Military Businesses in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Decline, Reform and Persistence
One of the most crucial challenges for transitional or consolidating democracies is establishing effective government control over the armed forces (Diamond & Plattner, 1996). Without such control, the armed forces (or factional elements within them)
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Military Businesses in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Decline, Reform and Persistence Marcus Mietzner and Lisa Misol
One of the most crucial challenges for transitional or consolidating democracies is establishing effective government control over the armed forces (Diamond & Plattner, 1996). Without such control, the armed forces (or factional elements within them) retain the capacity to sabotage democratic reforms – most notably elections, the creation of independent legislatures and judiciaries, as well as the expansion of civil liberties. Many states undergoing democratic transitions try to impose control over their militaries by removing them from political decisionmaking, placing pro-reform officers in key positions and strengthen civilian institutions (Cottey, Edmunds, & Forster, 2002b). If militaries played a particularly strong role in the authoritarian regime that ruled prior to the democratic transition, new government leaders may also opt to make concessions to the officer corps, such as amnesty for past human rights abuses or some form of continued role in security affairs (Mainwaring, 1989). But one field that is often overlooked by civilian officials in democratizing states is the importance of gaining control over the military’s finances. More often than not, institutional reforms are being carried out that fail to curtail the military’s access to or even direct possession of vast monetary resources. With these resources, militaries become independent of the official defense budget allocations provided by the state, and can thus finance operations that run counter to the interests of the government (Br€ommelh€orster & Paes, 2003). Hence, even states that have successfully introduced electoral reforms and made other important institutional changes can still see their democratization processes undermined by militaries with sufficient financial autonomy to pursue their own agendas.
M. Mietzner (*) Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Misol Human Rights Watch, Washington, D.C., USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Ru¨land et al. (eds.), The Politics of Military Reform, Global Power Shift, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-29624-6_5, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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M. Mietzner and L. Misol
Both Nigeria and Indonesia have had significant problems with the continued financial autonomy of their post-authoritarian militaries. This should not be surprising. Both countries have experienced decades of military-run or militarybacked regimes, during which time their armed forces built vast commercial empires that funded the operational costs of the troops as well as the extravagant lifestyles of the top brass (Nwagwu, 2002; Robison, 1986). When Nigeria’s military regime formally came to an end in 1999 and Indonesia’s long-time ruler Suharto fell in 1998, it was to be expected that the military leaderships in both countries would try to hold on to their businesses and other funding sources. In this chapter, we discuss the development of military businesses and off-b
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