It's time for Chinese-Indonesians to wake up

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

This is the second of two articles suggesting steps which could be taken by Chinese-Indonesians in the aftermath of the May riots.

JAKARTA (JP): It escapes many people why President B.J. Habibie's administration persists in making statements that antagonize Chinese-Indonesians and belittle their decades of contribution to national economic development and abominable victimization in the May riots.

I recently observed continuous indiscriminate stigmatization of businesspeople and their economic activities as if being an entrepreneur and getting rich from it were a disgrace and should be treated with hostility. That is the last thing we want to do in the light of investors' lack of confidence in our country. We cannot afford to lose more investment.

The extent to which this development confuses business owners, especially in the distribution sector, has become the major thorn in the government's side. It wouldn't be that surprising if many decided to discontinue their businesses and deposit their money in the bank instead to benefit from the 60 percent annual interest rate.

The recent calls by the attorney general and minister of justice for the death penalty for those caught stockpiling staple foods has created fear among Chinese distributors with a large turnover who have been in the business for decades or even generations.

Some have been frequently visited by police to check if they have "suspiciously" large rice stocks. The risk of arrest, and subsequent death can be bewildering for a businessman who is simply trying to earn a living while alleviating hunger in his community.

It is a moot point to reiterate how much the Chinese have benefited from the country and its people, something they couldn't dream of having back in their ancestral homeland. They couldn't help being born in Indonesia. They couldn't help being Chinese. The fact is both the Chinese and pribumi (indigenous Indonesians) need each other and benefit from each other symbiotically. One cannot exist without the other.

With this in mind, it is really irrelevant to become engaged in a "mud-slinging" competition regarding who are the good or the bad guys when we know that this mess stems from a flawed, inhuman system perpetuated by one megalomaniac named Soeharto.

Unfortunately, unless fostered by a trustworthy and respectable government, the vast majority of our ill-educated people will not be able to grasp this.

To add insult to injury, many of our more privileged and educated members of society, particularly those who form the country's political elite, have little interest, or are completely blinkered, in providing a more balanced, sober assessment of the racial issue in Indonesia.

Despite much criticism of its recent formation, the Chinese- Indonesian-owned PARTI (Partai Reformasi Tionghoa Indonesia) is a symbol of the awakening of political awareness among ethnic Chinese in Indonesia that is worth supporting.

Even if it is true that this party won't get many votes, should it be allowed to contest next year's general election, the symbolism conveys a strong message that Chinese-Indonesians have had enough of being the nation's pariah, of going 32 years without political rights. They have had enough sleep, and today is the time to wake up and fight for their lives.

To win the general election, I believe, was never the intention of the party founders and very likely they will have to form a coalition with other parties offering similar platforms in order to be eligible in the general election, however it is a powerful statement.

It will at least be a political education for the ethnic Chinese citizens that there are other ways to fight for and protect their interests besides money. Those who view PARTI with skepticism, or even disagreement, out of fear that this movement will provoke a backlash against the Chinese community, have not shifted their paradigm away from the decay of the New Order; a model that the process of reform will relegate to the status of a political relic in the not-so-distant future.

The process of lending the Chinese "more Indonesian" identities should become a festering product of the past because it is this very philosophy that is one of the main sources of discord and tension between the two groups.

In the early years of independence, when the Chinese naturally used Chinese names, they were not viewed with contempt. They were accepted as a "fact of life", not something to be disguised or swept under the carpet. The "euphemism" of Chinese identity is basically a declaration of its bastardy. No wonder Indonesian people perceive them with disgust.

There are Chinese-Indonesians who still subscribe to the old ways of apolitical thinking, preferring "evolution" instead of "revolution" in reference to the street demonstrations and any open opposition to the current government.

They, understandably, have not overcome their old mental script of being "good, obedient" citizens. But fear, or peaceful evolution as they would like to call it, is not about accepting stagnation, wrongdoing and folly. They say, look what happened after Soeharto resigned. Is the economy getting better? No, it is getting worse.

This statement is really saddening and in a way a betrayal of those true reformists who are now either still in jail or buried, dead in their graves. This shows a lack of intelligence, or probably integrity and the tendency to consider a few bits and pieces of a complex puzzle in isolation as opposed to looking at the big picture.

It's true to say that what is happening to us is very much structurally, systematically and culturally interrelated and this has caused a vicious cycle of accumulated causal effects over the years. Every one of us, either "indigenous" or "nonindigenous", active perpetrators of injustice, the victims, or only silent watchers, bears a certain amount, big or small, of responsibility whether we realize it, want to admit it or not.

This, in fact, has been elegantly stated by noted Moslem thinker Emha Ainun Nadjib when he, on behalf of his "indigenous" brethren, apologized for what happened to the Chinese during the May riots. No self-defense. No justification. No examples of how rude Chinese shopkeepers are to their indigenous customers. No ifs and buts, just a sincere apology. It was a very powerful moral message that unfortunately wasn't appreciated by our government until much later.

As in any psychiatric therapy, it is mandatory for all parties involved to be able to openly talk about their wounds in order to heal them and move forward, forget, forgive, and start afresh.

This will only be achieved when Indonesian people have their sovereignty returned to them and are empowered to voice their grievances openly and fearlessly.

When the two "warring" parties stand on an equal platform, both politically and economically, that is when the Chinese are given back their political rights and the "indigenous" are elevated to a more equal economic status with their Chinese counterparts, a harmonious Indonesia based on true acknowledgment, appreciation and gratitude of its rich, awesome diversity will be in sight.

So, what is needed next, in my humble opinion, is the big- heartedness of the power holders to realize that their power wasn't accorded to them voluntarily by the people. They should therefore return it to the people through a fair, democratic election, the sooner the better.

It's probably utopian but if they really want to reflect a bit, this, in the long run, is in their own best interests. The sooner they free themselves from being the target of people's anguish and frustration, the better.

Chinese-Indonesians should actively participate in the reform movement, voice their aspirations, be more "political" and be aggressively involved in electing the leader of the country who reflects their strong belief in liberty, equality and fraternity.

The writer is a human resources consultant based in Jakarta.