Daniel Lev is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle. Professor Lev is a leading specialist in the comparative politics, legal systems and human rights of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia. Much of his research has dealt with political change and legal evolution.

Lev was interviewed by Chris Lundry in July, 2005. Lundry is a PhD candidate in political science at Arizona State University, where he lectures in political science and Southeast Asian Studies. He has spent considerable time doing academic research in Indonesia.

Lundry: Thanks for agreeing to this interview. I want to begin by asking some very broad questions, moving into specifics as we go, and beginning with democracy in Indonesia. Given that democratization is a long-term process, and not a “moment,” how would you gauge, broadly, Indonesia’s progress toward democracy and consolidating its democratization?

Lev: A very complicated question, and what makes it particularly complicated is that I very seldom use the word democracy at all. The reason is that democracy as the term is used now is fundamentally a myth. The modern state is not a democracy, it can’t be. And I know that people get upset at this kind of position, but you have to start with terms that actually have meaning, right? And democracy implies something, you have to go all the way back to Aristotle. Democracy implies that the demos, the people, are in charge. And if you stop and think about that for a moment, do you know of any place where the people are really in charge? At best, democracy has come to mean, for many people, elections; elections choose.

You might think a little about who it is who designates what the people may choose. In the last election in the United States, there were two major candidates, Bush and Kerry, and I didn’t like either one of them. Many of the people I knew didn’t like either one of them. So, what was the meaning of democracy there? That is, you tell people they have a choice, but actually the choices are made first by somebody else, and that’s difficult. So, when I think of the modern state, it has very little to do with democracy, it has to do with control. You notice when many political scientists and the leaders of our government, in Europe, Japan, et cetera, talk about democracy, they actually also mention law. That is, basic to democracy is law. That’s true, in one sense, but law is a restraint. And the thing about legal process is that it is made to restrain both political leaders on the one hand, and people on the other.

And I point this out because it is very important to ask, when you talk about things like democracy, whether you really want democracy. Because among democratic actions, are of course the incidents in which mobs kill somebody. That’s a democratic decision. You see it in this country, you see it in Indonesia. You want to see democracy at work, well, the people who decide they are going to burn a thief to death, that’s a democratic decision. Actually, then, in the modern state, if it more or less runs well, you want restraints. You want to restrain the government from murdering people, you want to restrain the people from murdering other people. So it becomes very complicated.

The question you ask is not one that I can actually deal with, except in a different way, which is to say: I am not talking about democracy here, but the type of change that will generate a more effective state. And what I mean by a more effective state is one in which political and bureaucratic leaders are brought under control, and subject to legal process, in which society itself is also subject to legal process, and these controls will never work very well, but they will make life rather better than it was, say, under the New Order regime, or than it was here, say, in a number of periods that became dangerous for people.

What is the likelihood of that happening in Indonesia? I think it is good. But there is a little bit of history you need behind that which is, during the 1950s, there was in fact, despite the effects of the revolution, the confusion, the difficulties caused by the revolution, new groups in society. Indonesia had a very effective government, a parliamentary government, between 1950 and 1957. Now what do I mean when I say it was effective? First of all there were political leaders who were actually attuned to society, these were old-line nationalist leaders who had strong commitments and while they were divided and some of them were corrupt, of course, as politicians are wont to be, they had this powerful idea that they wanted to remake Indonesian society.

And the proof that they took this very seriously, and that they were actually very effective, despite the many parties that existed and the deep ideological disagreements among them, is that they produced remarkably effective policies with regard to health and education. The fact that most people in Indonesia now can actually speak Indonesian, even very often as a second language, and read it, is due to that education policy. Similarly the health policy was one that was deeply concerned with wiping out things like malaria and what have you, and it was effective.

At the onset of Guided Democracy and the New Order, that all went downhill. It went downhill because controls over the government by society disappeared. And of the problems there was, of course, primarily the introduction of the army into politics. What I see going on now is that the generation that was produced by the New Order is beginning to fade. It takes time, and they’re not going to disappear right away, but they will be replaced increasingly by young people, many of whom suffered under the New Order, many of whom were very angry at it, who wanted to produce what was talked about as democracy, but really they had the meaning of an effective state.

Unfortunately one of the accomplishments of the New Order was to wipe out that earlier history, and so for this new generation of leaders who are beginning to engage politically and socially and otherwise, many of them aren’t aware of the history of that parliamentary order. Now I notice over the last few years, there are young people, and I mean really young people, in their twenties, who are beginning to address these questions. Just recently I received some e-mails from a very young woman, she is only 26 years old, and she is interested in a number of things, but one of them is to begin to do some really serious research about what happened in 1965. But she is also interested in what happened before that, and she wants to go back and back and back, and she’s obviously very serious, but there are many others like that. If you look around Indonesia now, there are a large number of NGOs, many of which don’t really exist, some of which are corrupt, but many of which are first rate. And the organizations, such as the LBH (The Legal Aid Institute), the PSHK (The Center for the Study of Law and Policy), ICEL (The Indonesian Center for Environmental Law), which used to deal only with environmental issues, but is now expanded into much else, Kontras from Munir, the Indonesian Corruption Watch. These are strikingly good institutions, and they will help to produce, I think, good, stable institutions.

Lundry: This is interesting, because you have touched on just about every other question I was going to ask. But speaking of generational change in Indonesia, Nasution died five years ago. Roeslan Abdulgani died just a few days ago. These were figures who were from the revolutionary generation, and from that position were able to somewhat openly criticize the New Order during its reign. These people are all now dying off. You mentioned the younger generation now that tends to be somewhat politically active, and I have a follow up question about them as well. But it seems to me the generation that will be coming into power has experience under the New Order, and this is a long period of time. Do you think people will be able to get past that history? I mean, not be tainted by their experience during the New Order? You mentioned that there were plenty of people who suffered under the New Order, but there are also plenty pf people who gained. And it appears to me as though plenty of these people are still involved in politics today, and may still be at the helm.

Lev: I think that’s true. Look, when you talk about generational change, it’s never a new break; generations are mixed. And there are many young people who in fact prefer what was going on during the New Order because they profited from it. There are young people who are descended from elite groups and who really want to defend what was going on. So there are going to be very tight kinds of conflict over this, and it may never disappear, you may want to think about what goes on in every state in the world, that relatively stable groups, elites, that are both economic elites and political elites are necessarily going to oppose dramatic change. The thing about that, of course, in Indonesia as in elsewhere, is that the abrasive kind of conflict that goes on between generations, and between different class groups, and between differently oriented ideological groups, will not go on forever, but it is actually very useful. That is, the modern state is never altogether stable. When the state becomes completely stable, it dies. Nothing is going on, it is meaningless. The young people who are coming up are going to be opposed, and many of the young people who are coming up are actually part of a much older group, and they are going to try to fight it out, and maintain what they’ve had. We will see this particularly in arguments over state policy with respect to the economy, with respect to education, with respect to health. And it will have to do with -- you’ll see it in parliament, and in the press -- what kinds of healthcare the state should spend money on. Notice that during the New Order lots of money was spent on health, but it often had to do with big hospitals, with heavy equipment, with CAT scan material, MRIs, what have you, hospitals that deal particularly with heart attacks.

These are problems particularly of elite groups. So if you want to address the problems that most people in Indonesia have, you want to be thinking about those common ailments that kill off large numbers of adults and kids, cholera, for example, or malaria, various kinds of fevers. You want to address those. In some ways it has been addressed, [through a focus on] pregnancy issues and delivery. You have a choice here in your budgets for health. Do you address the many problems that occur among a small group which drinks too much and eats too much and smokes too much and all that, or do you want to address, rather, the problems of a huge group of people, the poor people, or the Indonesian middle class and lower class that can’t afford much, It seems to me to be obvious, you address the latter. They need it more. And that is what that elite back in the 1950s did.

Lundry: Speaking about the younger generation, it seemed to me as though in 1998, 1999, there was a very unified student movement with the obvious goal of getting Suharto out of power and instituting some kind of reform. They occupied parliament, they demonstrated in the streets, some were shot and killed, but it was a very unified movement. I don’t see that today. Do you think that because the overall goal was achieved to some degree – they got Suharto out, but whether there has been significant change is debatable – that student activism is still there, but it’s just more diffuse? People are now picking their own issues?

Lev: I think to some extent that’s true. Keep in mind that student movements notoriously don’t last long, no matter where in the world. And there are obvious reasons for that. That is, to maintain a movement, you need not simply the standard ideological place to meet, but you also need a lot of money to sustain it. Young people have other things they’ve got to do. They do lose interest over time, and sometimes become frustrated, but they have their educations to deal it, and what have you. Are the ideas that brought them together likely to be sustained? No. To some extent they will be, as always, some people ‘s political experience is permanent and they will always maintain it, and maintain the friends. But by and large, most people go off and do other things. They will finish their educations, they will be troubled until they find a job, then they will raise families and so on.

The point is, none of the dreams that people have about sustaining a movement make all that much sense. The activists of the ‘90s most likely were folded into one or another political party and new political parties, new groups in which the demand is not for people who are willing to march and what have you, but rather who will associate with each other. And that’s not going to happen until those young people begin to emerge as professionals or workers of some sort or the other. Over the last years I have spent some time talking with the four of five young professional organizations in Jakarta and elsewhere. I am interested in those because when I first began to interview them, or I would be invited to give a talk, inevitably these young lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, etc., wanted to stay at arms length away from politics. They didn’t want anything to do with it. They didn’t want to join parties, they hated political parties, they hated politics, because it was corrupt, they said – it’s true, it was – and it was dangerous, you could get hurt if you took a position. And that’s begun to change. And some of the same people, when I meet them now, say in effect, though not in these words, we have no choice but to become politically involved, because if we don’t it’ll be left to the older generation, and the corrupters, and to their sons and daughters, who will also be corrupters … so what I see now is that young people who said to me they don’t want to be involved are giving in and becoming politically involved.

The problem with that is that the party system is not of a sort in Indonesia that is going to produce dramatic change. The parties that exist by and large came out of the New Order itself. It’ll be interesting to see, and I don’t know the answer to this, one of the things that’s happening is that some young people are actually joining these parties. That is, Mega’s party has incorporated lots of young people who you would not have expected to join, but they have. Why? Partly because some of them want to take over the party, and they will try. The problem is that some of the young people who first tried this became rather cynical and said to hell with it. They couldn’t take it over. Others may stick it out. But I suspect the solution to this problem over the next five years will be in efforts to create new parties, to reflect the ideological differences that actually exist. That’s not easy and it takes a lot of money. And how that works out I don’t know. It’s impossible to predict.

Lundry: Speaking of new parties, what do you expect from the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, representing a new, small party, but also a long history of military involvement in politics? What about a broad picture of SBY: what do you expect in terms of reform, concerning the military or economic reform?

Lev: I think SBY is a very capable man, actually, and I think he’s got something of a right approach. The difficulty – and I think he’s serious, he’s not someone who’s self-serving, he does have some ideas – he is in a position, obviously, to deal with the army, but it is not clear to me that he has the ideas necessary to deal with the army. In other words, SBY is perfectly aware that the army has to be removed from politics. How you do that is something else, that’s a big problem.

The difficulty for SBY is not that he lacks character or anything else, he’s a serious man, he wants to do something. The institutional base of Indonesia is so weak that it’s hard for anybody to do anything. So SBY may end up being simply another interim president, waiting for the time when it becomes possible to begin to remake the institutions of the state.

Let me put this in the hardest and crudest terms. There is not a single institution of the sate now in Indonesia that works all that well. And it’s not just the corruption, it’s that for 40 years these institutions, the ministries and what have you, and the army, and the police, and the courts, have been deeply corrupted, manhandled, moved away from what should be their responsibilities.

The only choice now is literally to begin rebuilding. Now when you think of the problems involved in rebuilding a whole state -- and a state consists only of institutions, that’s all -- it’s not easy. Even the approach to it, where you begin, until you decide that you can make this kind of decision, to take five ministries and remake them, and they will be the most important ministries, and we’ll get rid of some, or we’re going to start with the army, or we’re going to start with something else.

In each case, there is terrific resistance to change. The problem is more than anything else people talk about corruption in Indonesia. Corruption is not something you can ever get rid of completely, there will always be some corruption. The problem is controlling it, and that depends on institutions. Well, when people talk about corruption in Indonesia, one of the first things you notice is that nobody quite knows what the hell to do about it.

There’s a new corruption court, and I’ve met some of the members, and they have no idea where to start. And how far can they go? There are some in jail who should probably stay there for life, given what they have done. Whether it is murder or corruption, they hurt a lot of people and yet they will get out, and there is a lot of confusion about what to do about that. There are huge programs invested in repairing the courts. How do you do that? That is, how do you come up with a strategy for dealing with a layer of problems that involves millions of people, with a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Now, I suspect, as far as I can tell, SBY is actually interested in these things, but he is also very aware of how limited his power and authority are. And he’s got to step very carefully. A lot of people want him to address the problem of the army, and I agree that one of the first institutional problems that should be addressed is the army. And the destruction of the Indonesian state is largely the result of the army, which became politically involved in 1952, when it first tried to force Sukarno to essentially overturn the Constitution of 1950 in favor of the constitution of 1945. Once it becomes involved in politics, it becomes involved in the economy too, and very soon it is exercising its power for the sake of its own interests. How do you deal with that?

Most countries in the world have armies, and armies are very expensive, and the problem is that there are not enough wars to go around, to keep your army involved. And if your army’s not at war, how do you stop it from doing other things of interest to it, like getting involved politically? And the way this is managed in the modern state is to buy it off, to bribe it, to stay in its place. And you bribe it with new airplanes and tanks and medals and opportunities, and in this country, in the U.S., it’s basically a corrupt thing. When many army, naval, and air force officers retire, they wait for a year or two, and then they become involved in some big corporation that has already offered them something. And the response is to say that it is better they do that than try to take over the country. In the Indonesian case, sure, the army problem is very hard, it really has only about a third of its budget covered. One of the things to keep in mind about the Indonesian army is that it has never had to defend Indonesia from foreign invaders, nor is it likely to have to do so, because nobody wants to invade Indonesia. What that means is that the primary enemy for the Indonesian army is the Indonesian people and I know that’s a horrific thing to say but it is inescapable when you look at history. Well, what do you do? There are some things that are obvious. Indonesia now has a rally superb minister of military affairs. Juwono Sudarsono is very good. Conservative, highly intelligent, he is eager to do something about the army, but there is not much at this point that he can really do, unless he has full support from the president and a lot of money. So one approach, for example, the obvious one, is to reduce the size of the army. You can reduce the size of the Indonesian army by half, and not hurt the defenses of the country. And the remainder will have to be told no more territorial commands, which they actually now want to multiply. No more of the yayasan, these foundations that have served to generate more money for the army, no more use of the army to engage in non-security affairs or security affairs that have to do with private industry and what have you. The army has to be remade. More money should be devoted to the navy, which it desperately needs, and maybe to some extent the air force. All of that is possible but it is very difficult, because the army, like any other political group, resists. Somebody has to come up with a formula. What makes this particularly difficult is this: The United States, the major country in the world, sees the Indonesian army as an ally, and very useful to America. And that’s what helped the army become more engaged in the first place, in 1957, 1958, when the United States spotted the army as the principal means for getting rid of the communist party, at that point the third largest communist party in the world. That was a disaster for Indonesia. Then the issue was communism, now the issue is terrorism. But American support inevitably, for that army, will give that army more political clout than it should have. And one can already see the indications that the army is delighted with this and is eager to protect itself. The decision, for example, to have more territorial commands rather than fewer. They should all be made to disappear. But that’s an expensive question. When we look at that problem, just isolating the army problem, we begin to see the difficulties that it itself poses for what we were talking about earlier, by way of reform. None of it is simple, and it is going to take a lot time.

Lundry: You just mentioned that the US is giving clout to the Indonesian military by offering support. The House of Representatives recently voted to overturn 1991 military aid restrictions to Indonesia. I am opposed to military aid, and I get in arguments with people who are for it because they say that military aid such as training is working to democratize the Indonesian military, and I don’t see much evidence of that...

Lev: That’s because there is no evidence of that...

Lundry: You said it is just giving them more clout. Do you think any sort of military engagement with Indonesia is appropriate at this time, and if so, what?

Lev: No I don’t actually. I think the Indonesian army should be dealt with on its own merits, by the Indonesian government. Let them work this out.

The people in the Department of Defense in the United States are constantly arguing that the thousands of Indonesian officers who they train are advantaged by that training. But there’s no evidence of that!

They mention SBY. SBY did not get the standard training. He was here, for a time, at a military base, but he was actually trained at a university. There is no evidence at all that what our department of defense and what our military say that we have somehow taught the Indonesian army about human rights has counted for anything. And the places where they have trained don’t have to do with human rights. They have to do with crushing people, actually. And they have to do with intelligence services and the like. My view is that the primary result of that relationship between the American and Indonesian militaries has been to pump up the reputation of the Indonesian army, in Indonesia, and also to make it clear, politically, that the United States was in support of the Indonesian army for whatever it did.

Now there’s a sense in which if you go all the way back to 1965, it’s true that the American government of the time was deeply grateful to the Indonesian army for carrying out and implementing in a sense one of the worst massacres of the last century. There was applause in this country for what the army did to Indonesians. That is, all those people who were slaughtered there, either by the Indonesian army or by support of the Indonesian army, were Indonesian citizens. Right now, when the Unites States argues about, or justifies, its taking up that relationship again, what American leaders have in mind is American interests, not Indonesian interests. And what happened in ‘57, ‘58 worked against Indonesian interests. And I’m arguing that right now, supporting the army again, will also work against Indonesian interests.

Lundry: Continuing with the United States’ relationship with Indonesia, or perhaps international pressure writ large, a United Nations Commission of Experts recently voted that an international tribunal should go ahead for Indonesians implicated in the military’s mass killing and destruction in East Timor in 1999. They don’t seem to want to look further back than that, which is unfortunate, but it is a first step. Some East Timorese leadership has taken what can be called a “pragmatic” approach, publicly stating that they don’t want nor is there a need for a tribunal, a friendship commission would suffice, and they are obviously looking out for political and diplomatic relations with their biggest neighbor. There is, however, an obvious groundswell of support among civil society and behind closed doors in East Timor. What do you think this UN recommendation will have in terms of effects on actually getting an international tribunal? They’ve actually offered Indonesia an escape clause by allowing Indonesia to hold more hearings, but most people recognize that the ad hoc tribunals were a sham. Do you see this progressing in any way?

Lev: It’s very hard to see it progress in any way. I personally feel that there should be a tribunal. But I also think that it would have very little effect. We don’t manage these issues very well, nationally or internationally. And while I think that there should be a tribunal just to bring that information out, I don’t see any likelihood that the Indonesian military leadership will accept whatever the tribunal comes up with, nor do I think it likely that civilian leadership, including Susilo Bamabang Yudhoyono, are likely to pick up the idea and hammer it home, it’s still politically risky. So is anything likely to come of it? I think not. Will many people in Indonesia support it? I think so, but they are not likely to be heard. Now, again, one has to admit it’s really too bad because it reduced the likelihood that something like integrity will actually count in relations between states. But you have to be aware too that Indonesian is not the only country to reject this sort of thing. The Unites States has too. We’ve refused to sign on to the international criminal court. Our president and his supporters in the congress have been very reluctant to pay attention to international human rights pressure. We’re strong enough to do that. We can tell everybody else to go to hell. Indonesia can’t do that, but it can do something quite like it, simply by saying we’re not going to subject our officers to a tribunal.

Continue to Part 2

Return to part 1

Lundry: Following last year’s tragedy in the Indian Ocean, there was a huge influx and international presence in the province of Aceh. Do you see any significant long-term political change coming as a result of international presence, and perhaps international pressure, to improve the situation in Aceh, as well as an increased awareness and focus on the region, or do you think the Indonesian goverment will be able to continue to stymie progress in resolving the conflict in Aceh?

Lev: I wish one could say one of the consequences of the tsunami in Aceh and elsewhere would be to propel political leaders and societies to do things differently. I don’t see any evidence of that, in Aceh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka or in India. Nothing changes. In Aceh right now, all of the massive foreign aid that came in was not accompanied by anywhere near enough Indonesian governmental support and action, in part because of one thing I mentioned before: The institutional base for that just doesn’t exist. SBY himself was very good, he went there, and he obviously said all of the right things, but he couldn’t move various parts of the state to do what should have been done. On the other hand there were LSMs (NGOs) that were very effective, both in the country and out of the country. The Indonesian Doctor’s Association sent people up there right away, and so did some other NGOs. The difficulty for them was again the presence of the army. When you have something like the tsunami it’s a good idea to forget about some of the other conflicts and do something about that first.

The army decided that its primary concern was GAM (The Free Aceh Movement). Well, it should not have been. Now I don’t know that this is true because I haven’t been there myself to see it, but the rumors are coming through that now the building of new houses and what have you, the concerns that are doing that, the organizations doing that, have been told that to buy lumber and other material for these houses they will have to go through the army. That’s not the army’s function. But that raises the whole issue as to why the army is there in the first place, that is to deal with the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement). That is fundamentally an internal dispute, a political issue, and you don’t very easily resolve political issue within the state by military means. You resolve political issues by political approaches. That means talking, compromising, arguing, bargaining.

If you send in an army there is no bargaining. And for the past 15 years or more, to be honest you could go all the way back, the tendency has been to send the army in. Whether in Aceh or Papua, there seems to be indication that people want to get the hell out of the state. But the reason they want to get out is precisely this: an army is used against them.

So, resolving some of the internal problems in Indonesian actually requires resolving the army problems. And I don’t know if anyone can actually do that now. I notice that there have been growing complaints among some of the foreign NGOs involved in Aceh. It’s not easy for them to work, they are pushed around. And that’s also true for some of the local NGOs. So, do you expect change? I don’t know. I don’t see it coming yet.

Lundry: Returning to the notion of legal reform, and also tribunals, there appears to be a willingness to reevaluate or reopen cases going as far back as 1965, 1996, but also 1998, 1999, Semanggi, Trisakti, rapes of ethnic Chinese in Jakarta, etc. What sort of significance do you place on this? Do you think they are going to find success? Do you think the ideas of revisiting these tragedies of Indonesian history will reverberate in Indonesia, or are people more willing to sweep them under the rug as has been done in the past?

Lev: There are people who think the best thing to do is sweep it under the rug and there are others who think, “no, we’ve got to deal with this.” There are arguments going on all of the time. The problem in Indonesia is that while the country once, during the ‘50s, had highly independent courts and prosecution and police, they no longer do. To use other courts for these kinds of issues... one should use the courts, that’s what they’re for. But it’s very difficult in the Indonesian case, because reform in the Indonesian system, because while it has made some headway, it’s not even close to being done. And it is not all that clear what kinds of policies will do it. To use that term “judicial reform” makes it sound easy, and of course it’s not. Repairing the courts in Indonesia, including some of the new courts, really means a 10-15 year policy of recruitment, of insuring the courts that they will not be intruded on by political authority, of redefining the jobs of the courts, the task of remaking something like the supreme court itself, which is now an institution of over 50 judges, many of whom have risen from their first placements in the appellate courts all the way to the supreme court, but that means that most of them have actually come up through the New Order years when the courts were filled with corruption, and deeply lacking competence and courage. One of the most difficult things any state can do is to restore a judicial system that has been destroyed. There have been very good programs involved in the Indonesian case, but they seem to be coming apart at the seams, both because of what’s been going on internally but also because of the external programs that are involved. I don’t want to say a lot about that because it is very complex at this point.

But regarding whether the legal process is going to play more of a role, I think the answer is a highly qualified yes … but not without extraordinary difficulty. It’s going to take time and a lot of pressure, and that means legal reform. It’s not a matter of simply looking at the courts and rearranging them and what have you (and there are good ideas to do that which have been generated within Indonesia, and not by external forces), but it also means paying some real attention not only to the courts but also to the prosecution. It means working out new procedures for recruiting people. It means breaking down some of the old traditions of the courts. For example, that only judges may become higher judges. You can bring in private lawyers, as they have in England, for example, as private prosecutors. But you also have to play extraordinary close and expensive attention to your law faculties. They need more money. They need help in getting rid of some faculty members, in redefining what they teach. It’s all very complicated stuff.

Similarly, to fix the police it’s not simply a question of telling them to be honest. You’ve got to pay them appropriately, and train them better. You’ve got to do a study of how many police you use. We talked earlier about the army, one way around some of these problems is if you cut the army in half, or even take away a third of it, you can put these soldiers into the police and retrain them as police, you need more police than you need army. Just as if you look at the Indonesian navy, you need to pump it up and spend more money. Not to buy big ships, but to buy patrol boats and the like. This is the largest archipelago in the world. When it comes to the police, do you want to keep the present organization of the police, which is essentially the same way it was created in 1912 by the Dutch, or do you now want to say wait a minute, do we actually need a national police force run out of Jakarta, or do you need a whole bunch of local police forces, locally responsible? The Indonesian legal sociologist Satjipto Raharjo recommended breaking up the army and making it territorially responsible, locally responsible. It makes very good sense, I think.

Lundry: I guess I want to end with a specific instance of the importance of the legal system, but not in terms of the military necessarily. This is the Buyat Bay case. Charges have been dropped against five of the six representatives of Newmont Mining Corporation, with regard to the long-term problems at Buyat Bay. How important is the Newmont case in terms of balancing legal protections for Indonesian citizens versus encouraging international investment in the Indonesian economy?

Lev: I think it is a very important case, and the way it’s going now is not encouraging. I don’t know exactly what happened there, but I am inclined to suppose, along with WALHI and others, that there was some serious contamination in the bay. When you are mining gold you are bound to cause some damage unless you take extraordinary care. When the suit against Newmont was first raised, I found that very encouraging. It could go either way, as cases can always go either way, but the fact of the matter is people were thinking about the science of it and to try to figure things out and what have you, but the decision to allow several of the executives to go, only one now is under indictment, and to bring the pressure off of Newmont is too bad.

Again, I‘m not there in Jakarta right now so I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it seems probable to me that the decision has been made that the country needs Newmont more than it needs to pay careful attention to what’s happening to various parts of the country and its citizens. I think more research needs to be done, but as far as I can tell from the reports that I’ve seen, and not even the most recent reports, but reports about Newmont that starting being generated five years ago, that what was going on was dangerous, that people were getting hurt from it, and the number of cases of the local population which were quite serious, they don’t just pop up by the hell of it, they were most likely influenced by what they were eating. And what else I don’t know.

So I think this is too bad. And one can understand why the government has done this, governments do this all the time. They say in effect we’re going to sacrifice some people because we need this project for this money or this war or whatever, I think that’s what happening in Jakarta on the Newmont problem, and I think it’s too bad.

[Editor's note: On November 15, 2005, the US$1.33 million civil suit filed by the Indonesian government against Newmont Mining was dropped by the presiding judge, Sudarto, who stated that the case should be brought before international arbitration as the South Jakarta District Court had no jurisdiction over the case. Newmont executives were "very pleased" with the decision, and a company spokesman in Denver hailed the decision as a victory for all company's doing business in Indonesia. There may be an appeal. The criminal trial against Richard Ness, the company's top executive in Indonesia, continues.]



Lundry: Thank you.

Return to part 1