Awakening to challenges

Nationalism and national unity have naturally become the main topics of speeches by government leaders and discussions at various seminars and public meetings over the two weeks prior to the observance on May 20 of our National Awakening Day which President Soeharto has termed as our Second National Awakening.

Obviously, the first awakening was the national movement of May 20, 1908, which launched the national struggle for independence from the Dutch colonial rule.

We understand the term "Second National Awakening" as meant to reflect the new challenges we are facing and will likely encounter in the rapidly changing world of today. Indeed, as the President reiterated at the ceremony marking National Awakening Day on Friday, the main challenge of the nation today -- almost 50 years after its national independence -- is to achieve the final goal of the independence itself: A just and prosperous society for all.

We should magnanimously acknowledge that the lofty ideals linked to national independence are still far from becoming reality. That, of course, is not something which we should be ashamed of. Developing a nation of almost 190 million people with hundreds of ethnic origins, who for centuries suffered under cruel colonial rulers and who occupy the one of the world's largest archipelagic countries, is not an easy task that can be accomplished within five decades.

Nonetheless, as the country has been making remarkable progress in almost all aspects of its nationhood, there have been extensive complaints about the widening gap in the well-being of the different segments of society due to what the public perceives as sharply unfair distribution of the gains of development. In other words, instead of coming closer to social justice, the nation is seen by many as heading into a higher degree of social injustice.

We prefer to view this phenomenon as a temporary trend along the road towards a just and prosperous society.

However, the more we indulge in retrospection on this phenomenon, the more worried we become about the ways the nation is governed, the manners in which the economy is developed, the pace at which the gains of development are trickling down to the common people and the gap between what the authorities pronounce will be done and what actually comes about. As more instances of collusion between officials and businessmen are uncovered, as more people are uprooted from their land by greedy businessmen in the name of development and as the people in many regencies feel robbed of their rights to choose their own administrative leaders, an increasing number of the people feel they are merely the objects, and not the subjects, of development.

The government, for sure, always assures us that the development program is by and for the people and that the ways the nation is governed are decided by the people. But as the powers that be show an increasing impatience about listening to discordant voices, disparate interests and conflicting points of views and show a weakening capacity to deal with differences and to respect them, the participation, knowledge and involvement of the people in the process of governance seems to be declining.

We think the various forms of disillusionment that lie beneath our political stability, security and national unity, as well as the widening social gap that is stretching thin the social solidarity that is so necessary to binding our nation in unity, are the major challenges we must deal with in this era of the Second National Awakening.