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.