Brookings: Topics - Indonesia

Democracy, Human Rights and the Emerging Global Order

Ted Piccone — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:12:00 -0400

The Brookings Institution’s Managing Global Order project convened a two-day workshop to discuss emerging trends in international support for democracy and human rights and the increasingly complex drivers shaping foreign policies. Bringing together policy makers and experts from emerging and established democratic powers at Greentree, the workshop identified areas of convergence and divergence in foreign policy priorities, methods, and discourse, and extrapolated implications for the evolving global order.

On the first day, participants explored the concepts of democracy and human rights and their promotion within the context of competing national interests. On the second day, the focus shifted to international cooperation on issues of democracy and human rights, especially as seen through the lens of the Arab uprisings and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and the politics that guide the foreign policies of democracies. The discussions, which were held on the basis of the Chatham House rule of non-attribution to specific speakers, are summarized here.

The conversation was predicated on a working definition of democracy as a liberal, representative political system as articulated in various international instruments like the Warsaw Declaration of the Community of Democracies, UN General Assembly Resolution 56/96 of 2001, and the Inter-American Democratic Charter. While recognizing that it takes different forms in different contexts, democracy in this sense reflects such core principles as the separation of powers with checks and balances, civil and political rights, freedom of the press, universal suffrage in free and fair elections, and civilian control of the military. Although participants disagreed to what extent social and economic rights should be emphasized in the expression of democracy, they agreed that all human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing and deserve protection.

Global Governance

In an era when the gap between the demand for and the supply of global governance is growing, it is increasingly urgent that established and emerging democracies find common ground on norms and delivery of global public goods, especially on democracy and human rights issues. There is cause for optimism: Rising democracies like India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Turkey are embracing democracy and human rights at home and to varying degrees promoting them in their neighborhoods. But they are not yet stepping up to address the gap on these and other issues in global governance internationally.

Simultaneously, the rules-based system under which international relations take place is in flux, providing an opportunity to reshape and redirect the global order. Emerging powers emphasize the importance of democratization both domestically, where they are grappling with their own internal processes of reform, and multilaterally, where they question whether actions of established powers are commensurate with their principles, argue for universal application of rules and norms, and insist on a greater voice at the decision-making table. They have the opportunity to shape the future of global governance as leaders and are proving themselves important players in global affairs, but this shift has been more marked at the level of regions and neighborhoods. The results of multipolarity in the global sphere have been more ambiguous and it remains to be seen whether the liberal world order persists or a new framework emerges with rising powers at the helm of a more elastic set of norms. While it appears certain that human rights will remain a durable legacy of the era of Western hegemony, the cause of enlarging democracy stands on less solid footing.

The Democracy Advantage and its Place in Defining National Interests

In the modern era, peace generally reigns amongst democracies. Democracies also perform better than non-democracies at economic development, and democracy, economic development, and regional integration work hand-in-hand to promote peace and stability. Non-democracies are more likely to be failed states spawning internal or external conflict. It would be expected, therefore, that democracies would identify the spread of democracy as in their national interests and would partner on certain issues, such as support for democratic transitions, human rights and rule of law. A state’s designation as a democracy or non-democracy, however, is not necessarily a good predictor of foreign policy alignment. While there is strong convergence on the fundamental principles of human rights, emerging and established democracies favor very different methodologies for addressing threats to such core values, resulting in divergence of policy, politicization and stalemate, as in the case of Syria.

There was consensus that democracy cannot be imposed by external actors, but rather must be pursued organically by a population. It is a path, not a destination. Similarly, countries formulate and express democracy differently based on their unique histories; there is no single model of democracy. Aspiring democratic countries seeking advice from other democracies are increasingly turning to states that have undertaken their own transitions more recently, and they, in turn, are responding positively if and when asked to assist. In fact, the “twinning” model of pairing newer democracies with transitioning states is being prototyped by the Community of Democracies through its project pairing Poland with Moldova, and Slovakia with Tunisia. The G8 has arranged similar pairings through the Deauville Partnership with Arab Countries in Transition, which links leaders in aspiring democracies with G8 partners to build institutional capacity, promote knowledge sharing, and strengthen accountability and good-governance practices. In addition, rising democracies like Indonesia and South Africa have been key players in establishing and utilizing multilateral fora like the Bali Democracy Forum and the African Peer Review mechanism to share experiences and best practices in this domain.

Although participants agreed that democracy must be demand driven, disagreement emerged regarding the universality of democracy promotion. Some felt strongly that countries on the path of democracy have a responsibility to assist those who seek the same path. Others noted the negative connotations associated with democracy promotion and its perceived application as a post-hoc, faux justification for military intervention aimed at regime change, as with U.S. involvement in Iraq. Some also pointed to its selective application, especially when energy security interests take precedence over influencing, punishing, or removing repressive regimes, as with U.S. passivity in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Some in the global South interpret democracy promotion as a U.S. agenda rather than a universal aspiration and wish to construct a unique brand of support for democracy in contrast to the U.S. and E.U. model. Rising democracies seek their own identity (also referred to as strategic autonomy) in an effort to avoid being seen as tools of more established powers. In one respect, this attitude has prompted emerging powers to act timidly with regards to democracy promotion, hiding behind the fig leaves of sovereignty and non-intervention when asked by the international community to act outside their neighborhoods.

Nonetheless, such powers have actively promoted democracy in their regions through both bilateral and multilateral mechanisms. Indonesia, for example, was a key player in leveraging ASEAN to encourage Myanmar to undertake political change and in drafting the first ever ASEAN Declaration of Human Rights. However, emerging powers have been as complacent as established powers in indirectly suppressing democracy when other national interests take precedence, as with India’s less than decisive response to the political crisis in the Maldives, or Brazil’s uncritical support for Cuba. In response to the Arab Spring, rising democracies are for the first time being expected to grapple with the notion of democracy promotion beyond their own regions, an expectation many find difficult to fulfill. The prevalence of extremist ideologies and xenophobia, the increased threat of the tyranny of the majority, and the free and fair election of leaders the international community may dislike all posed significant red flags for emerging (and established) democracies and reinforced their reticence regarding democracy promotion. Other national interests like trade relations, energy dependence, migration and diaspora population concerns present roadblocks to greater international engagement on this issue.

The emergence of other domestic political and economic actors with their own interests and values plays an important role in shaping national interests, especially in emerging democratic powers. Some disagreement concerned which actors had the most influence over the definition of national interests. In Brazil, for example, the private sector may be notably more influential than other domestic players, which complicates a truly national definition of priorities. Parliament plays an uneven and unpredictable role in formulating foreign policy, although legislators in emerging powers have begun taking greater interest. For example, Brazilian congressmen and senators recently joined a coalition with NGOs to hold the foreign minister accountable on human rights issues. While recognizing the important role legislators can play in inserting human rights into foreign policy, some acknowledged that their contribution could also be a mixed blessing due to nationalist, religious or ethnic political motivations.

Much conversation also involved the balancing of interests that sometimes conflict with human rights, such as national security and the economy. Some argued that human rights and democracy support must be managed in a way that does not jeopardize other national interests or relations with key trading partners like China. In this respect, constant calibration between interests and values is vital. Rising democracies will continue to define their own pace of democratization at home and support for democracy and human rights abroad, leading many observers to predict a continued period of inertia and inaction in responding to or preventing democratic breakdowns or mass human rights violations. The international community is thus tasked to advance a mutually respectful collaborative approach that appeals to both emerging and established powers and that achieves results. To successfully reach such a compromise, it must identify approaches the global South feels comfortable employing and develop strategies to bring those tools to bear in new and challenging contexts.

The Arab Uprisings and the Responsibility to Protect

Although the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is embraced as within democratic principles, its primary purpose is not democracy promotion. R2P’s mission is atrocity prevention, though it is difficult to operationalize the concept. The application of R2P in Libya through military intervention authorized by the UN Security Council and the subsequent failure to exercise it in Syria as of yet has revealed many challenges inherent in current understandings of R2P. It also provided an important venue for conversation between established and emerging powers about humanitarian intervention. It is clear that a fundamental shift has taken place regarding humanitarian intervention and that more and more states embrace the broad values expressed by R2P. For example, most of the 118 states that mentioned Syria at the UN General Assembly in 2012 expressed concern about the population, up from less than a third who invoked Kosovo and East Timor in 1999. In addition, the IBSA Dialogue Forum sent a delegation to Syria, as did Turkey, a new rallying of emerging powers to address threats to human rights both inside and outside their own neighborhoods. This level of attention and the unprecedented advocacy of a policy of intervention by rising powers can be attributed at least in part to the improved quality of democracy in the rising democracies.

With the support of emerging powers like South Africa, UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized the use of force in Libya, but elicited rancor from some parties when it resulted in the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi. Suspicions were voiced that Resolution 1973 had acted as cover for regime change, and because it was couched in the language of R2P, states began questioning the concept. In response to this breakdown in consensus, Brazil proposed the Responsibility While Protecting (RWP) principle, which emphasized the sequencing of measures to ensure all options were exhausted before using force, and called for greater accountability and reporting to the Security Council. Participants disagreed as to whether RWP served as a useful basis for conversation between the North and South, or if it represented a counterproductive Brazilian political move that merely inflamed rhetoric. Some of the good will engendered by RWP has begun to disintegrate as the situation in Syria continues to fester with no coordinated international response.

Admittedly, Libya and Syria are very different countries, especially in terms of the roles they play in the strategic interests of key actors. Nevertheless, the application of R2P in Libya but not in Syria highlights the phenomenon of selectivity, a topic of debate throughout the workshop. Participants agreed that crisis situations should be examined on a case-by-case basis, but at the same time many reinforced the global responsibility to support all states that are unable to adequately prevent mass atrocities. Some suggested that selectivity is the principled application of R2P but called for transparency in decision making to better understand a state’s motivations for supporting or denouncing intervention as an option. Others argued that universalizing the concept to make responsibility an obligation at all times in all cases is a fundamental challenge that the international community should pursue. At the very least, discourse must recognize that all states engage in some form of selectivity in order to advance the conversation.

It was pointed out that international responses to the Arab uprisings have been uneven not only in atrocity prevention but also democracy support. Emerging powers hesitate to lend support to the application of R2P in Syria lest it be used as a mask for regime change, as some perceive to have been in the case in Libya. However, established and emerging powers alike have not exercised leadership in universally supporting calls for democracy in countries of the Middle East because of overarching security concerns like energy and relations with Israel. And although emerging and established powers share an interest in energy security, they still differ on methodologies; a country may have leverage in a situation short of intervening militarily which might result in strategies that are most cost effective in money and lives. For example, South Africa resisted intervening militarily in Zimbabwe in response to democracy and human rights crises, despite international calls to do so, but was able, in their view, to improve elections there through alternative means. Likewise, it refused to intervene militarily in Sudan, instead employing a triangulation strategy that led to secession. Similarly, Turkey initially prioritized dialogue and consultation with the Assad regime, relying on the relationship it had cultivated with Syria over the last ten years to exhaust all potential peaceful solutions. IBSA also sent a high-level diplomatic mission to Syria to try to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict and thereby ward off military intervention.

The Arab uprisings have fundamentally challenged the Western idea of the separation of church and state, and Arab democracy demands a redefinition of secularism that allows religious values, but not rules and regulations, to take root in society. Discussants will continue to have to confront this new reality as the conversation continues regarding democratization in the Arab world.

Current understandings of preventive diplomacy tools like R2P – especially how they relate to and affect emerging democracies – must be improved. The discussion prompted by the Brazilian proposal of RWP highlights the need for further conversation or clarification about R2P as a tool. There is still fear that R2P provides a blank check to pursue national interests rather than prevent atrocities. Therefore, a refocusing on R2P’s purpose and intentions is needed, and may reduce objections to its proper application. In addition, a multilateral coalition must be built and maintained to address mass atrocities such as in Syria. This requires ongoing messaging with all partners and the public to maintain support and communicate expectations and mission objectives.

Tools for International Cooperation on Democracy and Human Rights

Recent events show a clear incapacity of international mechanisms to effectively address major threats to democracy and human rights. While established democracies are quicker to pursue coercive tactics and emerging democracies strongly prefer dialogue and reconciliation, a variety of tools are available and being tested on the world stage. Indonesia seeks to make democracy and human rights foundational concerns at existing institutions like ASEAN, its new Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), and the G20. Indonesia’s leadership in the adoption of the ASEAN Declaration of Human Rights and the establishment of the Bali Democracy Forum underscore this commitment. The Community of Democracies creates issue-based working groups to involve government and civil society and maximizes technology through the LEND network, connecting key leaders in transitioning countries with those in transitioned countries.

Another key tool touted by many participants is reliance on regional bodies as antenna in noting potential problems and as early movers in response to crises. The AU and SADC both have provisions to suspend any country that experiences an unconstitutional interruption, ECOWAS recently suspended Mali’s membership in response to a coup, and UNASUR recently exercised a similar provision against Paraguay. These and other multilateral mechanisms are critical because they reflect regional ownership without the presence of Northern powers and because such a coalition is less likely than a single nation to create further problems or receive pushback from local actors.

Participants discussed in depth the merits of democracy-inclusive forums and democracy-exclusive forums for discussion of important transnational issues. For example, the Community of Democracies reformed its invitation and governing council selection process in 2010 to ensure leadership consists of staunchly committed democracies while expanding participation at ministerial meetings to include countries at incipient stages of democracy. The Bali Democracy Forum, however, invites a broader base of participants, including China and Vietnam, in an effort to establish a conversation with more parties. While it was agreed that both style of forums are necessary and beneficial, participants lacked consensus as to when democracies should and should not include others in policy conversations.

Most participants with a global South view asserted that for any country to retain credibility in international cooperation on human rights and democracy, a strong human rights record at home is a vital requisite. Otherwise, the rules-based system that governs behavior is weakened by the perception that great powers write the rules but are not necessarily committed to following them. In this respect, emerging powers emphasize the importance of addressing human rights challenges domestically. For example, Brazil recently established a truth commission to investigate human rights abuses under the military dictatorship and passed a freedom of information law to increase transparency. It has also engaged in international efforts to combat violence against women and encourage open government initiatives, key concerns within Brazil and essential to advancing its own democracy. No consensus was reached on the means by which accountability can be increased on the global level, although the need was clearly articulated. Emerging democratic powers are increasingly held to account by vibrant civil society organizations and media that feature voices from victims of violations and question government’s actions abroad. Decision makers have noted this democratization of foreign policy and it continues to shape their processes and actions.

Words of caution tend to outweigh prescriptive solutions in discussing tools for international cooperation. According to some participants, limiting discussions on transnational issues to an exclusive club of democracies is a false dichotomy that discourse must move past. Engaging with imperfect democracies (like Venezuela and Bolivia) is crucial to encourage their continued development on the path of democracy. The regional dimension of democracy and human rights support should also be strengthened so that neighbors hold each other accountable for advancing democratic practices. Trade and regional economic integration can also be considered as a potentially effective tool for promoting values. States should also leverage their private sectors, which engage in new and different ways with civil society when investigating potential investment opportunities abroad, to take advantage of new avenues for dialogue. In addition, they should encourage business leaders to prioritize their obligations to protect human rights and sustainable development. Finally, the international community must better coordinate its efforts to avoid overwhelming target populations, as has occurred with countries rushing to Tunisia’s aid in its transition. It must also ensure that such aid is voluntary and in no way coercive.

The Politics of Foreign Policy in Democracies: The Human Rights Dimension

In the last session, participants articulated the tactics that facilitate action at the global level and the factors preventing further progress, with suggestions for improvement. Agreements at the UN Human Rights Council and other similar international fora are often reached by isolating extremists and working effectively with the middle. Diplomats are also successful when they can effectively navigate their governments in capital to alter a country’s position on an issue. Therefore, personalities of the diplomats at the UN, the Human Rights Council, and other relevant bodies can play important roles in shaping the course of negotiations. Similarly, personal priorities of government leaders can influence how much importance is placed on human rights. U.S. Secretary of State Clinton has prioritized women’s human rights and LGBT human rights, but Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, is a technocrat who prioritizes economic growth and social protections. The foreign policies of the countries reflect these priorities.

Many factors, including the realpolitik interests of emerging powers, resource constraints, political dynamics, personalities and what is politically and procedurally possible at international bodies all combine to explain why more action is not taken on human rights issues at the global level. For example, to highlight the importance of human rights in foreign policy, one European expert shared that the human rights section of the foreign ministry receives the highest number of parliamentary questions on foreign policy, while about half of the daily statements from the ministry spokesperson pertain to human rights. However, budget constraints and the current state of the economy prevent more robust action at this time. Another participant from an established democracy shared that internal bureaucratic politics limited the policy options available to diplomats which slowed action at the Human Rights Council and limited that country’s opportunities to lead. Conversely, domestic politics forced India to change its vote at the Human Rights Council regarding a resolution calling on Sri Lanka to address human rights abuses. India had long resisted such resolutions, but thanks to overt pressure from a coalition partner, it became more active. This represents an unusual but important example of domestic politics prompting rather than impeding action on human rights at the international level.

Emerging democracies face major challenges in addressing their own human rights deficits at home. They largely lack a domestic constituency for a more human rights-oriented foreign policy, meaning the few NGOs advocating for these issues have a small pool of support on which to draw. As a result, economic growth and private interests are usually prioritized over accountability. In Brazil, much of civil society has not been actively engaged on these issues, and in Indonesia, the discussion has traditionally been dominated by think tanks. This has begun to shift and influence on foreign policy has begun to diversify, but in many of the emerging powers this change is still in the nascent phases. In some cases, emerging democracies still struggle to maintain a high-quality representative system. The process of decentralization in Indonesia has led to a growing oligarchy which threatens the protection of minority rights – especially religious minorities but also women. Turkey has experienced serious backsliding regarding freedom of the press while continuing to wrestle with its own minority rights challenges. Overall, civil society engagement on foreign policy in emerging democracies has been limited but is improving. Attention should be paid to framing the discussion on a case-by-case basis to bring these issues into the public consciousness in the relevant countries.

Despite these challenges, most participants agreed that civil society and NGOs have an enormous role to play in shaping foreign policy regarding human rights. When governments refuse to act on important issues, civil society can apply pressure to prompt action. For example, when South Africa hesitated to broach LGBT rights at the Human Rights Council, South African civil society held the government accountable by bringing public attention to the prioritization of human rights codified in the 1994 constitution. This shamed South Africa into leading on this issue. However, many participants asserted that civil society and NGOs must be more creative in approaching governments. While the foreign ministry is often the lead on foreign policy regarding human rights, many other ministries have equity in these crosscutting issues and shape (or block) the debate. Civil society and NGOs should approach other ministries – ministries concerned with the economy, education, and security, for example – to apply pressure and enact change. In addition, they can call upon leaders in the executive branch with a personal interest in democracy and human rights matters to apply pressure. For example, in Brazil, NGOs approached an attorney general who had previously worked in the human rights field to question the foreign ministry about an upcoming vote on North Korea. By invoking Article IV of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, which codifies a commitment to human rights, the attorney general and NGOs were able to elicit a change in Brazil’s vote.

While these recommendations may help civil society and NGOs bolster their impact, they must be prepared for pushback from governments. While governments in the global North revert to funding constraints and domestic pressure as motivations for their action or inaction, governments in the global South might rely on arguments that South-South cooperation should be emphasized over naming and shaming tactics and that the system operates under a double standard. Civil society and NGOs should accept and support South-South cooperation, but not complacency. They must demand leadership from their governments to ensure the safeguarding of the global democracy and human rights order.

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Ted Piccone

Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report IV: Wildlife Trafficking, Illegal Fishing, and Lessons from Anti-Piracy Efforts

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Cruel Wildlife Market

Hundreds of cages with birds, lizards, bats, and mammals were stacked upon one another, with tens or sometimes even hundreds of specimens crammed into one cage. Several dozen white-eyes (a bird genus) were squeezed into a cage appropriate for one canary. At least a hundred bats were stuffed into another container. In a cage atop this stack, more than fifty green agama dragon lizards, some dead, with their bodies rotting amidst those still alive, were desperately competing on the ceiling of their container for a little of bit space. Two baby civets, on sale for 400,000 Indonesia rupiah each (about USD 40) were shoved into an adjacent box. Like the rest of the unfortunate animals – squirrels, chipmunks, black-naped orioles, drongos, leafbirds, shamas, mynas, partridges, and the highly-prized and highly-threatened lories – the civets had no water and no protection from the full blast of the hot Indonesian sun. Many of the animals would die in this (in)famous Yogyakarta bird market before they were sold to new owners.

Meanwhile, however, the Yogyakarta bird market, like other wildlife markets in Indonesia and East Asia, serves as a perfect incubator for diseases that can mutate and jump among species, such as avian influenza and SARS. Such zoogenic diseases could potentially set off a catastrophic pandemic killing millions of people. The spread of the viruses to domestic animals and people is exacerbated by the trade in roosters for cock-fights, also on sale in the market amidst the wild-caught birds and animals. Even the animals sold before they die in the hands of their traders often do not survive as household pets – typically the fate of species such as woodpeckers, eagles, and owls.

The inhumane treatment of the animals in the many wildlife markets I visited during my research across the Indonesian archipelago was as heart-wrenching as the devastation this unmitigated trade in wild birds and other animals wreaks upon Indonesia’s ecosystems. Orange-headed thrushes and white-crested laughing thrushes, available in cages to eager buyers, are now exceedingly rare in the remnants of Indonesia’s forests, for example.

To reduce the consternation and criticism of international tourists, Yogyakarta’s wildlife market was moved more out of sight – away from its previous location next the frequently visited old royal palace. Nevertheless, enterprising Indonesian young men on motorcycles still bring Western tourists to the market’s new location. A young German woman, with a Lonely Planet Indonesia guidebook tucked in her purse, was eagerly taking photos of the cages, her very short shorts and tanktop as much an affront to Indonesia’s cultural sensitivities in this conservative Muslim city as the appalling conditions of the traded animals are to Westerners. An emblematic introduction to the fusion and confusion of conflicting values in this modernizing yet tradition-bound country?

Hunters and Buyers

In the Indonesian Market

Indonesian buyers and sellers rarely exhibit any qualms about the ecological impacts of the trade and the conditions of the animals. Wildlife trade, particularly in birds, is deeply entrenched in Java’s culture. A Javanese proverb states that every man should have a house, a horse (these days often interpreted as a car, or at least a motorcycle), a wife, a kris (a traditional dagger), and a bird. Because of this strongly-held tradition, at least one third of Javanese households keeps birds, I was told by representatives of a joint international-Indonesian environmental NGO, whom I interviewed on the condition of anonymity. Indeed, strolling through middle-class neighborhoods of Javanese towns reveals house after house with several cages of prinias, bulbuls, orioles, laughing thrushes. Eerily, however, there are precious few birds in the Javanese countryside, most having been caught by traders.

The bird trade is so culturally-ingrained that only some environmental NGOs operating in Indonesia dare oppose it. “Our current priority is to preserve and try to rehabilitate the devastated Indonesian ecosystems. The bird trade is just too difficult; too culturally sensitive. Attempting to stop it could get us shut down or hamper our other operations, such as trying to restore at least a tiny sliver of Indonesia’s lowlands forests. The Indonesian police are not interested in the bird trade anyway. We count ourselves lucky when we get law enforcement action against endangered mammals,” one of the NGO representatives told me after I repeatedly assured him that I would not identify either him or the NGO.

But even in this tradition-oriented society, tastes in the wildlife market do evolve. Unfortunately, in Indonesia and East Asia, wildlife tastes have been changing all too often toward a more expanded and voracious appetite for wild animals and wildlife products. One of the latest fads in Indonesia is keeping lizards; and young middle- and upper-class Indonesian men on the make now prefer them to birds.

Still, rare and highly-endangered birds, such as lories from Papua, or the Bali starling, continue to be highly desirable and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. A summer 2012 biological survey revealed that only 31 Bali starlings were left in the Bali Barat National Park, a conservationist involved in the survey told me. Then in July 2012, poachers coated a few trees with glue and captured six of the starlings in the park, eliminating one fifth of the population in the wild. A release of captive-bred birds is planned to boost the population of the species whose survival hangs on a thread as thin as the fishing nets that poachers also use to catch the birds. But without better law enforcement in the park and against buyers throughout the archipelago, and without a dramatic decline in the desirability of the Bali starlings by Javanese bird owners, will the released birds have any chance?

Some of the poachers are desperately poor. In the Moluccas or Papua, they are sometimes paid as little as a bowl of noodles for a day’s hunting, or a pack of cigarettes for a rare bird. But that pack of cigarettes can be enough to extirpate an endangered species. And traders can be shockingly frivolous in how many individual birds or animals they are willing to have killed for the survival of a few that would bring high profits on the international market. Ambonese hunters, mostly very poor, will be paid five dollars for a caught black-capped lori. In order to smuggle out the protected endangered and highly-desired species, traders will then shove the small birds into plastic bottles tied together, throw them into the sea, and fish them out miles away from the island and any possible law enforcement action. With the surviving birds fetching up to thousands of dollars, even a 95% loss of the captured birds (many would suffocate in the plastic bottles) will generate handsome profits. For a fistful of dollars, a species can be rapidly wiped out.

Keeping birds and consuming products from wild animals has a long history in Indonesia. The Dayak communities in Kalimantan, for example, have hunted hornbills for their feathers for centuries. In northern Sulawesi, the Christian community has had a strong taste for bushmeat, with anything that can be hunted often being highly craved for dinner (and very pricey in the Langowan and Tomohon bushmeat markets). One of the greatest delicacies—its consumption being a symbol of status and affluence -- is the black crested macaque, a primate endemic to Sulawesi. Over the past three to four decades, the species has been experiencing an 80% decline. Although deforestation in Sulawesi has eliminated much of the macaques’ habitat, hunting these days actually poses a far greater threat to the species. In addition to its highly-prized meat, its fur is used in traditional dancing to signify bravery; and its skulls decorate masks and costumes.

Protecting the threatened primate has become an environmental priority for conservationists in northern Sulawesi. In an inspired move, an NGO tried to reduce some of the hunting pressures on the macaques by producing artificial skulls looking identical to the real ones, so the replicas would be used for traditional costumes. Another NGO that is currently leading the effort to save the macaques near the Tangkoko Reserve – the Selamatkan Yaki project – has emphasized environmental education to explain to consumers that if they do not reduce the hunting to sustainable levels, all the macaques will be gone and there will be no more pricy meat or and no more fun of hunting the primates, a factor which many hunters identified as an important motivation. (Many of the wildlife traders I interviewed across the archipelago about the critical depletion of the species they were selling and the negative impact on their business if the animals were extirpated in the wild were shockingly unaware and indifferent. They would insist that the birds and animals would always be in the forest and dismiss my suggestions that the species could die out and their trade collapse.) As part of its environmental education and demand-reduction effort, the Selamatkan Yaki project has also tried to involve the local Christian church in the campaign for environmental conservation, as well as to get influential community leaders to declare that the macaque meat, unlike pork, is not crucial for celebrations. But these demand reduction efforts, as imperative as they are, are also very painstaking and slow-going. And for many species, the time is running out at a rapid pace.

In the Booming International Market for Wildlife

The portent of extinction has become all the more threatening as the volume of animals hunted for the local traditional markets is nowadays vastly surpassed by the volume of animals hunted for the booming international market. These international profits often dwarf those in the traditional trade, and international wildlife trading and trafficking are expanding at an exponential rate as a consequence. Many of the hottest wildlife markets are located in China and in East Asia.

Keenly embraced by East Asia’s increasingly affluent middle and upper classes, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) concoctions promising extraordinary curative powers, enhanced longevity, and increased sexual prowess are more popular than ever. So is the consumption of exotic bushmeat. These international wildlife-demand markets have resulted in extraordinary numbers of animals being hunted, sometimes in the millions of specimen per year. The toll on genera such as pangolins, seahorses, turtles, or civets has been huge.[1] Just over a decade ago, for example, Malayan box turtles, then widespread across Indonesia, as well as two endemic Sulawesi land tortoises, fell victim to the Traditional Chinese Medicine craze. So that they would be eventually shredded in blenders into TCM jelly and paste, villagers in Sulawesi would collect them everywhere and sell them for 5000 Indonesian rupiahs (about half a U.S. dollar) per turtle or tortoise. According to a biologist from the Pacific Institute in northern Sulawesi, a subsequent three-month field research project in the area in 2007 found only 2 specimens of what used to be several plentiful species, including some found nowhere else. The turtles and tortoises were literally eaten off the island.

One of the newer fads in the Traditional Chinese Medicine market I encountered during my research in Kalimantan was for hornbill tusks. In Kalimantan, the bills and tusks would fetch 2 million Indonesian rupiahs (roughly USD 200), making the beautiful and enigmatic hornbills a new favorite of local Kalimantan hunters. In the demand markets of China, Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong, the tusks would bring far more. The presence of well-heeled Chinese coal and timber companies in Kalimantan facilitated the trade, and the companies were often already paying off the Indonesian police, military, navy, and coast guard. Even without extensive bribes, stopping the trade in the tusks would be of far lower priority for Indonesian law enforcement agencies than interdicting artisanal illegal mining, for example, which the big mining companies have an interest in stopping and can financially motivate the law enforcement agencies to take action against.

Policy Responses

Reducing Demand for Wild Animals through Captive Breeding

Sometimes, a legal market in captivity-bred animals can greatly reduce pressures on the natural ecosystems and species. The prohibitions and restrictions on importing wild birds into the United States and European Union, coupled with a legal supply of desirable birds, such as parrots, from captive stocks, greatly reduced poaching for those markets. This legal supply of birds certified to have been bred in captivity have had a palpable impact in Indonesia too, where the bird trade to Europe and the United States dramatically declined, despite the fact that the trade had a centuries-old history, being established essentially at the time when Europeans first arrived in the Moluccas and Papua and saw the local exotic birds.

However, according to the environmental NGOs and conservation biologists I interviewed in Indonesia, bird-breeding facilities in Indonesia itself have not produced similarly positive conservation outcomes, and often serve merely as mechanisms for laundering birds caught in the wild. For a bribe, Indonesian officials often hand out fake licenses for such supposedly captive-breeding programs and the birds. For example, since selling wild-caught lories is illegal, traders often claim that they are captive-bred and produce fake documents to launder the birds.

Alternative Livelihoods for Hunters and Illegal Fishermen

These days hardly all hunters are desperately poor individuals. Nonetheless, even organized crime groups specializing in poaching frequently hire local people living on the edge or inside the forest as trackers, guides, and even shooters. In Indonesia, they can be very destitute individuals struggling to eek out a living and support their families, like those in the Moluccas, who will hunt endangered birds for a bowl of noodles a day. Providing them with an alternative means of livelihood is not only important from the perspective of human rights and human security, but also frequently critical for the success of conservation policies.

Occasionally, alternative livelihoods programs to reduce poaching have scored successes. On the Indonesian island of Seram, for example, twenty poachers of rare parrots were converted (through the work of Profauna, one of Indonesia’s NGOs most determined to fight against the illegal wildlife trade) into rescue-center staff and wildlife guides for tourists. As a result of this alternative livelihoods effort, poaching dramatically fell off. But the success depended on a steady flow of eco-tourists whom the newly-converted poachers could guide. For that, an international counterpart to the conservation effort helped recruit birdwatchers in the United States to travel to Seram. When that international supply of eco-tourists fell off, the income from wildlife guiding for the former poachers declined and the pressure to resume illegal hunting to generate livelihoods intensified once more.

The Seram story is a micro-example of the conditions on which successful alternative livelihoods depend. If poor poachers have an assured income from other sources, they are often willing to abandon the illegal hunting, even though poaching often brings more money. But their income from other sources needs to be steady and assured. The problem with many ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts is that the income fluctuates greatly and tends to be sporadic and seasonal. Often, for an area to draw a sufficient number of ecotourists to generate income, it needs to contain large mammals that can fairly easily be seen by tourists. Thus, eastern Africa’s savannahs tend to attract many more tourists than rainforest areas.

Moreover, success in bringing an alternative income to potential poachers depends also on the number of potential poachers. It is one thing to employ twenty hunters (like in the Seram example) and quite another thing to bring employment to several thousand people who may reside in or near an ecologically-sensitive area and can become poachers (as well as illegal loggers). The number of jobs generated by ecotourism is often far lower than the existing local needs for employment and the number of illegal poachers, illegal loggers, and pastoralists who encroach on forests. Moreover, whether such ecotourism takes the pressure off poaching is also dependent on whether eco-lodges and ecotourism companies capture the vast majority of profits or whether local communities do in fact get a sufficient cut from the profits.

Note that the above discussion has not taken into consideration whether or not the influx of humans through high-impact ecotourism generates even greater environmental damage than the previous hunting and more profoundly disturbs the entire ecosystem, rather than just particular species.

Income generated by non-ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts, such as converting hunters into producers of ethnic crafts or honey and other renewable wildlife products, rarely does better than ecotourism alternative livelihoods. Mostly, such alternative economies generate incomes too paltry and sporadic to be attractive to local communities to sufficiently wean them off poaching. Success of such efforts mostly tends to be lower than even the infrequent success in converting illicit crop farmers to farmers of legal crops. In the case of wildlife poaching, legal agricultural production can sometimes reduce hunting – though once again, the question is whether the required land conversion and deforestation will ultimately devastate the entire ecosystem even more. Just as in the case of alternative livelihoods for illicit drugs, success is predicated on well-enforced property rights, the availability of microcredit, good infrastructure, and other structural factors. Crucially, it also depends on well-established value-added chains and assured markets, neither of which are developed easily in remote areas where forests or biodiversity-rich savannahs still exist. Thus on Indonesia’s Flores island, one of the sensitive land and marine areas, there may well be first-rate avocados, but because of a lack of infrastructure and value-added chains, farmers often feed them to pigs instead of exporting them. Flores’s four kinds of mangoes could well be successfully sold in many international markets, but those markets have not yet been developed. And if one day they are, it is critical that they do not generate new deforestation to clear the way for the mango trees, compounding the pressures on already devastated natural forests of the island.

In the Komodo National Park area, for example, inducing local people to switch from dynamite-fishing that decimates the area’s biodiversity-rich marine ecosystems to carving wood crafts for tourists has met with some successes. However, the former fishermen got used to taking wood from the park’s mangroves, replacing one negative ecosystem impact with another. Persuading them to use jackfruit timber instead has become the new imperative. Similarly, seaweed farming in the Komodo area and around Sulawesi has become a popular alternative to fishing, and one that currently has a thriving international market. But careful assessments as to whether the seaweed farming – and of what particular seaweed species and through what precise methods - is fully compatible with coral conservation have yet to be made.

Scuba diving tourism is thriving in the area, bringing with it a variety of positive spillovers for the local economy, such as new restaurants, lodges, and markets. But it is mostly concentrated in Labuan Bajo, not benefiting all parts of Flores equally and many not at all. Moreover, most hotels and dive companies are not owned by local people, with much of the profit leaving for Jakarta or abroad. And only very few of the dive masters are local people.

Improved Law Enforcement

Without alternative livelihoods in place or the ability to change the structure of incentives for the many types of actors who participate in the illegal wildlife trade – as well as without reducing demand for wildlife products -- law enforcement is rarely a sufficient answer. But it is a critical and inescapable component of such efforts.

In Indonesia, enforcement of wildlife regulations has a long way to go. The problem starts with the laws themselves. With few exceptions, such as in the case of kingfisher species which are not allowed to be hunted, Indonesian law does not prohibit the killing and trapping of wild animals in general, only those protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Unsustainable legal hunting, often poorly monitored to assess its true environmental impact, thus devastates species in Indonesia, with Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies having no interest or means to counter it. Even for wildlife protected by CITES, the Indonesian law sets as the maximum penalty five-year imprisonment or a ten thousand dollar fine. But poachers and wildlife traffickers rarely face law enforcement action, frequently bribing their way out of punishment in Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt courts. If they are sent prison at all, it is usually for a few weeks at most.

Nonetheless, improvements in Indonesia’s wildlife protection enforcement are under way. Many new commitments, efforts, training, and better practices are stimulated by ASEAN’s Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) and its international government and NGO partners. The United States government is actively supporting those efforts; and INTERPOL has also elevated wildlife trafficking on its list of priorities. In turn, the importance of acting against wildlife trafficking has also risen for Indonesian law enforcement agencies, though it still retains a much lower priority than drug trafficking, for example, and hence rewards (such as promotion in rank) are not come easily earned for interdiction of wildlife trafficking. Such increased law enforcement efforts are very important and welcome. Setting quotas for the minimum of wildlife cases Indonesian law enforcement officers must catch is hardly the optimal law enforcement approach but, arguably, it shows at least an increased awareness of the issue.

Yet as is the case with law enforcement against all kinds of illicit trade, sometimes increased law enforcement only makes the markets more hidden. Certainly in Indonesia, sales of more politically and legally-sensitive species, such as monkeys, that are either sold outright illegally or whose trapping generates strong criticism from environmental NGOs, has been driven from public view. Nonetheless, behind closed doors, these species are usually available in many of the country’s big wildlife trading places. When in the huge Jatinegara wildlife market in Jakarta, where supposedly any animal, no matter how endangered and enigmatic can be bought, I tried to pull out my camera, I was met with a great deal of hostility and protests from local sellers and was essentially chased out of the market. One representative of an Indonesian environmental NGO, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that tiger parts, rhino horns, or alive orangutans and Komodo dragons can all still be obtained in the Jatinegra market and from Indonesia’s other wildlife traders. Illegal pet shops in Jakarta boast that they can deliver any species within a week – and often the transaction is made over the internet.

Nonetheless, there have been some genuine successes in Indonesia’s law enforcement. In Bali, for example, the enforcement of the ban on catching sea turtles has been greatly strengthened. Used in traditional Balinese ceremonies, turtles had been caught at a rate many times surpassing the 1000 specimen catch per year allowed under local regulations. In 1999, 27,000 turtles, for example, were slaughtered. Profauna encouraged zero-catch quotas and pushed for greater law enforcement by the police and other law enforcement agencies, such as the Forestry Ministry. The fact that police units on Bali have a reputation for being less corrupt than elsewhere in Indonesia, and with greater international presence to help in the monitoring, the police confiscation of turtles increased significantly and the illegal catching decreased by 80 percent since.

The intensification of law enforcement interdiction in Indonesia has been critically enabled by the increase in animal rescue shelters. In the past, the Indonesian police often used the small number of available animal shelters as an excuse for not undertaking interdiction raids, claiming that they could not care for the rescued animals. Indeed, according to a very impressive young female Muslim veterinarian in Bali who has supervised some of the rescue shelters, about 95 percent of animals confiscated in wildlife markets or private collections are too sick and damaged to be returned to the wild. With few releases possible, because they might introduce new diseases that could devastate the wild populations, most of the recovered animals will have to be treated at the shelters for the rest of their lives or euthanized. Unfortunately, rehabilitation shelters in Indonesia have depended almost exclusively on foreign funding. Several important international donors have been disappointed with Indonesia’s performance in cracking down on the wildlife trade and have not renewed their donor commitments, leaving some of the shelters struggling to operate.

Challenges in Cracking Down on Illegal Fishing

To some extent, improvements have also been registered in Indonesia’s efforts to combat illegal domestic fishing in protected areas. The Komodo National Park provides an example. Fifteen years ago, dynamite and sodium-cyanide fishing, both extremely destructive to the marine ecosystem, were prevalent and perpetrated by local communities around the park and by fishermen from the eastern parts of Flores as well as other islands, such as Sulawesi and Sumbawa, as already mentioned above. When confronted by local communities trying to prevent the destructive fishing, fishermen from the eastern part of Flores and surrounding islands would often admit that the reason they were coming to fish in the Komodo National Park was the lack of fish available in their home areas, where local stocks were depleted as a result of the destructive fishing.

Pressure from international NGOs and intergovernmental agencies, such as UNESCO, on law enforcement agencies operating in and around the Komodo National Park stimulated better law enforcement action and diminished the dangerous illegal fishing practices. The fact that the Komodo National Park, including its extraordinary marine ecosystem, obtained high international visibility, and hence international pressure for protection, critically helped.

Surprisingly, because the issue can be construed as one of national security and certainly of national sovereignty, Indonesia has been far less capable of cracking down on illegal fishing by foreign fishing fleets, including Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Philippine, that invade its waters. Some of the Indonesian fishermen I interviewed about international illegal fishing in their waters maintained that they were afraid to confront the foreign fleets because the foreign fishing ships were presumed to be armed. They believed that the presence of guns on the fishing ships also deterred action by Indonesia’s coast guard. Some of the fear can perhaps now be offset by the creation of a community patrol “coastal watch” effort run by the Ministry of Fisheries, for which the U.S. government has installed a communications technology that allows the fishermen to report the presence of illegal fishermen in real time and thus enables a heftier law enforcement response.

Most of the interviewed fishermen, however, believed that the lack of robust law enforcement action had to do with large amounts of corruption money sloshing around in the international fishing industry which could easily buy off Indonesia’s naval and coast guard patrols. Church and NGO activists in Labuan Bajo, Flores, for example, recounted how they suspected that local police and navy officials were involved in the smuggling of the endangered Napoleon wrasse (also known as humphead wrasse), the trade in which is prohibited by several countries and whose possession in Indonesia requires special permits from the government. Nonetheless, the species is highly sought after in Taiwan, China, and other East Asian markets. Repeated tipoffs to local Labuan Bajo police and navy units regarding the illegal catching and smuggling of the wrasse fell on deaf ears, with the law enforcement agencies demanding proof from the activists before they would take any kind of law enforcement action against the identified smugglers. The activists thus invited local media to the port where the wrasse smuggling was taking place, and “by accident” spilled one of the boxes transporting the smuggled wrasses, forcing the police to acknowledge in front of flashing cameras that illegal fishing was taking place there. Nonetheless, a visit to the Chinese market in Labuan Bajo in October 2012 revealed Napoleon wrasse on sale. The trade in other exotic fishes, even if not necessarily protected species (CITES only prohibited the trade in some sharks and manta rays in March 2013), was thriving there. Local buyers were eagerly haggling with fishermen over lips from parrotfish, manta ray parts, and sharks fins.

Lessons from Indonesian Anti-Piracy Efforts for More Robust Law Enforcement Action against Illegal Fishing and Wildlife Trafficking

The anti-piracy efforts in the Strait of Malacca and around Indonesia can provide insight into the factors which can stimulate better law enforcement action by Indonesia. Before the frequency of maritime piracy spiked around the Horn of Africa and West Africa, pirate attacks on ships at sea in Strait of Malacca amounted to almost half of the world’s piracy incidents. Out of the more than 250 yearly attacks in the Strait and around Indonesia during the first half of the 2000 decade, the majority originated in Indonesia.[2] Indonesia’s archipelago provided many safe-haven opportunities for pirates, while law enforcement action against them both on land, such as on the Riau islands, and at sea was sporadic and limited at best.

As the frequency of pirate attacks kept growing, it came to present a threat to Singapore’s economy – critically dependent on the safety of its seaborne commerce and accessibility of its port, with more than 50,000 vessels carrying 40% of world’s trade passing through the Strait yearly. Backed by the United States, Singapore pressured Indonesia to take more robust action against the pirates and delivered a variety of financial incentives-- delivering technologies, patrol assets, and ultimately paying for much of the anti-piracy effort Indonesia mounted. Anti-piracy intelligence sharing among Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, previously inhibited by traditional rivalries, also increased, even though many of the proposed “joint” patrols among the three navies really amounted only to “coordinated” patrols. In the latter part of the 2000 decade, piracy in the Strait fell off by about three-fourths – even though the actual number of interdiction operations on the seas remained very small. Just the greater deployment of patrolling assets and importantly actions by Indonesia against the pirates on land created a robust deterrent effect.

The fact that Singapore mounted strong pressure on Indonesia is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that ultimately Singapore had to back up the pressure by extending various modes of assistance to stimulate greater law enforcement action against the pirates. What is more interesting is that in the case of maritime piracy, unlike in the case of its many other large-scale illicit economies, such as illegal logging and mining, Indonesia was able to overcome the corruption that has long plagued its law enforcement apparatus and undermined the interdiction and deterrence efforts. In other words, it was pressure from Singapore, underwritten by material assistance from that city-state, that stimulated Indonesia’s resolve to go after the pirates. But what accounts for Indonesia’s improved capacity to carry out the law enforcement effort?

To a great extent, the answer appears to lie in the low profits and un-institutionalized form of corruption surrounding maritime piracy in the area. Unlike in the case of piracy off the Somalia coast, the profits from piracy around Indonesia were fairly low, with attacks often amounting more to robberies on the seas and in ports, rather than to long-term hostage and cargo seizure with ransom payouts in the millions of dollars. (Indeed, the “pirate” attacks around the Indonesian archipelago that have taken place over the past three to four years remained mostly thefts and robberies when ships are anchored in Indonesia’s ports.) Consequently, the bribes from piracy paid to either Indonesian coast guard or navy officials or to local government officials on land in areas that the pirates used as safe-havens were not very large, nowhere on the scale of the bribes paid by illegal logging or mining companies. Nor have the Indonesian law-enforcement agencies become addicted to the piracy bribes for their institutional budgets, unlike in the case of bribes and problematic profits from natural-resource extraction on which Indonesia’s military and law enforcement agencies have come to depend for sustaining their operating budgets.[3] The political costs Jakarta had to absorb to make law enforcement agencies act against the pirates and the muscle it had to exercise to corral local officials into compliance were far lower with respect to piracy than the political costs would be for Jakarta to enforce compliance with resource-extraction regulations. The number of political and institutional actors with a vested interest in perpetuating piracy (because of the rent payouts it generated) was also much smaller than in illegal logging and mining, and the management problem for Jakarta therefore also much simpler. The resolution of secessionist militancy in Sumatra’s Aceh region, after the 2005 peace deal, is sometimes also put forward as a factor enabling the more robust law enforcement action against the pirates.[4] But there are limitations as to how far this explanation carries, given that most of the pirate attacks did not originate from Aceh and the area was not a prime safe-haven area for the pirates. (The fact that many of the former Free Aceh Movement combatants continue to be unemployed and economically-frustrated could easily make them an easy recruitment pool for pirate businessmen. Other illicit economies, such as marijuana cultivation, have in fact been thriving in the region.)

For combatting wildlife trafficking and illegal logging in Indonesia, the anti-piracy story has two implications. On the positive side, in the case of wildlife trafficking, the vast majority of the conservation actors and Indonesian government officials I interviewed agreed that corruption surrounding wildlife trafficking was not institutionalized. Nor was it believed to generate large off-budget income for the law enforcement institutions, like logging and mining. Tackling individualized corruption, as difficult as it is, is still far simpler than weaning entire institutions of illicit budgets.

On the negative side, the bribery profits from illegal fishing for Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies are considerably higher than those from piracy. For some agencies, such as the coast guard and the navy, the bribes may well constitute corruption payoffs akin to that from mining and logging that go beyond individual bribes. That is bad news for developing more robust law enforcement action.

The barriers to international cooperation against illegal fishing are also far higher than against piracy. Major fishing offenders such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam would have to take on their domestic fishing industries -- a high-cost political action they have not been willing to mount, just as Indonesia has not been able to effectively take on its logging industry, for example. Vietnam and Indonesia have announced joint anti-illegal fishing patrols, but whether these will amount to more than window dressing by Vietnam yet remains to be seen.

Beefed up law enforcement action against wildlife trafficking and illegal fishing is critical. Providing effective alternative livelihoods for poor hunters is a policy that enhances human rights and human security as well as greatly facilitates law enforcement. Unfortunately, alternative livelihoods efforts are rarely effective, with auspicious circumstances mostly lacking and structural problems difficult to overcome. Ultimately, there are great limits to what even much more effective law enforcement and much more effective alternative livelihoods can accomplish unless demand for wildlife products around the world, and particularly in East Asia, is rapidly reduced. So far, demand reduction efforts in the region for bushmeat and Traditional Chinese Medicine have registered thinner, even if somewhat improving, results than demand reduction efforts to reduce the consumption of illicit drugs. But time is running out for Indonesia’s magnificent biodiversity –both on land and in the sea.

[1] For details, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia,” Working Paper No. 6, The Brookings Institution, June 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/6/illegal%20wildlife%20trade%20felbabbrown/06_illegal_wildlife_trade_felbabbrown.

[2] “Piracy Down 3rd Year in Row: IMB report,” Journal of Commerce Online, January 23, 2007; and “Pirate attacks Up 14 Percent Worldwide in Jan-Sept Period, Maritime Watchdog Says,” Associated Press, October 16, 2007.

[3] See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Natural Resources and Law Enforcement,” Aseia Report No, 29, December 20, 2001, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/Indonesia%20Natural%20Resources%20and%20Law%20Enforcement.pdf; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Indonesia Field Report III – The Orangutan’s Road: Illegal Logging and Mining in Indonesia,” The Brookings Institution, February 7, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/02/07-indonesia-illegal-logging-mining-felbabbrown.

[4] Michael Shuman, “How to Defeat Pirates: Success in the Strait,” Time, April 22, 2009.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Chaiwat Subprasom / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report III – The Orangutan’s Road: Illegal Logging and Mining in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Kutai’s Destruction

Like in a desolate Edward Hopper landscape, the orangutan was clinging to the one last tree that stood next to the river in Kutai National Park in eastern Kalimantan. The joy of seeing this magnificent primate was spoiled by his destroyed habitat. Under normal circumstances, the orangutan would never venture so far out from trees, but here he was in a beyond-degraded and marginal habitat, probably looking for food that he could no longer find inside the forest.

Although once a jewel of biodiversity in Indonesia, teeming with Sumatran rhinoceroses and bantengs (wild Asian cattle species), and long-portrayed as one of the greatest wilderness areas left on the Indonesian side of Borneo, much of Kutai today looks like a devastation zone. Kilometers deep into its boundaries, the park has been stripped of trees. Despite the fact that the park is nominally a protected area, the trees have been logged for their hardwoods as well as to cultivate palms. The park was also badly affected by extensive fires several years ago. The big dipterocarp trees that are the essence of a Southeast Asian rainforest and on which many animal species depend for survival – and the hardwood of which is unfortunately highly valuable – have been all but eliminated in vast tracks of the park. The one last standing dipterocarp a kilometer deep into the forest has become an attraction to show to tourists. As a result, and also because of hunting, few hornbills are left in much of the park: Over the days we spent there, we saw only three species of hornbills: wrinkled, rhinoceros, and Asian pied. Overall, despite hours and hours in the forest, we could saw few other species of birds and mammals, including those that should be common genera in this kind of habitat, such as bulbuls and broadbills. One of the most common bird species in the park, even as deep into the forest as that which several hours of hiking would bring us, seemed to be the blue-eared barbet, a typical forest-edge species whose prevalence well inside the forest indicated that the forest is destroyed and of marginal quality and resembles more a forest edge, rather than a high-quality lowland growth.

We cut the motor of our canoe to watch the orangutan male, but instead of birds and insects, we continued hearing engines and industrial noise from a major coal mine that churned on nonstop for 24 hours a day right on the edge of the forest. Quite possibly, the mine could actually lie at least partly inside what was once national park. Park boundaries in Indonesia are exceedingly easy to redraw to accommodate mining and logging interests and generate revenues for local officials. During interviews with artisanal loggers in villages inside and around Kutai and in other national parks throughout the archipelago, I was told that local government officials and park managers would occasionally clandestinely encourage or at least tacitly tolerate artisanal logging and mining for gold and coal. The initial opening up of the ecosystem and thereafter its degradation would then allow them to apply to national offices in Jakarta to have parts of the park redesignated as unprotected environmentally-degraded land so they could issue permits for industrial-scale logging and mining concessions or African oil palm plantations, which bring great revenues. As efforts to improve local resource management and governance have produced various rankings of how much revenue local officials raise and “invest” in local communities, few regencies (the local administrative unit in Indonesia equivalent to a county) have an incentive to be saddled with forest that cannot be exploited. Whether the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) schemes, discussed below, will succeed in altering the structure of incentives remains to be seen and depends as much on local political-economy structures and power distribution as on their technical and financial feasibility.

The river within which we had canoed was itself clogged by piles of tailings, and spots of gasoline and some industrial runoff floated on the surface with regularity. Two several-hours-long night trips revealed only two buffy fishing owls and three common sandpipers, while no kingfishers or mammals could be sighted. Ornithologist Keith Barnes who has studied birds throughout Africa and Asia commented that until our research trip to Kutai, he had not been on a river in Southeast Asia for more than one hour without seeing at least a squirrel: “There is something seriously wrong with this forest.” For one, vast tracks of the forest are gone, with empty grassland and brambles, and not even secondary forest growth, left in its wake. Indeed, lowland forests throughout Indonesia have been destroyed or are facing tremendous pressures from logging; and even highland forests, such as in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Halmahera, are increasingly shaved off by logging companies that decide to stomach the logistical expenses of hauling away the timber from steep hills and mountains or by poor artisanal loggers and farmers who desire more land.

Deforestation in Indonesia Going Down?

During the 2000s decade and beyond, deforestation in Indonesia has slowed down, but that is partially because so much forest has already been cut down. Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has won international accolades for promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia 26% by 2020 through reducing deforestation (even while maintaining a 7% annual growth). Indonesia, one of the world’s largest carbon-emitters, may well come close to succeeding in that goal, but it will be to an important extent because much of its forests have already been commercially logged out, not because conservation efforts have become more robust and effective. Commercially-viable lowland forest in Sumatra is gone, pockets still remain in Kalimantan, and Papua is the hotspot of logging and chainsaw profits.

What is highly disturbing about Indonesia, however, is that the small slivers of forest that are left (often designated as protected areas) continue to be invaded by loggers, poachers, and miners – whether poor artisanal ones who operate illegally or official companies with formal licenses obtained through bribery. Because law enforcement continues to be exceedingly poor and many officers are on the take, even protected areas are far more degraded than similar protected areas elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia or Thailand. These countries too have logged out their forests, but what areas they set aside for conservation, even though small they might be, they tend to protect far better than Indonesia does. Moreover, many of the areas designated as protected in Indonesia, even national parks, are those that had already been commercially logged out and had their biodiversity degraded – the forests of Sulawesi provide a prime example. Setting logged forests aside and protecting them from new encroachment has the potential to greatly boost biodiversity; but whether once species that have become extinct or come close to extinction in a particular area can return and biodiversity be fully restored to its original richness (to that of a primary unlogged forest), no one knows. Many of the tree species and ecosystems they support take several hundred years to grow and reach maturity.

Indonesia’s Law Enforcement and Its Complicity in Illegal Economies and Other Regulatory Problems

Indonesia’s law enforcement and military forces are not only inadequate and under-resourced, they are also deeply complicit in various illicit economies, including illegal logging and mining. The corruption problem goes well beyond many individual officers being in on the take. During the Suharto era, Indonesia’s military had investments in large parts of Indonesia’s economy. Although it was forced to give up many of these past investments, it continues to rely on outside-the-budget revenues for large parts of its income. A decade ago, as much as a third of revenues for the military came off budget, and that dependence and problem has been poorly tackled since and has not fundamentally changed.[1]

Local police officials and military officers not only close their eyes to illegal resource extraction, they at times actively encourage it in order to promote their family businesses. Some representatives of the mill concessions I interviewed in eastern Kalimantan’s business hub Samarinda even claimed that local law enforcement officials would make them accept illegally cut timber for processing or the mills would face raids. “Look, realistically, we have few incentives to comply with regulation,” one of the logging company executives told me. “Getting all the permits and licenses takes a lot of time. You have to pay bribes to local officials and to those in Jakarta. And these days, bribes are complicated and unreliable. If we don’t pay bribes, it will take two years to get a license. And then what? The police or the military will hold up the logs on the river, sometimes for weeks on, until the timbers starts rotting. It’s far simpler just to pay off everyone right away.” He went on to bemoan how corruption used to be far simpler during the Suharto era, with a 10% standard rate for everything. “But these days, the military are angry that the police are getting a cut too, and they’re both jealous of who gets to be paid more. And yes, the coast guard and the navy make money off the coal exports.” Complicity and impunity debilitate regulatory policies. This is particularly so in a deeply corrupt system, such as Indonesia’s, where big violators often hold great political power, including sometimes by being members of Indonesia’s parliament or local administrations, rarely are arrested; and even then can bribe their way out of the law’s punishment.

Strategies to improve natural resource management and protect the environment in the face of seductive vast profits have been undermined in Indonesia not just by poor law enforcement, as key as that is. Efforts to develop effective and equitable regulatory frameworks have also been complicated by overlapping and competing bureaucracies, unclear regulations, poor local management and government capacity, and lack of clear land titles. Poor local administrative capacity and poor local law enforcement capacity are exacerbated by the fact that for a variety of reasons line ministry, law enforcement, and military officials are often rotated out of many postings and areas after a few months. Such short-term assignments guarantee that the officials are in a perpetual catch-up effort to learn local issues, or lead them to simply ignore local contexts. The short-term rotation system is based on the assumption that it limits how deeply involved in local corruption schemes the deployed officials can become. Instead, they often have an incentive to make as much money as fast as possible before they are sent to a less lucrative posting.

Community Ownership as the Solution?

To the extent that law enforcement raids do take place, whether to satisfy Jakarta or silence international criticism, they often target the poorest participants in the illegal economies, such as illegal miners and loggers. Their activities are hardly benevolent; rather, they have significant and highly negative effects on the environment. Overall, their impact may be less detrimental than in the case of large Indonesian or multinational companies, but they often significantly disturb and destroy fragile ecosystems, such as highland forests where commercial logging is unviable and which thus become some of the last strands of forest standing. But the reality also is that the basic livelihoods of artisanal loggers and miners can be profoundly dependent on these illicit economies, and their human security entwined with their participation in illegality. Lacking access to legal livelihoods, microcredit, and titles, they are also far less able to pay license fees and bribes, as well as having little capacity to bribe their way out of being arrested. The sentence of several months or even years in prison may deter some from further illegal logging. But some of the villagers whom I interviewed had been imprisoned for illegal logging and stated that they merely switched to poaching. They could not make ends meet legally and faced lesser sanctions for poaching than for illegal mining and logging. Among the variety of illicit economic activities surrounding resource extraction, Indonesia’s law enforcement frequently makes the most effort to crack down on artisanal illegal mining because large mining companies have an interest in keeping the artisanal loggers out of their way.[2]

Democratization and power decentralization in Indonesia were expected to better align the behavior of local officials with the interests of local communities, strengthening local communities’ rights and improving environmental protection. That promise has not often materialized for a variety of reasons: First, powerful interest groups and large businesses, often linked to local politicians, tend to be far more effective at lobbying than local civil society groups. Indeed, many of the NGOs working in the community rights or natural resource sectors I interviewed throughout Indonesia felt impotent; along with journalists, they would expose violations of laws and regulations, but no one would be punished and behavior would not change. Second, feeling they have poor choices and that most politicians are corrupt anyway, many voters are easily seduced by cheap handouts from politicians before elections. Rather than poorly- performing government officials being voted out of power, they are often reelected or arrange for their family members to be elected. Throughout Indonesia, resource-baron local dynasties have been emerging. Third, decentralization has greatly empowered local officials in Indonesia – in fact, often to the extent that they believe they can get away with a lot in violating edicts from Jakarta and disobeying the national government. Conflicting local and national regulations only further permit escaping desirable regulations.[3]

Furthermore, it is not always clear that local communities are fundamentally opposed to economic exploitation that destroys the local environment. Occasionally, they will resist and protect their land from logging or mining and even do so effectively – such as in the famous case of the Wehea Forest in Kalimantan. The level of social cohesion plays a critical role. In tightly-knit indigenous communities spiritually-linked to a forest, as in the Wehea case, the capacity to resist the lure of short-term profits can well be strong and effective resistance action can be organized. But many communities in Indonesia’s frontier areas such as Kalimantan are transmigrasi migrants. They do not have attachments to the area, they do not necessarily plan to stay there for the long term, they do not know their neighbors in the shack next door, and they often do not have land titles. They have moved to the logging and mining areas precisely to make money. They are in it for the quick buck, and their horizons tend to be very short, even shorter than the horizons of many local government officials. When I questioned the officials about the sustainability of their primary commodity exploitation-led growth, many would delightedly reply that they had coal supplies for twenty years – “a very long time.” And even communities with more established roots in an area but that are struggling with marginal livelihoods are easily tempted to sell their land to big companies for exploitation.

Many resource-extraction companies have also learned that they can get away with unsustainable strategies, not only politically and legally, but also economically. For many years, Indonesia’s timber and mill industry was eating its own tail, slashing the forests at a rate that was unsustainable while the industry was becoming more and more bloated. But instead of suffering the painful effects of having to downsize their operations as Indonesia’s forest shrank and the Indonesian national government became more interested in limiting deforestation (if only to get its hands on the REDD+ money), many companies were able to diversify or altogether switch into African oil palm cultivation or mining.

International Mechanisms to Foster Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability I: REDD+

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and, more broadly, approaches such as paying-for-ecosystem-services (PES) schemes are based on the idea that if the economic structure of incentives pushes toward environmental degradation because natural ecosystems are not economically valued, one can change the structure of incentives by pricing environmental services, such as carbon capture. These financial transfers pay for an undesirable – such as, environmentally-destructive – economic activity like logging or mining not to take place. Western governments who care about tropical forests not being destroyed or Western companies that need to offset their carbon emissions pay for forests elsewhere not to be cut down and carbon emissions thus not to be released. In the best of outcomes, such schemes will reduce carbon emissions and preserve forests and biodiversity. After several years of tough and protracted negotiations, Indonesia and Norway agreed in December 2012 on such a REDD+ scheme which pays for a protection area to be established abutting the Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, to create an important buffer zone around it. Investors in the Rimba Raya forest include Russia’s giant gas producer Gazprom and a large German financial institution Allianz. The project was originally supposed to start in 2010, but then stalled as the Indonesian government proposed to cut the amount of land devoted to the conservation area because an African oil palm plantation company had overlapping concessions that it was not interested in relinquishing.

REDD+ mechanisms were at the center of the stalled UN climate change negotiations in the latest November 2012 Doha round. And just like the overall climate change negotiations, they too are mired in international political disagreements. The procedure on which to base reference emission levels, i.e., the baseline from which the level of carbon emission that would take place in the absence of REDD+ is counted, is developed; but key emitters, such as Brazil, have refused to submit to international verification and monitoring procedures. In a country with deep corruption and pervasive regulation evasion such as Indonesia, credible external monitoring will be key for making REDD+ and other PES efforts effective.

A second major problem is that the lack of emissions reductions commitments from the United States, China, India, Canada, and Russia raises doubts about how and whether funding for REDD+ will be generated and at what levels. China and India are loath to commit to any emission reductions until the United States makes a move, and perhaps not even then. Nor has it been agreed as to how much of the burden and responsibility middle-income countries like Brazil and Indonesia need to share. Indonesian officials I interviewed often expressed a desire that the REDD+ is used to pay for law enforcement in the national parks and other protected areas, for example; but Indonesia is not so poor that it requires international payoffs to pay its park rangers better. Anyway, the problem often lies as much with actors outside the national park as with the rangers themselves.

And here lies one of the potential difficulties with REDD+. The payoff goes to either the national government or a local government. But surrounding the two and between the two, there are often complex webs of powerful vested economic actors. Even equitable and proportional transfers between the national government and local governments do not guarantee that local government officials will develop the muscle and wherewithal to resist corruption and coercion from powerful economic groups, particularly if those economic groups are the military and police, like in Indonesia. Nor will the money necessarily make its way into the hands of the artisanal loggers and miners. In other words, the domestic payoff transfer and internal distribution of the money and transferred resources will affect the REDD+ effectiveness as much as their international component.

Such problems with government compensation to local forest owners for preserving natural forests have been experienced even outside of the carbon schemes. If monitoring and law enforcement is poor and the local community places little intrinsic value on forest and biodiversity preservation, local communities will often collect the money and log anyway, or in other cases face invasion by logging companies from outside the community. Similarly, if payments are set too much below the value of logging the forest, even compensated owners can be tempted to participate in illegal logging while collecting no-cutting rents.[4] And making sure that the money reaches the forest-dependent communities and is not usurped by corrupt powerbrokers is often a challenge.

Another aspect of REDD+ that could have important effects is developing local capacities to better manage forests. But those better sustainable practices will once again run into local economic interests that either need to be bought via the REDD+ transfers or coerced by law enforcement to comply with regulations. What the REDD+ initiatives have already accomplished in Indonesia is to force officials in the Forestry Ministry – a notoriously corrupt institution which regards its task as making as much money out of forests as possible, rather than preserving forests and biodiversityn – to conduct much better assessments of existing forests and even publish that data. Previous self-monitoring and data collection on deforestation has been rather unreliable in Indonesia.

Critically, the price structure of the payoff schemes will be a significant determinant of their effectiveness not only for capturing carbon, but also of preserving the world’s biodiversity.[5] Surprisingly, a certain price structure could have a negative effect on the preservation of natural forests, and the failure to incorporate biodiversity considerations in forest management designs could be compounded by emerging carbon-for-forest payoff schemes. In some countries and under some circumstances, where there is strong government commitment, successful cooptation of key logging industry stakeholders, and effective law enforcement, such financial transfers can halt deforestation or even expand existing forest cover.[6] But for that to be likely, the compensation payments need to be far greater for preserving natural, and especially primary, forests than for capturing carbon by degraded forests or replanted forests or timber plantations. And these differentials – with by far the most compensation going for primary forests, smaller amounts for secondary forests, and the least for non-native monoculture plantations – need to be sufficiently great to steer government decisions toward keeping forests intact. Without such a price structure in place, with any tree accorded an equal or similar carbon-capture value, governments could be tempted to maximize profits by intensely logging their forests first and then signing up for carbon offsets for halting further deforestation, including from forests that are no longer viable for commercial logging or through biodiversity-poor reforestation and plantations. Even if the logged forest regenerates timber through replanting or natural recovery, it often cannot do so in a manner that will restore its original biodiversity. Without a far greater unit price for carbon captured by intact natural forests rather than by forest plantations and other reforested areas, the carbon schemes thus encourage the preservation of any forests – including monocultures – rather than native primary forests.[7]

International Mechanisms to Foster Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability II: Green and Other Certification

Since the 1990s, certification labeling of the legality and environmental sustainability of harvested timber or African palm oil or of the absence of conflict in the extraction of minerals has emerged as a key mechanism to suppress undesirable behavior associated with economies that cannot be fully prohibited. Certification is supposed to mitigate inherent harms and negative externalities, such as human rights violations, social strife and violent conflict, and environmental destruction. To combat illegal logging, timber certification is meant to designate that the logged and traded timber has been sourced and transported in a legal or environmentally-sound way and that illegal timber has not been mixed in with the legal timber. Ideally, such certification examines and approves the entire custody chain; the traded timber would be certified from the moment it is carefully, legally, and sustainably selected for cutting in the forest to the moment a customer buys a piece of furniture in a Western furniture store. Any gap in controls in the custody chain increases the chance that illegal timber enters the trade and is effectively laundered.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC, an independent, international NGO) certification, which tracks timber from forest to the shelf, is often considered the current gold standard of certification labels for timber. However, by the end of the 2000s, the FSC still certified only approximately 220 million acres, of which 110 million are in North America, while there are 10 billion acres of forested land on Earth.[8] Less than 2% of tropical timber was covered by FSC certification.[9] Getting certified is expensive, costing about U.S. $50,000 per concession, and customers are not always eager to absorb the higher costs.

Given the size of the trade and the complexity of certification – as wood changes many hands along trade routes and is processed into many, often minute pieces, over extensive periods of time – the reliability of the process is frequently problematic, with many opportunities for fake certificates, falsification, or timber laundering along the way. The more timber subject to certification, the more challenging it will be to maintain quality and reliable certification. When I asked a logging company representative in Samarinda about whether they were concerned about failing to obtain green certification and whether they altered their practice as a result of increasing desire for such certification in Western markets, he just laughed: “For us, it’s just another bribery item. We pay for the inspectors. And anyway, they go out for two days out of a year – how much can they see?”

Beyond the sheer volume and the previously discussed challenges of law enforcement intensity, fake documentation, and the amount of time it takes to check a sufficient amount of timber to discourage laundering and smuggling, certification schemes are also plagued by other problems: The most important one is that timber may be certified as legal, but may not be harvested sustainably and in an environmentally sensitive way. Some of the legality verification is very limited, confirming only that timber originated in a particular concession area and that the company had the necessary permits. Other legality certification can involve more rigorous evidence of compliance with harvesting regulations and other operational matters. [10] Even then sustainability may not necessarily be a part of the certification evaluation. Since most legislation mandating certification of wood and wood products, including the expanded U.S. Lacey Act and the European Union’s Timber Regulation due diligence requirements, centers on its legality, as opposed to its sustainability, suppliers have concentrated on precisely assuring timber’s legality but not necessarily sustainability. Moreover, getting a certification for sustainability takes considerably longer and is far more expensive than the legality certification.

Certification problems often start with forest management plans. Both the design and implementation of forest management are often pervaded by serious problems, even though the mere existence of such a plan can qualify the logged timber for certification. Not all forest management plans ensure sustainability and minimal environmental damage, including measures to protect biodiversity. Often forest engineers, large numbers of whom are required to design programs for all the logging operations, are incompetent and corrupt. Moreover, since natural forest regeneration often takes decades in the tropics, there is not any easy way at present to see whether the management programs are effective, and to correct policy if they are not. Thus certification does not always involve all three components: legality, timber sustainability, and biodiversity protection. Certificates are issued only for one or two components of desirable practices, with law enforcement officials and customers having no idea what exactly is being certified and whether the certified timber in fact reflects optimal practices.

In addition, consumer preferences and regulatory requirements for certified wood have given birth to some certification schemes of dubious quality. Many of these certification labels represent simple cases of “greenwashing,” i.e., illegal and unsustainable wood being certified as legal and sustainable. In other cases, major retailers – even in the United States and Western Europe where customers are overall greener and the regulatory oversight greater – have appropriated and advertized green labels, including that of FSC, without ever being certified.[11] At other times, timber and wood product suppliers have obtained FSC’s chain-of-custody certification indicating that they have adequate capacity to check their supply chains without actually handling any FSC certified timber.[12] Extensive unreliability of certification can whitewash consumer conscience and encourage greater, and undesirable, consumer demand. Large numbers of certification schemes also make law enforcement more difficult. Watching the watchdogs, or in this case certificate issuers, and establishing lists of reliable certifiers, is essential for certification to reduce illegal logging.

Critically compounding the limitations of certification is the fact that some of the most important and emerging markets, such as India and China, fundamentally do not care about corporate social responsibility or mitigating the multiple harms that various economic activities can generate. Mining company representatives I interviewed in Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and Sumatra all said how they love to sell coal to India. “The Indian companies just don’t care about anything,” the representative in Kalimantan opined. “Not any environmental issues, social conflict, nothing. It’s a pleasure dealing with them. They even don’t care about the quality of the coal. They just want more and more of it.” Clearly, to improve the effectiveness of certification, it is necessary to create certification inspectors who are fully independent and not paid by the business firms or governments seeking the particular legal, environmental, or social certification. It is also necessary to fundamentally change attitudes toward corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability in emerging markets. Not surprisingly, many Asian companies and multinationals tend to behave better at home than abroad, like in Indonesia. Indonesian logging and mining companies are hardly, however, paragons of virtue.

While critical, a regulatory framework only partially determines the effectiveness of policies. Local institutional and cultural contexts matter a great deal and can facilitate or render ineffective regulatory frameworks. The overall level of corruption and the quality of law enforcement and rule of law matter as much as the regulatory design itself. And in Indonesia they have a long way to go to improve.

As we were leaving Kutai, we stopped at a roadside shack to take some photographs of the destroyed forest. A local Dayak woman was selling various wares. While trying to talk us into buying parts of animals her father killed in the park, such as hornbill feathers, she told us that she frequently sees orangutans cross the paved highway. On either side of the road, there was little forest left – just palms as far as the eye could see. It was not clear to us where the orangutans would be going or why: Perhaps there is so little food left in the forest that even here, in a national park, they are forced to eat the insides of the African oil palms, a foraging coping mechanism that frequently puts them in conflict with people and gets them killed. While I was looking at the road and the destroyed forest, a paraphrase of the famous line from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptical novel The Road ran though my head: Borrowed time and borrowed world and whose eyes with which to sorrow it?

[1] See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Natural Resources and Law Enforcement,” December 20, 2001, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/Indonesia%20Natural%20Resources%20and%20Law%20Enforcement.pdf.

[2] See also Samuel Spiegel, “Governance Institutions, Resource Rights Regimes, and the Informal Mining Sector: Regulatory Complexities in Indonesia,” World Development, 40(1), 2012: 189-205; and Gavin Hilson, “What Is Wrong with the Global Support Facility for Small-scale Mining?” Progress in Development Studies, (7)3, 2007: 235-249.

[3] For how decentralization has become excessive and distortive, see International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Defying the State,” August 30, 2012, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/b138-indonesia-defying-the-state.pdf.

[4] For examples of such compensation policies and their shortcoming in particularly institutional and regulatory settings in China, see, for example, Forest Trends (2006): 20. For an effective, but expensive compensation scheme that increased the amount of land protected from certain kinds of environmentally-damaging land in Colorado, the United States, from just under 350,000 acres in 2000 to almost one million in 2005, see “Mountains for the Centuries,” The Economist, 382(8514): 35.

[5] For other challenges for effectively implementing REDD+, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Not as Easy as Falling off a Log: The Illegal Timber Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies,” Brookings Foreign Policy Working Paper No. 5, Brookings Institution, March 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/3/illegal%20logging%20felbabbrown/03_illegal_logging_felbabbrown.

[6] See, for example, Raymond Gullison, Peter Frumhoff, Joseph G. Canadell, Christopher B. Field, Daniel C. Nepstad, Katharine Hayhoe, Roni Avissar, Lisa M. Curran, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris D. Jones, and Carlos Nobres “Tropical Forests and Climate Policy,” Science, 316, 2007: 985-986; and William Laurence, “Can Carbon Trading Save Vanishing Forests?” Bioscience, 58, 2008: 286-287.

[7] For how carbon offsets support such undesirable behavior in Papua New Guinea, for example, see Colin Filer, Rodney J. Keenan, Bryant J. Allen and John R. Mcalpine, “Deforestation and forest degradation in Papua New Guinea,” Annals of Forest Science, 66 (8), December 2009: 813-25.

[8] Pervaze A. Sheikh, Illegal Logging: Background and Issues, Congressional Research Service, June 9, 2008: 5. Even the FSC is not infallible, as was revealed with respect to illegal and unsustainable timber from Laos the FSC nonetheless certified. See, for example, World Rainforest Movement, “Laos: FSC Certified Timber Is Illegal,” http://www.illegal-logging.info/item_single.php?it_id=1683&it=news; and Wright and Carlton.

[9] The Economist, September 25, 2010: 13.

[10] Sam Lawson and Larry McFaul, “Illegal Logging and Related Trade: Indicators of Global Response,” Chatham House, July 2010: 77.

[11] See, for example, Environmental Investigative Agency, Behind the Veneer: How Indonesia’s Last Rainforests Are Being Felled for Flooring, 2006, http://www.eia-international.org/cgi/reports/reports.cgi?t=template&a=117.

[12] Lawson and MacFaul: 75-76.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Stringer Indonesia / Reuters

Governance, Rule of Law and Natural Resources in Indonesia and Lessons for Burma’s Transformation

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 7, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

An authoritarian state merely a decade ago, Indonesia is now an open, pluralist democracy characterized by consistently high levels of economic growth, a growing middle class and booming foreign investment. Not only is Indonesia geostrategically important in the development of U.S. policy toward Asia, it is also a model for the coexistence of Islam and democracy and a key player in efforts to tackle global deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change.

On February 7, Brookings hosted a discussion on Indonesia’s natural resources management in the context of the country’s political, economic and rule of law reform efforts, as well as its battle against terrorist groups. The panel also drew lessons for Burma’s political and economic transformation and its management of natural resources.

Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown provided insights from her recent fieldwork in Indonesia on illicit economies and organized crime; School of Advanced International Studies Associate Director William M. Wise analyzed the rise of terrorist activity in Indonesia; and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Lex Rieffel discussed how Burma can learn from Indonesia’s economic reforms and management of foreign aid and foreign investment. Senior Fellow Richard Bush, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Indonesia Field Report II – Bali High, Rainforest Low: The Illicit Drug Trade in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Yet another Western tourist – this time a 56- year-old grandmother from Britain – has become the face of drug trafficking in Indonesia. Her death sentence for smuggling 10 pounds of cocaine worth of $2.5 million in her suitcase has riveted international media. Her story – that she was coerced to smuggle the drugs in order to protect her children and grandchildren whose safety was at stake – vaguely resembles the misfortunes of Bridget Jones from the movie Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. But so far, no miraculous Mark Darcy has landed to liberate her from prison and death row. Rather, human rights groups have criticized the British government for not doing enough to provide an adequate legal defense for Ms. Lindsay Sandiford. But as unfortunate as her story is, and even as it is but one in a long line of Western tourists dramatically apprehended and punished for drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, it is to a great extent a distraction from the drug trafficking problems and trends that Indonesia faces.

Like other countries in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has for decades applied extremely harsh penalties for drug trafficking and drug use. Like in Ms. Sandiford’s case, Indonesian law punishes drug smuggling with the death penalty, or at least a decades-long imprisonment. Merely getting caught smoking a joint can land one in jail for several years. As with elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such harsh penalties have done little to decrease drug trafficking in Indonesia.

In fact, both drug use and drug trafficking appear to have increased in the country. In 2011, Indonesia’s user population was estimated to be approximately 4.1 million, or 1.6 percent of Indonesia’s total population. In 2009, that user population was believed to be only 500,000.[1] If the estimates are equally correct – or more precisely make the same (under)estimation mistakes for both years – that would be an astounding eight-fold increase in three years. The expansion of Indonesia’s middle class, its growing purchasing power underpinned by the country’s economic boom fueled by its primary commodity exploitation and resulting GDP growth rates of over six percent, the stress of increasing inequality, and the democratization and political opening of the post-1998 era are all the kinds of triggers that can increase illicit drug consumption. Just like in China, Indonesians have been developing a taste for methamphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, and ketamine.

If the number of drug seizures, which can be signs of both greater drug flows and greater law enforcement effectiveness, are any indication, trafficking too seems to be increasing. Drug shipments intercepted at the Soekarno Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, arguably the most patrolled and monitored port of entry into the country, have risen from 16 in 2008 to 63 in 2010 and 52 in 2011.[2] With over 18,000 islands and a coastline of over 54 thousand kilometers, the Indonesian archipelago offers the perfect geography for smuggling, never mind how under-resourced and notoriously corrupt the Indonesian law enforcement apparatus is, and how weak and bribery-susceptible the justice system. Even with much less corruption in Indonesia – as critical and pivotal an achievement as that would be – and far greater resources devoted to counternarcotics enforcement, Indonesia would still be the trafficker’s paradise. Particularly since for several years now, prices of illicit drugs in Indonesia are believed to have remained higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia.[3]

With the poor rule of law and the pervasive and deeply-ingrained corruption that exists in the country, Indonesia’s law enforcement and military officials, even more so than their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are perfectly positioned to dominate Indonesia’s drug trade. The dramatic court showcases of Western tourists smuggling drugs aside, examples of military and law enforcement complicity in drug trafficking abound. Rather laughably, officials at one of Indonesia’s high-security prisons, for example, have been caught cooking meth and supplying both the prison and the nearby city.[4] According to U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, Indonesian military commanders in West Papua have participated in all manner of smuggling, including drug and timber trafficking across the border with Papua New Guinea.[5]

Importantly, however, Indonesia is no longer just a transit country for illicit drugs heading to Australia, China, and Japan, but is also increasingly a destination country. It is also a hot and rapidly expanding meth production center. Since cold medications containing pseudoephedrine are sold in Indonesia without prescription or any registration required, as they used to be in the United States until the early 2000s, cooking meth is easy. A major producer of methamphetamines itself, China supplies the pseudoephedrine both to Indonesia’s pharmaceutical industry and illicit market in a rather unregulated and unmonitored manner.

Ever more, the meth cooks in Indonesia are native, instead of the Dutch who would arrive in their former colony to produce the methamphetamines. Indeed, one of the most important developments in the Indonesian drug market is the growth of Indonesia’s domestic production capacity. The expansion of the synthetic drugs market and the domestication of production have potentially large transformative effects on Indonesia’s landscape of organized crime. Western tourists may well be those most visibly apprehended in Indonesia, but the formation of powerful Indonesian drug-trafficking groups can radically transform the structure and characteristics of the Indonesian criminal market. The emergence of far more powerful and vertically-integrated drug-trafficking groups could alter the market’s proclivity toward violence. So far, it has been a rather peaceful market. It could also change the relationship between the Indonesian state, military and law enforcement officials, and politicians on the one hand and Indonesia’s criminal gangs on the other – a complex web described in Indonesia Field Report I on urban gangs. With far greater profits at stake than in the previous drugs-for-tourists deals, a large meth market is also bound to attract the attention of powerful organized crime groups from other Southeast Asian countries and China, potentially triggering turf wars over the market and once again fundamentally altering the relationship between state and crime in Indonesia. Already, members of Malaysian drug syndicates attempting to smuggle drugs are caught with increasing frequency at Jakarta’s airport.[6]

Although the growing meth market is potentially radically transformative of Indonesia’s criminal market and is certainly highly lucrative, Indonesia is hardly a newcomer to the drug trade. Along with Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, Indonesia has long been a significant producer of cannabis. The Aceh region in Sumatra has been one of the primary cultivation areas, with the pot profits funding Acehnese secessionists and Indonesian jihadists as well as poor farmers.

Historically, various foreign as well as domestic political actors profited from the illicit and licit drug trade in Indonesia. Opium poppy used to be cultivated in Borneo and other islands of the archipelago during the 19^th century. At the turn of the 20^th century, the Dutch imported opium from British India, Persia, and Turkey and sold it in legal government-sponsored shops and smoking outfits as well as to pharmaceutical companies. The Japanese occupation forces taxed the opium-processing factories as did Sukarno’s pro-independence forces who took over the factories from the Japanese. After the end of World War II, the pro-independence parallel government smuggled out large quantities of illegal opium to Singapore to generate revenues to fight the Dutch.[7]

More surprisingly, coca, the quintessential Latin American drug-producing plant, also used to be cultivated in Indonesia. During the 1870s, a Javanese coca cultivar was developed with leaves containing about 1.5 percent cocaine, a much higher potency than the South American coca varieties had at that time. Foreign sales of coca leaves subsequently boomed, with over 1,000 tons of leaves exported to Amsterdam for processing into cocaine in 1912. By 1920, coca exports had increased to 1,600 tons, equivalent to 25 tons of cocaine and surpassing the level of cultivation in Peru and Bolivia during that period.[8] As attitudes toward cocaine use began to change during the 1930s and the European market shrank, Indonesia’s coca cultivation and exports dwindled. By 1935, coca leaf exports from Java fell to less than 10 percent of peak production, and after a few years coca cultivation in Indonesia rather precipitously stopped. The expansion of the global illicit trade in cocaine after the 1970s fueled a massive coca cultivation expansion in the Andes, yet Indonesia’s cultivation has not returned. But now, the illicit market in synthetic drugs has robustly taken off.

Of the various smugglers I was able to interview in Indonesia during my research there in the fall of 2012, none were as reticent as the drug smugglers. Those who organized illegal mining and logging bragged with pride about their capacity to bribe Indonesian authorities – see Indonesia Field Trip Report III on illegal logging and mining. Wildlife poachers and traffickers exhibited with glee, and without any remorse, the animals they slaughtered – see Indonesia Field Trip Report IV on wildlife trafficking. But those who supposedly could talk about local drug peddling and trafficking were tight-lipped, nervously looking over their shoulders and denying any knowledge. The differential penalties – very harsh for drug trafficking and minimal for illegal logging, mining, and wildlife trafficking – may not have reduced the intensity of illicit drug flows in Indonesia, but they have silenced the participants in the illegal drug trade. And yet one needs to wonder not only about the readiness of Indonesia’s law enforcement to cope with the potential growth and power of Indonesia drug trafficking groups, but also about its priorities. The illicit drug trade often generates the most international opprobrium; yet it is the illicit as well as licit destruction of Indonesia’s biodiversity that is most pressing and requires urgent attention from the Indonesian government and law enforcement. After all, the drug trade is in renewable, nondepletable resources -- unlike Indonesia’s forests and unique species that are being overexploited and are disappearing at breakneck speed. Once they are gone, there is no way of bringing them back. Meth will be cooked and consumed decades from now. The only question is who will control the meth market and what kind of political power the market will generate.

[1] United States Department of State Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control strategy Report, March 2012, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/187109.pdf: 262-266.

[2] Multa Fidus, “Malaysian Syndicates Dominate Drug Smuggling in RI,” Jakarta Post, 26 April 2012, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/04/26/malaysian-syndicates-dominate-drug-smuggling-country.html.

[3] Interview with counternarcotics officials, Jakarta, October 2012. Given Indonesia’s rather limited and varied efforts to collect systematic drug data as well as frequent short-term fluctuations in drug prices, such assessments need to be taken with a grain of salt.

[4] Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, “Indonesian Drug Trafficking Busts Doubled in 4 Years,” Jakarta Globe, 4 April 2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/indonesian-drug-trafficking-busts-doubled-in-4-years/433371.

[5] Philip Dorling and Nick McKenzie, ‘Indonesian Army Linked to Drugs,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/indonesian-army-linked-to-drugs-20101222-195kx.html.

[6] Fidus.

[7] Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 290.

[8] David Musto, “International Traffic in Coca through the Early 20th Century, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 49(2), January 1, 1998: 145-156.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Supri Supri / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report I - Crime as a Mirror of Politics: Urban Gangs in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Gang Truce in Indonesia … and El Salvador

Following a wave of violent confrontations and tit-for-tat killings, the leaders of five mass organizations-cum-urban gangs in Greater Jakarta – Pemuda Pancasila (PP), Pemuda Panca Marga (PPM), the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR), the Betawi People’s Forum (Forkabi), and Badan Pembina Provinsi Keluarga Banten (BPPKB) – agreed to a ceasefire in June 2012. The violence to be shut down had erupted in the late winter and early spring of 2012, escalating and taking on ethnic overtones in March 2012 when the leader of another gang John Refra, a.k.a. John Kei, was arrested on murder charges. Fronting as a debt-collecting business, Kei’s Key Youth Force (Amkei) was centered on Moluccan migrants in Jakarta and had been clashing with rival gangs from Flores. The June gang truce, facilitated by police negotiations and mediation,[1] for a moment seemed to turn the violence off. The gang truce paralleled a ceasefire announced by two large gangs in El Salvador – an ocean away.

In El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Calle 18, two large transnational gangs whose notoriety and proclivity to violence greatly surpasses the Jakarta toughs, declared a ceasefire in March 2012. In exchange for various privileges for imprisoned gangs leaders and members, the two maras promised the El Salvadorian government that they would turn off the violence that has significantly contributed to El Salvador’s extraordinarily murder rate of over 60 per 100,000 which for years plagued El Salvador’s citizens. Endorsed and facilitated by the government and the Catholic church, the truce was celebrated as a major breakout from the high urban criminal violence. Indeed, the truce appears to have reduced murders and other visible violence in El Salvador during the past year.[2] Even as extortion and less visible forms of violence have continued since the deal and even though there were signs in the fall of 2012 that the truce was becoming shakier and less stable, the truce has held so far and has been declared (rather controversially) by the government to be a model of dealing with urban gangs.

By contrast, in Jakarta the truce did not hold; and several weeks later, turf contestations among its gangs were back on. Of course, with 8 homicides per 100,000, Indonesia’s murder rate is nowhere close to El Salvador’s. In fact, despite occasional dramatic killings by the gangs that draw sensationalist media attention, Indonesia’s urban gangs come across as rather docile compared to their Central American brethren. Jakarta’s smog may be deadly and its traffic murderous and the inability of Jakarta’s cabbies to locate any address may well push one’s self-control to the threshold of violence; but with respect to crime, Jakarta is a remarkably safe city. Even in the vast slums where, as in San Salvador, the state is absent and the gangs rule, the atmosphere of violence is palpably lower than in many of Latin America’s cities. That does not mean that the Jakarta gangs do not exercise a great deal of power and authority over both slum areas and some business parts of the city. Just like in Rio de Janeiro, some gangs may at times have a virtual stranglehold on a neighborhood, complete with checkpoints and controlled entry into the slum.[3]

The State and the Street Rough

Yet the violence is indeed much lower in Jakarta – one reason being that the influence that official authority, such as the law enforcement, exercises over the gangs is great. Indeed, Indonesian gangs have a decades-old history of thick and complex relations with the Indonesia government, primarily its military, intelligence, and police forces, and also with Indonesian political parties that goes back to Indonesia’s independence. That basic set-up of the gangs doing the bidding of the formal powers has weathered dramatic changes in the country’s fundamental political arrangements and forms of rule over the decades. The faces and names of the gangs have changed, but the essential arrangement of official power remaining the true master and overlord of the criminal underground and employing the gangs for the purposes of the state and political bosses – as shady and illicit as these purposes may often be – has persisted.

In Latin America too, the state has often used criminal groups to advance its goals: In Mexico, deals and arrangements between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI] that ruled Mexico for 71 years plus Mexican law enforcement agencies on the one hand, and drug-trafficking groups on the other hand, moderated crime until the 1980s.[4] In Rio de Janeiro and Jamaica, politicians have long used the urban gang bosses to deliver votes and collect donations for their political parties in exchange for patronage.[5] In Central America, the military and intelligences services employed criminal groups to fight insurgents during the civil wars of the 1980s; and in the 1990s, organized crime groups there evolved from the military-crime nexus of the civil wars. However, Latin American urban gangs have frequently broken away from their subservient relationship vis-à-vis the official power elite and have become rather disobedient, and at times very violent.

In Indonesia, and throughout much of South and Southeast Asia, the state and major formal political parties have been better able to hold the rein on the criminal gangs. That is not to say that the urban gangs, and their facades and manifestations as youth wings of political parties, are totally under the thumb of the politicians or military and police forces. They are agents in of themselves, with their own political and coercive power, at times fiercely asserting their own identity and agency. They negotiate and push back against their political-military overlords even as they take orders from them. Still, in contrast to Latin America, the relationship between the gangs and official political power in South and Southeast Asia has overall remained far smoother and less confrontational. By and large, the gangs have remained tightly integrated into the formal political processes and often closely linked with particular political parties.

Whether taking over unregulated spaces through force due to the absence of other regulators or being de facto granted concessions from the state, the Indonesian gangs have collected rents from various informal and illegal enterprises. They will organize, direct, and tax informal parking on Indonesia’s city streets; the fees are minimal and a refusal to pay may well result in slashed tires or a scratched car, but unlike in parts of Rio, it is unlikely to land one in a hospital. Gangs will also tax nightclubs and street vendors for protection. Often, this informal tax collection can be pure extortion; at other times, the gangs may actually provide protection against rivals, often from different ethnic groups, not merely against themselves. The nightclub protection racket tends to be highly lucrative: The Association of Indonesian Entertainment and Recreation Center Entrepreneurs claimed that over 400 nightclubs, bars, massage parlors, and discos in Jakarta generate revenues of around $200 million annually, with owners spending about 20% on formal and informal fees.[6]

At times, the protection racket can become quite formalized, with gang members hired off the street by “formal” security or debt-collection services.[7] In fact, Jakarta’s business operators have increasingly moved to these formal, legal firms, instead of hiring the informal gangs straight off the street to pay for protection and debt-collection services. The membership between these two types of protection outfits often highly overlaps, but the bosses of the former tend to sport ties rather than tattoos. Like their brethren around the world, gangs in Indonesia also have taxed, or run, gambling, prostitution networks, and local drug distribution operations. At times, the gangs provide informal microcredit, but that service tends to be rather abusive and frequently slips into loan-sharking.

The Many Facets of Preman

There are many types of gangs in Indonesia and they vary in their savviness of how to accumulate power, cultivate political connections, and acquire political capital.[8] Rather surprisingly, many Indonesian gangs frequently do not appear to provide extensive socio-economic services to the communities where they operate or deliver otherwise absent public goods, beyond providing protection and security. Many of the street vendors I interviewed throughout Java and in Sumatra, for example, complained about the gang taxes and claimed that the gangs were of little use to them and appeared to welcome when the state acted to suppress the gangs.[9]

Some are informal organizations of soldiers and sailors out for fun after dark, and one would not expect them to have political ambitions or organize services parallel to or in the absence of the state. Neither would one expect such behavior from the motorcycle gangs, such as the Moonraker, Grab on Road (GBR), and Exalt to Coitus (XTC), that operate in Indonesia.[10] But since Indonesia moves on mopeds and motorcycles, distinguishing a motorcycle gang of the Hells Angels-type from a gang that employs the typical Asian means of transportation may be tricky.

Indeed, the labeling of groups and individuals as preman (with the term encompassing everything from a criminal, street tough, to an outright organized crime group) has often been used and misused for political purposes. As much as the formal state institutions and political parties have used the gangs for their purposes, they have also often found it convenient to make the gangs and, more broadly, the urban poor their scapegoats. Many underprivileged urban young, or homeless people and beggars have been labeled preman merely because they are poor and live in a slum. Similarly, the Indonesian police have a tendency to call even peaceable groups of young kids just hanging around on the streets preman.

Some gangs, such as the aforementioned of John Kei’s Key Youth Force, are ethnically based. The transmigrasi policy encouraged population movements throughout the archipelago – mostly Javanese and southern Sulawesi natives moving to other islands; and, inevitably, quite apart from the transmigrasi policy, Jakarta’s economic growth and opportunities attracted migrants from elsewhere. With poor skills and lacking access to established patronage networks, they would often languish in Jakarta’s slums, with particular ethnic groups settling down in particular areas. The young unemployed become easy recruiting targets for ethnically-based gangs. The wider ethnic-minority community would depend on the gang for access to formal and informal jobs and other patronage, with other ethnic enclaves and their gangs remaining closed to outsiders. Some of the prominent ethnically-based gangs have included groups from Ambon, the Moluccas, Timor, and southern Sulawesi, particularly Makassar.

Violence between the ethnically-based gangs has occasionally not only triggered violent confrontations in the criminal market, but also set off wider ethnic violence in Indonesia. The November 1998 Ketapang riot in West Jakarta between gangs from Ambon and Flores, provoked by clashes over the control of parking lots and a gambling den, was believed to be the last spark igniting the ethnic and sectarian violence in Ambon during the late 1990s and early 2000s. But that narrative may have merely provided a convenient excuse for the police and military forces to be supporting Betawi (Jakarta native) gangs since then. Of course, ethnic tensions over access to land and state resources in Ambon had been growing for a number of years and were intensified by the Islamist salafi global mobilization of the 1990s. (The ethnic violence itself, despite its terrible human toll, provided Indonesia’s military and law enforcement forces with a plausible justification to keep high budgets after the collapse of the Suharto regime.)

But the gangs that do provide socio-economic services and hobnob with the politicians can accumulate a great deal of political power. Indeed, it is often very difficult to draw clear distinctions between some gangs and formal political youth organizations in Indonesia. The two entities may strongly overlap in leadership and membership, with each being unique and separate only at the margins. The gangs with the most explicit and thickest connections to formal political parties provide – rather naturally – the most extensive socio-economic and social services beyond protection, such as street cleaning, electricity, water distribution and sewage, flood assistance, and blood donations. They also resolve disputes, whether over land in slum areas without formal justice institutions and rule of law, or even among businessmen who choose to risk going through Indonesia’s corrupt and increasingly unpredictably bribable courts. Importantly, they also deliver votes for their political sponsors, put on mass rallies to demonstrate the particular political party’s street power, intimidate opponents, and break up the opponents’ rallies or labor strikes. Both the gangs and youth organizations help local party bosses to win public goods tenders and are themselves rewarded with such tenders by their political overlords.

From Nationalism to Ethnicity and Islam: The Evolution of Urban Gangs in Indonesia

One of the most powerful gangs and most visibly used as a tool of the political order and highest formal political power is Pemuda Pancasilla. A criminal gang with large membership on the one hand, it also managed to present itself as the ultimate defender of Indonesian nationalism and the New Order of President Suharto. Established in the early 1980s in Sumatra, it grew under the leadership of Yapto Soerjosoemarno to claim a pan-ethnic membership of 10 million throughout the archipelago in the late 1990s.[11] Often doing the bidding of Indonesia’s military and intelligence services or Suharto’s political party (Golkar) it coerced support for Suharto’s regime, beat up opponents and extorted the Chinese business community for private rents and political donations, as well as partook in charitable activities and the provision of socio-economic goods to local communities. It also provided privileged access to jobs. Unlike the gangs that the Indonesian state employed after the creation of Indonesia and those that had been used by Indonesian political actors even during the colonial, pre-independence days, PP succeeded in sufficiently covering its origins and connections to the criminal underworld so as to portray itself as the ultimate voice and carrier of the official ideology and values of the Suharto’s regime.

Given how tight with the Suharto regime PP was, it is not surprising that it did not weather well the end of the Suharto regime. After the end of Suharto’s reign, Pemuda Pancasilla tried to transform itself into an official political party, and twice, under different names, it did very poorly in national elections. It still exists as a youth group and a street gang, but it now needs to share power in the criminal market and in the political space far more than ever before with other gangs-cum-political-organizations.

The criminal gangs that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Suharto regime have reflected the diversification of political cleavages in Indonesia. Many have remained ethnically-based.[12] Not surprisingly, some of most successful urban gangs have been those that have received the most support from the post-Suharto state and law enforcement – namely, Jakarta’s Betawi gangs, such as the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR) and the Betawi People’s Forum (Forkabi), based on ethnic groups “native”[13] to Jakarta. By supporting them, the security services believe they have a better capacity to control outbreaks of ethnic violence beyond the criminal market.[14] By the late 2000s, the Betawi groups displaced other ethnically-based groups from large areas of Jakarta, such as Tanah Abang area.

Reflecting the new era of Indonesia’s Islamization during the 2000 decade, the Betawi gangs have also embraced Islamist narratives. Donning Islamic regalia, they have at times taken it upon themselves to enforce sharia and harass the Christian and Ahmadyyia minorities in West Java – both because of genuine ideological drive and because such actions would make them politically useful to politicians mobilizing on the basis of Islamization as well as generate various resources, including access to land, and other economic rents for the gangs. This coating with Islam too made them appealing to Indonesia’s military and law enforcement agencies, which since the early 1990s have also become increasingly Islamized.

The (Non)Evolving State’s Response: Beyond Cooptation and Selective Repression?

The selective embrace of some of the preman and targeted repression of other gangs is nothing new in Indonesia. The most brutal campaign of such selective weeding out of the gangs who were most troubling for the regime and cooptation of those most useful to the regime took place in the early 1980s. Suharto’s so-called Petrus campaign (short for mysterious killings) viciously and rather indiscriminately targeted all manner of “inconvenients” – unemployed youth, disobedient criminal gangs, or those supporting Suharto’s rival General Ali Moertopo, and sometimes even just street children. At the end of the campaign, between 5,000 and 10,000 people were killed.[15]

Although far less violent than during the Suharto era, the anti-preman repression waves during the 2000 decade have continued to target political criminal enemies as well as to cater to the growing middle-class fears of criminality and distract the broader body politic from other problems, such as the country’s socio-economic difficulties, and also away from having to fundamentally redesign the tight relationship between the state and political parties and criminals. Like the mano dura policies in El Salvador and Central America, the suppression campaigns would target vulnerable marginalized individuals merely because they sported a tattoo, and would flood the jails with low-level offenders or members of targeted criminals simply on the basis of their membership, rather than any evidence of actual criminal behavior.[16] But this seemingly indiscriminate repression has consciously coincided with highly-selected nurturing of some cultivated “friendly” gangs.

Indonesia’s politicians continue to be deeply complicit in the perpetuation of the state-crime/cooptation-repression pattern, for fundamentally breaking with the system would require their sacrificing the various advantages they get from employing the criminal gangs. It is far easier and more convenient to occasionally give in to periodic public outrcries for anti-crime campaigns and to round up the most vulnerable people.

In labeling the sponsorship of favorite proxies and ethnic-kin vigilantism as “community policing,” politicians and law enforcement agencies in Indonesia put a new face over the past decade on old practices. Often underwritten with a lot of money, such “community” initiatives and “community partners” would receive official blessing to cleanse areas, such as Tanah Abang in Jakarta, of ethnic and business rivals. At the same time, in a classic Mansur Olson fashion,[17] the repression waves have made membership in a gang all the more valuable: those without membership and sponsorship would be more vulnerable to arrest and have more difficulties obtaining patronage. Within certain bounds, gang membership would materially, politically, and psychologically empower marginalized individuals, while, paradoxically, by reinforcing the pressures toward gang membership within the slums, gang leaders and politicians as well as police and military officials would profit from the repressive anti-gang campaings.

Such a policy of incomplete, selective repression is also much cheaper than addressing the basic socio-economic and public safety deficiencies that trouble Indonesia’s sprawling slums. Rather than bringing the state into the slum in a comprehensive, multifaceted, and accountable manner,[18] periodic selective repression allows the powers that be to get away with murder (literally and figuratively) while minimizing the resources necessary to suppress crime and manipulate it for one’s purposes. In the long term, the outcome is a profound marginalization of vast segments of society and perpetuation of political and socio-economic conditions that give rise to alienation and that sever bonds between citizens and the state, but in the short term, such an approach is cheap and delivers benefits to adroit politicians and law enforcement agents.

Nonetheless, the concept and language of “alternative livelihoods” for the preman have seeped into political discourse and policies in Indonesia. Formally organizing the gang members in official security or debt-collection companies has been described as one form of “alternative livelihoods.” This approach has several limitations: One is that the amount of jobs these companies generate is still vastly fewer than the amount of jobs provided by the gangs. Second, the “services” that the gang members obtain from belonging to a gang go beyond employment and regular services and are not matched by the formal security companies. And fundamentally, as long as the formal security or debt-collection companies behave no less thuggishly than the informal gangs, they are merely a cover for the same old nexus of political-power-formal-business-and-crime that has characterized the Indonesian scene.

What may perhaps be changing in that nexus is its increasing interaction with terrorism in Indonesia. While still much less violent and virulent than in South Asia or the Middle East, Indonesia’s salafi terrorist groups have been experiencing a certain revival over the past several years – reinvigorated by the influx of refugees from the Middle East, funded by Saudi Wahhabi money for two decades, and at least indirectly fostered by the apathy and meekness of Indonesia’s government and politicians over the past several years when it comes to speaking up against the kind of Islamization that oppresses ethnic minorities and undermines individual human rights. One of Indonesia’s counterterrorism policies of the early 2000s (which have been widely heralded as very effective) has been to throw arrested terrorist group members into the same poorly-controlled general population prison facilities that are used to incarcerate the preman and other criminals. The consequence has been that the criminals and terrorists have been fraternizing and establishing conspiratorial relations.[19] During several recent terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the various terrorist groups have used ex-criminals and criminal gangs both for logistical support and conduct of actual terrorist operations – though the recent terrorist attacks have been highly unsuccessful from the perspective of the terrorist groups and generated minimal casualties and damage.

Overall, these crime-terror connections in Indonesia remain very low level and not very frequent: the salafi terrorist groups, organized crime, urban gangs, and the preman continue to be distinct nonstate actors, very differently connected to and differently antagonistic toward the Indonesian state. The big question is whether eventually, perhaps as a result of their interactions with the terrorist groups, the Indonesian criminal gangs will throw off the reins of their political overlords and strike out far more on their own, and perhaps far more violently, as the gangs do in Latin America, or whether the formal political system in Indonesia will manage to maintain the delicate balancing act of using the urban gangs and criminal groups for its own purposes, while keeping their power in check.

[1] “Gang Leaders Vow to Bury the Hatchet,” Jakarta Post, June 30, 2012.

[2] For details on the truce in El Salvador, see, for example, Linda Pressly, El Salvador Gang truce: Can MS-13 and 18th Street Keep the Peace? BBC News Magazine, November 21, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20402216.

[3] For the atmosphere in Rio, see, for example, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “President Obama's Visit to a Favela in Rio: Below the Surface Calm,” The Huffington Post, March 17, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanda-felbabbrown/obama-brazil-favela_b_837371.html; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “President Obama to Visit a Rio Favela: Surfing on Sewage,” Brookings Institution, March 17, 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2011/03/17-obama-favelas-felbabbrown.

[4] See, for example, Luis Astorga, “El Tráfico de Fármacos Ilícitos en México: Organizaciones de traficantes, corrupción y violencia,” paper presented at a WOLA conference on Drogas y Democracia en Mexico: El Impacto de Narcotráfico y de las Políticas Antidrogas, Mexico City, June 21, 2005, cited in Laurie Freeman, “State of Siege: Drug-Related Violence and Corruption in Mexico: Unintended Consequences of the War on Drugs,” WOLA Special Report, June 2006; Peter Reuter and David Ronfeldt, “Quest for Integrity: The Mexican-US Drug Issues in the 1980s,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 34(3), Autumn 1992:102-103; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Violent Drug Market in Mexico and Lessons from Colombia,” Foreign Policy at Brookings, Policy Paper No. 12, March 2009,

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/03_mexico_drug_market_felbabbrown/03_mexico_drug_market_felbabbrown.pdf.

[5] See, for example, Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Enrique Desmond Arias, ‘The structure of criminal organizations in Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.’ Presentation delivered at the conference on “Drug Trafficking, Violence, and Instability in Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean: Implications for US National Security,” at the Matthew B. Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, October 30, 2009; and Enrique Desmond Arias and Corinne Davis Rodrigues, “The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas,” Latin American Politics and Society, 48(4), 2006: 53-81.

[6] Hasyim Widhiarto, “Former Street Thugs Revamp Jakarta’s Protection Racket,” Jakarta Post, November 1, 2010.

[7] Ibid.

[8] On how frequently nonstate actors, including criminal groups, provide such services in both Asia and Latin America and how they use the provision of such services to acquire political capital and legitimacy, see, for example, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Human Security and Crime in Latin America: The Political Capital and Political Impact of Criminal Groups and Belligerents Involved in Illicit Economies,” FIU/WHEMSAC, September 2011; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, December 2009).

[9] Interviews with street vendors throughout Java and in western Sumatra, fall 2012.

[10] See, for example, Bayu Marhaenjati, Zaky Pawas, and Ardi Mandiri, “Gang Warfare in Jakarta’s Streets,” Jakarta Globe, April 14, 2012; A’an Suryan, “Concerted Efforts to Tame Motorcycle Gangs,” Jakarta Post, April 23, 2012.

[11] For a detailed study of Pemuda Pancasilla, see Loren Ryter, Youth, Gangs, and the State in Indonesia, Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, 2002.

[12] David Brown and Ian Wilson, “Ethnicized Violence in Indonesia: The Betawi Brotherhood Forum,” Working Paper No. 145, Murdoch University Asia Research Center, July 2007, http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/publications/wp/wp145.pdf.

[13] Native is a relative term. The term Betawi is applied to people who have lived in Jakarta for several centuries, and, in fact, the name comes from an old colonial name for Jakarta – Batavia. But centuries ago, many of those people were migrants from various parts of Indonesia’s archipelago and Southeast Asia themselves, and ended up mixing with migrants from other parts of the world, including Arab, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese, and Dutch migrants.

[14] “Betawi Big Boys Rule Jakarta Underworld,” Jakarta Post, August 28, 2009.

[15] Ian Wilson, “‘War against Thugs’ or a War against the Poor?” Jakarta Post, April 7, 2012.

[16] “From Petty Theft to Rioting, Gangs Are a Jakarta Plague,” Jakarta Globe, March 4, 2012.

[17] For seminal conceptualization of collective actions problems and group formation, see Mansur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

[18] On how the design and implementation challenges of such comprehensive state approaches, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Conceptualizing Crime as Competition in State-Making and Designing an Effective Response,” NDU-ONDCP Conference on Illicit Trafficking Activities in the Western Hemisphere, Washington DC, May 21, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/research/speeches/2010/05/21-illegal-economies-felbabbrown; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Bringing the State to the Slum: Confronting Organized Crime and Urban Violence in Latin America,” Brookings Latin America Initiative Paper Series, December 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/12/05%20latin%20america%20slums%20felbabbrown/1205_latin_america_slums_felbabbrown.

[19] International Crisis Group, “How Indonesian Extremists Regroup,” Asia Report No. 228, July 2012, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/228-how-indonesian-extremists-regroup.pdf.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters

Global Swing States and the Human Rights and Democracy Order

Ted Piccone — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: This paper was originally published on the German Marshall Fund of the United States website. You can also download the related report titled "Global Swing States: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Future of International Order."

SUMMARY

The convergence of values and divergence of methods between the “global swing states” — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Turkey — and the world’s established democracies are on particular display in the arena of democracy and human rights. To varying degrees, all four nations are prepared to play a role in supporting international mechanisms to strengthen human rights and democracy, but this is to be done on their own terms: through quiet diplomacy and mediation, using coercive methods only as a last resort. The challenge before Western democracies is to evaluate when to seek convergence with global swing states on international interventions to uphold human rights and when to yield to parallel efforts that may entail less control but greater acceptance and therefore greater effectiveness on the ground.

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Global Swing States and the Human Rights and Democracy Order

Authors

Ted Piccone

Publication: The German Marshall Fund of the United States

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Rising Democracies Take on Russia and China

Emily Alinikoff and Ted Piccone — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:25:00 -0500

The Security Council’s recent failure to condemn Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown in Syria after months of attacks against unarmed civilians would suggest the case is hopeless. Russia and China vetoed a resolution proposing a process for a negotiated transition to democracy despite full backing from the usually anti-interventionist Arab League. The stalemate raises perennial questions about the international community's ability to respond to crises, the legitimacy of the veto power and the doctrine of responsibility to protect that underpinned intervention in Libya. The Syria vote, however, may have strengthened what appears to be an increasingly common view among the world's emerging democracies: dictators determined to stay in power at any cost are no longer tolerable.

The double veto has made international action in Syria all the more difficult. But it also shows that Russia and China are increasingly isolating themselves from a widening consensus that human-rights violations demand an international response. In one corner, established and newer democracies, more attuned to their voters at home, are under pressure to support movements for universal rights. In the opposite corner, China and Russia are silencing domestic dissent at home while trying to prop up comparable autocrats abroad. This divide became abundantly clear when India and South Africa disassociated themselves from their usual affiliates (BRICS) to support the Security Council resolution on Syria. Brazil likely would have joined its democratic cohorts if it were still on the council.

Rising Great Powers?

Rising democracies like India, Brazil and South Africa, along with their counterparts Turkey and Indonesia, are beginning to stand up for human rights in ways that may reshape the international system. India, Brazil and South Africa already self-identify as IBSA, explicitly invoking their democratic identity to differentiate themselves from Russia and China. Adding Turkey and Indonesia—large Muslim-majority democracies—to the group we call IBSATI would further distinguish these states as examples of developing democracies that, unlike Russia and China, have made remarkable economic progress while also expanding the rights of their citizens.

Cooperation with IBSATI and other like-minded democracies, however, requires some skillful diplomacy. We know from their response to the Arab Spring and other democratic transitions that the IBSATI powers share several characteristics when it comes to supporting political reforms in their respective regions and beyond. All five have made unequivocal commitments to democratic and human-rights standards both as a goal of national development and as a principle of their foreign policies. This shared starting point offers an opportunity to find common ground with each other and with more established democracies.

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Authors

Emily Alinikoff
Ted Piccone

Publication: The National Interest

Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

Rising Democracies and the Arab Awakening: Implications for Global Democracy and Human Rights

Emily Alinikoff and Ted Piccone — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:36:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

As the emerging global order takes shape, debate is growing more intense around the trajectory of the rising powers and what their ascendency to positions of regional and international influence means for the United States, its traditional allies, and global governance more broadly. Commentary about these rising powers— often referred to in a generic way as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) but actually encompassing a dozen or so countries largely represented in the G-20—ranges from alarmist to sanguine. Pessimists argue that China, with its impressive economic growth and increasingly global reach, is well-positioned to challenge the United States’ role of global superpower and to weaken the commitment of other rising powers, and various international organizations, to liberal values. More optimistic analysts insist that the rise of middle powers, most of which are democracies of varying stripes, bodes well for the world: millions are being lifted out of poverty, rule of law is taking hold and the international system is bound to be a more inclusive, representative one.

Each of these narratives holds some truth. It is in principle a net positive and a success story of the post World War II system that these states are growing stronger and more integrated in the global architecture. As China impressively expands it economic reach, its model for growth— one that has embraces elements of capitalism and a growing middle class while retaining authoritarian powers and repressing dissent—has become increasingly attractive to other developing countries striving to improve their economic performance, and a counterpoint to the so-called Western model of democratic development.

It is misleading, however, to suggest that the rise of emerging powers is inevitably a threat to the predominant Western democratic success story. A group of these rising powers—namely India, Brazil, and South Africa, acting at times under the IBSA banner, along with Indonesia and Turkey, a group we collectively refer to as IBSATI—are making impressive economic strides, including expanding middle classes, while simultaneously consolidating their own democracies and expanding the rights of their citizens. All five are members of the G-20, the leading group of major economies, all of which also happen to be democracies, with the exception of China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Leaders and activists around the globe are looking to these states as relatable models of economic and political success, opening new opportunities for influence. This is especially true in the context of the Arab Spring, where transitional states increasingly are looking to emerging democratic powers for assistance and advice. Turkey and Indonesia, as large Muslim-majority democracies, play a potentially crucial role in this regard. For those in the West, and elsewhere, concerned with the future trends of global attention to democracy and human rights, it is critical to understand how these new, rising powers incorporate democracy and human rights into their foreign policies.

Of course, while they all share a common identity and sense of pride at having emerged triumphant from the dark days of authoritarian, military, racist and/or colonial rule, each of these states has unique histories and associations with democracy and human rights and each will incorporate these values into its foreign policy differently. All five articulate a strong belief in the value of democracy and human rights as a principle of foreign policy and have signed on to a long list of treaties, charters, declarations and communiqués politically binding them to honor such values at home and abroad. Similar to established democracies, however, these rising powers behave inconsistently and unpredictably when it comes to applying these principles to concrete cases. Like any other country, they are primarily concerned with national security, economic growth and regional stability and carefully and cautiously weigh the costs and benefits of raising democracy and human rights issues bilaterally or multilaterally against these primordial interests.

As they seek to play a bigger role on the global stage, policymakers face a new set of challenges arising from their own domestic situations. Internal democratization coupled with globalization in trade, migration and communications is opening foreign policy decisions to wider attention and scrutiny and presenting governments with more difficult tradeoffs. Within the complexity of this decision-making environment, it is important to learn if and how democracy and human rights fit into these states’ conceptions of national interests as they ascend to positions of regional and international influence.

To better understand how these states have performed on international democracy and human rights challenges in the last five to ten years, we have undertaken an analysis of their approaches on such issues in their own regions as well as their reaction to the widespread demands for democracy and human rights in the Middle East. A review of how these states have performed regionally is a logical starting point for understanding what place democracy and human rights have in their foreign policy. After all, these states are considered— and consider themselves—leaders in their own regions. We then review their responses to the dramatic and unfolding events of the Arab Spring to provide further insight into how they incorporate values in their foreign policies in real time, and how they may address these issues in the future. We conclude with some core findings that help distinguish their individual and collective approaches from the other leading actors in this field, namely: their strong support for sovereignty and non-intervention in internal affairs, their preference for mediation and “constructive engagement” over condemnation and isolation, their deep antipathy to military intervention in the name of protecting or promoting democracy, their demand for greater equity in global governance and complementary resistance to initiatives led by established powers, and their willingness, in varying ways, to offer support to transitioning democracies, as demonstrated in the Arab Awakening. Within this group, the IBSA states act as straddlers between traditional powers in the West and their southern, non-interventionist colleagues, a stance akin to Indonesia’s, while Turkey is moving closer to a more robust stand for democratic change in its own neighborhood. For all five, there is a growing insistence on regional organizations as the frontline responders to political crises in their neighborhoods, a position that reinforces their own agenda for regional leadership.

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Emily Alinikoff
Ted Piccone

Image Source: Â© Andy Clark / Reuters

Rise of the TIMBIs: Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia

Jack A. Goldstone — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Nov. 30 marked the 10th anniversary of Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill's anointing of the BRIC economies—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—as the future leaders of the global economy. Yet 10 years on, the notion of the BRICs already seems out of date. In China and Russia, demographic patterns have shifted. Their working-age populations are declining, as are exports, while still-rigid political systems stifle free thought and hamper technical advance.

Future trends still look robust in Brazil and India, but these countries should now be in new company—a group of dynamic and democratic emerging economies. Let's call them the TIMBIs: Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia. These countries form more than just a cute acronym. They all share favorable demographics and democracy and are already large economies. Their GDPs combined have already surpassed that of China and will be much faster growing in the coming decades. Their combination of booming labor forces and political openness points to rapid increases in human capital and innovation that will propel these regional powers into global powers in the near future.

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Authors

Jack A. Goldstone

Publication: Foreign Policy

Indonesia’s Green Prosperity

Nigel Purvis and Michael Wolosin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:39:00 -0500

On November 19, 2011, in Bali, Indonesia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a new partnership agreement with the Government of Indonesia providing more than $600 million of U.S. aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). More than half of these investments are dedicated to “green prosperity”—the sound idea that sustainable natural resource management and clean energy technologies accelerate economic growth and poverty alleviation.

What does this mean in practical terms? New U.S. funds will help Indonesia make wiser land-use decisions by, for example, guiding future palm oil plantations away from pristine rainforests and toward abandoned, degraded lands, which are abundant. These “land swaps” hold enormous potential. While palm oil plantations on degraded lands require higher up-front investments (and are therefore uncommon without government intervention), over time plantations on degraded lands are usually more productive and profitable than palm plantations grown in newly deforested and drained peat lands.

The United States can provide affordable bridge loans and long-term financing, and technical assistance to help local communities map surrounding lands, clarify land-rights and develop community-supported strategies. In so doing the United States can help Indonesia increase economic growth, strengthen its democracy, reduce illegally logging, respect the rights of forest-dependent communities, conserve threatened tropical forests and orangutans, and reduce a major source of climate pollution.

Investments in renewable energy—such as modest sized hydropower projects and geothermal power plants—are also contemplated in the new green prosperity program and can also provide important benefits. Affordable, clean electricity in rural communities spurs business development and lays the foundation for long-term growth by enabling school children to study in the evenings.

The green prosperity program represents an important milestone in Indonesia’s own development and a step forward in modernizing U.S. foreign aid programs.

Nowhere is green growth a more pressing need than Indonesia. Natural resources are a major part of the Indonesian economy, but Indonesia’s runaway deforestation and wetland destruction, driven by illegal logging and unchecked expansion of oil palm and pulpwood plantations, threaten Indonesia’s social stability, national security, environment, health, and future economic growth.

For a long time Indonesia’s forest economy has been notoriously inefficient and corrupt, with profiteering and resource exploitation often trampling the rights of the rural poor. Pulp, paper, timber, and oil palm companies and powerful syndicates have routinely seized the ancestral lands of local communities [1]. The resulting dislocation, economic and upheaval exacerbate social tensions by further marginalizing the struggling rural majority.

Across Indonesia overbuilt pulp and paper mill capacity is driving illegal logging, causing the disappearance of old-growth native forests and costing the government nearly $2 billion in lost tax revenue annually [2]. Rapidly expanding palm oil plantations also are taking the place of healthy forests and wetlands. Deforestation in Indonesia is so prevalent that at current rates of destruction, old-growth native forests could disappear within 30 years [3] with devastating consequences for the poor, wildlife and the world’s climate [4]. Indonesia is the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind only China and the United States [5], and destructive land-use practices account for 85 percent of Indonesia’s emissions, while the resulting oil palm and forest products sectors contribute less than 8 percent to its GDP [6]. Fires caused by the draining of peat-land soils are not only an exceptionally large source of emissions, but also result in economic losses estimated at $4 billion annually, causing major health problems in local populations through smoke inhalation [7] .

In this context, Indonesia’s decision to focus the bulk of new U.S. foreign aid resources on sustainable land-use and clean energy is a cause for hope. Indonesia deserves credit for prioritizing not just growth, but green growth in its partnership with the United States.

The investments announced by Secretary Clinton are also in America’s vital national interest. Indonesia’s strategic importance to the United States is difficult to overstate. As the world’s most populous Muslim nation, its third largest democracy, and an example of religious tolerance in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is an essential partner in promoting democracy, and combating Islamic extremism and terrorism. The United States has major economic and military interests in the shipping lanes around Indonesia, where close to half of the total global merchant fleet capacity transits. Indonesia is a major U.S. trade partner ($18 billion annually) with a large and growing economy (18th largest globally with 5 percent annual growth).

The Millennium Challenge Corporation deserves recognition for responding to Indonesia’s growing interest in green prosperity, and for understanding the essential role that natural resource management and renewable energy play in the MCC’s objective of poverty reduction through sustainable economic growth. The MCC has a strong tradition of investing only in projects that achieve a high rate of economic return for local communities (at least 10 percent) and this green prosperity program is designed to ensure the same. In short, the MCC is innovating while staying true to its mission.

Of course, success is far from guaranteed. Mismanagement and corruption are deeply embedded in Indonesia’s land-use sectors, and entrenched interests will fight against efforts to increase transparency and rationalize natural resource decisions. Indonesia will need to sustain the political will to overcome these challenges at all levels of government.

The MCC will also need to continue innovating by more fully and accurately measuring the economic benefits of proposed green prosperity investments. The MCC should measure not only the immediate jobs and income its projects create but also the broader societal benefits of proposed investments. Well-designed projects that avoid pollution and environmental degradation can lower heath care costs, improve water quality and security, increase agricultural productivity, and safeguard traditional sources of income (such as fruits, nuts and other forest products). These very real benefits must not be ignored, and recent advances in modern economics mean they no longer need to be.

Regardless of the challenges ahead, we must welcome the new bilateral compact between the United States and Indonesia to seek out a new, green prosperity. It’s the right vision and a good start.

[1] Chip Fay and Martua Sirait, in Which Way Forward?: People, Forests, and Policymaking in Indonesia, 2004.
[2] USAID, Growing Conflict and Unrest in Indonesian Forests, 2004; Human Rights Watch, Wild Money, 2009.
[3] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
[4] U.S. Census Bureau and World Bank.
[5] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization; World Resources Institute.
[6] The National Development and Planning Agency of Indonesia (Bappenas), Reducing carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peat lands, 2009.
[7] The Indonesian National Board on Climate Change, Fact Sheet – Carbon Emissions and Development, 9-6-2010.

Authors

Nigel Purvis
Michael Wolosin

Image Source: Â© Candida Ng / Reuters

Obama’s Pacific Trip: What Will Be the President’s Message?

Jonathan D. Pollack — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:18:00 -0500

Continuing the pattern established during his first two years in office, President Obama departs Friday on a major November trip across the Pacific. At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Honolulu, through bilateral defense agreements to be signed in Australia, and at the U.S.-ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit in Bali, the president will reinforce America’s enduring commitment to regional diplomacy, economics and security.

However, uncertainty pervades the president’s visit, and the stakes arguably have become far larger than in prior years. Obama confronts acute political polarization at home and a daunting reelection challenge that will increasingly dominate his time and attention. Despite repeated assurances from senior U.S. officials about the centrality of Asia and the Pacific to U.S. interests, the acute dysfunction in American politics during 2011 has triggered widespread unease within the region about American resilience, constancy and strategic purpose. The president will need to counteract these perceptions and impart how the United States seeks to contribute to the future regional order.

No one expects President Obama to offer a highly elaborated vision of the Asia-Pacific future. At the same time, proposing a comprehensive regional economic and security architecture seems overly ambitious and quite possibly unhelpful. But unregulated power rivalries at a time of a weakened, domestically preoccupied United States could put regional security and prosperity at risk. These issues could easily become the unspoken subtext over the next ten days. The opportunity for frank discussion will be missed if such issues are minimized, or ignored altogether.

Much of the regional unease focuses on the rapid ascendance of China, and worries that insufficient American involvement will ultimately enable China to supplant the United States within the region. At the same time, proposals for a U.S.-China “G-2” or (alternatively) efforts to exclude or marginalize China in regional politics are comparably misguided. America and China are now the world’s two largest economic powers, but this does not warrant an effort to reintroduce bipolarity into the international system. It is an outcome that none in the region –including China—seek, and would not be conducive to longer-term regional stability.

The strategic challenge for the United States is to enmesh emerging major powers within enhanced regional arrangements in which the United States is also a full participant, while affirming American links to allies and regional partners who want to avoid “either or” strategic choices. The critical questions are driven less by perceptions of imminent threat, and more by larger uncertainties and power asymmetries that could develop in the absence of clear strategic purpose and direction.

The United States thus needs to counter regional fears by offering an inclusive conception of regional order. Enhanced trade partnerships could provide some of the key building blocks in this process. President Obama will emphasize export-led growth as a primary means to revive America’s economic performance. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be a central part of this message. But the TPP in its extant form represents an overly constricted approach to trade ties across the Pacific; to many observers, it seems a thinly disguised means to counter China’s growing economic influence.

At the same time, Obama’s visit is not without significant political risks for the president. The administration and the Republican leadership remain mired in a highly partisan stalemate over the ballooning federal debt and how to address it. The deliberations of the Congressional super committee are due to conclude by Thanksgiving. Without an agreement, even sharper cuts in U.S. government expenditure (including defense expenditure) would be mandated in 2013. Such an outcome would directly undermine American aspirations to a central role in the regional future. An immobilized political process in Washington, D.C. during the president’s travels can only diminish the seriousness of strategic purpose that the United States seeks to convey, and that nearly all in the region want to see.

Authors

Jonathan D. Pollack

Image Source: Â© Yuriko Nakao / Reuters

Do New Democracies Support Democracy?: The Multilateral Dimension

Ted Piccone — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:57:00 -0400

The world’s six most influential rising democracies—Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey—are at various stages of democratic consolidation. Freedom House ranks them all as Free in terms of political rights and civil liberties except for Turkey (which is at the top of the Partly Free category), and all six have enjoyed remarkable economic growth and improved standards of living in recent years. Yet when it comes to supporting democracy and human rights outside their borders, they have differed quite a bit from one another, with behavior ranging from sympathetic support to borderline hostility.

One revealing indicator of their stance toward international action to support democracy and universal human rights can be found in the votes that they have cast on relevant issues in international organizations. United Nations voting data compiled since 2004 by the Democracy Coalition Project, as well as a review of each country’s behavior at the UN Security Council and on the international stage reveal positions ranging from pragmatism to fairly strict allegiance to traditional principles of state sovereignty and noninterventionism. This essay presents a comparative examination of the voting patterns of these six countries in three key UN bodies—the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly, and the Security Council. The UN voting records of these countries must be understood within a larger context, however, and so we begin with brief accounts of the overall place of democracy and human rights trends in their foreign policies over the past decade.

Brazil

Formerly a country with a relatively quiet, inward-looking, and defensive foreign policy, Brazil has evolved into a more assertive regional—and increasingly global—player, a transformation that has coincided with the huge political and economic strides that the country has made in recent years. Brazilian diplomats often credit the country’s democratic consolidation and economic progress for its growing credibility and influence on the world stage. When it comes to wielding that influence in support of democracy in other countries, however, Brazil has been ambivalent and often unpredictable. If supporting democracy or human rights will help it to further its own goals of consolidating regional leadership, protecting business interests, or winning a seat on the UN Security Council, Brazil generally favors multilateral strategies geared toward pro-reform outcomes. But in the recent cases of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and most recently Syria, Brazil has taken a more ideological or “soft-balancing” approach, siding against the United States and Europe by avoiding criticism of human-rights abuses and ducking behind the defense of noninterventionism favored by diplomats in the foreign ministry.

India

The world’s most populous democracy was a founding member and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. Its foreign policy is deeply rooted in the twin principles of anti-imperialism and noninterventionism. Yet as India has grown into a global economic power, its identity as a secular, pluralist, and democratically governed state has begun to influence its behavior in multilateral organizations. Thus, on the global stage, India has become increasingly vocal in favor of democracy, which it believes can be a strong foundation for international peace and cooperation. At the same time, the South Asian powerhouse maintains that democracy must not be imposed on other countries; rather, nondemocratic countries should seek out the assistance of India and other democracies if they themselves wish to make the transition to free societies. It will take some time for the traditionally noninterventionist diplomats in charge of multilateral affairs to implement the increasingly clear prodemocracy sentiments coming from the top political leadership in New Delhi.

Indonesia

Indonesia’s remarkable transformation from an authoritarian system to an open, pluralist democracy—the third largest in the world—has been accompanied by a significant reorientation of its foreign policy. In the past, Indonesia rejected international norms of democracy and human rights, claiming that they were incompatible with “Asian values.” Now the country strongly endorses the principles and values of democracy in its foreign-policy rhetoric, though it continues to oppose most human-rights initiatives at the UN. This transformation, accompanied by consistently high levels of economic growth, a growing middle class, booming foreign direct investment, and (for the most part) internal and external peace, is precisely its greatest asset when it comes to projecting its interests and values in Asia. Although Indonesia has—in word, if not in deed—pushed for democracy in the region, its advocacy thus far has had little impact. Today, the majority of ASEAN members are nondemocratic, and there is no meaningful regional mechanism to support democratic change. Nonetheless, Indonesia can claim credit for advocating the establishment of an ASEAN human-rights mechanism, albeit a weak one, and for bringing its foreign-policy rhetoric—though not its UN votes— more in line with its domestic credentials.

South Africa

Although South Africa’s record of democracy and human-rights promotion is in some ways laudable, it is perhaps the most disappointing case among the six. The country’s remarkably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy under the inspiring leadership of Nelson Mandela raised high expectations that South Africa would become a strong ally of peaceful democratic movements in Africa and elsewhere. Yet when faced with tough choices, South Africa’s four postapartheid presidents have generally aligned themselves with nationalist or pan-African movements, either acting in “South-South solidarity” or choosing neutrality vis-à-vis autocratic regimes. Faced with deep-rooted economic and social challenges at home, South Africa tends to prioritize foreign relations that help it to achieve such domestic priorities as rural development, job creation, and crime prevention.

South Korea

After emerging from three decades of military rule in the early 1990s, the newly democratic Republic of Korea quickly became a reliable supporter of multilateral efforts to promote democracy and human rights. Its generally strong voting record on these issues at the UN during the past two decades, particularly under President Kim Dae Jung (1998–2003), is no doubt influenced by its security alliance with the United States. South Korea’s record of democracy support has been somewhat constrained, however, by its attempts at rapprochement with North Korea and by its heavy dependence on oil exporting states such as Iran. An active participant in the Community of Democracies since the organization’s founding in 2000, Seoul hosted the group’s second ministerial meeting in 2002. As there is no East Asian regional body with a democracy agenda, South Korea has instead relied on ad hoc initiatives to offer cautious support for democratic transitions abroad.

Turkey

A candidate for European Union membership, Turkey stands apart from the other countries considered here. As part of the EU accession process, Turkey has been a recipient rather than a provider of democracy assistance. The goal of EU accession has undoubtedly helped to bring Turkey’s own democratic standards and practices more in line with liberal international norms, although it still has progress to make. Nonetheless, its improvements in human rights and democratic practices thus far are a testament to the positive role that EU enlargement has played in expanding the circle of democratic, rights-respecting states throughout wider Europe. Because Turkey has fairly successfully managed its own transition from a military-dominated state with weak checks and balances to a thriving, competitive, multiparty, and multiethnic society in which Muslim democrats now win elections, it has great potential as a defender of democracy and human rights abroad. It deserves some credit, for example, for its willingness to stand up for democracy and human-rights activists in the context of the “Arab Spring” despite complicated geopolitical interests.

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Ted Piccone

Publication: Journal of Democracy

Assessing the Islamic World, Post-9/11

Michael E. O'Hanlon and Ömer Taşpınar — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:25:00 -0400

The United States has spent much of the month commemorating the horrific 9/11 attacks of a decade ago, and monitoring the progress of the ensuing wars abroad and homeland security efforts at home. This is all appropriate and necessary.

But one question remains to be asked: How well has the broader Islamic world done over the past decade? This is not just an academic or humanitarian question. Countries with large numbers of unemployed, angry, hopeless individuals subject to extremist propaganda are prime breeding grounds for the kinds of movements that gave us al-Qaeda. Countries creating jobs; conveying a sense of purpose, dignity and freedom to most of their citizens; and offering a positive vision for their country's place in the world tend to produce far fewer extremists.

Though the verdict is of course mixed in the 57 countries making up the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, we would offer an encouraging overall assessment. There are huge problems, most notably in Pakistan and Iran, where the witches' brew of nuclear weapons programs, extremist politics, terrorism and economic challenges casts a pall over the future. And high population growth in several key Muslim countries will continue to create "youth bulges" that will make it hard to create enough jobs for current and future generations.

Even though the wars of the past decade have obviously focused on Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya, we do not dwell on these countries here — partly because there is already ample coverage of them, and partly because with the exception of the first they are not really at the heart of the Islamic world or among its major powers.

Alas, America remains unpopular from Turkey to Egypt to Pakistan, even in the Obama era. But in most places, the overall story about how these countries are doing is somewhere between acceptable and good.

Bangladesh. A large country with nearly 10% of the world's approximately 1.5 billion Muslims, Bangladesh used to be a basket case and the butt of jokes. It is still poor, vulnerable to monsoons and somewhat unsettled politically. Even so, it has an early form of democracy and a recent economic growth rate averaging over 5% a year. Transnational extremists are almost absent from its territory. As evidence of some degree of moderation and progressivity, its prime minister is a woman.

Egypt. It is too soon to know where this country's fascinating revolution is headed, and real worries persist. But what a 2011 it has been; the Tahrir Square protests and ouster of former presidentHosni Mubarak have to count as the most inspiring international event of the year.

India. More Muslims live in India than in Bangladesh, so it too is a major center of Islam. Despite ongoing tensions within their society and occasional outbursts of violence by or against this group, Muslims in India have shared their nation's successes over the past decade, as that country finally joins the ranks of the world's fast-growing and forward-looking democracies.

Indonesia. This nation, childhood home of President Obama, has the world's largest Muslim population. And overall, in the past 10 years, Indonesia has moved in the right direction. Its economy has been growing at 6% a year, translating among other things into robust job creation. It remains accepting of diversity within its own population and open to visitors. It is a huge success story that we don't talk about enough.

Nigeria. Half of this country's 155 million people are Muslims. There are religious tensions in this land, and even though oil production has boosted economic growth, it has been a skewed kind of fiscal success with relatively modest benefits to the working classes. Alas, this country will have to be watched carefully and cannot really be placed in the same successful class as the others. But it has had an OK decade.

Saudi Arabia. This complex country remains half-friend and half-problem, a major source of oil with a generally stable government, yet also a nation that has tolerated the extremist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam that encourages intolerance and violence and helped give rise to al-Qaeda. But the government has dealt with extremists on its territory rather well and made at least modest reforms in how it educates its youth and limits extremist propaganda from the Wahhabis. It has also forged partnerships with American universities to try to diversify its economic strengths.

Turkey. The country's moderately Islamic government — often admired as a model in the Arab world — has been a diplomatic challenge for America and a major challenge of late for Israel. But civilian rule has finally become firmly established in Turkey, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not violent or extremist, and Turkish educational institutions are thriving. As the only Muslim member of NATO, Turkey provides a check on Iran and a link between the Western world and the Arab Middle East. Economic growth exceeded 6% on average over the past decade.

So of the world's most important countries with Muslim majorities or large Muslim minority populations, to their great credit, more than half have made substantial headway in the past 10 years, by our brief reckoning. This is a provisional judgment, to be sure, with lots of warnings and caveats. But if you are looking for good news, take a look at what most of the world's major Muslim countries have done since 9/11.

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Publication: USA Today

The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:28:00 -0400

Southeast Asia is rapidly becoming one of the world’s "wildlife trade hotspots," despite the enormous threat this illicit activity poses to the area’s biodiversity and species preservation. Vanda Felbab-Brown offers a broad set policy recommendations that form a regulatory structure to counteract the detrimental effects of this market and enhance conservation.

Executive Summary

Southeast Asia, with its linkages into the larger Asian market that includes China, Indonesia, and India, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots as well as one of the world’s hotspots for the illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife parts. Although demand markets for wildlife, including illegally-traded wildlife are present throughout the world, China ranks as the world’s largest market for illegal trade in wildlife, and wildlife products, followed by the United States.

Globally, the volume and diversity of traded and consumed species have increased to phenomenal and unprecedented levels, contributing to very intense species loss. In Southeast Asia alone, where the illegal trade in wildlife is estimated to be worth $8-$10 billion per year, wildlife is harvested at many times the sustainable level, decimating ecosystems and driving species to extinction.

Other environmental threats such as climate change, deforestation and other habitat destruc- tion, industrial pollution, and the competition between indigenous species and invasive species often impact ecosystems on a large scale. But the unsustainable, and often illegal, trade in wildlife has the capacity to drive species into extirpation in large areas and often into worldwide extinction—especially species that are already vulnerable as a result of other environmental threats.

The threats posed by illegal (and also legal, but badly managed and unsustainable) trade in wildlife are serious and multiple. They include irrevocable loss of species and biodiversity; extensive disturbances to larger ecosystems; economic loss- es due to the collapse of sustainable legal trade of a species and its medicinal and other derivate products, or of ecotourism linked to the species; severe threats to the food-supply and income of forest-dependent peoples; spread of viruses and diseases; and the strengthening of organized crime and militant groups who use the illegal trade in wildlife for provisions and financing.

At the core of the illegal trade in wildlife is a strong and rapidly-expanding demand. This includes demand for bushmeat—by marginalized communities for whom wildlife meat is often the primary source of protein, and for the affluent who consume exotic meat as a luxury good. Other demand for wildlife is for curios, trophies, collections, and accessories, furs and pets. Much of demand arises out of the practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) which uses natural plant, animal, and mineral-based materials to treat a variety of illnesses, maintain good health and longevity, and enhance sexual potency, and is practiced by hundreds of millions of people. Although effective medicinal alternatives are now available—many of these TCM potions fail to cure anything, and the supply of ingredients for TCM frequently comes through illegal channels and crisis-level poaching—demand for TCM continues to expand greatly.

The expansion of supply of illegally-sourced and traded wildlife has been facilitated by the opening up of economies in Southeast and East Asia and the strengthening of their international legal and illegal trade connections; infrastructure development linking previously inaccessible wilderness areas; and commercial logging.

The illegal trade in wildlife involves a complex and diverse set of actors. These include illegal hunters—ranging from traditional and poor ones to professional hunters, layers of middlemen, top-level traders and organized-crime groups, launderers of wildlife products (such as corrupt captive- breeding farms and private zoos), militant groups, as well as local and far-away consumers, both affluent and some of the world’s poorest. Other stakeholders in the regulation of wildlife trade and conservation include logging companies, agribusinesses, the fishing industry, local police and en- forcement forces, and governments. Policies and enforcement strategies for curbing the illegal trade in wildlife to ensure wildlife conservation and preserve biodiversity need to address the complex and actor-specific drivers of the illegal behavior.

In Southeast and East Asia, government policies to prevent illegal trade in wildlife continue to be generally characterized by weak laws governing wildlife trade, limited enforcement and low penalties. Government efforts to inform publics largely unaware of (and often indifferent to) how their consumer behavior contributes to the devastation of ecosystems in the region and world-wide also continue to be inadequate.

Monitoring of captive-breeding facilities in Asia is often poor, thus facilitating the laundering of illegally-sourced wildlife and undermining the capacity of the legal trade in wildlife to curb illegal and unsustainable practices.

Nonetheless, there has been intensification and improvement of government response to the illegal trade in wildlife in Asia, with many governments in the region toughening laws and increasing law enforcement, the Southeast Asian countries establishing the ASEAN-Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) to facilitate law enforcement, and even China undertaking more extensive labeling of legal wildlife products.

The extent of unsustainable, environmentally damaging, and illegal practices that still characterize the wildlife trade in Asia and in many parts of the world cries out for better forms of regulation and more effective law enforcement. Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to the problem; and almost every particular regulatory policy is either difficult to implement or entails difficult trade-offs and dilemmas.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Foreign Policies of Emerging-Market Democracies: What Role for Democracy and Human Rights?

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 14-15, 2011

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

The rapid growth of emerging powers in recent years has raised many questions about the future of global governance. A vital bloc within this group is that of the emerging-market democracies, the leading group of developing countries that are governed democratically. While much attention has been paid to how these powers influence the world economy, not enough consideration has been given to these powers’ foreign policies, including how they influence the advancement of human rights and democracy.

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On April 14 and 15, the Managing Global Order project at Brookings and the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy hosted a conference on the foreign policies of emerging-market democracies and their efforts to advance human rights and democracy. Leading experts on Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and multilateral affairs explored these countries’ strategies and tactics and made suggestions for U.S. policymakers. On April 15, Samantha Power, special advisor to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council, provided commentary on the administration’s efforts to work with the emerging democracies.

After each panel, panelists took audience questions.

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Participants

Panelists

Marc Plattner

Director, International Forum for Democratic Studies
National Endowment for Democracy

Moderator: Francine Frankel

Professor and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Contemporary India
University of Pennsylvania

Author: Pratap Bhanu Mehta

President
Center for Policy Research

Commentator: Satu Limaye

Director, East-West Center

Moderator: Diego Abente

Deputy Director, International Forum for Democratic Studies
National Endowment for Democracy

Author: Roberto Abdenur

Former Brazilian Ambassador to U.S

Author: Soli Ozel

Professor, Istanbul Bilgi University

Moderator: Akwe Amosu

Africa Advocacy Director
Open Society Policy Center

Author: Moeletsi Mbeki

Deputy Chairperson, The South African Institute of International Affairs

Commentator: Pauline Baker

President, Fund for Peace

Moderator: Brian Joseph

Senior Director, Asia and Multiregional Programs
National Endowment for Democracy

Author: Rizal Sukma

Executive Director
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia

Commentator: Donald Emmerson

Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University

Author: Youngshik Bong

Senior Researcher, Asan Institute for Policy Studies

Author: Chaibong Hahm

Director, Asan Institute for Policy Studies

Commentator: Scott Snyder

Director, Center for U.S.-Korea Policy
The Asia Foundation

Introduction: Carl Gershman

President, National Endowment for Democracy

Samantha Power

Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director, Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights
National Security Council

Moderator: Richard Gowan

Associate Director
Center on International Cooperation

Commentator: Peggy Hicks

Global Advocacy Director
Human Rights Watch

Moderator: Larry Diamond

Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Stanford University

Thomas Carothers

Vice President for Studies
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Moises Naim

Senior Associate
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Does Fairness Matter in Global Governance?

Hakan Altinay — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

Worldwide, there has been a recent increase in expressions of cynicism. We are reminded that all power is hard power, and that being loved or respected is no substitute for being feared. The great power game of nations always continues, we are forewarned, even when a higher goal or rhetoric is evoked. Superpowers are selfish, arbitrary, and dangerous nations, and they should not be embarrassed to be so and not feel constrained by international legitimacy and laws. We are cautioned against assuming that the rise of the world’s emerging powers is doing anything to the status of the United States as the sole superpower. Naturally, it would be a folly to think that global public opinion is, in effect, a “second superpower,” or is even a crucial factor. Such concerns are akin to the Lilliputians binding an unsuspecting Gulliver. Anyone harboring naïve views needs to be told that good intentions are, at best, a distraction and a nuisance and, at worst, a recipe for disaster, given their imprudence. Cynics prefer to be unconcerned about the achievements of transnational normative actions, such as abolishing the slave trade or establishing the International Criminal Court.

The advocates of these views would readily conclude that fairness does not matter in managing our global challenges—only power does. And these cynical views are not advanced only in the hard center of the international system. In a fascinating twist, many on the various peripheries of the international system also agree with this depiction. They argue that might makes right, and this absolves those without formidable power of any responsibility for solving global problems or even articulating their potential contributions if something other than the law of the jungle were to prevail. Thus, the hubris of the powerful triggers irresponsibility among the not so powerful, which in turn is used by the cynics to argue the need for unadulterated power, given the rampant irresponsibility in the world at large.

This working paper, however, is based on a hypothesis that the cynics may be wrong. Its central conjecture is that fairness in global governance does matter today and will matter more in the future. Long-term projections are notoriously and predictably difficult. The forecast that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the Next 11 group of emerging nations will overtake the Group of 7 may not materialize for a very long time. Yet it is evident that power disparities are less severe today and are likely to be even less so in the near future. At the same time, the current level of global interdependence and the very nature of the imminent global problems we face have clear repercussions for the minimum constellation of alliances that is necessary to overcome these problems. Climate change is the most obvious case in point; unless all the major players and their citizens willingly and proactively cooperate, it is unlikely that human civilization as we know it will survive. It is clear that Commodore Matthew Perry’s body language will not secure the proactive and willing cooperation of citizens around the world. Hubris and cynicism will also not embolden those who witness emergent threats and plots, as diverse as those by Osama bin Laden and Abdul Qadeer Khan, to speak out. And, thus, both notions and perceptions of fairness will be central to developing the master narrative about our epic interdependence and our responsibilities toward each other. Without a sense of fairness that appeals to many and a corresponding framework of global civics, we cannot navigate the treacherous waters of global interdependence

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Hakan Altinay

October 2010 Update for TIGER: Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery

Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 10:49:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In collaboration with the Financial Times (FT), Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda of Brookings have developed a set of composite indexes which track the global economic recovery. The Financial Times has produced the Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER) interactive map, which appears on the FT Web site.

The October 2010 update of the Brookings Institution-FT Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER) paints a sobering picture of the world economy, which has lost momentum. The global economy is teetering between a slowdown and at best a tepid recovery. Advanced economies are stuck in a funk and even the dynamic emerging markets have lost some of their swagger.

The updated interactive map below displays how fast individual G-20 economies are faring in global economic recovery. Underneath the map, links to updated key indicators display how fast those indicators are recovering for advanced economies, emerging markets and a composite total. The October 2010 updated indexes now also incorporate credit growth as an additional financial indicator to help further gauge the pulse of financial markets in G-20 economies.

Economic Recovery in the World's Advanced and Emerging Market Economies

View the interactive map »

Click on an individual country in the map to view charts for the main TIGER indexes for that country and charts for the indicators that make up the indexes, which are broken down by real economy, financial and confidence indicators.

As well as tracking country performance, the TIGER indexes also track the performance of key indicators across groups of advanced economies, emerging markets and a composite total. Click on the following links to view the charts for the following key indicators:

Real Activity Indexes

Financial Indexes

Confidence Indexes

For detailed information on the composition and construction of the indexes and a comprehensive description of the data and source information, please refer to the technical appendix.

The October 2010 update reveals three main themes:

In G-20 economies, a common feature is that financial markets are not providing much support to the real economy. This reflects poor performance of equity markets and weak credit growth. Financial market weaknesses and lackluster employment growth have dented consumer and business confidence, which could hold back the recovery in aggregate demand.
Financial markets appear spooked by the notion that macroeconomic policy tools may have reached their limits in terms of supporting economic growth without creating untenable risks for the future. Uncertainty about the regulatory landscape may also be restraining financial market performance, although some of this uncertainty should now have been resolved by the Basel III accord.
All told, the optimism of the summer is giving way to the realization that the global economic recovery is going to be a long and hard slog. The G-20 objective of robust, balanced and sustainable growth remains a chimera for now.

Highlights for Q2 2010:

The Overall Growth index has fallen in recent months for both advanced and emerging market economies, mainly because of weak financial market conditions.
The Financial index took a beating roughly around the initial period of the European debt crisis and has continued to weaken. Stock markets around the world remain in a state of torpor after a correction that signals a reversal of the optimism that led to their getting ahead—perhaps too far ahead—of improvements in real economic activity.
Real economic activity has eased up after initially surging from the low levels around the trough of the global recession in late 2008. Real GDP growth has not done too badly, especially among emerging markets, but growth in industrial production, exports and imports have all dipped across the board in recent months. Employment growth in the advanced economies also remains weak. If the negative trends in these variables persist, real GDP growth might moderate in the next couple of quarters.
Among G-20 economies, confidence indicators in the private sector have leveled off from their gains earlier this year. Even though business confidence is still rising in advanced economies, it has not yet made up the ground lost during the crisis and consumer confidence has entirely lost momentum. Consumer confidence has dipped sharply in the U.S. and many emerging markets.

Read the related commentary: TIGER Update: Global Economic Recovery Is Teetering »

For commentary and analysis on Q1 2010, please see the original release of TIGER »

Authors

Eswar Prasad
Karim Foda

The World Economy is Recovering

Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This commentary is based on research and analysis from the Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER) interactive map, which appears on the Financial Times Web site.

View the Brookings version of the interactive map »

Despite all the portents of doom the world economy has been quietly mending itself.

This is not to say that the recovery is firmly entrenched or that few risks remain, but despite the rough patches in 2010, it is important to keep in mind that the economic picture looks far better now than it did a year ago.

Why do I conclude this? Well, to get an accurate picture of where the world economy now stands, we need to look at a broad set of economic data. We have gathered data from the G20 economies for three types of indicators: real economic activity, captured by GDP, industrial production, employment, imports and exports; financial indicators such as national stock market indexes, stock market capitalization and, in the case of emerging markets, their bond spreads relative to U.S. treasuries; and finally, indicators of business and consumer confidence.

By combining information from these variables using statistical techniques, we can take the pulse of individual economies as well as the world economy. And thus was born the Brookings Institution-Financial Times index for the world economy, which we have christened TIGER—Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery.

The composite indexes reveal five dominant themes. First, the global economy turned the corner by mid-2009 and has strengthened gradually since then. Growth rates of many indicators have rebounded strongly after plunging into negative territory during 2008.

These high growth rates are off a lower base of course and there is still a lot of ground to be made up before the levels of these indicators are back at their pre-crisis levels. For instance, growth rates of industrial production in many G20 economies are now higher than before the crisis but, because growth rates fell sharply during 2008, the levels of industrial production are still below pre-crisis levels. Still, the recovery has clearly gathered momentum.

Second, the recovery has been rather uneven. Growth rates of industrial production and trade volumes have recovered strongly, while the recovery in GDP and employment has been modest at best. Employment growth, which tends to be a lagging indicator of the business cycle, was very weak in advanced economies until the beginning of 2010 but is now showing some signs of life. So the recovery is ever so slowly becoming more broad-based.

Third, the performance of world financial markets has outpaced that of key macro variables. In the last two months, however, financial markets have dipped as they have been rattled by the problems in Europe. This could signal prescience of financial markets about more difficult times ahead or just a temporary pullback from an earlier surge of unfounded optimism. Either way, this is not good for the recovery. Then again, a more tempered financial market performance may not be such a bad thing for the longer term.

Fourth, confidence measures have regained some of the ground they lost during the worst of the crisis. In both advanced and emerging market economies, business confidence is still rising gradually but consumer confidence in advanced economies has been stuck in a rut in recent months. Resurgent business confidence is a positive sign as it could boost investment. But weak consumer confidence and minimal employment growth could dampen the recovery if they translate into tepid growth in private consumption.

And finally, emerging markets felt the effects of the global crisis later than the advanced economies and have also recovered more sharply. Among the major emerging markets, the recoveries in China and India have been particularly strong.

So far in 2010, emerging markets are still barreling their way to a strong performance despite the problems that have beset advanced economies. Perhaps, in a long-term structural sense, they are becoming less dependent on advanced economies. But emerging markets cannot pull the world economy along by themselves. If advanced economies continue to turn in a weak performance, we are in for a long and hard slog towards a durable global economic recovery.

We are certainly not out of the woods yet and all manner of risks could still forestall the recovery. While it is easy to paint dire scenarios, it is still worth recognizing that there is a lot of positive news relative to the desperate circumstances that the world economy was in a year ago. It’s not yet time to open up the bubbly, but at least there is less need now for a stiff drink.

Authors

Eswar Prasad
Karim Foda

Publication: Financial Times

TIGER: Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery

Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Is the global economic recovery on track or are we in a lull before the next phase of the storm? This question dominates the news headlines and the current debate on the state of the global economy. But before we know where we are going, we need to know where the world economy now stands. This new index from the Brookings Institution and the Financial Times aims to track the recovery based on a set of macroeconomic, financial and confidence variables for the G-20 economies.

The interactive map below displays how fast individual G-20 economies are recovering and weathering the storm. Underneath the map, links to key indicators display how fast those indicators are recovering for advanced economies, emerging markets and a composite total.

Economic Recovery in the World's Advanced and Emerging Market Economies

Click to view the interactive map »

Real Economy Indexes

Financial Indexes

Confidence Indexes

While global economy turned the corner by mid-2009, there is still a long way to go before the recovery is entrenched and on track toward robust growth. Industrial production and trade volumes, in particular, have recovered strongly while the recovery in GDP and employment has been more modest.
Emerging markets felt the effects of the global crisis later than the advanced economies, experienced milder slowdowns, and have also recovered more sharply.
Since mid-2009, the recovery in world financial markets has outpaced that in key macro variables. In the last two months, financial market performance has leveled off, suggesting greater uncertainty about the recovery and possibly presaging a period of weak growth.
Confidence measures have regained much of the ground they lost during the worst of the crisis. Business confidence has continued to increase gradually while consumer confidence has been stuck in a rut in recent months.

Highlights for Q1 2010:

The global economic recovery continues to gather momentum but has hit some rough patches in 2010.
Financial market performance has cooled off in recent months. The debt crisis in Europe has clearly rattled financial markets. This could signal prescience of financial markets about more difficult times ahead or just a temporary pullback from an earlier surge of unfounded optimism. Either way, this is not good for the recovery.
Employment growth in the advanced economies was very weak until the beginning of 2010, when it started showing some signs of life.
In both advanced and emerging economies, business confidence is still rising gradually while consumer confidence in advanced economies has been stuck in a rut in recent months. Resurgent business confidence is a positive sign as it could boost investment. But weak consumer confidence and minimal employment growth could dampen the recovery if they translate into tepid growth in private consumption.
Emerging markets are barreling their way to a strong performance despite the problems that have beset advanced economies. Perhaps, in a long-term structural sense, they are becoming less dependent on advanced economies. But emerging markets cannot pull the world economy along by themselves. Continued weakness in the advanced economies could mean we are in for a long and hard slog toward a durable global economic recovery.

Read the related commentary: "The World Economy is Recovering" »

Authors

Eswar Prasad
Karim Foda

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