Miles of wrong priorities

Bantarto Bandoro, Editor, 'The Indonesian Quarterly', Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), bandoro@csis.or.id

President Megawati Soekarnoputri's first year in power has witnessed nearly 100,000 miles in foreign trips. So far her globetrotting has not helped our recovery. Now, Megawati has added another 10,000 or so miles to her travel log. The latest included her visit to Johannesburg to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development, from where she continued to Algeria. Now she is in Hungary, and will continue to Bosnia, Croatia and Egypt.

This trip takes place amid some acute domestic problems, particularly the migrant workers deported from Malaysia. The President has hardly issued any meaningful statement on the issue. The country still faces security problems, the latest potential problem being an attack by gunmen in Papua on two buses carrying foreign and local employees of PT Freeport Indonesia.

Megawati's foreign trip to Africa and Eastern Europe would gain public support if it offered clear and concrete benefits to our development process. For the president, showing what is perceived to be a sense of a leadership of the most influential country in the region is greater than a sense of crisis; meaning a lack of priorities. Domestic problems are sacrificed for the sake of letting the world know that Indonesia still exists.

Apart from public concerns as to what policies will emerge next year in regards to our recovery, there are still concerns that Megawati's government is unwilling to follow the spirit of reform that the country now needs. Instead, her government seems to prefer incremental, insignificant steps.

In a defensive mode, a legislator from Megawati's party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, Tjahjo Kumolo, stated that critics against the President's trip were part of an attempt to uncover her alleged wrong-doings. He was quoted as saying that the current East European and African trips were meant to promote Indonesia's global interest through multilateral forums.

Tjahjo seems to overlook that fact that the public has, from the outset, detected Megawati's inability to understand national issues, the economy in particular, and that her past record provided very little indication that she had the vision and strategy to carry out the reform agenda.

Therefore, present criticism against the President should not be seen in isolation from the previous criticism raised immediately after she replaced Abdurrahman Wahid.

Tjahjo's argument is not supported by the logic behind the need to develop better and more stable external relations and multilateral diplomacy. If foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy, then attempts to strengthen and promote international diplomacy will not achieve its objectives unless fully supported by a highly stable domestic condition.

This newspaper reported that she spent some Rp 22 billion of the public's money for her various trips in her first year, not including the current one, which included an entourage of 111 people. Perhaps the money would be better spent to reduce the burden of the expelled workers or to handle forest fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

The presidential trip also takes place at a time when Indonesia is again in the spotlight as among the world's most corrupt countries. This means the public cannot trust officials in eradicating corruption. They might see corruption as something that reflects the wealth or privilege of officials, resulted among other things from such overseas journeys. Unless concrete steps are taken such as reducing such trips and thus giving more priority to the settlement of domestic problems, such a view will be reinforced.

Megawati once stated that "we have to be realistic in that there is no instant and quick solution for the complex problems we are facing now". This is among the classic arguments put forward by our leaders when criticized for slow response to crucial issues. Her trip is also considered by many to be unrealistic regarding efforts to resolve all our problems.

Addressing the Johannesburg summit, Megawati said world leaders must take concrete steps in eradicating poverty. Even if citizens here listen to this statement, the image here is of a corrupt state which clearly is a failure in terms of poverty reduction.

Megawati's statement reflects her apparent unawareness of the fact that her government has yet to become a strong government that can provide long-range planning necessary for rational growth patterns. Thus she can only appeal to world leaders to wipe out poverty while implicitly covering the fact that Indonesia is still poor, meaning that it does not have the real capacity to generate adequate savings. Her statement would only have had some weight if there were some consistency in measures of fighting poverty at home.

The 2004 general election is still two years away. But the issue of which political parties will survive and win have already become hot topics. The election will take place at a time when we will still be facing a domestic crisis, perhaps even more severe if the current government fails to initiate a fresh approach to our real problems. Whoever will be president, he or she must not be detached from national problems.

The question now is will the first few months of our next government witness another 100,000 miles of foreign trips, ignoring sensitivities at home?