News from the Indonesian Left

I was asked today by a reader and comrade about the state of the Left in Indonesia. To be quite honest, I've not kept up with developments in contemporary Indonesia. There are, however, several developments worth mentioning.

Max Lane in Australia's Green Left Weekly provides a report on the latest moves of the People's Democratic Party (PRD), the organization formed by students in the last few years of the Suharto regime. Since leading the street protests that forced Suharto from power, the PRD has splintered and fragmented several times over: there were splinter parties, splinters of splinter parties, splits within the mass groups, and several notable sellouts by PRD cadres to major parties.

Lane writes that the PRD is attempting to branch out now, by forming the National Liberation Party of Unity (in Indonesian, Papernas) in preparation for a new round of elections in 2009. Some of the groups claimed in Papernas's coalition include Wahli (Friends of the Earth), Agra (a peasant organization), the FMN (National Student Front), and PRP (Working People's Association).

Now for the hard part: While it may seem from the inclusion of the words "National Liberation" and emphasis on the United Front that the group is taking a turn (however slight) toward Mao, one needs to be cognizant of two things. First, that in Indonesia, there has always been a tendency toward use of radical sloganeering even in the most decidedly tepid parties -- for instance, the party of the left-liberal daughter of Sukarno, Rachmawati, was named the "Vanguard Party". Second, that this is the report from the member of the Australian Socialist Alliance, whose interpretation of the United Front tends toward the Trotskyist version.

While avoiding taking the sectarian cheapie, there is something to be said about how Indonesian politics have been traditionally been more opaque than a brick wall. There are reasons for this in the Left, of course -- the fact that Indonesia has anti-communist laws on the books that would make Senator Joe McCarthy look pinko in comparison being the big one. Australia's Trotskyists, to their credit, have traditionally served as a means of helping sustain the movement -- but however well-intentioned and internationalist, there does come a point at which the training wheels must come off.

(Photo by the Flickr photoset by Indonesian superblogger Wimar Witoelar)

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