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Indonesia The Pancasila and Political Parties
Suharto's regime transformed and marginalized political
parties, which, minus the PKI, still retained considerable
popular
support in the late 1960s. Party influence was diminished
by
limiting the parties' role in newly established
legislative bodies,
the DPR and the MPR, about 20 percent of whose members
were
appointed by the government. Parties were forced to
amalgamate: in
January 1973, four Islamic parties were obliged to
establish a
single body known as the Unity Development Party (PPP) and
nonIslamic parties, including the PNI, were obliged to merge
into the
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). Established by the
armed forces
in 1964, the Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups
(Golkar) was
given a central role in rallying popular support for the
New Order
in carefully staged national legislative elections.
Designed to bring diverse social groups into a
harmonious
organization based on "consensus," by 1969 Golkar had a
membership
of some 270 associations representing civil servants,
workers,
students, women, intellectuals, and other groups. Backed
both
financially and organizationally by the government, it had
mastered
Indonesia's political stage so completely by the 1970s
that
speculation centered not on whether it would gain a
legislative
majority, but on how large that majority would be and how
the
minority opposition vote would be divided between the PPP
and the
PDI. In the general elections of 1971, 1977, and 1982,
Golkar won
62.8, 62.1, and 64.3 percent of the popular vote,
respectively. As
the 1980s progressed, Golkar continued to consolidate its
electoral
dominance
(see Political Parties
, ch. 4).
In 1985 the legislature passed government-backed bills
requiring all political parties and associations to
declare their
support for the Pancasila as their ideological foundation.
Declaring such support was an extremely delicate issue for
Muslim
groups, including the PPP, since it attacked the basis of
their
identity (the government demanded that the Muslim parties
not be
exclusive and allow non-Muslim memberships). Although the
Pancasila
includes the principle of belief in a "supreme being," use
of the
term Maha Esa, rather than Allah, was designed to
encompass diverse
religious groups: Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists as
well as
Muslims. The Pancasila policy aroused strong opposition
among
politically active Muslims. Riots broke out in the Tanjung
Priok
port area of Jakarta on September 12, 1984, and a wave of
bombings
and arson took place in 1985. Targets included the
Borobudur
Buddhist temple, the palace of the Sunan of Surakarta,
commercial
districts in Jakarta, and the headquarters of the
Indonesian state
radio.
Voices of democratic opposition were heard May 5, 1980,
when a
group called the Petition of Fifty, composed of former
generals,
political leaders, academicians, students, and others,
called for
greater political freedom. In 1984 the group accused
Suharto of
attempting to establish a one-party state through his
Pancasila
policy. In the wake of the 1984-85 violence, one of the
Petition of
Fifty's leaders, Lieutenant General H.R. Dharsono, who had
served
as secretary general of ASEAN, was put on trial for
antigovernment
activities and sentenced to a ten-year jail term (from
which he was
released in 1990).
Data as of November 1992
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