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Legitimizing Military Rule: Indonesian Armed Forces Ideology, 19582000. By Salim Said. Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan, 2006. ISBN 979-416887-4. Glossary. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xliv, 312.
Suharto's Armed Forces: Problems of Civil Military Relations in Indonesia. By Salim Said. Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan, 2006. ISBN 979-416889-0. Glossary. Notes. Index. Pp. xxiv, 298.
Said is a well schooled journalist and observer of Indonesia's military and politics over the last forty years. He is exceptionally well trained, having studied and worked with some of the leading American scholars in the field, including Daniel S. Lev and William Liddle. Both volumes have been translated from Bahasa Indonesia by Toenggoel Siagian, one of the most accomplished teachers of the language in the United States and with whom this reviewer studied in the 1970s.
Legitimizing Military Rule is a very readable narrative of the rise of the army as a political force in Indonesia's post-revolutionary period from 1952. Said explains both the motives and methods of the officers in convincing the country's political leaders to return to the 1945 constitution, which legitimized the military as both defenders of the nation and social political participants. This dwifungsi (double function) concept placed the military in a preferred position...