Soeharto says critics ignorant of govt system

JAKARTA (JP): President Soeharto said yesterday that his administration's critics did not seem to understand the basics of Indonesia's political system.

The President said certain people were eager to propose an overhaul of the system but the alternative they had in mind was foreign and incompatible with Indonesian culture and mores.

"There are people who analyze our 1945 Constitution using a foreign frame of mind," he said when inaugurating 1,016 senior instructors of the state ideology Pancasila.

The instructors, who had completed two-week intensive courses on the ideology, are academicians, government officials and senior journalists.

On hand were senior government officials, including Vice President Try Sutrisno and head of the Agency for Pancasila Propagation Alwi Dahlan.

According to Soeharto, many of his critics did not seem to understand the underlying concept of the Indonesian system in which the president is elected by the People's Consultative Assembly.

"The assembly elects a figure it believes is capable of carrying out prepared guidelines of state policy. This implies there should be no opposition to any policy in the guidelines as they have been approved by representatives of all the people," he said.

The 1,000-strong assembly consists of representatives from all three political organizations, the Armed Forces, the government and many other sociopolitical groups.

As many as 600 of the last assembly's members were appointed by the President.

Opposition, President Soeharto said, was acceptable in other countries' where people directly elect their head of government.

Soeharto, who has been reelected five times since he became president in 1968, warned that the globalization of information and economic activity was, in some ways, posing a "tremendous threat" to the nation's unity.

"The free flow of global information has brought people in all countries closer to those in others. This enables people to receive foreign values that can erode their sense of nationalism.

"So extreme is the impact of foreign influences in some people they no longer care about maintaining their nation's unity."

Soeharto's remarks come amid a continuing crackdown on dissent. More than a dozen political and labor activists are currently on trial in Jakarta for subversion for allegedly undermining the government.

The latest to be detained is the chairman of the unrecognized Indonesian Democratic Union Party, Sri Bintang Pamungkas, and two of the party's activists, Saleh Abdullah and Julius Usman.

Bintang, who was sacked from the House of Representatives by the Moslem-oriented United Development Party, has drafted a constitution to replace the 1945 Constitution.

He has openly urged people to boycott the May 29 general election and reject President Soeharto's reelection in 1998. (pan)