Habibie's brinkmanship

Four parties, including two of the biggest factions in the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), rejected President B.J. Habibie's accountability report outright. Six others, including the incumbent's own Golkar Party, raised so many questions and qualifications, they effectively negated the President's achievements. With the outright support of only one minor faction, we expected Habibie to take a magnanimous decision and renounce on Sunday his presidential bid.

When Habibie quaveringly begged the highly critical Assembly on Sunday to forgive him for his failures, we were on the verge of expressing our enormous respect to him as a statesman willing to kill his ambition for power to defuse a situation so fraught with the potentials for horrific conflicts.

Instead, Habibie appears to be steeling for an all-out fight to realize his presidential bid. The move was reflected on Sunday in his response to the Assembly's criticisms of his accountability address delivered last Thursday.

We sadly must resign ourselves to the bitter fact that morality does have never played a part in the way politics is exercised in this country. This was especially the case during former president Soeharto's 32-year-rule, in which Habibie was a major player for more than 25 years.

It really hurts our sense of propriety that in this reform era someone is still desperately clinging to power at all costs. We are really sad that we still dream of even such simple things as a situation when we can equate legitimacy with morality and ethics.

In an eleventh hour bid to fend off criticisms leveled at his accountability speech, Habibie again tried to play with the truth. The President cited figures to suit his needs. He invoked or misinterpreted laws to justify his nonaction in several important matters, and stopped short of providing explicit details when he wanted to hide his failings.

In his last election pitch to the country's top lawmakers, Habibie said that restoring domestic and foreign investor confidence in the country was the key to reviving the crippled economy. But the President failed to realize that trust in the national leadership -- that most precious commodity all too absent in his administration -- is the key to restoring such confidence.

Citing last week's visit to Jakarta by an International Monetary Fund technical team, Habibie said the IMF's suspension of aid to Indonesia was not because the multilateral agency distrusted his government. He stopped short of explaining that the IMF is not acting alone. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United States and even Japan have followed the IMF's move. Surely Habibie was advised that the IMF technical team came not to meet with the government, but with private sector economists, non-governmental organizations and top executives from the country's political parties.

Habibie defended his government's decision to withhold the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit report on the Bank Bali scandal by misinterpreting laws. Article 23 of the 1945 Constitution and the law on the Supreme Audit Agency clearly stipulates that the agency must submit its audit report to the House of Representatives (DPR). But Habibie quoted an article in the law that requires the agency to submit its audit report to the government (meaning law enforcement agencies such as the police) if the auditor finds any indication of corruption and other crimes. The President conveniently interpreted this provision as meaning that audit reports may only be submitted to the government. In fact, the spirit of the stipulation is that such reports shall "also be submitted to the government (law enforcers)".

Habibie fended of accusations of foot-dragging over his handling of corruption, collusion and nepotism, arguing that the previous anticorruption law did not define collusion and nepotism as crimes. He said the new anticorruption law enacted in May did cover such practices, but that the law could not be made retroactive in handling collusive and nepotistic practices committed before May 1999.

He defended the Rp 350 trillion (US$43.7 billion) figure cited in his Thursday speech as the cost for the bank recapitalization undertaking, and said the amount was accurate. But he disclosed on Sunday that another Rp 218.3 trillion had been spent on the government guarantee scheme on bank deposits and claims. Clearly his first statement was only a half-truth, because what the public wants to know is the total cost of the bank restructuring program to the taxpayers. As most economists have said, the correct figure is about Rp 570 trillion, a figure Habibie eventually acknowledged on Sunday.

Habibie said Pertamina and the National Logistics Agency (Bulog) had been audited by independent auditors and that their findings of Rp 44.3 trillion in losses due to inefficiency and irregularities had been disclosed to the public. The truth is that only a summary of the reports, which were composed by the government to suit its own needs, were announced to the public.

Even more perplexing were Habibie's statistics on worker layoffs caused by the economic crisis, a figure which he claimed totaled only 16,000 in 1999. He said hard-core unemployment totaled only 6.12 million, or a mere 6.5 percent of a total workforce of about 93 million people in 1999.

Habibie's defense of his record in human rights, East Timor, as well as other points raised by the 11 factions in the MPR, was, if not self-serving, then at least contained confusing statistics, and sometimes incomplete and misleading factual elaborations.

The MPR may still vote to accept and endorse Habibie's accountability report, given the fact that many current MPR members are the very ones who unanimously elected Soeharto in March 1999, only to unanimously dump him two months later. MPR members may also claim that the students who have been mounting anti-Habibie demonstrations since last Wednesday only represent a small segment of the population, or that the big wave of opposition to Habibie is simply an urban phenomenon.

The MPR members however, would be well advised to remember that their decisions could alleviate or worsen the present crisis or could even make or break the nation.