Quoth our honorable moderator:
> When a dictator falls to popular forces we seem to always get the same
> dreary outcome. From the Philipines to South Africa to Haiti, leaders
> come to the fore spouting slogans of people power, only to fall in line
> with the forces of neo-liberalism.
>
> Indonesia is a bigger country in terms of population. Is there any way
> that it could resist falling into the same pattern?
First of all it is we that should resist falling into an automatic
expectation of this standard scenario. Indonesia is not only a bigger
country but a vast archipelago whose apparent political integrity should
hardly be taken for granted; separatist movements could suddenly emerge
on some of the major islands, where resettlement schemes for land-hungry
Javanese peasants were experienced as foreign intrusions in the '80s.
What do we really know about the pre-Dutch history of this entity?
It's time for some input from the world systems people.
According to travellers, except for parts of Sumatra the influence of
Islam is fairly shallow; we have to know more about the classical
civilization that the Dutch found there and whether a resurgence of it
is possible. Considering the art I've seen out of Indonesia, I doubt
that it suffers from the kind of cultural/historical amnesia that
Mariategui sought to dispel among the Indians of Peru.
Let's not be too quick to minimize Indonesia's revolutionary options.
valis
