Abstract
The Indonesian social system began to disintegrate in 1997. In the aftermath of social collapse, many forms of state crime, organized crime, terrorism, ethnic violence, religious violence, assassinations and other political violence escalated. An anomie theory interpretation is offered of this rise and the subsequent fall of a complex of serious crime problems. Security sector reintegration, reintegration of perpetrators and reconciliation (without truth) played important parts in enabling the rebuilding of institutions of security.
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Notes
By 2005, public opinion poll support for al Qaeda had also fallen dramatically from support by 58% of the population in 2002. During the second Gulf war, Saddam Hussein was the most popular name for babies born in Indonesia (Kivimäki 2007).
Negative peace means the absence of war in the Peacebuilding Compared project, while positive peace means a peace secured through commitment to the justice of the post-conflict institutional settlement [see Galtung (1969) for the original formulation]. And see in turn the foundations for this in the seventeenth century thought of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza: ‘Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice’.
At the time of writing in 2009 there is concern that political support for tough corruption enforcement may be waning, with President Yudhoyono being publicly critical of sting operations against fellow politicians during the 2009 election campaign, for example.
Wilson’s (2008) research on North Maluku, as discussed in Braithwaite et al. (2010), highlights the role of youthful masculinities, the pursuit of excitement in the onset of that armed conflict. Just as a demography of a youth bulge can be important to sharp upward movements in rates of common crime, so our systematic empirical work over time may show that youth bulges are associated with increased risks of armed violence, including in some of these Indonesian cases.
Of course it would have been better had they been prevented from ever arriving in Christian areas as happened in 1999 when the first 300 of what was said to be a contingent of 800 Laskar Jihad were intercepted and sent back by police on their way to Manado in Christian Northern Sulawesi (source for this is an undated manuscript by David Henley, Mieke Schouten and Alex Ulaen entitled ‘Preserving the Peace in post-New Order Minahasa’).
Maria Ericson identifies three elements in securing reconciliation:
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The establishment of safety, including bodily integrity, basic health needs, safe living conditions, financial security, mobility, a plan for self-protection, safe and reliable relationships, and social support.
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Remembrance and mourning, telling the story of one’s trauma.
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Reconnection with ordinary life (Maria Ericson, paraphrased in Daly and Sarkin (2007: 47).
On reflection, none of these require learning the truth of the root causes of the conflict.
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Papua and West Kalimantan are the cases where least reconciliation has been secured.
The justice enforcement effects we have found also deepen rather than resolve the puzzles of truth, justice and reconciliation. North Maluku, like Bougainville in the second volume of Peacebuilding Compared, is a case where everyone involved in the conflict was amnestied, a condition for peace demanded by militia leaders. A contrast is Central Sulawesi where there were a considerable number of criminal prosecutions and even executions for war crimes, but where the feeling on both sides was that scapegoats rather than the major elite criminals of the conflict were put on trial. With the exception of thousands of arrests of GAM members in Aceh during that war (almost all amnestied in compliance with the Helsinki peace accord), impunity was overwhelmingly the justice norm across these conflicts and was mostly accepted by elites and ordinary people alike as part of the spirit of a non-truth and reconciliation that put the horror behind them and moved on.
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Braithwaite, J. Anomie and Violence in Indonesia and Timor-Leste, 1997–2009. Asian Criminology 6, 51–68 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-010-9087-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-010-9087-2