Basofi and Megawati: Actors or victims in PDI rift?

Basofi and Megawati: Actors or victims in PDI rift?

By Cornelis Lay

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Hopes have withered that a solution to the disarray in the East Java chapter of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) will be found well before next year's general election.

What happened was quite the opposite. The discord appeared to have been nourished while the local bureaucracy -- as happened in previous cases -- smartly devised reasons to block the party's regional representatives from sitting in the provincial general election committee and in the official general election watchdog committee.

The existence of two provincial PDI party boards was officially mentioned as being the main reason for this temporary exclusion until May, if the latest schedule drawn up by the government is anything to go by.

Being a democrat, East Java's political patron Basofi, always aware of the proper ethics in the political game, had no desire to betray his innermost conscience by choosing one or the other of the opposing party factions. Instead, he opted for wisdom and chose to instruct the PDI party to convene in order to find an internal settlement to the problems.

However, so the word is spread, Basofi's good intentions are obliterated in a chain of incidental frame-ups, allegedly engineered by PDI's central party board, which has been dexterously aiming to drape him -- and by extension Golkar and the government -- with a cloak of negative image as being the cause of all the disaster.

In the mind of Basofi and his followers, falsehood is the instrument used by the PDI party board as a means to evade responsibility for the discord in the PDI ranks.

In Basofi's eyes, the East Java incident should have been solved internally and top party leaders should not have acted arbitrarily against the party branches and Latief Pudjosakti, whose actions were justified by both the constitution and by political ethics.

According to official accounts, 32 branches out of 37 branches reject the arbitrary actions of the PDI central party board. However, it was never disclosed that in all the regional branches only the chairman and secretary had ever confronted the party's central board.

The remaining members either sided with Chairperson Megawati Soekarnoputri, or chose to be neutral. This might be the reason why the provincial authorities, citing security reasons, have always rejected requests from the central party board to meet face to face with all the branch leaders of the party in East Java.

The bad intentions of the PDI central board have since long been detected by Basofi.

An excessive anti-Latief spirit was said to have been promoted by the central board before, during and after the East Java party conference. This presumably went so far that central board leaders forged conspirational ties with party branches and often resorted to forms of intimidation and cheating during the vote counting. This allegation is presumably backed up by photographs of people involved in these activities. When they failed to intimidate local party representatives, ruling No. SK 043 was launched by Megawati.

Foul play by PDI leaders and Megawati did not stop there. Quite extraordinarily, by whatever means, they managed to mesmerize the media into voluntarily and systematically running a series of falsehoods and frame-ups. Furthermore, they easily convinced the general public into swallowing the stories fabricated by Megawati and the PDI leaders.

As a result, all the crimes which the PDI central party board had committed -- so obviously clear to the Basofi-Latief camp -- did not affect observers' comments in the least. These observers, in the eyes of Basofi, know much about the excesses inside PDI in East Java. However, they are highly ignorant about the roots of the problem as they appear to Basofi.

Basofi and Latief's version of the incident went mostly unheeded and ignored. The remaining problems at the heart of PDI are still held at bay, leaving Basofi, who had laid his neck on the line for PDI, with the image of the poor underdog.

However, the question that has to be answered is: Is it true that the core of the whole problem lies within the PDI, as Basofi and his sociopolitical affairs assistants assert, and that Basofi must therefore be seen as a victim of scheming by an ill-behaved PDI board?

Or, could Basofi be the victim of an even bigger plot, as many people seem to believe? Could the chaos within the East Java PDI ranks be part of a grand scenario aimed at destroying the legitimacy of Megawati's leadership and curbing the popular support for the PDI in East Java and, most crucially, all this because of an existing rivalry between two different centers of power?

This assumption might not be all that vague. There are enough reasons to support the theory. We could pose a simple question: Would Basofi and his assistants have taken the same step if PDI had been Golkar?

We could also regard the odd position the policy makers are taking and the strange behavior of the local bureaucracy -- as exemplified, for example, by their open support for Latief, to the point of accompanying him to the Ministry of Home Affairs -- as a remote indication of the validity of such an assumption.

This second assumption could give existing speculations another interesting turn. Basofi could merely be an accidental factor in the drama, forced, because of his position, to play a certain part in the existing grand scenario; a puppet forced to go through the motions in a scene deliberately set up. Could it also have been that PDI leaders, Megawati in particular, were led, just as Basofi, to respond to circumstances in accordance with the existing scenario?

If these wild assumptions have any core of truth at all, then we may well assume that the problems of PDI would still be there, even if another power holder stood at the helm of the political hierarchy in East Java and other PDI luminaries were involved in the drama. Latief and Soetjipto, like Basofi, would then be purely accidental factors which may switch positions, or even disappear, without altering the essence of the story in any way.

If this were true, then all the allegations, the bitterness expressed by PDI followers outside the Latief camp, the writings in the mass media, obliquely directed at Basofi, would be far from just. Basofi, like the PDI, is merely acting as a medium of something entirely different, something that is more meaningful to him than Megawati, or the PDI party.

Considered in this context, it would not be hard to follow PDI's reasoning behind their careless act of blatantly placing Megawati in a position of rivalry to the power center. We might thus come to realize that the PDI and Megawati are being herded into -- or have fallen into the trap of -- reaching for the impossible, thereby giving their political adversaries the justification for declaring open war.

If this were the case, we should be ready to see a revival of the kind of politics which we experienced in the 1970s and in which the PDI was so heavily entangled. East Java has already provided the model for this kind of set up. But what purpose would all this serve? This is a question to which the answer will perhaps always remain elusive.

The writer is a lecturer in political science at the Gadjah Mada University.