Habibie's brinkmanship

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.