Reform? Who is it for?

To the political elite in this country, the lot of millions of Indonesian children is obviously not as important as the political fate of President Abdurrahman Wahid, the deteriorating relations between Indonesia and the United States or the question of whether or not Hutomo Mandala Putra, the youngest son of former president Soeharto, should go to jail.

The media (including yours truly) gave scant or no coverage to a national conference on children which was held in Jakarta last week. Most newspapers regarded the event as not newsy enough to merit even a small mention in their pages, let alone front-page treatment. Thanks to such indifference, few people can recall that there was such a conference. It is even harder to find someone who can recite the content of the discussions.

University of Indonesia psychology professor Yaumil Agoes Achir, in a front-page interview with this newspaper on Tuesday, however, gave some shocking news about the condition of millions of children which should bring shame to society (and the media) for neglecting the issue entirely.

The figures, revealed during the conference in an attempt to draw public attention, are too mind-numbing to be believable: 6.8 million children between the ages of 7 and 15 are out of school; 20 million are malnourished; the infant mortality rate is 100 for every 1,000 live births; there are 3.6 million child workers for 12 million children who are on the street or are neglected; up to four million children have physical or mental disabilities, and almost all have no access to proper care; and hundreds of thousands each year are subjected to sexual abuse and forced prostitution, with little hope of legal protection. Yaumil said most of these figures virtually doubled from what they were before the economic crisis struck Indonesia in 1998.

What is even more mind-boggling than these numbers is society's virtual indifference, particularly the media and politicians, the very people who should have raised the alarm about these problems. For the past year, the nation's elite seem to have been more preoccupied with the struggle for political power. Economic problems have been relegated from the national agenda, while social problems, including the children's lot, have been removed completely from the agenda.

The children's fate, along with many other major social issues, were actually given some prominence when the economic crisis began to affect the lives of many people in this country in 1998. We recall the massive social safety net programs launched by the government, with the help of the billions of dollars of World Bank loans, to cushion the poorest of the poor in Indonesia from the worst impact of the crisis. We also recall the spontaneous massive public fund-raising campaigns in response to reports of children dropping out of school, of increasing prevalence of undernourishment among children and of increasing impoverishment among people as a result of the economic crisis.

The public campaign to help the poor somehow lost its momentum in the middle of 1999 when the nation became so consumed with a series of elections, first the general election in June and later the presidential election in October. After Abdurrahman Wahid became Indonesia's first democratically elected President, the country should have turned its attention back to resolving the outstanding social and economic problems.

Alas, that has not happened at all. Since the October presidential election to this day, the nation's political elite have been caught in an endless struggle for political power. These are the same people who came to power by riding on the back of the reform movement which toppled the authoritarian regime of president Soeharto in 1998 in the hope of bringing meaningful improvement to people's lives. They are the ones who have the mandate from the people to make those changes.

Now, more than one year after the election of the first "reform" administration, life has hardly changed for most people, including, as we can see from the statistics above, millions of children. For many, things have even gotten worse.

As repressive and corrupt as the regime of Soeharto was, it at least tried to take care of children's needs, from their education to their general welfare. The regime did not necessarily do a good job but it had the political will. The same cannot be said about the current administration. Which raises the question: for whom was the reform movement intended? Certainly not for the millions of children who dropped out of school, the millions of children who have become undernourished or the thousands of infants who died within weeks or months after their birth.