a-faith-based-initiative-of-another-kind/

Mass Killing in Egypt

Let’s define a state-led mass killing as an episode in which state security forces or groups acting at their behest deliberately kill at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians from a discrete group in a relatively short period of time—weeks, months, or maybe even several years. This is a paraphrased version of the definition my colleague Ben Valentino developed for a U.S. government-funded research project, so using it allows us to identify and compare many episodes over time, as I did in another recent post.

Since World War II, nearly all of the state-led mass killings that have occurred around the world have followed one of three basic scenarios, all of them involving apparent threats to rulers’ power.

First and most common, state security forces fighting an insurgency or locked in a civil war kill large numbers of civilians whom they accuse of supporting their rivals, or sometimes just kill indiscriminately. The genocide in Guatemala is an archetypal example of this scenario. In some cases, like Rwanda, the state also enlists militias or even civilians to assist in that killing.

Second, rulers confronting budding threats to their power—usually a nonviolent popular uprising or coup plot—violently repress and attack their challengers in an attempt to quash the apparent threat. The anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-1966 fit this pattern. In rare cases, like North Korea today, just the possibility of such a threat suffices to draw the state into killing large numbers of civilians. More often, state repression of nonviolent uprisings succeeds in quashing the challenge with fewer than 1,000 civilian deaths, as happened in China in 1989, Uzbekistan in 2005, and Burma in 2007.

Third, rulers who have recently seized power by coup or revolution sometimes kill large numbers of civilian supporters of the faction they have just replaced as part of their efforts to consolidate their power. The mass killings carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s are probably the most extreme example of this scenario, but Argentina’s “dirty war” and the long-running political purges that began in several East European countries after World War II also fit the pattern.

What happened in Egypt yesterday looks like a slide into the third scenario. Weeks after a military coup toppled Mohamed Morsi, state security forces violently assaulted crowds using nonviolent action to protest the coup and demand Morsi’s restoration to the presidency. The death toll from yesterday’s ruthless repression has already surpassed 500 and seems likely to rise further as more of the wounded die and security forces continue to repress further attempts at resistance and defiance. What’s more, the atrocities of the past 24 hours come on top of the killings of scores if not hundreds of Brotherhood supporters around the country over the past several weeks (see this spreadsheet maintained by The Guardian for details).

One of the many rationalizations offered for the July 3 coup was the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood had used violence to suppress its political rivals during and after mass protests against Morsi last December. People were right to challenge the Muslim Brotherhood over that thuggery, which was arguably a nascent version of the second scenario described above. In calling on the military to deliver them from that threat, however, some of those challengers seem to have struck a Faustian bargain that is now producing killings on a much grander scale.