Political amnesia and why avoid it

The case of ex-President Suharto, as he slowly succumbed to death, has raised an important issue for Indonesians as well as many other societies around the world. It comes only a couple of months after four high-ranking officials of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia next door were arrested to face charges of crimes against humanity. In so many countries aspiring toward the difficult goal of democratic and just governance, be they called transitional or revolutionary or post-communist, there is one shared puzzle: what to do about their undemocratic and unjust pasts.

Criminal procedures pursued to enact retroactive justice – that is, justice over past crimes – can easily appear to be so many acts of revenge. Erich Honecker of former East Germany, in famous trials during the 1990’s for the injustices committed by his regime, called the whole process ‘the victor’s justice’, and many former subjects of his dictatorship found such depiction compelling. Vengeance, to be sure, is not a good springboard for starting a law-abiding, just society.

The grand criminals may be humbled, and their surviving victims tempered, by recalling that in most cases the magnitude of committed crimes far outweigh the realistic extent of punishment that might be carried out. The 1.7 million persons’ lives could not be proportionally ‘revenged’ even by electrocuting Pol Pot. At the end of the day, there is a risk to end up with a shallow memory that would say: “He killed lots and lots and lots of people. Then he was killed himself”.

Retroactive justice, therefore, is better done by aiming at monumental moral lessons from such crimes, rather than criminal reprisals. There is a stronger substantive, longer-lasting, and future-pertinent potential in the former. The regimes such as Suharto’s, Pinochet’s, Ceausescu’s, and many others, are unequalled monumental lessons to be learned by Indonesians, Chileans, Romanians, and any other society aspiring toward democracy, freedom and justice.

Certainly, not all former undemocratic regimes stand on equal footing with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Many authoritarian ex-leaders may be culpable on accounts of corruption and embezzlement, nepotism and environmental disasters, and other less monumental wrongdoings. Nonetheless, to the extent that they led to millions of lives in unnecessary poverty, stolen chances, burdens of insurmountable debts and environmental disasters, and other such tolls, the consequences of such regimes are monumental.

The numerous projects of building democracies during the so-called Third Wave of democratization have focused primarily on institutional and constitutional designs, on the here-and-now technicalities of democratic government, and promotion of oftentimes alien and abstract freedoms and rights. The apparent failures of most of the Third Wave cases are to be attributed to this formalism and detached-ness in no small part.

Alternatively, a stronger, more robust democratic project would be one that is based on lessons learnt from its own past. In that case, a given society would know it is headed toward a just, free, prosperous life, with institutions of multiple parties, checks and balances, and elections, most of which they never saw in their lives. However, they would know even better what they cannot return to, what they are moving away from, all the injustices, oppression, poverty, and so on, all of which they have known in the most immediate manner.

With Suharto departed from life, his legacy of three decades’ rule over Indonesia remains. The issue is whether that legacy will be learned, studied, and brought home, or whether it will remain in the raw, cast into oblivion, gradually forgotten, only to come back at some distant future in robes of glory – and possibly under a new Suharto.