Government vs the House

Since 1989, with the exception of a few intervals, my husband and I have had the privilege of living in Indonesia. During these years, The Jakarta Post has been our daily reading. We have enjoyed and appreciated the constant search for objectivity shown by your newspaper during very difficult times for the Indonesian press.

However, since almost one year we are observing an increasingly evident attitude of the Post in using ambiguity as far as Indonesian internal politics is concerned. In relation to this, we have noticed a biased hostility towards President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, as appears mainly through titles and arguments chosen in your newspaper's political pages, although the contents of the articles, which so often clash with the meaning of the respective titles, tend still to keep an objective stance.

Nevertheless, the insistence in reporting diffusely on "objective" rumors and gossip instead of more objectively significant facts, and to elaborate editorial comments on the basis of clearly tendentious interpretations of such rumors and gossip, provides the attentive reader with a disappointing image of the newspaper she/he was used to consider a very good example of journalism. The editorial of May 21 When enough is enough, is a bitter confirmation of how judgment can be released and propagated on the basis of a quite tendentious and prejudicial interpretation of the alleged intention ascribed to a person, whose image has to be damaged for political purposes.

We regret this change in the habits of the Post.

So far, we have not been able to detect any objective analysis in your newspaper concerning this matter and the tremendous loneliness in which any honest and courageous head of government would have found himself in fighting against the almost invincible resistance of the past era, which is really reluctant to pass away. The previous administrative apparatus, men, habits, mentality, aims, are still there, to perpetuate a system created for its primary benefit.

Apart from the members of Megawati's party, the House of Representatives is still substantially formed by people who served the previous regime in one way or another. If this legislative body, instead of focusing on the promotion of new laws and legislative measures as a priority task to recover from the crisis, concentrates almost all of its energies on finding a way to expunge the President from the role that the same legislature assigned to him, the easiest interpretation for people who know Indonesia is that the man being expunged from such a key role cannot be digested by the system, which tries to self-perpetuate by any means.

When one notices the new propensity to process rumors, gossip and hypotheses, it seems surprising that the Post has made no attempt to go behind the rather ridiculous accusation of corruption moved against Gus Dur. The current campaign, promoted daily by the House of Representatives against Gus Dur, looks much more like an attempt to prepare a coup d'etat rather than the willingness to assert democratic principles.

The only reasonable and just alternative to the grotesque situation created by a mass of hyperactive politicians quite unfamiliar with democracy, seems to be that the government and the House cooperate in efforts for the good of the people.

There is little to hope for, however, for the objective of striving for the people's good doesn't seem anywhere to be seen.

KRYSTYNA KLEMCZAK

Jakarta