Megawati's presidency: Is sincerity alone enough?

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.