Preserving good tie

Preserving good tie

President Soeharto and Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok
Tong Wednesday ended their second bilateral meeting this year,
the first having been held in March. As is to be expected from
encounters among friends, those meetings have also served to
sustain the tradition of routine consultations between the two
heads of government at both the formal and the personal levels.

This time, however, the meeting between President Soeharto and
Prime Minister Goh assumed a distinctive nature due to the
current currency crisis in this region. Prime Minister Goh
offered Indonesia help in trying to overcome the turmoil which is
at present affecting the rupiah, whose value against the U.S.
dollar has sharply declined.

According to Prime Minister Goh, the World Bank's view that
Indonesia's economic fundamentals are healthy is correct. A
statement issued after the meeting also said that Prime Minister
Goh was confident that Indonesia's basically market-oriented
economic policies would eventually be able to overcome the
present currency crisis.

At the same time, however, Prime Minister Goh believed that a
weakened sense of security and loss of trust among foreign
investors in the economic conditions of this country was also a
factor contributing to the decline in the rupiah's value against
the U.S. dollar. To overcome the crisis, Prime Minister Goh
suggested that a mutual understanding between the IMF and
Indonesia regarding the proposed aid packet be established.

Rather than merely viewing Singapore as a shoppers' paradise
and a place where medical services are excellent, we in Indonesia
would do well to try to gain a better understanding of the many
other aspects of this close neighbor of ours. Recent surveys have
placed Singapore in the upper categories of countries where
observance of the law ranks high. In terms of freedom of
corruption in official circles, Singapore is on par with
countries of the West.

Despite the fact that Singapore has unpretentiously adopted
Pancasila as its formal ideology, there is much that we can learn
from the manner in which their country has managed to preserve
the harmony between their Chinese, Malay and Tamil ethnic
populations. Both nations, Indonesia and Singapore, will find
that learning from each other will help them to ensure continued
good relations.

-- Kompas, Jakarta