What will US-Indonesian relations look like under new President Prabowo? : NPR

A vendor holds a portrait of Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto at a market in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24. Achmad Ibrahim/AP .

switch captionAchmad Ibrahim/AP

A vendor holds a portrait of Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto at a market in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24.

Achmad Ibrahim/AP

SEOUL, South Korea Prabowo Subianto's path to the Indonesian presidency now appears clear. After winning his country's vote in February, he weathered legal challenges to his election, with the highest court rejecting calls for a re-vote and allegations of fraud. President Biden and other foreign heads of state sent their congratulations on his election.

But after a year of major elections around the world, big questions remain about the consequences of the vote in the world's third-largest democracy: Has Prabowo turned over a new leaf, or will he bring back the Indonesia towards its authoritarian past? And what will be the relationship between Prabowo and the United States, the country that first trained and supported him and then imposed sanctions on him for alleged human rights violations?

On April 22, Indonesia's Constitutional Court rejected a petition by the two losing election candidates, in which they alleged widespread vote buying and government interference. But for many observers, Prabowo's accession to the presidency remains problematic.

“I think we can easily see, in fact, that this national election was without a doubt the least free and least fair of all the elections that we have had in the post-Suharto period,” says Edward Aspinall, an expert on Indonesian politics at the Australian. National University of Canberra.

The fall of former President Suharto in 1998, after three decades of authoritarian rule, led to a period of democratic reforms, during which elections were generally considered fair.

However, outgoing President Joko Widodo has lifted restrictions on presidential power. Critics say Widodo muzzled the country's anti-corruption watchdog in 2019 by stripping it of its independence and making it a government agency, and placing his 37-year-old son as Prabowo's vice president. Experts suggest Prabowo may not need to further roll back democratic reforms.

Bivitri Susanti, a lecturer at Indonesia's Jentera Law School, believes that given the Biden administration's emphasis on global democracy, the United States should speak out against “dynastic politics.”

“If the United States really wants to build an alliance on democracy and the rejection of authoritarianism,” she said, “I think it's a big step toward authoritarianism and therefore needs to be criticized publicly “.

It's unclear what kind of president Prabowo will be, and even critics admit he has an opportunity to show he's changed since his military days, when he was accused of committing serious abuses against civilians.

During the election campaign, Prabowo declared that “power and sovereignty are in the hands of the Indonesian people” and that the country's future would be decided by “one person, one vote.”

Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto (left) speaks to reporters with Vice President-elect Gibran Rakabuming Raka (second from left) as they arrive at the General Election Commission's plenary session after challenges to his main rivals against his election victory in Jakarta, April 24. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images .

switch caption Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto (left) speaks to reporters with Vice President-elect Gibran Rakabuming Raka (second from left) as they arrive at the General Election Commission's plenary session after challenges to his main rivals against his election victory in Jakarta, April 24.

Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

But in the past, Aspinall notes, Prabowo has disparaged elections as “too costly and too tiring”, and argued that open opposition to the government “was not compatible with Indonesian national culture, which emphasized on harmony.

Similarly, observers are looking for signs as to whether Prabowo's early attachment to the United States or his later estrangement from it will affect his relations with Washington.

Prabowo graduated from high school at the American School in London, where his family lived in exile. He received special forces training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina (renamed Ft. Liberty in 2022) and officer training at what was then Fort Benning, Georgia, now Ft. Moore, in the 1980s.

But Prabowo was dismissed in 1998 as head of Kopassus, Indonesia's special forces command, for his role in alleged human rights abuses, including the killing of civilians during the invasion and from the Indonesian occupation of East Timor in 1975 until 1999, and the disappearance of student activists during protests against Suharto. in 1998.

Prabowo was never prosecuted for his actions, as part of what Aspinall calls a “Faustian bargain” between the new civilian government and Suharto's outgoing generals, which granted the generals immunity in exchange for giving up of their influence on politics.

Prabowo has denied the allegations against him. But “there was ample evidence that Kopassus and others were essentially operating as a criminal enterprise. Death squads, so to speak,” said Tim Rieser, a former foreign policy adviser to former Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy.

Rieser helped craft the Leahy Act, which prohibits the U.S. government from assisting foreign military forces involved in gross human rights violations. And Leahy himself argued, Rieser says, that “if there was ever a place to enforce the Leahy law,” it was Indonesia.

As a result of this law, the United States severed ties with Kopassus in 1999 and banned Prabowo from entering the United States from 2000 until he became defense minister in 2020.

(The United States has recently considered whether to apply the Leahy Act to the Israeli military for human rights violations against Palestinian civilians, but has so far imposed no sanctions.)

Rieser describes Prabowo as placing the United States in a dilemma between its geopolitical interests and the values ​​it proclaims.

“We need partners and Indonesia is a country that the United States wants to be a partner with,” he said. “On the other hand, I think we make a mistake, and we have done it too often, when we fail to uphold the core values ​​and principles that people expect of us.”

Rieser notes that part of the problem is competing priorities between branches of government, like the Pentagon and the State Department.

Congress banned U.S. training of Indonesia's armed forces from 1992 to 1995, but the Pentagon continued training under its own separately funded program, in what former Rep. Nancy Pelosi called a clear “circumvention of Congress.” “.

Another problem is the change in historical priorities. The United States supported Suharto during the Cold War to fight against communism. He called for him to step down after the end of the Cold War, when the Clinton administration was trying to promote democracy and riots broke out in Indonesia over authoritarianism, corruption and economic hardship in 1998.

Many Indonesians are too young to remember this story.

But the U.S. government, Rieser says, will hopefully learn from its Cold War experiences and, he says, “when someone like that [Prabowo] comes to power, we will always stand up for what we believe in” and publicly support Indonesians who are fighting for democracy.

For now, however, world leaders, including President Biden, have only offered congratulations to the president-elect.

Yosef Riadi contributed to this report in Jakarta.

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