The move was emblematic of the Indonesian government’s policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020: indisputably necessary, but either too piecemeal or too late to achieve their intended effects.
After President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was comfortably re-elected in April 2019, the world waited to see whether he would augment his signature infrastructure-building programs with a new focus on institutional reform.
That experiment didn’t take place in 2020. Instead, the pandemic delivered Indonesia its greatest social and economic challenge since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, which triggered the country’s transformation into Asia’s second-largest democracy.
What shone through in the face of this crisis was not the disruption but the resilience of Indonesia’s political status quo, writes Liam Gammon in this week’s lead article, part of our 2020 Year in Review series.
‘Ultimately, the pandemic has done little to shift Indonesia’s political trajectory, at best intensifying trends that were in train beforehand’, says Gammon. These include the government’s overriding focus on economic growth as the backbone of political stability, and a hypervigilance towards political opposition that is causing collateral damage to the quality of democracy.
Barriers to a socially and politically sustainable lockdown all exist to varying degrees in Indonesia, from its imperfect welfare targeting capacity to its dense and highly mobile population. Yet many of the failures of its official response speak not to a coherent plan but of ‘a government response that was focussed more on politics than public health’, Gammon argues.
Indonesia is not an exceptional case here. The complex narrative of this pandemic defies almost any attempt to deduce what makes for a ‘success story’, but we know what the key ingredient for failure is: a government preoccupied with dodging responsibility for the tough decisions that an effective response requires. Americans, Britons and too many others in the developed world are paying dearly for decisions made by governments that likely had the capacity to fight back effectively against the pandemic but lacked the political will to do so.
Indonesia could have done better. The country was once again well-served by its economic technocrats, who kept the macroeconomy more robust than could easily have been the case. The lesson is that when Indonesia’s competent technocrats are left to do their jobs, they respond with foresight and resourcefulness, as they so often do at times of crisis. But technocrats and reformers need to know that a president is thinking about more than the opinion polls.
If Indonesia can achieve herd immunity with a vaccination program in 2021, there is every chance that it emerges from the worst of the pandemic scarred but in a strong position to resume carving out a constructive role in the region.
The incoming Biden administration has flagged its eagerness to make democratic values a binding agent in the coalitions it aims to (re)build to discipline the behaviour of authoritarian rivals like China and Russia.
Indonesia will likely show just how complicated such an approach will be in today’s Asia. Scholars of Indonesian politics are unanimous in their judgment that the quality of Indonesian democracy is declining. But the US is also invested in suppressing the influence of Islamic radicalism in Southeast Asia — and it just so happens that the Jokowi administration is employing undemocratic tactics against conservative and radical Islamic groups who have been at the forefront of his main political opposition.
In late December 2020, the government outlawed the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), a radical group whose leader, Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, emerged as Indonesia’s de facto opposition leader after Jokowi co-opted all key political factions into his governing coalition. In early December, six FPI members were shot dead by police officers on a freeway outside Jakarta.
The officers claimed self-defence; the FPI claimed extrajudicial killing. Indonesia’s highly professional National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) is investigating the incident and will report in due course. Without prejudging the contents of its investigation, it is germane to note the very real problem of police brutality, and the dark history of extrajudicial killing targeted at ‘undesirables’ by the Indonesian state.
Is the Biden administration willing to annoy the Jokowi administration to put in a good word for the rights and freedoms of the Islamists who have manned the barricades outside the US Embassy in Jakarta over the years? Given the geopolitical stakes, it is almost certain that feel-good rhetoric will be dashed on the rocks of realpolitik — as will likely be the case in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and anywhere else in Southeast Asia where the US will be looking to rebuild credibility and influence after the Trump years.
As always, Indonesia — like the rest of its region — needs to be understood and engaged as it is, not as others would like it to be. In 2021 East Asia Forum will continue providing a resource to help readers to do just that — and in that spirit we wish all of our readers a very happy new year.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
This article is part of an EAF special feature series on 2020 in review and the year ahead.
This article is part of an EAF special feature series on the novel coronavirus crisis and its impact.