Indonesia's 54th anniversary in uncertainty

By Marianus Kleden

KUPANG, East Nusa Tenggara (JP): There are at least two peculiarities of our motherland's 54th anniversary of independence. First is the uncertainty about her future. Since this is the last commemoration of Indonesia's Independence Day in the 20th century and in the second millennium, there are questions about where she is headed in the new era.

Second, this celebration is marked by the uncertainty of the country's land size: whether East Timor will remain part of the country or will it go its own separate way. The uncertainty is twofold: temporal and spatial.

From a cyclical perspective, temporal segmentation is of no special significance since time comes and goes like clockwork. Christian pessimism of Judaic origin, Balinese belief in the karma pala or the natural law of reward and punishment, the Chinese horoscope consisting of 12 animals, all aptly reflect most Indonesians' habit of viewing everything as dull and repetitious.

Rivers flow into the ocean, but the water of the seas does not increase. The sun rises in the morning and sets in the afternoon and each day there is rice, so why hurry? Tears and laughter may be traded in a matter of minutes, for ancestors that have passed away will reappear in newborn children. For a good part of the Indonesian people, the coming of a new era does not mean so much.

On the other hand, Indonesian development programs have been designed linearly, a landmark example that the Five-Year Development Plan is nothing but an almost literal application of Rostow's ideal stages of a country's economic growth. Stages have passed and suddenly we have come to the "liftoff" stage, which means we have been able to fulfill our basic needs and maintain sustainable development without relying on foreign aid. Are we prepared to come off the ground? Yes, we are, says the government.

To mark that important moment in national development, Soeharto solemnly broke ground for the opening of the ambitious and symbolic airplane maker PT Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara in Bandung, which absorbed almost every single penny from our country's coffers. According to Habibie (the then minister of research and technology), after 30 years we would be able to compete with countries in the Pacific Rim. While 30 years is too far away for us to become excited about, we have been forced to come down to earth with the problem of how to sell our priceless, sophisticated toys.

Since our neighbors have a much better understanding of diplomatic politeness, they expressed eagerness at buying the advanced playthings. But as they did not have enough money, Indonesia had to resort to a primitive economic habit of bartering the ships with glutinous rice or cotton, then popularized under a modern vernacular as "equal purchase". Then came the downfall of Soeharto, and the destiny of this equal purchase evaporated into the profusion of political euphoria.

Being unable to take off, our giant airplane crashed into pieces of economic, political and social problems. It is on this stage that we were suddenly being championed as one of the biggest debtors in the world, East Timor's future became uncertain and unrest continued in Aceh. We have learned from experience that too much focus on the future results in the neglecting of urgent needs that should be satisfied here and now. While too much preoccupation with the daily nitty-gritty will leave us lagging behind in the global economic and political race. Our ambitious economic plans so far have not proven effective in resolving the dilemma.

Now that a new government is expected to come into power, cyclical worldview and linear orientation have arrived at a common ground from different directions. While the first is waiting for the reemergence of the glorious Majapahit kingdom of the past, the latter is heading forward to reach the peak of normal and gradual betterment.

The spatial problem has to do with the fate of East Timor. Several books on East Timor give historical and cultural as well as political justification of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor. Historically, so argue the writers, East Timor and the western part of the island were once a kind of commonwealth consisting of small kingdoms living peacefully. When the colonizers came, they divided the island into an eastern part which belonged to Portugal and a western part which became the property of the Dutch. In that case, we cannot blame Indonesia for annexing East Timor; rather was a historical process of reintegration of long time dividedness, or even reunification of separated brothers and sisters.

Others would argue that East Timor was part of the Majapahit kingdom, and since Indonesia is the reincarnation of that old kingdom, East Timor could not be anything but integrated into Indonesia. The writers were unaware that they had stepped onto a formidable brink of suggesting at the same time the possible appropriation of Sarawak, Brunei Darussalam, the southern part of Thailand, Malaysia and the southern part of the Philippines would also have been justifiable just because of the common historical past of cultural similarities.

Politically, the appropriation of East Timor was justified because of humanitarian consideration on the one hand, for the East Timorese were abandoned by the Portuguese without due provision and at a time of dire conditions. On the other hand, the takeover could also be justified with the Balibo declaration. This declaration, so the official story goes, was made on Nov. 30, 1975, when the East Timorese -- represented by prointegration groups Apodeti, the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), Kota and Trabalhista -- expressed a wish to be integrated into Indonesia.

In fact, what is called humanitarian consideration was realized in a remarkable physical development, but, as articulated by students from East Timor, upon blood and bones. And the celebrated Balibo declaration was not made in Balibo, a small town in the Maliana regency bordering East Nusa Tenggara, but in Bali, precisely at Paneeda View bungalow located on Sanur Beach -- all were engineered by the State Intelligence Coordinating Board (Bakin) under the chairmanship of quick-witted Lt. Gen. Ali Murtopo, as later disclosed by Guiherme Maria Goncalves, Apodeti chief, and Jose Martins from Kota in interviews with Radio Nederland 20 years after the event. UDT secretary-general Domingos de Oliveira revealed the same thing to George Aditjondro personally in Australia.

Judging from the above, we may conclude that there was no such thing as historical, cultural and political justification for the integration. At this point we can also conclude that Habibie was on the right track when he decided to let the East Timorese determine their own future. Despite his failure in managing temporal matters, he -- vested-interests aside -- deserves much credit in maintaining spatial problems.

Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri, in a recent speech, accused Habibie of whimsically handling the problem of East Timor. She may have forgotten that her father emphasized the importance of the will to unite in the process of nation-building, which is not at all embodied in the People Consultative Assembly's (MPR) Resolution No. VI of 1978 promulgating the inclusion of East Timor as part of Indonesia.

She has been inconsistent in placing the sovereignty of the people above the sovereignty of the MPR concerning her presidential candidacy, while at same time reproaching Habibie's effort to place the sovereignty of the East Timorese above the sovereignty of the MPR concerning their own destiny.

It is perhaps the last occasion for Habibie to be the prime host of Indonesia's anniversary celebration. May his initial success in handling spatial problems be perfected by the next president through his or her dealing wisely with temporal matters, especially those of Ambon and Aceh.

The writer is a social science lecturer at Widya Mandira Catholic University in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara.