MPR session opens under pressure

By Dwi Atmanta and Santi W.E. Soekanto

JAKARTA (JP): When House Speaker Harmoko bangs his gavel and opens the five-yearly General Session of the People's Consultative Assembly this morning, the curtain rises on the immense responsibility that each of the 1,000 legislators bears on their shoulders.

They will, during the course of the eleven-day convention, deliberate and endorse the State Policy Guidelines for the next five years, and elect a president and vice president. Errors and mistaken decisions will adversely affect the lives of the country's 202 million inhabitants.

The Rp 44.7 billion (US$5 million) event will deserve a special place in history by virtue of a different backdrop from the 1993 session. Then, many people's main concern was whether vice president-elect Try Sutrisno would eventually replace then president-elect Soeharto midway through his sixth five-year term.

The 1998 General Session, in contrast, is being held while the country is buckling under an economic crisis and political restlessness. Many people ask not only about what will happen after the legislators reelect Soeharto for his seventh term, but also what other crises Indonesia will face afterward.

One of the reasons for the restlessness is that in the months prior to the session, the economy took such a severe beating that some people found themselves asking, after some 25 years of relative prosperity, whether they would be able to feed, clothe and send their children to school tomorrow.

Reports about food shortages in remote areas sneaked into people's consciousness and left their mark. Rioting and demonstrations against soaring prices that left at least five dead were some of the ways people reacted toward the crisis.

Given that the food riots occurred so soon before the Assembly, the authorities then clamped down on protesters and attributed the upheavals to "irresponsible groups" seeking to disrupt the General Session and undermine the government.

There's another element to the session's social, economic and political backdrop -- namely the unprecedented increase in the demands for reform.

Granted, there are too many definitions of reform to count, but, over time, more and more people have spelled it out as presidential succession and an overhaul of the economic and political system.

"Seeking economic reform is useless unless it is accompanied by political reform," one critic said.

There are both local and international parties which wish to see Indonesia stable out of fear that change means chaos that may affect not only the region but beyond. Those who seek change, on the other hand, also draw their strength from a sense that a growing number of people, both here and outside Indonesia, support their cause.

In many ways, the General Session is a display of how strongly entrenched are the political system and mechanisms that President Soeharto has built over the past 30 years.

Assembly members enter the venue today with full knowledge that they are not supposed to dissent, interrupt or vote against presidential and vice presidential candidates Soeharto and B.J. Habibie.

However, the General Session is but a stage in the nation's life; it will eventually end. Outside of the renovated House of Representatives building, millions of people are still waiting and asking: What's next?

Uniform

The ample experience of holding five conventions under the New Order is not likely to encourage the People's Consultative Assembly to break away from the conventional uniformity of opinion.

This was clearly indicated in that the Assembly working committee ended in January its three months of deliberation on the draft of state policy guidelines -- sponsored by the ruling Golkar organization -- without introducing significant changes from the previous guidelines.

The formidable Golkar and its allies -- the Armed Forces and the regional representatives factions -- managed to override attempts by the minority Indonesian Democratic Party and United Development Party (PPP) factions to introduce change.

Included in the major decrees completed by the working committee is one that will give the next president extra power to take preemptive measures if the country is in danger or the development programs fail to run according to plan.

Now that the five factions have also unanimously agreed on the presidential and vice presidential candidates, there will be no crucial issues left for the Assembly's 1,000 members to debate, as PPP executive Jusuf Syakir put it.

"Of course the General Session will serve as merely a ceremony, but should it matter to us?" said Jusuf, who will lead the PPP's 134-strong team in the quinquennial convention.

"It's like a preparation for a wedding service," he said recently. "We have to pass a set of traditional and religious procedures. They may take us a long time, although the wedding service itself may last just one minute."

Jusuf however does not take it for granted that the session will run smoothly just because of the preliminary agreements.

"The agreements were made by 90 members of the Assembly working committee. I believe a lot of debates will still mark the upcoming General Session because of the presence of another 910 members," he said.

"The (State Policy Guidelines) draft, although it has been approved already, is not the final product. It needs a second look," Jusuf said.

Another PPP legislator, Hadimulyo, said further debate was needed on the question of the basis for long-term development programs, moving from economic growth to human resources improvement.

"We have been paying too much attention to economic growth while neglecting human resources development," he said.

He also called for courage to break constraints that have kept political organizations immature.

He was referring to the failure of the Assembly to revoke the controversial floating mass policy which bans political groups contesting the general elections from campaigning in villages and subdistricts.

"The policy favors Golkar because the administration personnel in subdistricts and villages are Golkar cadres," he said.