East Timor a test for Megawati

East Timor a test for Megawati

By J. Leandro Elvas

OPORTO, Portugal (JP): Since 1995, Indonesia's prodemocracy
movement has stood firm in defending Megawati Soekarnoputri from
Soeharto's attempts to boot her out of the political arena.
Today, many still believe Megawati's party, the Indonesian
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Struggle) is the party of the
down-trodden, with a clear agenda for democratic reform. Now,
Indonesian progressive groups should think better of their
judgment.

The party's latest statement on East Timor puts on show
Megawati's view as something not necessarily better than that of
former president Soeharto's New Order.

In a gathering of 120,000 supporters at Senayan Stadium,
Jakarta, on Feb. 14, Megawati said, "We became very sad upon
hearing that East Timor... will be set free on Jan. 1, 2000."

Her advisor, Kwik Kian Gie, explained further PDI Struggle's
position. "Who wants East Timor to be free?", asked Kwik (The
Jakarta Post, Feb. 15). "Is it the silent majority or the vocal
minority? So far the ones we've heard calling for freedom are
Ramos Horta who doesn't even live in East Timor and Xanana Gusmao
who has been living six years away from there."

Obviously, it is case of shameless garbling. Kwik seems to
think that Xanana's life in a Jakarta jail for six years is a
kind of escapist sojourn. He prefers to see Horta's years of
exile as a Club-Med type of vacation. Kwik disingenuously puts
aside all facts concerning Indonesian military brutality and the
continuing Xanana-led struggle against it.

Kwik's case should not be taken lightly. A genuine drive for
democratic reform requires a sense of alignment with the
oppressed. It is a bad sign to see a political leader, whose
party still has fresh memories of repression, casually sneering
at two men forced to live far away from their own people.

One may notice the irony of it. It is not Habibie -- a man
Soeharto would expect to be his faithful student -- who follows
the dictator's line on the East Timorese question; it is Megawati
who does -- and she claims to be the dictator's great opponent. A
strange, sad, irony may carry a seed of a strange, sad future.

In a way, the East Timor question is a test of democratic
commitment. In all appearances, Kwik has failed it. He asked
rhetorically whether it is "the silent majority" or "the vocal
minority" demanding East Timor to be free. Yet he also said that
"a referendum is not a good option". Too bad no one asked how
Kwik would gauge East Timorese preference. His only guide seems
to be people of the "12 branches of our party there (East
Timor)", who told him that they did not "wish to be freed". He
does not elaborate whether these 12 branches get real support
from the East Timorese -- especially after they have heard Kwik's
paternalistic manner of speaking (saying that East Timorese did
not wish "to be freed" -- why not "to be free"?).

It seems that we are dealing with something deeper than mere
choice of words. Megawati and Kwik may think that theirs is a
legitimate "nationalist" stance, something derived from the
famous Sukarno's elan. But there is a notable difference between
Indonesian nationalism of the Sukarno kind and that of Megawati,
her claim of being Sukarno's loyal daughter notwithstanding.

Sukarno's nationalism, born in the years of Indonesia's
struggle against a Dutch colonialist clutch, was primarily shaped
by a Marxist view of European capitalism.

Megawati, a child of a different era, has never had the urge
to apply Marxist analytical tools to unravel her political
universe. She grew up in a period when Marxism was a doctrine of
the dangerous outlaws. Thus PDI Struggle's brand of nationalism
is a distorted copy of Indonesian nationalism of the past. It is
a nationalism that has lost its original left-wing thrust. It has
degenerated into a muscular pretense of patriotism and an
automatic defense of Indonesia's unitary nation-state, of
Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution -- the later being a legal
foundation worshiped by the military.

Hence the need for a caveat. PDI Struggle's supporters,
hoisting a red banner of a dark, angry bull, can easily slip into
a populist movement with a fierce, but narrow, kind of loyalty.
From postcommunist Russia we have learned that it is not
unthinkable to see a menacing right-wing nationalist party
emerging from such a militant group of revivalists -- the
faithful who dream of the return of the Great Leader.

The writer, a graduate of School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London, is a freelance journalist based in
Oporto, Portugal. He has visited Indonesia twice.