Splitting the provinces

The President B. J. Habibie administration has apparently unlimited resources in sending shock waves throughout the vast archipelago. The people here have been often caught by surprise by its maneuvers.

Take, for example, the sensational decision to let people decide whether they will stay with the republic or be an independent nation. The way Habibie repeatedly shook up the Attorney General's Office has also made the public ask what he meant by the puzzling steps.

As many people have failed to understand his queer moves, they have the tendency to conclude that the policy is meant to shift their attention from his reluctance to carry out an order of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), the country's highest law- making body, for the government to investigate former president Soeharto's alleged wealth, which was allegedly stolen from the nation. Plus his refusal to make public those involved in the fatal shootings of the students at Trisakti University and the Semanggi cloverleaf. And then there are the officers whose hands are soaked with the blood of innocent people during the nine years of military brutality in Aceh.

One of the latest in a series of government products of astonishment is its plan to submit a bill to the House of Representatives which proposes to divide Maluku, the recent riot- devastated area, into two provinces.

As this kind of separation has been regarded as taboo by the authorities for more than two decades, people are aspired to see the authorities come up with a sort of logical reason for the policy.

But as of yesterday there were more make-believe reasons than what Ryaas Rasyid, director general of public administration and regional autonomy, said about the move which the administration expected to ease recent tension in the northern part of Maluku.

The question now is if several dozen northern Maluku students can get what they want by taking to the street, what will the authorities do next because many other parts of this immense archipelago have the potential to do the same. And Maluku, with its population of two million occupying small islands of 85,000 square kilometers, is one of the smallest province in Indonesia.

If the recent bloody religious conflict in Maluku is also the reason for breaking up the province will the authorities do the same if a similar drama takes place in North Sumatra. And what will be the limit of this unfamiliar tolerance?

The same question is also applied to the military leadership, which will grant Maluku its own regional command. Isn't it a humiliating setback from the 1980s measure that successfully reduced the number of regional military commands from 17 to 10?

The policy to divide the province looks ironically like history repeating itself but in a more ill-advised way from the 1957 policy to break up Central Sumatra into three provinces. It was an apparent effort to defuse the anti-Jakarta sentiments which were boiling over into the regions then.

While authorities still have to answer these questions satisfactorily, the people have been told of its plan to split Irian Jaya into three, separating the rebel-plagued and natural- resource rich sections from the others.

In all of this game, the present transitional regime is demonstrating its ambition to get all its plans passed by the House, which was a product of the Soeharto authoritarian regime, just before a democratic government is established.

What does the Habibie regime expect to get from this ploy?