Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

MANAGING POLITICS AND ISLAM IN INDONESIA 133cabinet posts (see discussion below), and thereby weaken ABRI’s dwi-fungsirole. Political posts were a major source of military career advancementand patronage and any reduction of these threatened ABRI’s access to benefitsand power. In the face of rising public criticism over ABRI’s dwi-fungsi, Suhartoplaced the military’s extensive role in Indonesia’s political institutions squarelyon the public agenda. At an ABRI leadership meeting in 1990, in the spirit of‘political openness’, Suharto had announced that ABRI should take a backseat rolein the nation’s affairs and ‘lead people from behind’ (tut wuri handayani). 4Although tut wuri handayani had long been part of ABRI’s doctrine, Suharto’sstatement had definite political overtones, as it coincided with the president’sinitiatives to give civilians a greater role in the nation’s political institutions. 5 Hispronouncement sparked a broadening public debate on the issue, as NGOactivists, intellectuals, politicians, and elite dissidents intensified their criticismsof ABRI’s official doctrine. It appears that Suharto was attempting to turn‘openness’ to his advantage by using it as a weapon against ABRI, and the publiccontroversy stimulated by his statement fitted in well with such a scenario. 6Suharto’s objective was to subordinate ABRI fully to presidential authority, sothat he could establish his own firm control over the vice-presidential race and theterms of future succession.ICMI’s AgendasThe purge of Benny’s network, the Suharto-military rift, and growing concernabout the succession issue provided the backdrop to ICMI’s rise to prominencein the early-to-mid-1990s. These factors, and the prevailing climate of politicalopenness, encouraged members of ICMI’s intelligentsia to pursue, or at leastaspire to, agendas for the demilitarisation, democratisation, and Islamisation ofsociety which, in turn, provided likely points of tension between the organisationand ABRI. Some members of the intelligentsia viewed ICMI as a vehicle forgaining access to the power holders and decisional structures so that they mightinfluence the direction of national politics in support of their agendas. For example,two ICMI intellectuals, Aswab Mahasin (a liberal scholar and NGO leader) andSucipto Wirosarjono (a former bureaucrat at the Bureau of Statistics), thoughtthat ICMI gave Muslims ‘leverage within the government’ by building networksof contacts with government officials. Sucipto averred ‘using their networks[they can] influence the way the system behaves…ICMI’s role can be observedfrom how they influence the changing balance of power, but in accordance withwhat is best for the interests of the Muslim community’. 7Thus, it appears that members of ICMI’s intelligentsia might have acted like a‘counter-elite’, in Ding’s sense of the term, in that they sought to displace (or atleast modify) the official goals of ICMI with their own, alternative goals. ICMI’s‘unofficial’ agendas not only placed the intelligentsia in tension with ABRI butpotentially brought them into conflict with Suharto. For example, two outspokencritics of Suharto, Amien Rais and Sri Bintang Pamungkas—before their removal