A senior legislator has demanded an explanation from President Joko Widodo for nominating the Army chief of staff, Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo, as Indonesia’s new military commander, breaking with a longstanding tradition that should have seen the Air Force chief get the top job.
“This is a new trend, so of course the House of Representatives wants the president to explain this move,” Fahri Hamzah, a House deputy speaker, said late on Tuesday, after Joko notified the House about his pick.The president surprised many by going with Gatot. Under the rotation system adopted by the Indonesian Military (TNI) in 1999, the role of TNI commander is supposed to be farmed out between the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force. The current commander, Gen. Moeldoko, who retires on Aug. 1, is from the Army, and under the rotation system it was Air Marshal Agus Supriatna of the Air Force who was due to take over.
Even before Joko’s decision, however, analysts had expected Joko to pick the Navy’s Admiral Ade Supandi, to bolster the government’s wider policy of developing Indonesia as a global maritime power. But few expected it would be the Army’s Gatot getting the nod.Muradi, the chairman of the Politics and Security Study Center at Bandung’s Padjadjaran University, said the move could be seen as Joko’s way to minimize friction between the different branches of the TNI, with more funding being channeled to the Navy and Air Force to support Joko’s vision of building Indonesia’s maritime and air supremacy.
“The important question is how Gatot can position himself as a leader of all three branches and not a member of just one branch,” he said.
Muradi also said the president should explain why he was abandoning the rotation system first put in place by the late president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid. The system, though never actually formalized, allowed the heads of the Navy and Air Force to break the Army’s monopoly on the post of TNI commander, and Muradi warned that breaking from this tradition could stoke simmering rivalries within the armed forces.
Chief security minister Tedjo Edhy Purdjianto, a retired Navy chief of staff, backed Joko’s decision to nominate Gatot, saying Army chief was the most experienced of the current chiefs of staff.
“I’m sure that there won’t be any controversy or friction inside the TNI,” he said as quoted by Kompas.com.Speaking in Solo, Central Java, where he is preparing for his son’s wedding on Thursday, Joko told reporters on Wednesday that his nomination of Gatot was based on “the current geopolitical circumstances,” but did not elaborate.
New intelligence chief nominee
The nomination was revealed late on Tuesday in a letter from Joko to the House leadership, in which he requested a confirmation hearing for Gatot.The same letter also sought a confirmation hearing for retired Army general and former Jakarta governor Sutiyoso as the nominee to head the State Intelligence Agency (BIN). Sutiyoso, the chairman of the Indonesian Unity and Justice Party (PKPI), is slated to replace outgoing BIN chief Marciano Norman, also a retired Army general.
State Secretary Minister Pratikno said the decision to nominate Sutiyoso had nothing to do with the fact that the PKPI was one of the parties that backed Joko’s presidential campaign. “The president’s appointment is based on integrity,” he said.
But Haris Azhar, chairman of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), argued that Sutiyoso had neither the integrity nor experience needed to be the intelligence chief.The rights activist noted that Sutiyoso once led a bloody crackdown on civilian protesters outside the headquarters of the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) on July 27, 1996, when he oversaw the Jakarta Military Command.
That same building was earlier this month reopened as the headquarters of the PDI’s reincarnation, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) – of which Joko is a member.
“We feel Sutiyoso’s appointment is political and merely an act of returning a favor,” Haris said.
He said Sutiyoso did not have the requisite experience to cope with increasingly complex security challenges such as terrorism and cybercrimes, nor the integrity needed to ensure that the BIN would not be used as a tool by the government to silence critics and the opposition.
“Joko must find another candidate to compete with Sutiyoso for the BIN chief post,” Haris said.
Joko told reporters on Wednesday that Sutiyoso’s appointment “was made after going through a number of considerations as well as a look at his records. He has a lot of experience in the fields of intelligence and the military.”
House Speaker Setya Novanto said he would bring the president’s letter before a plenary session next week to decide on whether to grant the requests for confirmation hearings for Gatot and Sutiyoso, or whether to ask the president to nominate more candidates.
Sutiyoso himself confirmed on Wednesday that he was ready for the House’s fit-and-proper test and that, if confirmed, he would first conduct a review of the intelligence agency.
“I would like to know exactly what BIN is like at the moment,” he said, “and see what the people are like.”
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