Free and fair polls essential, says Wolfowitz

JAKARTA (JP): A visiting former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia said here on Thursday free and fair elections in June would be the "absolutely essential first step" to working out the country's multidimensional problems.

Paul Wolfowitz, who served from 1986 to 1989, told a seminar on poll monitoring that if the elections were not free and fair, then "it will be almost impossible to overcome all of the other challenges".

"If the elections are disrupted by violence or destroyed by some of the old practices, then the consequences will be terrible," Wolfowitz, who is currently the dean of the renowned Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said without elaborating.

The seminar was organized by the Washington-based International Republican Institute (IRI) which plans to hold more than 30 training seminars throughout the country to assist political parties in monitoring the elections.

Wolfowitz said the June 7 elections, the first to be held since the resignation of former president Soeharto in May last year, will have a positive chance to be free and fair.

"I couldn't have imagined that Indonesia would be holding an election where nobody knew the result in advance," Wolfowitz said.

He, however, admitted that the coming elections would be held under more difficult circumstances as the entire system was new, complicated and needed to be developed in 300,000 different polling places.

"That would be a difficult job in any country, including my own," said Wolfowitz.

But, he said, the hardest part of all is that the elections will have to be done at a time of "great social tension amid terrible incidents of intercommunal violence".

More than 300 people have been killed in months of clashes between Muslims and Christians in the eastern province of Maluku since the violence first erupted in mid-January.

More than 200 people were also killed in other violent clashes pitting the Madurese migrant community against local Malays and Dayaks in the West Kalimantan regency of Sambas in March.

"Many of the problems that Indonesia faces, including the problem of law and order can't be solved, unless Indonesia has a government that the people believe in," Wolfowitz said.

"I think that makes the elections here particularly important," he added.

But, Wolfowitz said, free and fair elections will just be the beginning as there will still be "enormous work to do" afterward.

"How do you bring any of those 48 political parties together and say this was what the people wanted, this was what they voted for," he said.

IRI said in a press statement that Wolfowitz is on a five-day visit from April 25 to April 30 to meet a number of public figures and political leaders in the state capital to assess the preparations for the June elections.

Wolfowitz said the IRI would probably send around 30 or 35 observers.

He added that the Democratic Party would also send a delegation of about 40 to 50 observers led by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Another 100 observers will come from the European Union.

"So that is about one foreign observer for every 1,500 polling places... which means of course that if this election is going to be monitored properly, it will depend on the people that you are going to train," Wolfowitz said. (byg)