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)