Cult figure country, or not?

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!"