Megawati's presidency: Is sincerity alone enough?

Mochtar Pabottingi, Senior Researcher, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta

The question to be posed regarding our deep and unprecedented ordeal must certainly be about more than just the longevity of a presidency. Rather it must address the effectiveness of a presidency amid the urgent need to deal with the simultaneous political, economic, legal, and leadership crises exacted by the Soeharto regime, which are of sufficient magnitude to end the life of any nation.

If the presidency of Megawati Soekarnoputri were to last only a few weeks, but were able to eliminate all the basic ailments now afflicting Indonesia, she would still deserve the highest political laurels. Conversely, should her presidency last beyond 2004 merely to maintain the shameful shambles of the present situation -- if the nation could last that long -- we would scarcely owe her any gratitude.

Our main concern is not with her chances of remaining at the republic's helm, but whether she is doing the country the kind of service it desperately needs.

Our ordeal remains profound and multidimensional. The problem of security and defense has not improved. Killings continue in Aceh; and the lesser extent of killings in Irian Jaya was recently squared by the kidnapping and presumed murder of Theys Eluay, the leader of the Papuan Presidium Council.

Anti-American demonstrations captured headlines for at least three weeks last month. Fighting subsided in Ambon and other parts of Maluku as well as in Poso, Central Sulawesi and in the formerly volatile Sampit in Central Kalimantan. However, armed clashes occurred sporadically within the Indonesian Military (TNI) or between the army and the police.

Tension still grips the border of East Timor and West Timor, albeit with receding intensity. Already full of domestic refugees from these areas of conflict and from the most recent flooding in Central Java, Indonesia is now also inundated with international refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, including illegal immigrants. The country has also been helpless in the face of ongoing looting of natural resources and other violations in the border regions -- violations rumored to be protected by our own authorities and/or armed forces.

We must take as our starting point the old story of the absence of the rule of law. Huge scale corruption and cold- blooded crimes that include gruesome street justice drag on. More saddening is the seemingly incessant complicity of the judicial institutions in graft practices, major crime and human rights abuses.

About three months ago, a key witness in the Tommy Soeharto case mysteriously died in police custody. To the dismay of most Indonesians, Tommy himself, who fled his conviction, was recently cleared of corruption charges. This case of Soeharto's son is to be reopened again by the Attorney General's office, a move many are eying skeptically. The hottest news in town is the alleged involvement of Akbar Tandjung, the legislature's Speaker, in a Rp 40 billion rupiah scam about three months before the last election.

The legislature went on with its struggle to monopolize the work of amending the 1945 Constitution, stubbornly refusing to accept the establishment of a constitutional commission to make room for nation-wide participation and a more transparent and democratic procedure for its completion.

The TNI have shown significant sanity as regards corps unity and efforts not to get involved in politics, even though questions remain as to their sincerity for reasons of ideology and/or vested interests. The national police has been somewhat in disarray due to its blatant politicization by the former president.

Another pressing problem, marked by grievances from many sides, has to do with the shaky foundation, contradictions, and above all irrational implementation of the regional autonomy laws. Here the root of the problem lies in the strange assumption of political normality upon which the two autonomy laws were based.

With the utter abnormality of the political situation and under the pretext of democratization, remnants of the New Order are conniving to maintain the domination of New Order elements in regional politics.

Mired in gross human rights violations, investigations of past abuses are proceeding without either the integrity of the judicial institutions or the required capacity at the level of the state and society to handle them. Often, one gains the impression that the handling of so many cases at once is deliberate and is aimed at solving none of them.

Indonesians are still fettered by the lethal legacy of the Soeharto regime of the New Order. This is true on three counts. First, since mid-1997, the nation has been plunged into the worst possible multidimensional crises and the worst imaginable emergency situations, which are much more than simple dilemmas.

Any solution to each of the crises, however sound, is naturally accompanied by its proportionate pitfalls and drawbacks. It is also the worst emergency situation, because the magnitude of the damage has reached the point that precludes the possibility of introducing any kind of state emergency solution. This is because, in the first place, it was the emergency political format of the New Order that inflicted this condition on the nation. You clearly cannot use the cause of a problem to achieve its solution.

Second, while the state remains as rotten as it was in 1997, the society at large remains sane. The numerous instances of bad publications in both the national and international media, which indicate societal incivility, are a function of the spillovers of the rottenness of the state. The absence of law enforcement from resolution of the smallest breaches of the law, like traffic violations, to the largest, and the bureaucratic commodification of both crime and graft, have prompted people to take the law into their own hands. The Indonesian state has been rotten for decades, which was only concealed by the endless showering of praise by the IMF, the World Bank and dignitaries from "donor countries." What we had as from mid-May 1998 was but the culmination of the state's decay.

Third, if the nation survives at all, it is only thanks to the still functioning fabric of nationhood laid down by Sukarno and his cohort. Against all imaginable odds, the fabric has hitherto proven to be exceptional. But, also up till now, nobody knows whether the nation is capable of rescuing itself from the depth of its crises with all their attendant corruptions, distortions, and irrationalities.

And yet one thing is sure: Whatever political capital we inherit from our founding fathers, our time to overcome the shambles of irrationalities is running out. Without a coordinated, urgent, and above all courageous action on the part of our leaders, the head of the state in particular, to correct them, our energies are bound to dwindle -- and so, our hope for recovery.

President Megawati seems to share both her father's commitment to national unity and aversion to self-aggrandizement at the expense of the people. With an air of sincerity, she began her term with a vow to shun corruption, collusion, and nepotism (KKN), and not wanting to lose the presidency because of KKN. She appears to have been so far consistent on this matter.

She asked her cabinet members to follow suit, expressing concern about low returns of wealth registers particularly from the legislature and from the higher People's Consultative Assembly, and urged legislators of her own party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) to abide by the move of the Public Servants Wealth Audit Commission.

Indeed, coming from a well-to-do family, she should be strong enough to keep that stance. Recently she referred to those high state officials involved in graft and corruption as "thieves." In contrast to her predecessor, she conducts her presidency with good demeanor and humility, especially as regards the two legislative bodies, and she had maintained a cordial relationship with the Indonesian military years before her ascension.

Perhaps President Megawati's biggest liability has been the fact that she is neither quick to respond when necessary, nor particularly articulate. Here she is more or less comparable to Soeharto.

A number of her off-the-cuff speeches have tended to present complex problems in a way that has been simplistic, if not wrong. Thus she pleaded she was a "guest" when her speech was interrupted by a student in Aceh and introduced "a housewife management" as her strategy for tackling Indonesia's crises when she met compatriots in Japan. She is also very much the opposite of her father's character. She tends to be private, withdrawn, and shies away from the single-minded offensiveness that boldly characterized her father.