Academia
Eleven of the shadow cabinet's 15 members gather for their first working meeting in Jakarta on Monday following the launch of the self-styled watchdog initiative. (Courtesy of/The Shadow Cabinet))
Earlier this month a coalition of academics, activists and professionals did something no civil society group in the country's post-authoritarian history has attempted: they appointed their own cabinet.Fifteen "shadow ministers," selected from 121 applicants over two months of vetting, were unveiled as a citizen-run counterpart to President Prabowo Subianto's official "Red and White Cabinet." The group calls itself the Kabinet Bayangan, or "Zaken Kabinet dari Rakyat" (People's Cabinet of Experts). It has no office in the state bureaucracy, no budget and no constitutional standing. Its emergence nonetheless says something about the state of Indonesian democracy: when formal channels of accountability close, civil society builds an unofficial one rather than accept the silence.
The project is led by Feri Amsari, a constitutional law lecturer at Andalas University, who chaired the selection committee and serves as shadow "state secretary," alongside co-initiator Ahmad Jilul Qur'ani Farid of Masyarakat Transparansi Indonesia.
