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.