Splitting the provinces
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?