Signs of renewed military involvement in civilian life are raising concerns that Indonesia may be drifting back towards the authoritarian practices of its past.

Imagine you’ve seen a street skirmish and call the police. A brief chat reveals the brawlers are off-duty soldiers. They continue to throw punches and rocks. The cops drive away.

The policy was dwifungsi (an adopted loanword), and it ran throughout Indonesia during the 32-year authoritarian rule of the second president, Soeharto, a former general.

At the top was the army – at the bottom the police.

Dwifungsi was dismantled during the Reformation in 2000 by the fourth President, Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), now deceased.

A liberal Islamic scholar, he understood the importance of restricting the military to defence and separating it from the police role of domestic peacekeeping.

It hasn’t been an easy transition. Turf wars, access to power and rivalries continue.

Khairul Fahmi, a military analyst at the Institute for Security and Strategic Studies_,_ attributed the recurring clashes between the two forces to “institutional arrogance, a culture of superiority, sectoral egotism, and festering jealousies, dynamics that have grown unchecked.

“Much of the rivalry stems from competition for ‘fertile grounds’ of influence across civil society, bureaucracy, and even parliament.”

Stories of inter-service punch-ups........

© Pearls and Irritations