Democracy and Freedom: Wear them like your kindness, confidence, and pride

Democracy and Freedom Wear them like your kindness, confidence, and pride

escrito por Dini Harmita

Abstract 

When democracy and freedom are deteriorating after several times in the state of dying, this paper is seeing facilitating democracy as the forms of interaction between capitals, systems, and policies. Reviewing Europe and beyond, democracy promotion and support seems to color the world everywhere yet it’s still a bit dark. To enrich, the author also reflected on her two cents of experiences.

Keywords: Democracy, Freedom, Facilitation, Policy, System

Facilitating Democracy 

Facilitating people everywhere has been beautifully honorable. This paper is aimed at discussing the beauty of facilitation as a part of democracy, with cases from Europe and beyond including Indonesia where the author had opportunities to learn the practices directly and indirectly with related sides. 

In Indonesia, Barton (2021) mentioned FPI as one of the radical Islamic groups that’s involved in Indonesian democracy transition. The group was banned by the government but has been on the rise following the never-blacksiding authoritarianism and populism in the world. 

Another democracy’s wave influencer in Indonesia beside the mainstream political parties as traditional as PPP, PDI, and Golkar is PKS. Among other political parties at least they decided to put zero comments for corruption issues related to ‘cow budgets’ they had been accused with. 

Political parties in Indonesia were built mainly by bachelor school students. That explains why university students could also support different sides in cases such as Israel-Palestinian, even in developed countries including the UK, France, and US. Students have their own critical and ideal thinking where they don’t need to think about how to feed their families, how to secure their jobs, and it also means how to put their shoes on others. 

In Indonesia, HMI had been mainly the student Islamic association that built the politicians for several elections; until PDI was on the rise. PPP is a traditional Islamic party. Golkar used to be a compulsory government party where civil servants were required to vote for them. PDI used to be the most critical among all. Nonetheless, no matter which party leads Indonesia, the military seems to govern. That’s why the Soeharto era was called populist despite the fact that he was from Golkar and he was the one who commanded the killing of nine generals brutally to step down Soekarno, in the name of communism; thus not few innocent Indonesian activists fled to Czech. The worst thing is that he brainwashed our childhood through a movie that was mandatory to watch by primary children showing bluntly the harsh words and bloods when they killed the generals without saying that he was the mastermind.

During his presidency, infrastructures were built nonetheless he made his families richer and the poor poorer. Some rumors then said that the international world supported Soeharto at that time because they had seen Soekarno’s masterplan towards Indonesia and if it materialized Indonesia would be moving far away even from Japan, the country from whom Indonesia got its independence. That international world includes Japan. Sounds like imperialism. 

For me, I don't care who is the leader, I like doing research, helping, and empowering the poor simply because the waves I feel every time they’re around me. It’s like Van Gogh and paintings, Louis Wain and cats. 

Doing a Participatory 

Be it bottom up or participatory development, I didn't even know that what I had been doing was either participatory or development. Nevertheless, I like to listen, read, summarize, and facilitate people to find by themselves what they want and need; and when we get what we want, it means the gap between what we want and what we need is minimum or zero. Based on theories I learned from my undergraduate school, I call it participatory. Based on theories I learned from my graduate school, I call it development. Based on theories I learned from my winter school, I call it democracy. After reading this paper fully you decide yourself what you will name it.

The logic of math may have been similar with language; nonetheless, in languages we could combine the functions into unlimited. Vice versa, with numbers, alphabets also become indefinite. That’s the logic I used automatically when classifying and delivering the assistance in Aceh.

As if the universe listened to my follow up question about why the refugees sold part of the assistance I went there again for a local and indigenous people study where I had a chance to feel people’s trauma to go back to the sea. Naively I asked the one and only fisherman I found on the coast to go with me to the sea, without knowing what people were afraid of. Coming back to the village with fishes, since that day the people are less afraid of the beach. I wanted the local people to continue the legacy and again as if the universe heard me, LEAD asked me to do a research on youth leadership there. So, Aceh checked;  one of the indicators is, one of the young local leaders had written and published much more than me; and the international world wants to invest there again including JICA who asked me to accompany them to go there too. During the field visits for the research I only found Gnetum gnemon crackers as their small business, nonetheless now it has been intensified and diversified (Falahuddin, 2022). 

To be honest, the more I traveled at that time, the more I was wicked by my unintentionally widened intention that I wanted to visit all provinces in Indonesia. Like a common proverb says, be careful with what we wish for. It happens in no time. My biography is nothing yet full of moments and lesson learnt. Nonetheless, i don't want to be a politician. I like doing research, thus.

My adventure in the island other than Aceh province was colored with the two courses that often fight towards each other namely palm oil and national park. Both required long trips from one place to another, much longer than the flights themselves. I enjoyed every trip for sure, but more than that, it’s again in the eyes, sounds, and gestures of the poor that made me survive. I inherited the knowledge of course, but more than that, it’s in the morning glory flower that takes my interest to define whether a plantation is healthy or not. It’s in the clean water that is contested even surrounding the basins inside national parks. 

Democracy in San Marino (Lukaszewski, 2019), Liechtenstein (Marxer, 2022), and Malta (Stanton, 2022), represents people participation in smaller scopes not only because of their limited area physically, but because of the ease of constitutional reforms they are gifted with.

Harmita (2022) mentioned that the beauty of decentralization could only be felt when there’s a harmonized policy between local, regional, national, and international levels. One entity is not recommended to have decentralization when their policies, be it formulation and implementation are not in line with the other entities; because like capitals (Harmita, 2007), system including political party and system (Casal Bértoa, Enyedi, and Mölder, 2023), policies also interact with each other. 

In democracy financing, Lipcean (2021) has already treated democracy as not merely an election by discussing and examining Direct Public Funding (DPF) also in the governance statutory. In 2009 - 2010 I had the opportunity to study malnutrition in East Nusa Tenggara with WVI. My fiel wast West Sumba but I was honoured to represent the team to attend the provincial workshop too. Through the budgeting report archives I learned that the disbursement of the malnutrition funding tends to be used not for malnourishment.

To what extent the public funding should be used so it could be called direct or democracy? There is no universal rule that could be applied for all contexts and scopes but I think we all agreed on anti-corruption governments. Nonetheless, I am not going to discuss it. Rather, let’s discuss how a participatory budgeting should be because of its low probability in being touched by corruption, collusion, cartelisation, and nepotism.

Kukučková and Bakós (2019) discussed participatory budgeting as part of participatory democracy in Czech with definition from UN-Habitat where the participatory methodologies are applied during and between periods. Participatory budgeting has positive and significant effects, nonetheless they also mentioned that it’s not possible to solve the crisis of democracy only with that.

The main reason is that the voters who indirectly fund political parties are entities with budgeting too; as individuals or groups such as families, households, communities, societies, and citizens. Thus, it tends to be worth doing the participatory methodologies as micro as possible, including the budgeting. Like learning by doing itself, when it’s successful it could be improved and disseminated with adjustments; and when it’s failed it becomes a lesson learned to try again until successful. To free to learn, to be failed, to be standing for our stances, and to win at least over the devils within ourselves are essential parts of democracy. Like we wear our Chanel and tailored dresses, freedom as part of democracy and democracy itself should be worn with kindness, confidence, and pride we bring during the process.

Conclusion

Democracy tends to be only promoted and supported but not yet facilitating and or facilitated. Promotion and support seems to be one way especially in politics. They tend to be in favor of the funders or governors instead of the people. Like political party institutionalisation, listening and understanding are essential for stabilising freedom and democracy.