Sun, 26 Aug 2001

Indonesia seeks role as ASEAN 'big brother'

BANGKOK (Agencies): President Megawati Soekarnoputri, on a whirlwind tour of the capitals of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), said on Saturday that Indonesia must live up to its title as the "big brother" of the region.

Megawati told a meeting with some 200 Indonesians here that she wished people would stop putting quotation marks between the words "big brother" whenever referring to the role that Indonesia should play in ASEAN.

"In the past, we were called ASEAN's `big brother`. This means that Indonesia is expected to take the ASEAN leadership in international fora," she said at the meeting held at the Indonesian Embassy.

Indonesia should assume the region's leadership role not only in international politics, but also in the economic and other sectors, she said as quoted by the Antara news agency.

Megawati, who held talks with Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, later flew to Bandar Sri Begawan for the seventh stop of her tour of nine ASEAN capitals.

She had already visited Manila, Hanoi, Vientiane, Phnom Penh and Yangon. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur will be her last two stops before she returns home on Tuesday.

Her choice to visit the ASEAN capitals as her first overseas tour is not only in keeping with an ASEAN tradition for every leader to quickly acquaint themselves with their counterparts, but is also a reaffirmation of her pledge to make ASEAN once again the cornerstone of Indonesia's foreign policy.

Her predecessor Abdurrahman Wahid, in contrast, snubbed ASEAN and launched an initiative to set up a new West Pacific Forum which would include among others, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the newly independent East Timor.

There has been a consensus within ASEAN that Indonesia takes most of the initiatives and leadership within the organization simply because it is the largest member.

But with the country in almost perpetual economic and political crisis since 1997, Indonesia has not been able to play that role effectively the way that it did previously.

Megawati said on Saturday that she hoped to rectify that. For that to happen, she conceded that Indonesia must put its own house in order first and that this was something that she hoped to achieve in the remaining two-and-a-half years of her administration.

The administration must start by tackling the problems of law enforcement and corruption, she said, adding that should she fail, the dream of leading ASEAN would never materialize.

In her speech, the first in which she publicly addressed domestic issues during her present tour, Megawati called on her compatriots everywhere to build their sense of self confidence.

For Indonesia to be able to take a leadership position, "the recipe is to build a strong national identity, self respect and self confidence," she said.

Indonesians abroad, in particular, must never shy away from publicly identifying their nationality no matter how appalling conditions in their home country are and no matter what other people think of Indonesia, she said.

"I have met many people who said they were ashamed to be Indonesians," said Megawati, who is also the chairperson of the nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan). (emb/dja)