Megawati's snowball

It will surprise no one -- apart, perhaps, from President Megawati Soekarnoputri herself -- that her reported support for Sutiyoso to be reelected as governor of Jakarta is inviting so much controversy and debate.

If unchecked, the matter could well continue to grow and snowball into an issue that would be detrimental to the short- term political future of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan), which the President leads. Jakarta newspapers, for example, have been filled in the past few days with reports of public statements of opposition to the President's apparent choice.

And for good reason: Sutiyoso is a failure.

Media reports say that concern for keeping the Indonesian capital secure and orderly is a major reason for Megawati's preference for maintaining Sutiyoso in his present post at the helm of Jakarta's ship of public administration. Sutiyoso, in Mega's apparent reasoning, is, after all, a military man whose professional duty it is to maintain security and order, not only in Jakarta but throughout the whole country.

There are many Indonesians who regard such reasoning as naive at best, and some even suspect that family business and political interests could have been behind the President's preference for Sutiyoso, a suspicion that the President would be well advised to scotch as soon as she returns from her current overseas trip.

Whatever the case, at around the end of June 1997, when Maj. Gen. Sutiyoso was military commander, Jakarta was far from secure and orderly. At that time, what is widely suspected to have been soldiers disguised as members of the Soerjadi faction of the divided Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) stormed the party's headquarters on Jl. Diponegoro, which was under the control of the Megawati splinter group of the party.

That incident led to the worst riots the city had seen in two decades. The rampaging went on for two days, paralyzing parts of the city and leaving scores of people dead or injured. Many people went missing and remain so to this day. The unrest was put down with brutality. A trial started after the current reform movement gained momentum, but has so far led to nothing. Megawati must share the responsibility for all of this, for it was she, among others, who encouraged the public to come forward at an open public forum and spell out their grievances against the then ruling regime, thereby infuriating those who were in power.

Little wonder, then, that family members of victims of that incident and their sympathizers felt betrayed by Megawati's support for Sutiyoso. Just a few days ago scores of them registered grievances with PDI Perjuangan -- the reborn PDI that Megawati chairs -- but were unable to receive a proper hearing from any of the party's leaders. Nevertheless, in view of all this, Megawati's support for Sutiyoso, unless satisfactorily explained, could very well inflict serious damage to the party's standing with the public.

But aside from those old wounds, it might well be asked if Sutiyoso has learned from history and whether he has improved his record with regard to order and security. Take the question of security. Does Jakarta's public feel any more secure at present than in the past? The answer, unfortunately, is hardly so. If anything, the opposite is true. Hardly a day goes by without a report appearing in the newspapers of people getting robbed or even killed in taxis or buses or in their homes -- not to mention the bombings in public places.

Sutiyoso's record in other areas of public administration does not look much better either. One recent example is his handling of the recent, devastating floods that inundated large parts of Jakarta, including some strategic banking and business areas. But there are other reasons why Megawati's support of Sutiyoso is taken by many observers to be an alarming indication of a certain insensitivity towards what her father, Sukarno, would have called the current zeitgeist (the mood or spirit of the times), which, in one word, is reform.

It would be most unfortunate and against the spirit of reform if Megawati were to try and impose her will and ignore the wishes of the majority of the leaders in her own party, who oppose Sutiyoso's renomination. The best thing that could happen therefore would be for the President to retract her support for Sutiyoso and respect the choice of the majority in her party. Or, better still, for the government and the legislature to produce a system that took the selection of a governor away from the political parties and allowed Jakarta's citizenry to elect its governor directly, for only through direct elections can democracy be assured.