Cult figure country, or not?<\/p>\n
President Soeharto said last week that he refused to be turned
\ninto a cult figure. His pronouncement was warmly received.
\nMochtar Pabottingi a senior researcher at the National Institute
\nof Sciences looks at the significance of the statement.<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): As usual, as soon as they heard Soeharto's
\ncomment, praise poured in from legislators, military officials
\nand political observers.<\/p>\n
"Pak Harto is a democrat. He'll never be authoritarian and
\nwill always comply with the laws," said Deputy House Speaker
\nSjarwan Hamid and an adviser to the the Armed Forces faction.<\/p>\n
His counterpart in the House, Fatimah Ahmad, from the
\nIndonesian Democratic Party, followed suit: "It shows us his
\nstatesmanship," (The Jakarta Post, Oct. 16, 1997).<\/p>\n
To me it is wiser indeed to refrain from such instant praise
\nfor three reasons. First, it might betray something contrary to
\nits intention: prompt praise is exactly what cultists usually
\noffer to their supreme rulers.<\/p>\n
Second, it corroborates our decades of nationwide political
\ncomplacency, instant political amnesia, and serious poverty of
\npolitical reflection.<\/p>\n
There has been hardly any statesmanship from the government
\nover the last two years, least of all during the last election.<\/p>\n
Third, our political laws and practices are full of
\nirrationalities, pitfalls and double standards, and have been
\nincreasingly so over the last 30 years.<\/p>\n
They are characterized by a heavy skewness in the relations
\nbetween the ruler and the ruled.<\/p>\n
As such, most responses to rulers' statements like this one,
\nparticularly if they are rhetorical, advantaged the heavily
\nskewed system.<\/p>\n
In so far as our present head of state is concerned,
\npersonality cult is not the right term. What used to be more of a
\npersonalilty cult in the time of Soekarno's Guided Democracy has,
\nduring the course of the New Order, been transformed into a
\nformidable one: a systemic cult.<\/p>\n
By this I mean that in our case a head of state could be
\nindefinitely reelected every five years not so much because the
\npeople have made him a cult figure, but because virtually all the
\npolitical mechanisms and practices are devised in such a way as
\nto maintain the head of state in his or her position.<\/p>\n
Accordingly, the implementation of the ambiguous Chapter
\nseven, Section III of our Constitution becomes seriously
\ndistorted.<\/p>\n
What is involved here is not so much the literal
\ninterpretation of the reelectability of an incumbent president,
\nbut the heavy political engineering of the entire election
\nprocedures that make it systemically impossible for anyone to
\nreplace the incumbent if the latter wants to hold on.<\/p>\n
Article 1, Chapter one, Section I of Law No. 1, 1985
\nexplicitly mentions the implementation of people's sovereignty as
\nthe principle objective of elections.<\/p>\n
Yet there is not a single article in the rest of the law
\nguaranteeing the implementation of that objective.<\/p>\n
On the contrary, Chapter eight, Section III which explicates
\nthe total ex-officio domination of election committees
\nautomatically ignores the principle of people's sovereignty in
\nfavor of that of the regime.<\/p>\n
This violation is repeated in the regulation that says all
\nparliamentary candidates should be checked and approved by the
\npresidential office.<\/p>\n
Add to this the state mechanism which makes the President
\ndeliver his accountability address to the legislature he has just
\ninstalled.<\/p>\n
All this, and countless other rules and practices, have
\ncreated a situation in which government accountability has become
\nan utter facade.<\/p>\n
Most politically aware Indonesians know this as they know
\ntheir own limbs. Still those within the ruling circle endlessly
\ndeny that there is something gravely wrong with our state
\nmechanisms.<\/p>\n
"We have lied too much," said commentator Laksamana Sukardi as
\nhe said about a serious phenomenon in the economy, "and end up
\nbelieving in our lies" (D &R Oct. 18, 1997).<\/p>\n
We have been living with a much more dangerous cult, which
\neats up the very ideals upon which our nation was founded.<\/p>\n
The majority of our people might well be better fed and
\nclothed. This constitutes a gigantic jump from the time when we
\nhad to stand for hours to queue for a liter of kerosene oil or a
\nkilogram of sugar.<\/p>\n
Still the adage stays: man does not live on bread alone.<\/p>\n
True humankind of all ages and lands have always lived to
\nfulfill their equal needs in goods and in virtues.<\/p>\n
To say that our social upheavals and political riots during
\nthe last twenty-odd years stand from a rising expectation due to
\nthe success of development is to miss the goals of our nation.<\/p>\n
To say that the grievances of millions of Indonesians stem
\nfrom "social jealousy" is to launch an unpardonable insult at the
\ngrieving millions and the republic's agenda of our republic.<\/p>\n
We are indeed fortunate to be among the respectable community
\nof nations that believes in the possibility of there being a
\nvirtuous and ennobling humanity.<\/p>\n
I am thankful to God and to our founding fathers for our Five
\nPrinciples of the state ideology Pancasila.<\/p>\n
I can appreciate some good things the New Order has done. But
\nmeasured against those principles, we still have a very long way
\nto go before we see either a democrat or statesmanship at work at
\nthe center of the regime, let alone being proud of Indonesian
\npolitics.<\/p>\n
Let me close this brief insight by quoting for the prompt
\npraisers a recurrent line from a Holy Book: "How judged ye!"<\/p>",
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