Suharto’s belief that his subjects were incapable of governing themselves postponed for several decades the opportunity for Indonesians to learn how to govern themselves democratically.
Does the author really believe that countries divided into opposing groups of equal strength can be democratic? Doesn’t the history of Indonesia and Chile prove just the opposite?
I think that the democratic regime can only be applied to countries were discordance remains below a certain threshold. Methods of achieving that are twofold: 1) weaken at least one of the discordant parties, as has happened in Indonesia and Chile, 2) divide the country into several smaller countries, as is being attempted in the Middle East; namely, assigning different ethnic minorities such as the Kurds to different regions.