As Karl Marx famously noted, all great historical facts and individuals appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Indonesian President and retired army general Prabowo Subianto, a feared enforcer in the blood-stained Suharto dictatorship, recently played the obsequious clown on the world stage when he posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) of a November 8 telephone call with United States President-elect Donald Trump.
Prabowo was, unsuccessfully, fishing for an invitation to Mar-a-Lago to personally congratulate Trump.
“Wherever you are, I'm willing to fly to congratulate you personally, Sir,” said a beaming Prabowo.
But all he received in return was a thank you and a patronisingly racist pat on the head: “Your English is so good.”
Prabowo, who received military special forces and officer training in the US, responded: “Thank you Sir! All my training is American, Sir!”
The newly inaugurated Indonesian president still does not see how humiliating this exchange was and is still proudly promoting it in his social media feed.
Strangely, his advisers haven’t told him to remove it, despite the international ridicule that followed the video going viral. Some commentators say this is because Prabowo is surrounded by a coterie of “longtime aides, mainly drawn from the armed forces and his own family” who “are not ones to object to his flights of fancy or to deliver bad news”.
This is not the first clownish thing Prabowo has done since he became president on October 20, after winning an election described by Edward Aspinall, an expert on Indonesian politics at the Australian National University, as the “least free and the least fair of any election we've had in the post-Suharto period”.
From October 25-27 all members of Prabowo’s bloated “Red and White cabinet” put on military uniforms and took part in a military-style boot camp, cuttingly derided on social media as “glamping for ministers”.
All the cabinet members (including five who were once late 1990s anti-Suharto dictatorship activists in the People’s Democratic Party-PRD) took part in this pantomime, saluting each other and riding around the military base in golf buggies. They proudly posted videos of all this on their social media.
However, if Prabowo and his cabinet seem clownish there remains the fear that he may restore the notorious “dual function” powers of the military that were an essential part of the Suharto dictatorship.
Prabowo’s special forces (Kopassus) career is littered with war crimes carried out in East Timor, West Papua and against the young democracy activists, as Amnesty International and other human rights groups have documented. He was banned from the US for these war crimes and dishonourably discharged in 1998 over human rights abuses by Kopassus.
But if Indonesia is losing some of the post-Suharto democratic gains, this process was begun by former President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). Jokowi weakened restraints on presidential power, stripped the anti-corruption watchdog of its independence in 2019, and unconstitutionally manoeuvered his 37-year-old son Gibran into position as Prabowo's vice president.
Independent Indonesian scholar and social activist Dede Oetomo warned Green Left that Prabowo may prove to be a dangerous clown.
“To someone growing up under a military dictatorship, the whole circus chillingly reeks of a return to militarism.
“Despite his jingoistic posturing during the campaign, he has also showed himself to be just a lackey of the capitalist West. It is apparent that all he is after is money that he and his cronies can play with.”
Kelik Ismunanto, a veteran of the anti-Suharto dictatorship movement, former PRD activist and co-founder of the progressive publication Merdika.id told GL that Prabowo’s presidency can be understood as a continuation of the Jokowi dynasty.
“For us, friends who have been involved in the PRD, we see that the Prabowo-Gibran government is a continuation of Jokowi's government. A government held hostage to the trap of Jokowi's interests, in order to continue Jokowi’s power.
“Prabowo's government is trapped by a political elite which, during its 10 years in power, has produced more negative impacts than positive impacts.
“As a continuation of Jokowi's government, Prabowo must negotiate with Jokowi in placing people or continuing the policies of a reckless neoliberal regime, as the PRD characterised the Jokowi government as recently as 2020.”
Prabowo’s role, Ismunanto added, was to deliver “policy demagogy, issue more nationalistic statements, rather than implementing policies that are pro-people and pro-poor”.
Stunts like the cabinet boot camp give the appearance that he is charting a new course, when reality says otherwise.
Prabowo is also limited by “ballooning state debt built up during Jokowi's administration — debt repayments that will mature in the coming years,” Ismunanto added.
“The Indonesian economy has not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and there are indications that the garment industry is starting to collapse.”
The latest company to fall is Sritex, “the icon of the national garment industry”.
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Sritex has been declared bankrupt by the courts and while Prabowo rushed to declare in October that his government would not allow the country’s textile giant to fail, industry minister Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita has now clarified that “there is no discussion of a bailout”.
Sritex has a workforce of about 50,000 and so far 2500 have been stood down indefinitely. So the fear of mass layoffs remains.
The collapse of the garment industry should be seen as part of a general decline of the industrial sector, said Ismunanto.
This is followed by the decline in the number of people classified as “middle class” by Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics — from 57.3 million (21.5%) in 2019 to 47.8 million (17.1%) this year.
This section of the population, said Ismunanto, holds up the domestic economy through household consumption.
Over the coming months, the character of the Prabowo regime will be further tested but what is now abundantly clear is that it remains a loyal servant of US imperialism, he said.
The ridiculous excuses, including the idea that Prabowo represented a more independent nationalist turn — made by some fellow anti-Suharto dictatorship activists who have joined the Prabowo camp — lie in tatters.