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