ABSTRACT
The Republic of Indonesia is the largest and most populous country in Southeast Asia. It comprises a distended archipelago of some 18,000 islands that extend from south of the Indian sub-continent to north of Australia; the most sizeable and important of these are Sumatra, Java (on which is located the capital Jakarta), the major portion of Kalimantan (Borneo), Sulawesi (Celebes) and West Papua Province (known as West Irian Jaya until 2007). They comprise a land area of almost two million square kilometres. Its population of around 260 million is the fourth largest after China, India and the United States. Some ninety per cent of its citizens profess an adherence to Islam and constitute statistically the largest Muslim community in the world. The degree of religious observance varies, however, and orthodox Islamic practice is diluted and combined regionally with underlying Hindu–Buddhist and animist traditions. Islam has been denied a prerogative place in political life through a state philosophy, Pancasila, which was enunciated before independence by the country’s first president, Sukarno. Pancasila enjoins all Indonesians to believe in a single deity but permits them to worship any god of their choice. This philosophy was introduced initially in the interests of religious and cultural tolerance but was then exploited to serve the cause of political demobilization during the authoritarian rule of the country’s second president, and former general, Suharto. An Islamic revival encouraged from the late 1980s for political advantage found expression in sectarian conflict between Muslims and the country’s Christian minority from the late 1990s attendant on an acute economic adversity, which paved the way for the resignation of President Suharto in May 1998. A transitional rule under his constitutional successor, Vice-President B. J. Habibie, enabled a return to democratic practice, which was followed by the election in October 1999 of Abdurrahman Wahid as Indonesia’s fourth president. Although Indonesia is a unitary republic, a law came into effect in January 2001 that gave provincial administrations greater autonomy in education, health, land rights and transport policies as well as investment approvals. Further changes were introduced to the political system in August 2002, when the People’s Consultative Assembly of Indonesia (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat Republik Indonesia, MPR) approved an amendment that required all legislators to be elected to office. Henceforth, the MPR could no longer elect the country’s president and vice-president. Instead, they would be directly elected with a significant majority of more than half of the popular vote and at least twenty per cent of the vote in half the provinces otherwise there would be a second round of elections. This amendment eventually saw Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Partai Demokrat (Democrat Party, PD) become the sixth president of Indonesia and the first to be directly elected through elections in 2004. Another significant change was the establishment of the House of Regional Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD), which held its first elections in 2004, replacing the 200 unelected members of the MPR who represented various provinces, districts and municipalities across the country.
