ABSTRACT
Indonesia’s size is often forgotten. Its reach exceeds the distance from California to Florida or from Ireland to eastern Turkey. No account of the influence of oil on Indonesian business can ignore the symbiosis between the resource itself, and its military custodians. There has been a long immersion by the brass in the black gold. Despite growing professionalism in more recent years, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (popularly known by their Indonesian language acronym Abri) remain enamoured of an elastic, and corrupting concept. Dual-functioneering became a bedrock norm after Sukarno’s departure. One immediate result was a tightening of a grid-lock of Abri commands blanketing the archipelago. There is little evidence however that Abri’s commercial zeal is loosening, or that market forces are now permeating an economy cluttered by formal, and informal monopolies and by various areas of enterprise off-limits to other entrepreneurs by reason of cosy favouritism and mutual back-scratching.
