Over the past year, as Indonesia has geared up for its next presidential election, and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has desperately attempted to keep his party together in the wake of endless corruption allegations, nationalism has come to play a larger and larger role in Jakarta’s policymaking. In just the latest example, reported well on Asia Sentinel, Indonesia has effectively tossed the chief executive of ExxonMobil Indonesia out of his job. As Asia Sentinel notes, with increasingly weak leadership from Yudhoyono, other, more nationalist ministers are able to drive the agenda, particularly Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Hatta Rajasa. Read more »

Over the past decade and a half, Indonesia’s democratic transition has been praised (including by me)  as one of the most impressive of any developing country in the world. The distance traveled from the chaos, and potential split-up of the country, in the late 1990s, to the relative stability and high growth of today, is truly impressive. One of the main aspects of the democratization often highlighted by both Indonesia experts and many Indonesians themselves is how the country utilized political and economic devolution to reduce the power of Jakarta, cut the legacy of Suharto’s rule, increase local participation in politics and the economy, and improve citizens’ feeling of belonging to the polity. Read more »

Over at Asia Sentinel, a report analyzes how Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission appears to be going after high-ranking Democratic Party official and allies suspected of bribery, including several very close to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The Commission, known as the KPK in Indonesia, has also taken on the National Police, which is often considered by many Indonesians as now more corrupt than the army. The police have been empowered over the past decade by successive governments as the army has had its powers (rightly) curtailed. The devolution of powers to provincial and subprovincial areas also has reduced the power of the army, except in areas where there is still serious conflict, like in Papua. Read more »

Lost in the slow news of summer, the Olympics, and the conflict over the South China Sea, last week Indonesia released a report that was truly groundbreaking for Southeast Asia, in its willingness to examine serious past human rights abuses. In Thailand, the killings of 2010, in the streets of Bangkok, have not been properly examined, in a way that clearly assigns blame and ends controversy. In Myanmar, despite the promising political reforms, there has of yet been no real effort to analyze the vast abuses committed over the past fifty years by the military and the ethnic armies. In Cambodia, the Hun Sen government has for years stalled serious investigation of past crimes by the Khmer Rouge (KR). Cambodia under Hun Sen also has not included the KR period in most textbooks for Cambodian schools. Read more »

Over at Asia Sentinel, today there is a succinct overview of the announcement, made on July 4, that the Indonesian government may stop the signing of any new deals to export natural gas. According to Asia Sentinel, the director general of the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry announced that the administration may use this moratorium to shift natural gas deliveries to more domestic users, such as a range of Indonesian industries. But Asia Sentinel reports that Indonesia also has vast reserves of natural gas, and that to utilize more of it for domestic uses would require sizable changes in its gas delivery infrastructure. Indonesia does have a strong domestic economy, and local companies certainly are going to see demands for gas grow, but this announcement comes as part of a trend. Read more »

Months of revelations of alleged scandals of major figures in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party has slowly but surely dragged down public opinion in Indonesia of the government, and largely destroyed SBY’s second term. Though SBY himself is still seen by most people as personally honest —a rare commodity in Indonesian politics — that view of him as an exception is coming to matter less and less, as the public increasingly sees him as so indecisive and captured by corrupt, old-fashioned allies, that whether or not he is personally clean becomes relatively unimportant. Read more »

Last week, The Economist had a fine overview of the surprising resilience of the Indonesian economy, which it nicknamed the “Komodo economy” – tough and resilient, and surprisingly quick. Indeed, Indonesia grew by 6.5 percent in 2011, one of the highest growth rates of any emerging economy, and its fastest growth rate, The Economist noted, since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which devastated the country. Growth projections for 2012 are similarly rosy, despite labor unrest in several parts of the country, including in Papua; a weak international economic climate that shows little signs of improving; slow progress on cutting trade barriers within ASEAN; and Indonesia’s continuing massive problems with graft and misallocation of capital, some of which is a result of the decentralization program embarked upon over the past decade. Read more »