Jacqui Baker on the rise of Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto

in Jordan. Jackie Baker charts his rehabilitation and extraordinary climb to presidency and what it means for Indonesia's fragile democracy.

A political frenemy who is indebted to him for his twenty twenty four electoral success to tens of millions of young Indonesian voters. Here's the cuddly anointed successor of the beloved President Jacoe with a ponchon for Daggy TikTok moves to a cohort of voters with much longer memories. Here's the veteran of a brutal and oppressive military who was devoted three decades of public life to weaponizing agitation an extra judicial violence in service of his own political ambitions.

First and foremost, though Probosubiato should be understood as a blue blood, he bears the name Jojo Hadi Kosumo, a family best understood as fully paid up members of an Indonesian post colonial class, a stratum of extremely wealthy, extremely powerful changeling families that are a debt at maintaining their

privilege across a range of political regimes. For the Jojo Hadi Kosumo's, the pursuit of power has not been smooth, and yet, in the face of missteps that for other elites might have proven fatal, this family has preserved and accumulated their social power right up until the twentieth of October twenty twenty four, when the apex of political power the presidency will be in their hands. Like most dynasties in post colonial republics, the jojo Hadi Kasumos are the

perverse products of empire. The family's minor claim to Javanese gent the element Kusumo in the name signals Javanese nobility, gave them entry into the Dutch civil service, which opened up channels of economic and political power. Praboa's grandfather, Margono, grew up in East Java in a family that had

aristocratic claims but was economically humble. Margono followed in his father's footsteps, progressing from a Dutch education to a career in the Dutch East Indies Department of the Interior, specializing in banking. During the War for Indonesian Independence, two of Margono's young sons were killed during a raid on a Japanese armory for weapons, leaving only his eldest son, Sumitro,

Praboa's father. After independence, Margono established Bank Nagada Indonesia or the National Bank of Indonesia, and became a member of the Provisional People's Council, a kind of transitory legislative assembly. For the new Republic. Praboa's father, Sumitro, obtained his PhD in economics in Rotterdam and took up a series of cabinet positions in trade, economics and finance in the fragile

governments of the early post independence period. Sumitro was a member of the Socialist Party of Indonesia, who distilled his thinking in a concept he called economic democracy, which sought to address structural economic challenges through redistribution. But Sumitro's political assent was cut short when dogged by rumors of party corruption and cronyism, and publicly eviscerated as a foreign stooge

for capitalism. He fled cabinet for a rival republic on the island of Sumatra known as the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia or otherwise the P doubl Ar I. The fall of the P double r I in nineteen fifty eight sent Sumitro into self imposed exile, first in Singapore, then in Malaysia, Hong Kong, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom with his family, including father Margono, Sumitro's Christian wife Dora, two elder daughters, Mariani and Bianti, baby son Hashim and

five year old Probo Subianto. Prabo has reflected publicly many times on this period of familial isolation. At the dinner table, Margono would recount the heroism of his two dead sons, Sujono and Subianto, whose name Probo bears. Subianto and Sujono had been part of a group of rash young activists who kidnapped the future President Sukardino to hasten the declaration of Indonesia's independence. Both later died in nineteen forty six in a battle known as the Lengkong Incident during the

Japanese occupation. Probo credits these accounts with instilling in him a deep desire for military service and a sense of the great significance of the Jojo Hadikusumo's for the course of Indonesia. Sumitro too often reflected on the party conflicts that royaled the early days of the Republic and on his momentous decision to lump in with the doomed p double r Eye movement. Perhaps some inkling of those dinner

table conversations was captured in Sumitro's later writings. He wrote, history doesn't forgive those who miss an opportunity of historic moment. Those who are too impestuous and are eager to force history may get a second chance if they survive, but never those who miss the historic moments. Probo also likes to remind his foreign audiences that, as a child in Singapore and Hong Kong, then still under British rule, brown skinned boys like him, had limited access to public spaces.

We know how demeaning it is, he said, to be considered second, third, fourth class. This distance must have been vexing for a young Probo, whose class status nonetheless secured him entry into the elite schools of the very globalists against whom he would later rail in campaign speeches. This included the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur, the Gleneli Junior School in Hong Kong, the Zurich International School, and the American School in London, from which he graduated in nineteen

sixty eight. By then, of course, a bloody and authoritarian regime called the New Order was emerging back in Indonesia after two years of mass killing of supposed leftists, orchestrated and executed by General Suharto, the Indonesian military and supported by Western allies. Facing a country economically in tatters, now purged of its artists, writers, thinkers, scientists and scholars, President Suharto called doctor Sumitro back home. As Sumitro took up

the reins as trade minister. Probo entered the Military Academy or ACABRI in Magalung in nineteen seventy but graduated a year later than his cohort in nineteen seventy four after being held back for disciplinary reasons. Probo also stood out because, at the time, enrolling in the Indonesian military was the fallback option for the sons of Indonesia's poor, not its

erudite blue bloods. These were determinative years for the ny orders military the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia otherwise known as UBRI, which produced key generals such as future President Susilo Bambangiudiono and future ABRI head General Uranto.

More importantly, these graduating years vastly dwarfed any future cohort, producing a crop of ambitious soldiers whose fight for the spoils of power would spark an intra elite competition that would go on to shape the course of Indonesia's political history. Like many of the authoritarian militaries of this period, Abri was the dominant coercive institution of the regime. It expected to govern and to reap profits. Its expanded role in political and economic life was known as due funksi or

dual function. Abri held a quarter of the seats in the National and Regional Parliament, as well as in the People's Consultative Assembly, which under the New Order appointed the president in five year terms. Green shirts, the name people called the army on the streets, were spread through the New Order administration as minister's in cabinet, director generals of

the bureaucracy, ambassadors, and provincial governors. A key plank in ABRI's power was and continues to be its territorial structure. This is known as the Kodam structure or Military Regional Commands, which slices the country into fifteen regions and essentially places a military command of corresponding size at every tier of regional government right down to the village level. It is a structure that snubs territorial borders to face inwards, guarding

the regime against treachery and oppositional forces. This structure reflected ABRI's true purpose to maintain internal security and defend the new order from dissent. But this structure also led to unparal leelled economic clout, creating opportunities for military businesses to dominate the extraction of natural resources and for generals to open up joint ventures with aspiring economic magnates. In this way,

Indonesia's emerging bourgeoisie was deeply intertwined with military power. A young ambitious general then as now would expect a slow series of rotations and promotions circulating around this territorial command, currying political and private sector support before finally obtaining their

first gold star as general. As the outside graduating cohorts of nineteen sixty eight to nineteen seventy coursed through the command, plump positions became increasingly contested with shorter tenure times marked by rapacious extraction. While impost prabol by contrast, was outside of this structure. He was one of the few to build his career in the military special forces known as capassos,

specializing in covert operations, insurgency, intelligence, and psychological warfare. Probo joined Kopasus upon graduation a year before Indonesia's annexation of

Timor Leste. Timor would go on to shape much of his career, honing his counter insurgency skills and building him a loyal power base that has followed him all the way to the presidential palace in nineteen eighty three fall until the armed wing of Timor's resistance movement orchestrated a lavuntamento, a bloody collapse of the nineteen eighty three ceasefire triggered by the massacre of eighteen Abri soldiers by Timur's auxiliaries

to the platoon. The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in timor Leste produced a report known as Chega of

the Occupation. In it, it documents how Koppasus and in particular, the Chandracha eight anti terror unit, jointly established by Probo and the current Minister for Maritime Affairs, General Luhut Panjaitan, was instrumental in managing the fallout, killing and disappearing over five hundred and thirty people, including two bloody massacres of dozens of women and children surrendering on the slopes of

Mount Bibliaeo. Chandracha eight also kept civilians imprisoned in a concentration camp at caralek Mutin in Craras, where four or five people died of hunger each day. By nineteen ninety three, as Abri sought new methods to defeat the Timeri's resistance, Kopassus had become the central pillar of the military occupation.

Now married to President Suharto's daughter Citi Hediardi Hariati known as Tittet, Prabol was back in Java, heading the Kopasas three training center in Battuljajar, West Java, which Douglas Cammon of the National University of Singapore has called the Nerve Center for Timor operations. Here, Prabol, who had graduated at the top of his class from US military anti terror training in Fort Bragg, West Germany and Fort Benning, schooled

soldiers in propaganda, terror, kidnapping, and sabotage. Throughout the nineteen nineties, Probo and by default, Copassus, was the lynchpin of the U. S Indonesia military relationship, able to connect the U S Armed forces to other areas of Abri and indeed to the inner Suharto circle to the United States and other allies. Probo was an especially valued contact given the large scale personnel changes in the Indonesian military command as the military

tried to accommodate its bloated upper echelons. But Probo was a field man through and through. As Camen has observed, for probo Is Timor was like home. Timoor was Proboa's laboratory for managing political insurgency, producing techniques that were replicated in bloody operations that targeted civilian populations in Arche and West Papua. He would be spotted on the streets of Dili,

having simply turned up without command knowledge or approval. He learned to cultivate and mobilized civilian militia who would not only provide surveillance on the ground, but could disorder and terrorize popular movements. Amongst his many proteges was Euiko Quteres, whom he plucked out to run the Guard of Depaksi or Youth Guard for Integration. This civilian militia was ostensibly a youth employment agency, but really provided the military with

intelligence and captured local criminal rackets. Gutes was ultimately indicted by the UN Special Panels for serious crimes for crimes against humanity as head of the Aitarak pro Integration militia

group in the wake of Tiamoor's vote for independence. Provos strategy of cultivating ultra nationalists, criminal gangs, hardline Islamist militia groups, and most incredibly, his own former human rights victims as a spoiler are a motive of his career, repeated in the Melee of nineteen eighty eight, in his twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen presidential campaigns, and throughout the two Quo two movement in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen to agitate

against the Jacoi government. Another tactic Probol sharpened and timor was the orchestration of crises to destabilize rivals and consolidate his grasp on power. Scholars have long argued that Probo had a hand in the nineteen ninety one Santa Cruz massacre, where at least two hundred and fifty tea Mories were murdered after Indonesian soldiers inexplicably opened fire before an international audience.

Factional rivals were purged soon after. Similarly, in July nineteen ninety six, as head of Capassus, Probo and his coterie including Shafri Samsudin, Zaki Makarim, and Mukti Puruo Pranjono were accused of involvement in the takeover of a free speech forum run by the opposition party Megawati Sukrabno Putri. This

sparked a two day mass riot. In the fallout, the Probole faction was able to depose rivals from top military posts, capture kiy milllilitary positions, and initiate a restructuring of Kopassus, which provided Probol with his second military star. Flanked by his wife Titet, who herself ruled over an empire of toll roads, sat in cabinet and served as deputy chairperson

of the regime's political party, Golkar. Probol seemed destined to be the anointed successor to the aging President Suharto, but then came the nineteen ninety seven Asian financial crisis, which hit Indonesia hard. Within six months, the repair was worth

thirty percent of its previous value. As the economic crisis churned into a social and political revolution, Prabo allegedly amplified the anti regime unrest fomenting on the streets by instigating anti Chinese riots along the north coast of Central and East Java and later in the heart of the capital to disgrace his rival, General Wuranto, the head of the

military in Jakarta. As waves of protests royaled the capital, Proboa formed a copassus crack team known as tim Mawar or the Rose Team, which kidnapped dozens of student demonstrators in three waves from the streets. Prabo and the Rose Team took responsibility for the second group of abductions, people who were tortured but eventually released. The young people disappeared

in the first and third waves have never reappeared. On May twelfth, nineteen ninety eight, as the city reached boiling point, four students at Trisakti University were shot and killed by unknown security forces stationed on a flyover road. The deaths remained shrouded in mystery. Not only were the students engaged in peaceful campus protest, but Trusakti University was a private tertiary institution attended by Jakata's ridge Kits, who were late

comers to the wider reform movement. Prabol continues to deny allegations that his men were responsible. Nonetheless, the Trisakti killings sent the crisis into free fall. In the days leading up to Suharto's resignation on the twenty first of May. He assumed that the Indonesian military would step in to reassume power, but the years of backlogged promotions and rotations had fragmented ABRI's upper echelonce and soured them on prolonging the new order. Into the breach stepped a Probol, ally

Vice President b J. Habibi, who assumed the presidency. This was Probo's moment to force history. That same day, according to Habibi's autobiography, Prabol demanded he promote the Army chief General Subagio Hadisis Warwar to command it in chief of Abri, and Probol himself to Army chief of Staff. Instead, Habibi snubbed the probole faction by handing the top job to

his arch rival Wiranto. Infuriated, Probol led a party of Copasus loyalists to Habibi's home, but Habibi got wind of his plans and was quickly airlifted to the presidential palace for safety. After being hauled before a military honor board to testify on the student abductions in August nineteen ninety eight, Prabol was forced to retire soon after. He went into exile in Jordan at the invitation of his old fort

Benningchum King Abdul the second. Other ports of call, such as the United States, barred the former general from entry. Probola himself discovered this in two thousand when he tried to attend his son's graduation. In twenty twenty, the US lifted span after Probol was made Defense Minister in the

Jacobi cabinet. Australia and the United Kingdom, which do not formally retain blacklists, also quietly dissuaded any visa implications, although since twenty fourteen Australia has allowed Probol to return.

Energy shortly after returning to Indonesia in two thousand and one. Today, through Nusantara Corp. Co. Owned with his younger brother, Hashim Probo, has investments in pulp and paper, forestry, agriculture, mining, and commercial fishing, all sectors targeted by his government's big push for energy and food sufficiency. Indeed, much of the Jojo Hadikusumo fortune has been generated by Hushim, the family tycoon, who use Probos regime connections to extend the family's economic empire.

In the mid nineteen nineties, Hushim and his sister in law, Titek Probol's wife, were the Indonesian partners in the Payton I Project, a massive coal fired power complex in East Java that The Wall Street Journal then described as one of the most expensive power deals of the decade anywhere. Peyton One sought to charge the state electricity company a

markup of between thirty and forty percent. In this way, Hushim is as Australian scholars Edward Aspinall and Marcus Meats to have written a product of the Suharto regime's ability to transform the members of leading bureaucratic families into apex capitalists. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, Hushim pursued investments in the Middle East and North Asia while living

in one of the family villas in Geneva. Those villas have now been repossessed in lieu of over US one hundred and fifty eight million in unpaid tax to the Swiss government. In two thousand and six, Hushim cashed out his share in Kazakh oil assets to China International Trust for a whopping one point nine billion US dollars, some of which he spent on his brother's presidential campaigns like

Nusantara Energy. Hushim's Asari Group deals in Indonesian natural resource extraction and processing, palm oil, rubber, tin, pulp and paper, bioethanol agribusiness, and is worth nearly a billion US dollars. Hashim has also invested heavily in scholarly efforts to rehabilitate the legacy of the Jojo Hadi Kasumo name. He does this by supporting historical research and films about the family's legacy. Oh and funding is too much in Tiger sanctuary the

acquisition dujou of Indonesia's moguls. But Hushim is not just the family's financier. Prabo's younger brother is also the architect of its pivot to electoral politics. The party that Probo ostensibly leads, Garindra or the Greater Indonesia Party, was supposedly

Hushim's idea. The party's origin story is wild a brain wave hatched in the back of a cab between Hushim, then on trial for stealing Javanese artifacts, and the inflammatory former Islamic student activist Fudley Zon, another of Probo's Copasis

area cultivations, railing with indignation. Together, they agreed, according to the party's website, that democracy had been hijacked by irresponsible actors with large amounts of capital, the result being was that the little people just became a tool of elite interests. In fact, they said, anyone who doesn't have political and economic power can become a victim to these elite interests,

and one such victim was Hushim himself. Absent from this origin story is Girindra's historical roots in Perindra, the Greater Indonesia Party, a little known political party, established in nineteen thirty six by Prabo and Hushian's grandfather Margono and a

group of conservative Indonesian nationalists. While other nationalist parties were shaped by more radical ideological visions of social democracy or Marxism, Perindra was the intellectual product of the Leyden School, a cohort of organicist legal scholars who believed that Indonesian culture was essentially harmonious and consensual, and that these traditions should

be echoed in the country's political and legal institutions. Although support for Perindra eventually collapsed, the party never quite having lived down its reputation for re enacting Nazi ceremonials. The ideological currents of organicism were key to the resilience of Suharto's particular brand of authoritarian rule. Organicism was the rationale behind the new orders highly centralized and militarized machinery, its compression of civil society into a few state chartered corporatus bodies,

its sacralization of the state ideology of panchasila. Organicism was also behind the regime's pathological obsession with romanticized representations of Javanese village life and its self projection as a family state over which the benevolent patriarch Suharto would always preside. Prabo and Hushim founded Garindra like Perindra, with a small cohort of Islamists, capitalists and military generals, including Probo's long

time capacits loyalists Shafri and Mukdi. Mukti, somehow had emerged unscathed from a two thousand eight trial in which he was accused of ordering the murder of a human rights activist, Munir Sai Dalib, who was poisoned on a flight to Amsterdam in two thousand four. In its early years, Garinda was credited for attracting bright, young talent whose political aspirations

had been curtailed by Indonesia's cartel party system. But following the twenty fourteen elections, the party has become more solidly a family affair. While Hushim's son Ario has given up his parliamentary seat to return to Asari Group, Hushim's daughter Saraswati, her husband Harwendro, and a nephew of Hashim and Prabor, Buddhi Jiuandno the child of their sister Bianti, are all

elected members. In the National Parliament. Harwendro and Buddhi are members in the seats in which the Jojohandikosumas have natural resource interests. In addition, Harwendro has secured the role of Deputy chair of the powerful Legislative Commission that oversees agriculture, Environment, forestry and maritime affairs. The other son of Bianti, Thomas jiuandno Is Gurindra's treasurer and a member of the tiny fistful of six Gurindra Confidence who made up Probo's Transition

task Force. In July twenty twenty four, before the Proboa government was inaugurated, Thomas was promoted by ben President Jakoe to the second Deputy Minister or of Finance, where he remains today. We are likely to see more of the

Jojohdi Kasumbo clan take up chairs in Probo's government. We might well shrug Garindra off as just another vehicle for Indonesian dynasty, like Megawati Sukardinal Putri's Democratic Party of Struggle otherwise known as the PDIP or Socilo Bambang Yudiorno's Democratic Party.

But Garindra's manifesto is more than the usual blur of religious nationalist guff It argues for a return to the original nineteen forty five Indonesian constitution as a necessary correction to the democratic reforms of the REFORMACI movement, which they allege have generated national political instability and slowed economic development. What Indonesia needs, reckons Girindra, is a purification of the current economic and political system to reflect the identity and

soul of Indonesia. That is, the democratic principles of contestation, opposition and dissent should be replaced with traditional Javanese customs of harmony and consensus based decision making. Thus, the pledge to re implement an original presidential system of government as detailed in Garindris Manifesto, is about winding back direct presidential and regional head elections in favor of a centralized system in which the People's Consultative Assembly appoints the president. The

president appoints his lackeys in the provinces. A handful of parties demarcate the boundaries of political contestation, and Indonesia's brave and effervescent civil society is whittled back down to a few state sanctioned representatives of Panchasilla diversity. For many, Proboa's election as president marks the resurrection of new order authoritarianism by a forgetful, young electorate. For others, it is another manifestation of the Trumpian right wing populism currently sweeping the globe.

Both arguments are mistaken. Voter turnout rates in Indonesia are reliably above eighty percent at the national level and around seventy percent for regional elections. Frankly, Indonesians relish the opportunity to pick their governments and to kick them out. For all the evidence of dirty money and candidate vote buying, Indonesians still regard policy platforms and performance in government as

the main basis for their voting preferences. This is a country that loves its democracy and its freedoms, despite the system's many flaws. Having failed to win a popular mandate for a more pure implementation of the presidential system, as Garindra argues in twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen, Prabo has stepped up again to force history through a strategy of

elite negotiation. He and his coalitions seized on Jocoe's craven ambitions for his family and legacy and his tempestuous relationship with his nominating party, Megawatti's PDIP to court the outgoing president. Probol himself was rumoured to have first dangled the prospect of the vice presidency to Jacoe's firstborn Gibran rakabuming Raka.

During the twenty twenty four campaign, Probol shed his nationalist Safari suits, the horses in dressage, the Mussolini cosplay of his twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen campaigns for workshirts that mirrored Jacoe's presidential uniform. The roaring, hypermasculine speeches lambasting the

elite forces that would destroy the country were gone. Instead, his answers on policy were distinctly Beta mail, asserting continuity and taking care to reassure the electorate that the president's prized white elephant, the construction of the new capital, would continue.

While Gurindra shut down questions about its manifesto, the Indonesian public were presented with a chubby avatar, cushioned from the prickly questions of journalists by a gaggle of YouTube and TikTok influences who pushed this cuddly uncle as their presidential pick. Jacoe used his presidential powers to pork barrel and key constituencies. Jacoe annex legal and judicial institutions to harass and disable rival coalitions, and deployed the National Police to twist the

arm of potential dissenters and sources of opposition. The effect was a decisive win to the pro Bol Gibran pairing with fifty eight percent in the first round, though Gurindra's contest for the House of Representatives only yielded a middling thirteen percent of seats. Having been gifted a nascent authoritarian state architecture by the outgoing President, Probo and his political allies will seek to institutionalize a model of Indonesian state organicism.

Probol's strategy is to seek a new deal amongst Indonesia's elites, in which they will govern through an expansive coalition that will, as far as politically possible, consolidate their power and limit the scope of political competition and dissent. This is the reason Probole opens every speech with long and elaborate salutations

to every dignitary in the room. This is what the former general means when he reminds his audiences again and again that the failure or success of a civilization hinges on the unity of its elite classes, while power will be exercised through a fistful of loyalists and cabinet. Probol seeks to build a regime that will nonetheless be underpinned by an outsized governing coalition satiated by the grubby politics

of divvying up the spoils for elites. The carrot in this strategy is the reassertion of the state as a mechanism for natural resource extraction and as a distributor of their market share. This is what Probol gestures to with his big policy platform of national energy and food self sufficiency,

packaged within the infeasible populism of free school lunches. Probol's model of food security envisions the conversion of millions of hectares of forested land over twelve million hectares of degraded rainforest, as Hashim is wont to repeat into vast monolithic food plantations.

It doesn't really matter that so far, his involvement of the proposal to build food estates across eight hundred thousand hectares of forest and peatland in North Sumatra, Central Kalimantan and Papua has ended in failure, Probo is, in essence, proposing a colossal land grab from which plantation permits, supply chains, and food and energy processing monopolies will be doled out to a waiting brood of domestic conglomerates, tech billionaires, ex

military and intelligence stars, resource hungry oligarchs, dynasties, and party apparatchicks. Seen in this light, Probo's regular exhortations for food and energy sovereignty are a clarion call to Indonesia's elie to regroup around a new political economy of natural wealth extraction, one in which every early interest is invested, everyone gets their bit, and most importantly, everyone knows their place on

the stump. Probo's voice cracks with woe when he describes how his free lunch program will relieve the grinding hunger of Indonesia's little people, reiterating his dedication to ameliorate the suffering of ordinary Indonesians, so far so nobless oblige. Elsewhere, Probo has offered up uncanny accounts of people dying of starvation by his tent on the mountain slopes of Timor, presumably in the concentration camps he established and ran as

the emotional fodder for his food security program. There are many problems with this strategy, but the main one is there's not much in it for the kind of country Indonesia has become. Poverty rates have dropped from forty percent to twenty percent of the population since the early two thousands. Extreme poverty Indisdonesia is certainly a problem, but it now

stands at ten percent. Indonesia's economic and social policy making now needs to reckon with the rise of an enormous class of what has been described as the working non poor, who aspire to social mobility but are trapped in cycles of financial procarity and insecurity. Probos's most loyal voting base come from this very stratum, the youths educated at high school and university who are deeply frustrated by the gap between the promises of development and the low paid, low

skilled jobs that Jacoe's middle income Indonesia could provide. Indonesia is not, and indeed has never been, the docile population of peasants of PROBOS imagining. Over the past twenty five years of democratic reformacy, Indonesia has become a deeply unequal, digital savvy, highly urbanized, geographically mobile, and politically organized middle income country in need of an economic industrial strategy that can generate sustained employment with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, life,

and opportunity. This is the policy golden goose that would require a massive deconstruction of the very political and economic system that has elevated the Jojo Hadi Kusumo's to power. Probo's feudal representations of his populace need to be seen for what they are, a pregame strategy through which dissenters and oppositional figures can be attacked as foreign stooges or anti government meddlers, unrepresentative of the true moral majority, whose

aspirations should be as modest as their social status. But what happens when Indonesia's people express rights instead of gratitude? We should expect that Probo, a blue blood who has for decades fermented in his own briny destiny, will not shy from forcing history once again. What does this mean for us? Why should Australia's foreign policy thinkers and decision make his care about the prospect of a further dissent

towards authoritarianism under President Prabaul. Certainly our administration didn't so much as Flicker as the coalition aligned with Jacoe harassed Indonesia's journalists, civil rights activists, and academics with junk defamation cases.

Over the two terms of Jacoe's presidency, we have been untroubled by his government's silencing and displacement of Indonesia's reformers and professionals on the Constitutional Court, the Audit Board, the Judicial Commission, the General Elections Commission, and Indonesia's prized Corruption Eradication Commission. We have witnessed Indonesia's civil space become whittled thin.

After all, as staffers at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have asked me, what does Indonesia's declining civil and political rights record got to do with Australia's trade and foreign policy. The short answer is that these political dynamics have grave consequences for Indonesia's ability to provide the predictabilis rule of law and due process necessary to Indonesia,

Australia and our common prosperity. Australia has done much to build and support cohorts of professionals and bureaucrats committed to bringing about good governance and a more equitable rule of law through technical support and by opening up opportunities for mutual learning and exchange. This is important work, but in

itself it is not enough. A response to Indonesia's democracy trouble must lie in our clear eyed recognition that with this election, ordinary Indonesians have not voted for the organicist manifesto, that the probole camp will now agitate to install. Indonesians in fact cherish their democracy and have no intention of surrendering it to oligarchy. Since reformacy, Australia has largely equated supporting Indonesian democracy with helping Indonesians to build institutions or

produce good policies. Twenty six years on from indoniae USO's democratic transition. Plainly this was wrong. Democracy is not merely a technical matter sealed up in good institutions. Rather, the health of a democracy should be measured in the space

it permits for popular participation and contestation. In every democracy, that space must be pride open and defended anew by writers, journalists, workers, artists, activists, bureaucrats, economists, unionists, landholders, farmers, fishermen, environmentalists, lawyers, teachers, accountants, doctors, scientists, and scholars. In Indonesia. These groups have long been on the backfoot, especially during the consolidation of the national elite

under the Chacoi presidency. Australia's shift from development aid to a broader platform of engagement and partnership with Indonesia means that we are well placed to help sustain these groups by providing opportunities that value and advance their work. We

should ward against anything so instrumentalist as policy reform. Instead, we could support these groups by connecting them to each other and to Australian partnerships through fellowships, residencies and study exchanges, and providing the platforms to elevate and promote high quality work. We need to provide these vital social groups with avenues of respite from regime pressure, as well as create paths

for them to further their standing for Australia. Supporting Indonesian democracy means rethinking out often managerialists and risk adverse engagement with Indonesia so that we better support the groups to exercise fundamental norms including collective organizing and action, scientific expertise, academic and journalistic freedom, artistic license, bureaucratic independence, and other ethical and professional standards as nations. We have been here before.

Beneath a sometimes fickle political and economic relationship, Australia and Indonesia share an informal history, often forgotten, in which ordinary people forge genuine networks of camaraderie across a shared geography. The Australian government likes to refer to this as people to people relations, but the phrase diminishes the richness of the relations of care, curiosity, and solidarity that have bonded

our nations. Unions, universities, media outlets, galleries and civil society organizations have provided shelter and sustenance to Indonesia's cause during their long struggle for independence, after the bloody killings of nineteen sixty five, and most notably during the long dark years of the authoritarian New Order. To confront Indonesia's political future. It is to this shared history that we must return.