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102 Foreign Aff. 180 (2023)
To Kill a Democracy: What a Mysterious Murder Says about Modern Indonesia

handle is hein.journals/fora102 and id is 182 raw text is: REVIEW ESSAY To Kill a Democracy What a Mysterious Murder Says About Modern Indonesia KRITHIKA VARAGUR We Have Tired of Violence: A True Story of Murder, Memory, and the Fight for Justice in Indonesia BY MATT EASTON. New Press, 2022,288 pp. Indonesia held its first direct pres- idential election in July 2004, and it was immediately classified as one of the largest ever in world his- tory: 121 million Indonesians voted in the initial round, far outstripping the 111 million Americans who had voted in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. But Indonesian democracy, at that point, was still somewhat exper- imental. After Indonesia achieved its independence from the Netherlands in 1949, its first president, Sukarno (who, like many Indonesians, went by one name), ushered in a brief period of liberal parliamentary democracy. That evolved into a more authoritar- ian system known as guided democ- racy, which sought to incorporate traditional village consensus struc- tures, but was cut short in 1965, when army general Suharto took power in a transition that included the killing of up to a million suspected communists and leftists. He ruled until 1998, when mass protests and the Asian financial crisis finally prompted him to resign. Both of the final presidential candi- dates in 2004 had strong ties to those tumultuous early years of the republic. Megawati Sukarnoputri, the incum- bent president, was Sukarno's eldest daughter. Her challenger, Susilo Bam- bang Yudhoyono, a retired army gen- eral, had served in the military under Suharto. The huge, procedurally com- plex election was an undeniable accom- plishment for a six-year-old democracy. But its results-Yudhoyono won, per- petuating the Suharto-era military's influence on electoral politics-were somewhat less inspiring. FOREIGN AFFAIRS KRITHIKA VARAGUR is a writer in New York and the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project. She previously reported from Indonesia for The Guardian and the Financial Times, among other news outlets. 180

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