'Gong Xi Fa Cai'

For the first time, the Chinese New Year in Indonesia has been declared a national holiday by the government.

This is a long-awaited recognition of not only the presence of the largest minority ethnic group in this country, but also of its contributions to the nation, and to the process of nation building over the years.

Recognition it may be, but it is only a token gesture.

Chinese-Indonesians still face discrimination because of the color of their skin. We hope the government will follow up this recognition by revoking all remaining laws, decrees and regulations that smack of racial discrimination.

There are no official statistics on the size of the ethnic Chinese community in Indonesia. Estimates, however, put it at between six million and 10 million, including intermarriages.

Because they have lived in Indonesia for generations, ethnic Chinese should have the same rights as others in the nation. Alas, this has not been the case these last four decades or so.

Making the Chinese New Year a national holiday was probably the least that the community needed. Even without official recognition, the Chinese have marked the New Year within the confines of their private homes all these years. Only recently, with more openness and tolerance, have we started to see again the colorful lion and dragon dances being performed in the open.

Under the Soeharto regime, as part of its assimilation policy, the Chinese were banned not only from celebrating their New Year openly, but also from making an open display of cultural expressions. The use of Chinese characters was banned, Chinese were told to shed their names and adopt "Indonesian" sounding names, Chinese-language schools were closed down and they were told to adopt one of the five officially recognized faiths. Ethnic Chinese were barred from entering the civil service, the military and politics, and faced restrictions in the entertainment industry.

Soeharto's assimilation policy gave justification to the discriminatory policies. This in turn bred the prejudices against the Chinese among the majority "indigenous" population. These prejudices, in turn, have been the source of the anti-Chinese riots that have sporadically taken place in the country.

Reformasi changed some of that, but has not removed the chief problem: institutionalized racial discrimination.

Then president Abdurrahman Wahid gave the official recognition of Confucianism as a faith recognized by the state and declared in 2000 the Chinese New Year a "facultative" holiday, meaning that those who celebrate it may take the day off. President Megawati Soekarnoputri this year formalized it into a full- fledged national holiday.

Many ethnic Chinese also are beginning to appear in the political scene. One of them has even served in the Cabinet under both Abdurrahman and Megawati. More Chinese-Indonesians are starting to enrich the local pop culture.

This limited participation by ethnic Chinese in various walks of life shows that given the chance, they can make even greater contributions to society, besides their already well-recognized achievements in the trade and business sectors, and to a lesser extent in sports, particularly badminton.

All this is encouraging, because Indonesia is all the better off with the unrestricted and wider participation of minority ethnic groups in the nation's life. Racial harmony is best promoted not through forced assimilation, but by ensuring that every citizen of whatever race has equal rights in this country.

The development of recent years should be ground enough for President Megawati to remove, once and for all, every remaining law and regulation that discriminates against people on the basis of the color of their skin.

A pledge, with a concrete plan to remove this institutionalized racial discrimination, would be the best New Year's present the President could give to the Chinese community.

Gong Xi Fa Cai.