Awakening to challenges

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.