John Roosa explains how both Prabowo and Jokowi are advertising themselves as the legatees of Indonesia’s first President, Sukarno.
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Which Sukarno imitator would you prefer? The fellow wearing the black fez, just like the one Sukarno wore, or the fellow professing Sukarno’s slogans?
This is the choice facing Indonesia’s voters in the July 9 presidential election. The race between Prabowo Subianto and Joko Widodo (Jokowi) pits one version of Sukarno against another version. Both candidates advertise themselves as the authentic legatees of the country’s first president. Why are they appropriating the symbols and words of a long-dead president? Suharto, the army general who deposed Sukarno, spent his 32 years in power discrediting him as a relic of the “Old Order.” Why is his ghost still hovering around Indonesian politics?
Prabowo, the former lieutenant general and black ops specialist, likes the visual associations: his microphones are of a 1950s design like those Sukarno was photographed with; his white jacket is like the one Sukarno wore; the backdrops behind his photo-ops contain Sukarno portraits. His campaign managers claimed the large house they are using as their headquarters, Rumah Polonia, was once occupied by Sukarno. In fact, it was occupied by one of his wives, Yurike Sanger, and Sukarno only dropped in for the occasional conjugal visit.
The tempo doeloe (old times) style of the campaign launch at Sanger’s former house went to the head of Amien Rais, a leader of an allied political party, who took the microphone to improbably suggest that Prabowo’s heavy-set, droopy-cheeked face resembled Sukarno’s. Rais was like a drunken father of the bride at a wedding party as he watched his protégé, Hatta Rajasa, a faceless political operative, step forward as Prabowo’s running mate. Hatta was chosen because he knows more about the secrets of the ruling oligarchs than just about anyone else: he has been a cabinet minister for the last 13 years and Coordinating Minister of Economic Affairs for the last four. That his name is the same as Sukarno’s co-proclaimer of independence is just serendipitous. Prabowo’s campaign managers hoped to take advantage of the coincidence by using the building where Sukarno and Hatta wrote the declaration of independence in 1945 as the site of the campaign launch. They were disappointed to learn that it is a protected landmark.
Prabowo’s invocation of Sukarno’s spirit seems bizarre given that he is the ideological child of Suharto’s New Order and the biological child of a famous enemy of Sukarno’s. His father, a Dutch-educated economist, Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, collaborated with the CIA to sabotage Sukarno’s government and establish a parallel government in Sumatra in the late 1950s. The attempt failed and Sumitro was labeled a traitor. Prabowo (born 1951) partly grew up outside the country in places such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur where his family lived in exile. Sumitro only returned in 1968, after Sukarno had been driven out of power and kept under house arrest (at the house of his Japanese wife, Ratna Sari Dewi). Back in Jakarta, Sumitro became the Minister of Trade and a father figure to the US-trained economists of the so-called “Berkeley mafia” who were helping engineer the New Order’s great natural resource sell-off. Prabowo’s family owes its fortune to the Suharto regime.
What Prabowo sees in Sukarno is the image of a powerful, charismatic leader. He admires the Sukarno who emasculated the political parties and ruled by decree during the Guided Democracy years (1959-66). Prabowo has said that he would like to create a new version of Guided Democracy. His political philosophy from the 1990s, when he started speaking to journalists, to the present consists of essentially a single point: Indonesia needs a strong leader. His speeches and his party’s literature revolve around this point. Gerindra, like its emblem of the Garuda (the bird on which Lord Vishnu rode), is just a vehicle; it is designed to ferry its god to the presidential palace, an earthly paradise for worshippers of state power. Prabowo and his billionaire brother created the political party so that he could run for president. He has had no patience for the day-to-day wrangling of law-making and the rule of law: he has not served as a member of parliament. He has no experience with government, only with the military, business, and the business of the military (as an international arms trader). His entire political career has been an exercise in personal aggrandisement.
Gerindra’s manifesto characterises the post-Suharto political system as “liberal democracy” that is not in accordance with the “national culture.” Electoral democracy is decentered and dissolute; it has made the body politic flaccid, preventing a “strong national leadership” from standing erect. In Prabowo’s mind, everything about a country – the quality of its economic system, culture, and international standing – depends on the “leadership factor.” The solution for all of Indonesia’s ills is a “strong national leadership,” meaning himself, the great one riding the $300,000 Lusitano horse.
Prabowo’s version of the F├╝hrerprinzip cannot be equated to Sukarno’s without anachronism. Sukarno built a cult around his leadership at a time when the nation was in an existential crisis: the Constitutional Assembly was deadlocked on the basic principle of the state, with the Islamic political parties insisting on an Islam as the basic principle; army colonels in the outer islands had set up a rival government with help from Prabowo’s father and the Dulles brothers; armed partisans of an Islamic state terrorized West Java, even in areas close to the capital; the country was under martial law; cabinets had trouble lasting for more than a few months. And so on. Sukarno, as a product of the mass struggle for independence, presented himself as the “tongue” of the people, their voice, not their backbone or élan vital. His July 5, 1959 Dekrit was a last resort, an unwanted outcome. This authoritarian polity was not what he had worked towards since becoming a political leader in the 1920s, even as he put the best face on it.
Prabowo is condemning “liberal democracy” at a time when the Indonesian state is not facing an emergency, when much can be done to expand the rule of law and democratic rights. His ideas have not changed since he was part of Suharto’s praetorian guard. A journalist interviewed him in 1997: “He quotes academic studies that claim that a viable democracy can only be maintained after a society reaches a per capita GNP of around $2,000 (Indonesia is at $940). In the meantime, he says, there must be stability to achieve a basic economic level of welfare.” One knows it’s a fool’s game when the goalposts keep moving: Indonesia’s GDP per capita today is about $3,500 but supposedly it is still not enough to have a “liberal democracy.”
Prabowo fills his speeches with the populist, anti-imperialist rhetoric that has been the stock-in-trade of the Sukarnoist political tradition. He condemns the privatization of state-owned companies, deregulation pushed by the IMF, and the money politics behind Indonesian elections. According to him, foreign corporations, neoliberal policy wonks, and kleptocrats conspire to exploit the sweated labor of Indonesian peasants and workers. It is hard to take the rhetoric seriously coming from a wealthy capitalist who has been negligent in paying his own workers. Gerindra would not exist without the infusions of money from his brother, Hashim, the 32nd richest man in Indonesia according to Forbes. (If Prabowo becomes president one can be sure Hashim will quickly rise in the rankings.) Prabowo’s opportunistic use of the Sukarnoist rhetoric has occasionally landed him in trouble. Because of his promises to reassert state ownership over unnamed foreign-owned businesses, Hashim had to issue a press release to assure spooked investors that his brother has no plans to repeat Sukarno’s nationalization policies.
For the sake of historical accuracy, he should build his campaign around Suharto nostalgia. Prabowo wants to return the country to some form of the pre-engineered electoral system and unaccountable presidency of Suharto’s time. The problem he faces is that Suharto lacked one thing that he needs to win elections: the image of a virile, charismatic public speaker forcefully denouncing enemies and rallying “the masses.” Suharto’s public image – the quiet, reserved, non-ideological administrator – was designed to be the antithesis of Sukarno’s. Prabowo is designing a new mutant creature, transplanting the wild, romantic heart of Sukarno into the stiff, rotting corpse of Suhartoism.
If Prabowo invokes Sukarno to legitimate his retrograde, personalistic politics, Jokowi invokes Sukarno to legitimate a polar opposite political agenda. Jokowi, the choice of Sukarno’s biological daughter, Megawati (whose mother is another wife, Fatmawati), to be her party’s presidential candidate, represents a clear break with the existing politics of rent-seeking. As mayor of Solo (2005-12) and governor of Jakarta (2012-14), he cracked down on the civil servants’ bribe-taking and embezzling, thereby freeing up money to be spent on public goods. The progress in just two years in dealing with Jakarta’s problems, such as flooding, traffic congestion, lack of green space, and poor public health, has been impressive, especially when compared with the passivity of previous governors. Jokowi repeatedly states that the government has enough revenue to finance social welfare projects, as long as the revenue is not diverted into private pockets. He has shown what can be done when civil servants are serving the public.
Jokowi, unlike Sukarno and Prabowo, is not given to grandstanding. His speeches, effective and straightforward, have no flair. For his campaign slogan, he has borrowed Sukarno’s formula of Trisakti – the three sakti-s. Sakti connotes a kind of sacred or magical power. In a 1963 speech, Sukarno called for Indonesia to be “standing on its own feet” in its politics, economics and culture. At the time, Sukarno was defending the peculiarities of Guided Democracy. Jokowi has no desire to return to that form of authoritarianism. His interpretation of Trisakti is generic, abstracted from the original context. For Jokowi, who claimed Trisakti to be his guiding principle as early as 2012, it has practical import. It means, for instance, in economic terms, a greater emphasis on domestic production for domestic consumption, a reduction in the massive importation of things such as rice and sugar that can be easily produced in Indonesia. It means deriving greater revenue from the mines and oil wells that have so far enriched foreign corporations and a small group of local oligarchs, such as Aburizal Bakrie, the head of Golkar who has joined forces with Prabowo.
Jokowi’s commitment to the rule of law means that he is trying to overcome the entrenched legacy of both Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and Suharto’s New Order. Unlike every other presidential candidate since the first post-Suharto democratic election in 1999, he is seriously proposing to improve what social scientists call state capacity – its ability to collect taxes and spend that tax money on public goods – instead of just reshuffling the same set of rent-seekers. Prabowo has reportedly pledged a certain number of ministries to two of the parties supporting him (Golkar and PKS). That is the usual practice: the parties of the winning coalition receive ministerial posts as rewards. It is a sublime experience for them, sometimes prompting tears. They then proceed to mercilessly squeeze all the money they can out from their departments. With Jokowi, there is a chance that things will turn out differently. He has stated that he will not reward his allied parties with ministries.
Jokowi’s “vision and mission” statement is a detailed 42-page document, quite distinct from Prabowo’s 9-page, insubstantial, hastily written statement. While it contains some boilerplate prose, it also contains concrete proposals and carefully considered ideas. In elaborating the meaning of Trisakti, Jokowi’s statement lists nine priorities for his administration. Implicitly alluding to Sukarno’s Nine Points speech of June 1966 (Nawaksara), in which Sukarno defended his record against accusations from the newly triumphant Suharto, Jokowi names the priorities the Nine Ideals (Nawacita). One ideal is to “uphold human rights and reach just resolutions for past cases of human rights violations.” Jokowi specifically mentions the “1965 Tragedy” and the case for which Prabowo was responsible: the disappearance of political activists in 1998 (p. 27).
When it comes to imitating Sukarno, Jokowi is as much an imposter as Prabowo. It could not be otherwise. Sukarno was a protean and unique figure. Jokowi adopts the left-wing populism of Sukarno while (thankfully) repudiating the authoritarian tendencies. Prabowo adopts the authoritarian tendencies while insincerely mouthing the rhetoric of left-wing populism. One champions the rule of law. The other champions himself as Il Duce. That both of them are emphasizing their allegiance to Sukarno indicates the enduring hold he has over the public’s imagination of state power.
Sukarno tried to embody the entire nation in himself and believed in the impossible idea that he could singlehandedly bind all the disparate groups together. Every year on independence day, he stepped behind a bank of microphones to deliver a lengthy speech that explained where the nation had come from, where it was, and where it was going. It was nothing like a US president’s “state of the union” address. It was about the meaning of the nation’s existence. The speech was broadcast over the state radio stations and many Indonesians reverently listened at the same time in sonic communion. He once said his monologue over the airwaves was really “a two-way conversation between Sukarno-the-man and Sukarno-the-People.”
In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz wrote of the medieval kings of Europe having both a mortal body and an eternal body. As the embodiment of the entire state, the king’s body was also the “body politic.” It was a conception of royal power that can only be grasped by considering some political ideas as simultaneously theological ideas. The Indonesian state, like all other states today, carries its own theology, involving itself in ideas of immortality, the sacred, and the sublime. We have not transcended the medieval state in this respect, only sublimated it in different forms. As Benedict Anderson has argued, nationalism is better understood as a religion than an ideology.
Sukarno, given his central role in formulating the permanent state ideology (Pancasila), proclaiming independence, an irreversible event of eternal significance (sekali merdeka, tetap merdeka; once independent, forever independent), and ruling as its first president (appointed at one point as “president for life”), seems destined to reign as the immortal corpus mysticum of Indonesia’s body politic.
Sukarno is dead. Long live Sukarno.
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Professor John Roosa is a historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Jokowi and Prabowo wouldn’t know Sukarno from a Varanus komodoensis. Are we going to see a Bandung Conference of 2014 with Jokowi and Prabowo trying to outmatch Sukarno, and each other, in delusion of Third World grandeur ? Which political actor will also play the role of Adam Malik ? Prabowo’s and Jokowi’s legacy and pedigree are certainly located somewhere in Indonesia, but not with Sukarno. They may try to match Sukarno in hubris, but not much else, unless they are also planning to threaten Malaysia again. This is typical Indonesian flights of fancy, and (speaking of Malaysia) will disappear like an airplane into thin air. Sukarno and Marhaenism are dead, buried and gone, Jokowi and Prabowo may wish to articulate their own philosophical visions for Indonesia, but these visions will have absolutely no provenance in Sukarno’s leadership, Sukarno’s personality and Sukarno’s soul.
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A great read – carefully constructed and beautifully written. Thanks, John.
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They should first reveal how many wives or mistresses they have before comparing to Soekarno.
Or probably how they planning to team up with other countries to massacre their own people. Or probably how they going to push the country into a communist or probably worst state.
My feeling would be, we do not care how much they want to compare to less-than-normal President. (Just like how Kerry had compared himself how distinguished he was in Vietnam war as compare to Bush Jr, votes don’t lie, and he lose the election, people just do not care).
The point is are they really suitable for President? Would the be able to deliver whatever they promised? Gerindra has their plan set when they win the election, but all their plans come down to one thing, money.
And how will they generate those money if they are not planning to borrow from foreign funding (reduced borrowing according to them and given that Indonesia already owed a lot of money). Maybe they should elaborate on how they going to raise those funds rather than all the “paper talk”.
Until then, there are probably high percentage of people going to be Golput.
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“Or probably how they going to push the country into a communist or probably worst state.”
Still have problems with Communism eh, McCarthy? Sad
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A beautifully written and devastatingly effective critique of Prabowo. Thank you for the great read.
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Wonderful article, truly enjoyed reading it.
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Absolutely agree with this opinion: “Prabowo is designing a new mutant creature, transplanting the wild, romantic heart of Sukarno into the stiff, rotting corpse of Suhartoism.”
Jokowi stated that he will not reward his allied parties with ministries; yeah right, cause he is not the one who will defermine who will be the ministers–Megawati will.
Soekarno-wanna-be is dead. Long live Golput.
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“When it comes to imitating Sukarno, Jokowi is as much an imposter as Prabowo. It could not be otherwise.”
AGREED!
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An excellent read – no other piece has added this much needed context to the presidential debate and what it stands for. The putrid smell from Prabowo’s campaign stinks all the way to heaven, which no wax body double could ever mask. Prabowo’s Sukarno symbols are more transparent because his body is really Suharto’s rotting corpse, while Jokowi has already changed things for the better, is not self-serving, and is even, most extraordinarily, attempting to buck the way of doing politics.
However, a note of caution is surely in order here, because if Jokowi is elected, we could get less of Sukarno’s slogans and more of the emperor’s new clothes. Despite his best intentions, Jokowi may be bound not only by the image of a powerful past president, but by a system that he may not be able to change. Assuming politics IS about invoking powerful people for a moment, could it be explained how Jokowi’s appointment of Jusuf Kalla as his running mate (whose speech to a Pemuda Pancasila conference in ‘an act of killing’, betrays a ‘rotting corpse’ scarcely different to Prabowo’s) shows an appetite for a new kind of politics? Is this a pragmatic move, and a means to an end of election winning? An attempt to take on an elder statesman to supply gravitas, or what?
Time magazine just ran an attempt to take down the Obama-Jokowi comparison, which was far less informative than the above. Nevertheless, thinking about that comparison does draw attention to a) how much hype has surrounded Jokowi’s campaign, like Obama’s, and b) how Jokowi may be unable (if not unwilling) to change much of any. Again, time (history, not the magazine) will tell if the comparison holds, and I hope it doesn’t. But until then, probably best to hold the horses leading the funeral cortege.
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Many Indonesians dont read beyond local newspapers that are biased or gossip based, thus to be a Sukarno look alike is a strategy to get voters. I remember as a child in the 80s my neighbor had a huge painting of Sukarno. The reason why PDIP still exist is because of Sukarno. Jokowi is not Sukarno, but he needs Sukarno loyalist.
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I must say, although Roosa is a great historian (especially for his work on G30S), I find the article extremely one-sided, and therefore biased (despite it having many merits). One instance is when he wrote about Jokowi’s Import-substitution policy intentions. Prabowo from Day 1 has endorsed a similar policy, especially in agriculture. Political preferences aside, Import substitution industrialisation policies have proven to create massive inflation, and hence debt, due to the problem of “crisis of capital” – such as what Brazil and Argentina is facing right now. Moreover, we all know the implications of taking production efforts domestically: inefficiency, and more gov’t debt.
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I was not talking about “import substitution industrialization policies.” I was talking about a policy to strengthen Indonesia’s existing production in non-industrial goods. It isn’t exactly “substitution” for Indonesia to produce more sugar and soybeans, especially when some of the imports of those items are illegal, outside of the government’s quotas, and are artificially suppressing domestic production. Think about Indonesia’s existing situation before reaching for textbook formulas, which, by the way, aren’t always true. It isn’t as if the international market in agricultural goods is a level playing field: the major economies subsidize their agriculture. For instance, most of the sugar Indonesia imports is from Thailand which has heavily subsidized agriculture for a long time. You’re right that Prabowo has endorsed a similar policy but I thought the article made clear my belief that he doesn’t mean a word of what he says about nationalist economics. It is simply false that govt policies to expand domestic production only mean more inefficiency and government debt.
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I agree with the previous comment. The article is one sided and biased. Saying that Jokowi did a remarkable job in being governor if Jakarta was an overstatement. Like many governors before him, many of the promises he made wasnt followed through. Traffic is still an issue, and flooding is also still an issue. If you want to say that he have been working hard, yes, but only to an extent that was acceptable. He have been very busy with the media, but thats just for appearance. If anything, I can say that Ahok is the one who are actually doing a lot of the work. Jokowi to me seems more like a front man, a charismatic leader. I take Jokowi as someone who can dream, but unable to realize them, just like dreamers do. I dont want to say much of Prabowo. All I know is that he is a business man, and he have been laying the groundwork for years.
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Isn’t it a bit naive to expect Jokowi to fix the problems you used against him in such a short period of time (2 years)? Such an one-sided allocation of onus amounts to nothing short of Prabowo apologitism. Whilst I do not share the enthusiasm of the author on Jokowi’s performance as a governor, his examples are perfectly valid. Jokowi did do an impressive job comparing to his predecessors. Besides, that’s not really the core of the author’s comparison of the two candidates anyway – he placed much stronger emphasis on the campaign platforms of both sides and how Prabowo and Jokowi present themselves to the electorate.
To dismiss the article just because you don’t share the author’s more optimistic assessment of Jokowi’s performance as a governor (a small part of the article) is ridiculous.
Equally ridiculous, unless you have some insider informations that somehow escape the rest of us, I doubt if you can really make the claim that Ahok is the one doing the work whereas Jokowi is jut an empty media darling. In light of your reluctance to discuss Prabowo beyond a preposterous statement implying that his pedigree as a businessman makes him more experienced in laying the groundwork – whatever that means. If Prabowo’s family’s wealth is the winning aspect of his CV, you must consider that his extraordinary wealth has a lot more to do with his family’s connection to Suharto during the New Order than Prabowo’s managerial genius.
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Sorry got lost in my own sentences; by “in light of…” I meant to say that your reluctance in discussing Prabowo beyond your statement about his business pedigree seems to suggest that you have little faith in persuading the readers here to agree with your assessment of Prabowo.
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I totally agree with what Angrymagpie said.
It’s a fact that people always question Jokowi ability, due to his short tenure as Jakarta Governor and whether he will be leading the government or the head of PDI-P will be leading it. (Which strikes me weird why PDI-P has not hand over the party leader role to Jokowi).
However, one thing that has never been discussed is on the ability of Prabowo in the first place.
People only assume because he is a businessman, he will be fine. This is quite weird given that, one of his companies Kertas Nusantara is highly in debt and owed workers few months of salaries, alleged Rp14 Triliun (not sure if it has been resolved, but this question his ability to “care” about people and his “ability” as an overall).
And whether this issue is directly in conflict with 2008 Law No. 42 about Presidential and Vice Presidential Election, for the presidential candidates.
Also not forgetting how Prabowo has been barred from entering United States of America in year 2000, allegedly over the 1998 incident, who he himself refusing to talk about it. (Also not forgetting that he is actually discharged from Military rather than retiring from it)
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Both Joko Widodo are products of the Suharto ara, both they manifest itself in different ways. For Prabowo, its desire to return to New Order authoritarianism. For Joko Widodo, his policies are solidly New Order during the last year of New Order. During the last year he has moved the PDI-P rightward. The talk of ending the fuel subsidies and within five years, refusing to budge on raising minimum wage alot during his second year for that he did not get support of the labor unions. Most Indonesians want a leader who has the quiet humble administrator (doer) — Suharto, but without the brutality. Joko Widodo able to do that.
I think the author places too much blame on a Suharto, the New Order was built by a group of people, it was only when Suharto tried to concentrate his power, did those groups become more alienated. Do you think Suharto alone was responsible for the anti-Communist purges?
Both wrap themselves in Sukarno’s clothing, both are a product of the Suharto period, but just in different ways.
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I think a more accurate description is both Prabowo and Jokowi manifestation of the Suharto, trying to wrap themselves in clothes of Sukarno.
Prabowo desire for a strong President represent the harking for strong state of the Suharto era. However, Jokowi represent the yearning for a humble administrator, but without Suharto’s brutality. Jokowi and others like him have shifted the PDI-P rightward, with the talk of getting rid of the subsidies and turning his back on the labor unions.
Just like Suharto, Jokowi is best when he talks about concrete programs and policies, not making vague statements.
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If getting rid of the fuel subsidy is shifting PDI-P rightward, how should a leftist political platform approach this issue? Is the continuation of the fuel subsidy still a viable policy in Indonesia anyhow?
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[…] orang menyebarkan artikel kampanye yang kebanyakan isinya (mohon maaf) sampah, saya menemukan satu artikel yang sangat menarik dari Prof. John Roosa, seorang sejarawan dari University of British Columbia, yang mempelajari tentang sejarah […]
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[…] In a recent analysis, University of British Columbia historian, John Roosa, has compellingly argued that “in Prabowo’s mind, everything about a country – the quality of its economic system, […]
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[…] the election, these two essays: Indonesia on the knife’s edge by Edward Aspinall and Sukarno’s two bodies by John Roosa are worth reading to get a sense on how the outside world views this election […]
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[…] time, Prabowo is running as, in effect, the new Sukarno, the nationalist who loudly insists that he will not bow to […]
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“When it comes to imitating Sukarno, Jokowi is as much an imposter as Prabowo. It could not be otherwise.”
Admin on Soekarno Wife “Inggit Garnasih”
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