House should act as 'opposition': Scholar

House should act as 'opposition': Scholar

YOGYAKARTA (JP): A prominent political scholar dismissed yesterday as "absolutely irrelevant" the hope for opposition parties to emerge in Indonesian.

Ichlasul Amal of Gadjah Mada University said Indonesia cannot have an opposition party because it adopts the presidential system of government.

"Under the system, the 'opposition' force is the House of Representatives as a whole, not the political parties that make it up," he told The Jakarta Post.

Amal was responding to Gen. (ret) Soemitro's proposal for the establishment of "loyal opposition parties" which can balance the overly powerful executive branch of the bureaucracy.

Soemitro, a former chief of the defunct Internal Security Agency, said the recent mushrooming of mass organizations shows that Indonesian political parties have failed to defend the interests of the masses.

He recalled that in the last years of Sukarno presidency in the mid 1960s, the military sponsored the establishment of Golkar to channel people's wishes and criticism of the government.

If Indonesia had "loyal" opposition forces, Soemitro argued, organizations like the Indonesian National Unity and the National Brotherhood Foundation would not have necessarily come into being.

Amal, however, is opposed to the idea of having an institution like Golkar because the nature of people's demands at present is different from that in the 1960s.

"I doubt that problems that arise nowadays can be handled by an institution such as Golkar," he said.

Separately, political observer Riswandha Imawan said it would be futile to expect the Indonesian Democratic Party and the United Development Party to check the government like opposition parties do.

"This (inability to control the government) is largely because the prevailing laws severely limit their room to maneuver," Riswandha said.

He stressed that Indonesia needs effective opposition forces. The opposition, he said, may come from new organizations, such as intellectual associations. (har/pan)