Indonesia's path to reform
Indonesia's path to reform
As Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid prepares to fly into
Hong Kong today (Sunday) to address a meeting of the Asia
Society, it seems timely to remind him that the international
community is losing patience with the slow pace of reform in his
shattered nation.
The legal system is widely perceived as rotten, corruption is
said to be deeply ingrained, and racial divisions are seemingly
unbridgeable. With the return of Asian economic growth so far
bypassing Indonesia and leaving it with the most fragile of
recoveries, it has become clear that investors are waiting for
more concrete signs of change from Jakarta before committing
funds.
Mr. Wahid has not only included Hong Kong on his busy
international itinerary in an attempt to woo private capital, he
also wants to reassure Chinese investors who fled amid the
violence of 1998 that their return will be welcomed. But it will
take more than the charm and smiles, for which the President is
famous, to repair the damage.
He will need to convince his audience that he is making
headway in building a consensus in his badly-divided cabinet. One
sign Mr. Wahid should tout of his ability to focus the council of
ministers was his decision last week to castigate them, cancel
all overseas travel and call a weekend meeting to deal with
International Monetary Fund demands, which they had been in
danger of not being able to meet. Within days a taskforce had
been set up to restructure the nation's private sector debt
valued at more than U.S.$60 billion so meeting a key IMF
requirement in order for it to continue pumping massive amounts
of international aid.
The huge rifts in Indonesian society also need to be repaired.
The fight for separatism in the northern province of Aceh,
Muslim-Christian violence in the eastern Maluku Islands, and the
flight abroad of Indonesian Chinese are just a few of the ethnic
and religious divides that Mr. Wahid should bridge in order to
attract international aid and capital.
Even though Mr. Wahid is fond of diplomacy, he might like to
begin restricting his international forays so that he can spend
more time on the problems at home and communicate more
effectively with his electorate rather than issue edicts from
abroad. It would be a tragedy if Indonesia's first democratically
elected leader, widely considered to be a man of vision, failed
to put his nation on the road to reform.
-- The South China Sunday Morning, Hong Kong