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