Not much credit is due Habibie's presidency

After Soeharto finally relinquished power a year ago due to a combination of the economic downturn, bloody riots and unrelenting pressure from students, he put vice president B.J. Habibie in power. Political analyst J. Soedjati Djiwandono taps into the nation's pulse on the merits of his successor.

JAKARTA (JP): Two positive things about Habibie's presidency readily come to mind: He is a civilian and non-Javanese. Under Soeharto, the prevailing myth was that his successor would inevitably be an Army four-star general and a Javanese (apart from being Muslim).

The fact that Habibie, a native of South Sulawesi, is a member of an ethnic minority should have given a good and healthy face to Indonesia as a diverse nation. Unfortunately, however, he does not seem to realize its significance and he seems instead to have abused it. He has surrounded himself with a good number of people of his own ethnic group or the region of his birth. Surely, the argument goes, it's the Indonesian president's prerogative to appoint his ministers at his own discretion.

In President Habibie's case, however, it could be cause to disrupt Indonesian nationhood, at a time when national unity is facing a serious threat from disintegration. It may be one indication that he is not really a politician, let alone a political leader. As such, he has no power base. He was once chairman of Golkar's board of patrons. But even his membership in Golkar was initially ex officio since, ironically, as part of Soeharto's manipulation, all Cabinet members were to be not only members but also functionaries of Golkar.

His lack of a power base may explain his apparent reliance on his colleagues in the Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals Association (ICMI) when forming his Cabinet, although ICMI is definitely not a political party. Yet, it seems doubtful if people regard Habibie either as a political or an Islamic leader. Muslim intellectuals gathered around him and elected him chairman of ICMI apparently not only because he is an intellectual, particularly a reportedly highly qualified engineer, but also because he was at that time closest to the center of power -- Soeharto. As such, he could be used as a vehicle by which Muslim intellectuals could have access to political power, which they thought, rightly or wrongly, had been denied by the New Order regime, including the military.

On a personal level, President Habibie seems to be jovial, friendly, more approachable and fair-minded, and less feudalistic, than Soeharto, although on occasions he lacks tact in expressing himself.

Unfortunately, not much credit is due concerning his one-year- old presidency. Nevertheless, many foreign -- mostly Western -- observers and journalists tend to be naively generous in giving him credit he does not really deserve on a number of issues.

President Habibie has taken pride in the fact that people are enjoying greater freedom under his presidency. But this is not a gift from him, not even in the case of the greater freedom of the press, although foreign journalists readily refer to his "policy" in granting publishing licenses (SIUPP) as an example of his liberal mindedness.

Greater democratic freedom, including freedom of the press, has been won through bitter struggle as part of the student reform movement, which even Soeharto buckled under and which the much weaker Habibie could not have done much about.

He could not have arrested the trend that continued to gain strength and momentum when he assumed the presidency almost out of the blue. If credit is due at all in regard to freedom of the press, it is to Minister of Information Muhammad Yunus, a three- star general, apparently one of the very few decent individuals in the present Cabinet. He once defended the freedom of the media, ironically against a member of the House of Representatives, a representative of the people reportedly with a doctorate in communications.

Besides, if President Habibie were really liberal and a democrat at heart, he would not have agreed to the enactment of Law No. 9/1999 on freedom of expression, particularly with respect to demonstrations, as I have referred to before in this column. The law is against democratic freedom, and this in the supposedly reform post-Soeharto era!

The relevant question here is whether President Habibie is really committed to reform as outwardly indicated by the designation of his Cabinet. Admittedly, Habibie is faced with one thousand and one problems, prominent among them the economic crisis inherited from the Soeharto government. Unfortunately, he himself may be part of the problem. Under Soeharto, Habibie may have played a substantial part in putting the nation's economy into ruin.

As president, he has failed in dealing with security problems, such as the cases of the missing political activists, the shooting of the Trisakti students last May and the Semanggi tragedy, to name just a few. He is ambivalent in his attitude toward the issue of investigating the wealth of the Soeharto family, perhaps for fear of his own alleged involvement being publicly exposed.

Perhaps Habibie found these problems intimidating when he assumed the presidency. He stated not long afterwards that he had no interest in running for president in the coming election. Then, he had second thoughts, and finally he decided he did want to run. He has even claimed to having a full presidency rather than conceding he is a transitional president. He is Golkar's sole candidate for president this time round, copying Soeharto's style of retaining power over the years.

Many naive Chinese-Indonesians have been led to believe that Habibie is an antiracist and antidiscrimination reformer through his ordering that the terms pribumi (indigenous) and nonpribumi (nonindigenous) be discarded, and his move to eliminate all forms of discrimination in existing laws. It is actually deceptive grandstanding, for he has no constitutional competence to do such things through the presidential instructions in the style of Soeharto. Rather, these acts should be done through proper legislation.

The underlying problem seems to be that President Habibie has never set his order of priorities. If anything, his Cabinet seems to be as uncoordinated as the last two of Soeharto.