Cult figure country, or not?

President Soeharto said last week that he refused to be turned into a cult figure. His pronouncement was warmly received. Mochtar Pabottingi a senior researcher at the National Institute of Sciences looks at the significance of the statement.

JAKARTA (JP): As usual, as soon as they heard Soeharto's comment, praise poured in from legislators, military officials and political observers.

"Pak Harto is a democrat. He'll never be authoritarian and will always comply with the laws," said Deputy House Speaker Sjarwan Hamid and an adviser to the the Armed Forces faction.

His counterpart in the House, Fatimah Ahmad, from the Indonesian Democratic Party, followed suit: "It shows us his statesmanship," (The Jakarta Post, Oct. 16, 1997).

To me it is wiser indeed to refrain from such instant praise for three reasons. First, it might betray something contrary to its intention: prompt praise is exactly what cultists usually offer to their supreme rulers.

Second, it corroborates our decades of nationwide political complacency, instant political amnesia, and serious poverty of political reflection.

There has been hardly any statesmanship from the government over the last two years, least of all during the last election.

Third, our political laws and practices are full of irrationalities, pitfalls and double standards, and have been increasingly so over the last 30 years.

They are characterized by a heavy skewness in the relations between the ruler and the ruled.

As such, most responses to rulers' statements like this one, particularly if they are rhetorical, advantaged the heavily skewed system.

In so far as our present head of state is concerned, personality cult is not the right term. What used to be more of a personalilty cult in the time of Soekarno's Guided Democracy has, during the course of the New Order, been transformed into a formidable one: a systemic cult.

By this I mean that in our case a head of state could be indefinitely reelected every five years not so much because the people have made him a cult figure, but because virtually all the political mechanisms and practices are devised in such a way as to maintain the head of state in his or her position.

Accordingly, the implementation of the ambiguous Chapter seven, Section III of our Constitution becomes seriously distorted.

What is involved here is not so much the literal interpretation of the reelectability of an incumbent president, but the heavy political engineering of the entire election procedures that make it systemically impossible for anyone to replace the incumbent if the latter wants to hold on.

Article 1, Chapter one, Section I of Law No. 1, 1985 explicitly mentions the implementation of people's sovereignty as the principle objective of elections.

Yet there is not a single article in the rest of the law guaranteeing the implementation of that objective.

On the contrary, Chapter eight, Section III which explicates the total ex-officio domination of election committees automatically ignores the principle of people's sovereignty in favor of that of the regime.

This violation is repeated in the regulation that says all parliamentary candidates should be checked and approved by the presidential office.

Add to this the state mechanism which makes the President deliver his accountability address to the legislature he has just installed.

All this, and countless other rules and practices, have created a situation in which government accountability has become an utter facade.

Most politically aware Indonesians know this as they know their own limbs. Still those within the ruling circle endlessly deny that there is something gravely wrong with our state mechanisms.

"We have lied too much," said commentator Laksamana Sukardi as he said about a serious phenomenon in the economy, "and end up believing in our lies" (D &R Oct. 18, 1997).

We have been living with a much more dangerous cult, which eats up the very ideals upon which our nation was founded.

The majority of our people might well be better fed and clothed. This constitutes a gigantic jump from the time when we had to stand for hours to queue for a liter of kerosene oil or a kilogram of sugar.

Still the adage stays: man does not live on bread alone.

True humankind of all ages and lands have always lived to fulfill their equal needs in goods and in virtues.

To say that our social upheavals and political riots during the last twenty-odd years stand from a rising expectation due to the success of development is to miss the goals of our nation.

To say that the grievances of millions of Indonesians stem from "social jealousy" is to launch an unpardonable insult at the grieving millions and the republic's agenda of our republic.

We are indeed fortunate to be among the respectable community of nations that believes in the possibility of there being a virtuous and ennobling humanity.

I am thankful to God and to our founding fathers for our Five Principles of the state ideology Pancasila.

I can appreciate some good things the New Order has done. But measured against those principles, we still have a very long way to go before we see either a democrat or statesmanship at work at the center of the regime, let alone being proud of Indonesian politics.

Let me close this brief insight by quoting for the prompt praisers a recurrent line from a Holy Book: "How judged ye!"