Affirmative action won't work

By Iwan Pranoto

BANDUNG (JP): Political observer Jusuf Wanandi said in the Jakarta Post on July 1, 1998, that a policy of affirmative action would bring Indonesian people closer together.

The rationale for such a policy was that existing racial tensions had come about as the result of the gap between rich and poor.

I strongly believe that implementing such a policy in Indonesia is inappropriate. The policy has worked in neighboring Malaysia because the bureaucracy there is reasonably clean, but that is not case with our own system. How can we be sure that help intended for poor people will reach the right target?

Furthermore, the issue cannot be set clearly along ethnic lines because as Wanandi pointed out, not all Chinese-Indonesians are rich. Contrary to popular belief, many of them are very poor.

Populist sentiment would have it that racial tensions which exist between Chinese-Indonesians and those of Malay origin have come about because of the relative affluence of the former, but this is not true. If it were true, tensions would exist between rich Malays and poor Malays, but this is not the case.

We can therefore conclude that economic factors are not the primary cause of racial tension. There must be something else.

One reason is that we still cannot see people as they really are. We still cannot accept other people if they are different from us and we are more interested in the label one bears than the qualities one has. It is more important to consider one's religion, race, ethnic background and gender, rather than to consider one's attitude and expertise. It seems we are not yet mature enough to become a great nation.

We should ease the tension using a variety of methods, but affirmative action is not one of them. To fight racism with racism, which affirmative action does, is inherently contradictory.

Our society must improve its respect for universal human values and we must start to see things differently. Jobs should no longer be filled on the basis of race. Teaching people to communicate with others without considering race is the most effective way to fight racism.

The objective of affirmative action is good, but the means of getting there is wrong. The objective cannot justify the means.

Deep inside we can see and feel that we are all the same and that we live on the same planet. It is true that we are not all exactly the same, but God created us with variations so that we could learn from these differences. Imagine if we had to live in a world where everybody looked the same. It would be very boring, wouldn't it?

There is an old fable on this subject. A group of fleas lived on the skin of a dog and ate by sucking his blood. They slept in the dog's hair -- it really was a very cozy place to live. "Skin sweet skin," they used to say.

One day, a new group of fleas joined them. The two groups lived together peacefully on the dog until some fleas declared the dog belonged to the first group of flees only. The new group did not have equal rights to the dog's blood and were discriminated against. The first group of fleas became known as the indigenous fleas and the second group were always referred to as nonindigenous.

This lead to discord between the two groups and the tension was such that even the dog could feel it.

After contemplating the problem for a while, the dog philosophically mused: "It is absurd. They are both living on my bony body. They are sucking the same blood, my blood. They are sleeping in the same skin, my skin. They all are parasites on my body. How can one colony of fleas declare that they have more right to suck my blood and enjoy my body than another colony." The dog then asked himself: "How can one group of flees call themselves indigenous and brand others nonindigenous. Aren't they the same fleas and created by the same God?"

The writer is a lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology.