Guess What? Jeffrey A. Winters

American academic Jeffrey A. Winters must have forgotten to say "knock on wood" to cancel out potential bad luck when claiming that Indonesia was a much safer country for him now that president Soeharto has resigned.

"The last time I held a press conference here before Soeharto stepped down, I had to go straight to the airport afterward to save my life," Winters, an associate professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, told reporters last Monday.

"But now, I simply have to be at the airport soon," he said, pleading to be excused by the swarming reporters as his taxi waited outside.

Ironically, less than two days after he left for the States, Winters became a new target of the National Police for allegedly slandering Coordinating Minister for Economy, Finance and Industry, Ginandjar Kartasasmita.

Winters clearly overestimated the government's tolerance on free speech when he quoted on Monday a report by the Econit advisory group which alleges Ginandjar participated in shady business deals with mining giant PT Freeport Indonesia during the his tenure as mines and energy minister between 1988 and 1993.

"It's not proper for him (Ginandjar) to be the pioneer of anticorruption," Winters said then, adding that Ginandjar had to first come clean and resolve the Freeport issue.

Now, the political scientist, who last year came up with a finding that a third of the World Bank's loans to Indonesia in all likelihood, were siphoned off, is no longer allowed to set foot in the country unless he retracts his statement about Ginandjar and publicly apologizes. (das)