Signs of renewed military involvement in civilian life are raising concerns that Indonesia may be drifting back towards the authoritarian practices of its past.

Imagine you’ve seen a street skirmish and call the police. A brief chat reveals the brawlers are off-duty soldiers. They continue to throw punches and rocks. The cops drive away.

The policy was dwifungsi (an adopted loanword), and it ran throughout Indonesia during the 32-year authoritarian rule of the second president, Soeharto, a former general.

At the top was the army – at the bottom the police.

Dwifungsi was dismantled during the Reformation in 2000 by the fourth President, Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), now deceased.

A liberal Islamic scholar, he understood the importance of restricting the military to defence and separating it from the police role of domestic peacekeeping.

It hasn’t been an easy transition. Turf wars, access to power and rivalries continue.

Khairul Fahmi, a military analyst at the Institute for Security and Strategic Studies_,_ attributed the recurring clashes between the two forces to “institutional arrogance, a culture of superiority, sectoral egotism, and festering jealousies, dynamics that have grown unchecked.

“Much of the rivalry stems from competition for ‘fertile grounds’ of influence across civil society, bureaucracy, and even parliament.”

Stories of inter-service punch-ups had become ho-hum till a street acid-attack last month in Jakarta on prominent human rights activist Andrie Yunus as he left a legal aid office.

He was badly burned on his face, hands, and chest, covering 24 per cent of his body. He’s been in intensive care, and his family is in protection.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said he was “deeply concerned” with the attack. Four soldiers from an intelligence unit have allegedly been detained, according to military police commander Yusri Nuryanto.

A decade earlier, a former policeman turned corruption investigator, Novel Baswedan, was walking home from his local mosque in North Jakarta when two men threw acid at his face. He lost an eye.

After more than two years of investigation and a presidential order to find the assailants, he was reported as saying the police were “not really serious in handling his case.”

Two active police officers were convicted and jailed for a year. Novel’s supporters said they were scapegoats and the Mr Big had escaped identification.

Inquiries into the March attack on Andrie suggested the two assailants on a motorbike were soldiers and ordered to send a warning to civilian critics of the return of dwifungsi.

  According to the nation’s leading daily, Kompas, “the shadow of the military’s return to dominance in civilian governance is now increasingly apparent. A total of 2,500 active TNI (Military) personnel have quietly taken up civilian positions, a figure that exceeds the limits set by law.

“If the revision of the TNI Law currently being discussed by the DPR (Parliament) is passed, the last barrier to military involvement in civilian bureaucracy will collapse.

“Not only that, but soldiers will also be given the opportunity to engage in business activities, blurring the clear line that has long separated the military from economic and political interests.”

The California-based Asia Sentinel magazine is warning of “the Darkening Face of Indonesia’s Democracy.

“Reports of intimidation and terror directed at activists, legislative initiatives widely seen as constraining press freedom, and, perhaps most strikingly, the reactivation of military command structures at the regional level.

“… these developments evoke the territorial military influence that defined Indonesia’s authoritarian past, raising urgent questions about whether the country is gradually retreating from the democratic gains achieved since 1998.”

The present President Prabowo Subianto is the former son-in-law of the late Soeharto. He’s known to want the military in civil affairs, as soldiers are trained to follow orders and not challenge.

Personal loyalty is critical in the armed forces; fine in a firefight, though not in professional administrations demanding impartiality.

After the acid splash, Prabowo told some selected journos (not this one) that the attack on Andrie Yunus was a “barbaric act of terrorism” that demands a comprehensive investigation into its masterminds.

“This is terrorism. This is a barbaric act. We must pursue it. We must investigate it! We must find out who ordered it, who paid for it.”

He explicitly guaranteed that no “impunity” would be granted if security personnel are found complicit, vowing that legal proceedings will be conducted strictly and impartially.

Sounds like the right response, except this is Indonesia. The two previous incumbents of the Presidential Palace said much the same thing about the most blatant assassination since the Reformation.

In  2004, lawyer Munir Said Thalib, founder of KontraS, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, was poisoned on a Garuda flight while heading to Utrecht University to study for a master’s degree in international law and human rights.

A post-mortem found he died from arsenic in an orange drink. He perished before landing. Then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (another former general) promised Munir’s widow, Suciwati, that the assassination would be thoroughly investigated. It wasn’t.

KontraS is struggling to reopen the case, but there’s no political commitment. This is not a time for Indonesian activists to move about unprotected. Correction: It never has been.