Megawati a guardian of her country to the bone

Yoichi Funabashi, The Asahi Shimbun, Jakarta

Megawati, who became president in July, started out by saying her Cabinet was busy dealing with a mountain of problems inherited from the previous administration. It is true that Indonesia has many problems -- a troubled economy, separatist movements in Aceh and Irian Jaya, confusion and lax discipline in the military and corruption, to name a few.

Megawati is the leader of the world's largest Islamic nation. As the first daughter of the nation's founding father, former President Sukarno, she owes much to the people's admiration of her father for her popularity. Nevertheless, she could not be president for two years because Islam political parties refused to accept a woman to head the nation.

Shortly before the interview, I had met with former Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto. She told me in earnest how hard it was for a woman to be a political leader in an Islam society. I recounted Bhutto's remarks and asked Megawati about the Indonesian situation.

"I think there is a great difference between former President Bhutto and myself," Megawati said, pointing out that the Indonesian Constitution clearly spelled out in 1945 equality between men and women. She said although the majority of the ministers in her Cabinet are men, she is working on an equal footing with them.

The Afghan Taliban regime, which kept women under oppression, collapsed. How can Afghan women restore their rights to the same level as Indonesian women?

"They must fight to win their own rights," Megawati said.

How can international society help? For example, what can Japan do, I asked.

Megawati stressed the importance of education and health care. Under the Taliban regime, education in Afghanistan fell behind. In particular, women were oppressed and forced into misery. Megawati urged women around the world to extend a helping hand to raise the social standing of Afghan women. She also pointed out that many Afghan children were suffering malnutrition and urgently needed medicine.

As president, one of Megawati's top priorities is education. Even though her government is saddled with debts and struggling to pay interest, she took drastic steps to increase the nation's educational budget.

According to Megawati, Islamic religious schools are gradually changing their curriculums to those similar to regular schools to meet the needs of modern society. The schools also plan to use English to teach students, she said.

They do not cram students with reactionary religious ideas like the Pakistani Madrasa because doing so would run counter to Indonesia's founding principle of "unity within diversity."

Despite such moves, the influence of political Islam is growing little by little. In the northern Sumatra province of Aceh, separatism of Islam extremists is gaining power.

When Megawati visited Aceh in September, an Islam activist blasted her for not making good on the central government's promise to give Aceh greater autonomy. She put up with it.

When an influential ruling party member asked her why she let the activist abuse her, Megawati replied that it is much better to personally take verbal abuse than letting them attack the nation by force.

When a lawmaker of the ruling party heard it, the lawmaker thought the president was trying to play a mother role to children who are fighting with each other all over the country.

But can Megawati suppress the religious strife in Aceh and the ethnic conflict in Irian Jaya with such maternal-style leadership? Can she contain military hard-liners who want to take advantage of the U.S.-led anti-terrorism war to annihilate separatists with force?

At the end of the interview, I asked her, as president, what she most admired about Sukarno, not as her father but as a president.

After a pause, she said it was the way he firmly protected and held Indonesia together as a country and his contribution to maintaining the solidarity of the country and its people.

Sukarno's nationalistic passion for Indonesian unification and integration is most evident in the "West Irian liberation struggle" by which Indonesia won back West Irian from the Netherlands 20 years after independence. Now that East Timor became independent, West Irian, which changed its name to Irian Jaya, has turned into the scene of Indonesia's most serious ethnic crisis.

Father and daughter stand at the two ends of modern Indonesian history like sentinels of "unity within diversity." Megawati is a guardian of her country to the bone.