Nostalgic for the 'good old days of Soeharto'

Berni K. Moestafa and A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Chatting to a number of commuters at the Gambir station, a man complains about rampant crimes. Politics too is a mess and he thinks the military should return to power. Nostalgia sets in.

"It isn't as it use to be, times were better under Soeharto," he said.

Disturbing as it sounds, he may have a point there. Glaring shortcomings during the reform era undermined faith in the four- year-old movement.

"Nothing has changed after the 1998 reform movement started," said Nico Adrian, a former student activist of the City Forum (Forkot), known for its rowdy proreform rallies.

Forkot fought for political reform. Along with other student organizations it was at the front to get the message across.

At the opposite end were the status quo forces of the then ruling Golkar party and the military.

Calls for reform gained the upper hand, but four years later Golkar and the military continue to wield heavy political clout.

They reinvented themselves as also-reformists. For Nico, it is a slap in the face.

Outside politics, the promise of a better life beyond Soeharto remains elusive.

In fact, life has turned for the worse since the double blow of the 1997 economic crisis and the political turmoil that followed.

The immediate impact was inflation. In 1997 and 1998, inflation surged to 78 percent from just below 10 percent, driving millions into poverty.

According to the Indonesian Human Development Report 2001, unemployment also rose drastically from 4.7 percent in August 1997, just before the crisis, to 5.5 percent in 1998 and 6.4 percent in 1999.

The combination of high inflation and slow growth in nominal wages resulted in a steep drop in real wages. Overall, real wages fell by around one-third between 1997 and 1998 but in some places the drop was far steeper -- by 45 percent for industrial workers in Jakarta, for example.

These falling real wages and increasing unemployment resulted in the increase of the number of poor people.

A World Bank report last year showed nearly 60 percent of the population, or about 120 million people, were poor or vulnerable to poverty.

As the crisis sapped economic growth, the means to lift these people out of poverty became ineffective. Banks did not extend loans, companies did not invest, development stalled and not enough jobs were being created to offset the rise in unemployment.

Economic reform should have been the remedy.

But the reform program, set out with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since late 1997, falls short of expectations.

Head of the Indonesian Electronics Producers Association (Gabel), Lee Kang Hyun, said the country's adverse business climate kept foreign investors away.

Since this year, Lee said, the climate has improved, though less because of genuine reform measures.

"It's stable because nothing extraordinary happened," he said.

Political instability and security threats stalled reforms for the first seven months of last year. Stability returned after President Megawati Soekarnoputri assumed power last July.

Elsewhere, legal reform is facing an uphill battle.

"I don't feel safe anymore walking on the streets at night," said Rusminiati, a counselor who works in a law firm on Jl. Jend. Sudirman.

She said going home by bus at night was now out of the question.

Rusminiati is one of many concerned over the city's high crime rate that is another fallout of the 1997 economic crisis.

Every week of last year, Jakarta saw 21 armed robberies, 12 thefts of cars and motorcycles, and two dead bodies found with stab wounds.

Legal reform is under way to fight it, but the results have yet to show on the streets.

Analysts said failure to bring about legal reform was at the heart of most of the country's problems: corruption, rampant security threats, power abuses and a heap of economic woes.

In retrospect, the Soeharto era looks more appealing.

Political stability was a fact of life, people felt secure, and Indonesia was one of the new tigers of the Asian economies.

But returning to a Soeharto style of government is no option, said Arie Wibowo, a former student activist from the University of Indonesia.

He pointed out that Soeharto's achievements came at the expense of freedom and justice.

Reform may be painstakingly slow, he said, but it introduced freedom of expression which is the essence of true democracy.

In the face of adversity, Arie urged people not to tire of the reform process. "This is a transitional period, when we get through this depends on us."