Perfect cure takes time

By March 1, the doors of banks in 17 of the 48 states had been closed because the banks could not pay their depositors. The government did not have enough money to meet its March 15 payroll obligations. The largest private savings bank in the world in the nation's largest city was in danger of failing. The government estimated that 15 million men, most of them heads of households, were unemployed, and that one-fourth of the population had no income whatever, and instead survived by borrowing, begging, or in some cases stealing. The economic, banking and social crises threatening the country were terrifying.

This was the Great Depression, and the United States seemed on the brink of ruin. It was in this context of national despair that Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as 32nd president of the United States on March 4, 1933.

President Roosevelt's government had taken a number of resolute acts but they did not end the Depression. Meanwhile, they broke its stranglehold on America by restoring people's faith that the government would act to cure the economic and social ills of the preceding years.

Indonesia is not the United States; Indonesia's problems are different from those that faced the United States during the Depression, and the solution will be different. But there are similarities worth remembering in the conditions faced by the two countries 65 years apart. In 1933, the U.S. was on the verge of financial collapse, as Indonesia now is; some of the causes of the American Depression were also linked to corruption.

Like the U.S., Indonesia is a resource-rich country that holds the seeds of its own resurgence. Though reform was needed, Americans in 1932 elected as president a man known more for his elitist, conservative background than for his reputation as a reformer, just as Indonesians today have accepted President B.J. Habibie, who has not been known as naturally reform-oriented.

Let President Habibie present his hundred-day agenda to the House of Representatives as soon as possible but no later than the end of June; let other presidential candidates do the same. If there is to be a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), let it happen not in six months, but in June. Indonesia has already lost seven months of recovery time and can ill afford the luxury of a transition-caretaker president for six months or a year longer while waiting for the perfect reform president to emerge.

The threat of recurring change at the helm of the government would not inspire international confidence in the country or its currency. So let President Habibie and his challengers announce promptly their reform proposals. Then let the MPR act promptly to give the presidential and vice presidential mandates to that candidate, either President Habibie or someone else, who presents the most credible proposals for reform and recovery.

A nation's ills will not be cured in the first hundred days of a presidential term, nor in the first thousand days, nor in a single generation, as President John Kennedy cautioned. The cure may not be instantaneous but the rescue needs to begin immediately.

DONNA K. WOODWARD

Medan, North Sumatra