Habibie vs. the People

Just one day after President B.J. Habibie delivered his impassioned speech before the country's supreme policy-making body, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), to justify the policies he has taken over the past 16 months that he has been in power, it is crystal clear that a serious gap exists between the chief executive's thinking and that of the Indonesian public at large. Perhaps even more worrying, there are indications that some members of the newly elected Assembly may be just as out of tune as the President with the general mood that prevails among the public outside the Assembly halls.

Yesterday, even as legislators inside the Assembly were weighing the strong and the weak points in the President's "accountability" speech, thousands of people, including university students, high school students and residents, battled police and riot troops guarding the approaches to the MPR building in Jakarta.

A small number of students were on Thursday allowed inside the Assembly's grand conference hall to personally listen to the President's address. MPR leaders had promised at least 100 student representatives would be allowed to attend the session, and possibly more sessions, in the run-up to next week's presidential elections.

Well meant as such a move may be, it is certain to be viewed by the students as an empty gesture that will do nothing to get them closer to seeing their demands fulfilled. Those demands are, among other things, total political reform, a guarantee that civil rights and the law in general will be respected, clean governance and an end to military interference in politics. Already, to press those demands, student leaders have vowed that they will continue putting pressure on the legislature through street demonstrations, at least until after a satisfactory presidential election by the Assembly on Wednesday, Oct. 20.

While there are many events of the past 16 months that throw serious doubt on the President's capability to carry out the program of total reform that the Indonesian public demands -- the large number of unresolved cases of human rights abuses, the government's slow and selective handling of cases of corruption, the continued partiality of the state's judicial institutions toward the executive, the continuing veiled but unmistakable dominance of the military in public life and politics are some of the manifestations that immediately come to mind -- one case in particular may serve to illustrate the situation in this respect.

Such a case is the Bank Bali scandal, which the President for obvious reasons chose to sidestep in his address. A major public scandal of the moment, this particular case has all the elements that are indicative of a corrupt system. The few arrests that have been made in this case have failed to satisfy the public's sense of justice. The point is that while it may be true that those arrested are guilty of banking malpractices, people who have been widely mentioned as the instigators of the whole affair -- all close associates and allies of the President -- have remained untouched.

All the elements that are characteristic of bad governance -- malfeasance, corruption, disregard of the law and cover-up at all cost to protect people in high places -- are present in this single case. The government's stubborn refusal to disclose the full findings of an independent audit of the case conducted by the PricewaterhouseCoopers international auditing firm only serves to strengthen suspicions of serious wrongdoing on the part of the Habibie administration.

To many Indonesians, though, all this is to be expected since the incumbent Habibie administration is in every respect a mere extension of Soeharto's New Order regime. Having been Soeharto's privileged protege, it is natural that Habibie tries to cling to power. After all, since Soeharto's fall it is Habibie who has taken the old autocrat's place on the proverbial tiger's back.

It is true that there have been improvements since Habibie took over from Soeharto. Most notably, the rights of free expression, free assembly and association and press freedom have been restored. It is wrong, however, to assert that those improvements were made possible because of Habibie. It only takes one to recall the circumstances that forced Soeharto to relinquish power and caused his vice president, B.J. Habibie, to ascend to power. If anyone deserves credit for having forced the current democratic changes to be made it is the students and the masses of Indonesians who laid siege to the legislature to press their demands.

Considering all this, one piece of good advice that we can give to our legislators presently convened in the MPR is one that has been expressed by many of our leading political observers and analysts already: Listen to the voice of the people. Only by staying in tune with the people and taking heed of their wishes will it be possible for those people's representatives to achieve what is best for the nation.