Amien Rais' political acrobatics

Amien Rais' political acrobatics

For all practical purposes, President Habibie delivered his accountability speech twice to the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). It was only the President who spoke on Sunday. The people's representatives were not allowed to interrupt the President's speech and were not given the opportunity to question him afterwards because the entire allotted time was used by the President. This happened at the MPR under the leadership of the reformist Amien Rais.

The MPR being a people's forum to question their president, the people's representatives should have been given the larger part of the time apportioned. Instead it became Habibie's forum -- a forum for the President to hold his monologue while the representatives of 210 million Indonesians could only silently listen, like mutes bereft of speech by their MPR chairman, who is known as a reformist. This is a bad precedent because it disregards the principle of fairness. It is also bad because it raises the suspicion that Amien Rais is tacitly colluding with Habibie.

All this induces us to reexamine Amien Rais' past maneuverings. Before the (June) general election he declared that he was only willing to be president. After his party gained only a small number of seats in the legislature, he said he wanted to become the opposition. Now he is chairman of the MPR and has even turned into a king-maker by nominating Gus Dur as a presidential candidate. In the meantime certain factions in the "axis force", which Amien leads, are moving to nominate Nurcholish Madjid as an alternative candidate -- this while Amien Rais has never withdrawn his support for Gus Dur.

In his capacity as chairman of the MPR, Amien Rais approached student demonstrators, inviting a hundred of them to come into the building and listen to Habibie's speech, speaking to them from atop a car. Amien Rais skillfully spoke to the protesters, giving the impression that he was looking for popularity, but proved less skillful in putting a time limit on Habibie's speech, leaving no time for the people's representatives to let themselves be heard. Amien Rais was quite deft in shielding Habibie.

Amien Rais is currently engaging in political acrobatics. This, however, is no ordinary acrobatics since it is being staged at the MPR, which is about to elect our next president. We must therefore be watchful. What this newspaper aims to achieve is to remind Indonesians that they are free to bellow and harbor hopes. But they must be ready to see their hopes vanish, given the MPR and MPR leadership they have at the present.

-- Media Indonesia, Jakarta