Malaysian minister fears breakup of RI

Malaysian minister fears breakup of RI

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP): A Malaysian minister on Tuesday raised the prospect of neighboring Indonesia breaking up as a state and said its crisis poses a grave threat to the region.

Defense Minister Najib Razak said globalization was the "trigger point" that led to the collapse of president Soeharto's government in May 1998 after 32 years but this was also exacerbated by serious internal problems.

"Since the economic crisis, the country has been experiencing severe instability, with the possibility of the break-up of the state -- the Balkanization of Indonesia," Najib told a conference on globalization.

"The solution is not to have too radical a change but managed reforms. Otherwise, it's like opening a Pandora's box which will unleash forces you cannot control."

Najib, in an apparent reference to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said multilateral institutions appeared to be "far more concerned with promoting their ideologies and for their prestige and status, rather than being practical in saving the state and lives."

Indonesia must build a "strong, effective but benevolent" leadership to overcome the situation, Najib said, adding that the Indonesian crisis posed a grave threat to the region and urged the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to promote greater security ties.

"Today, national sovereignty is being challenged in the most surreptitious form. Multinational institutions have become very powerful to the point of having power over sovereign nations," he said.

"We need to strengthen our domestic and regional resilience." Najib said the combined forces of the 10-member ASEAN plus China, South Korea and Japan and the proposed Asian Monetary Fund, would help the region initiate and coordinate policies to withstand pressure.

"The biggest challenge facing nation states today is to deal with this latent though potent force of globalization," he said.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.