Success or failure?
Success or failure?
After four tense days of debates heavily marred by violent
clashes and bloodshed in the streets outside the impressive
conference building, the much touted Special Session of the
People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) is over. Convened
purportedly to lead the nation toward a better future and greater
democracy in the wake of the downfall in May of president
Soeharto's autocratic New Order regime, no cost or effort was
apparently spared to make a success of the event.
Among the most conspicuous of those measures as far as the
public is concerned was easily the heavy security precautions
under which were deployed not only were tens of thousands of
police and military personnel but also over a hundred amateur
civilian "guards" armed with bamboo spears, knives and machetes.
The question now is: what does the Assembly have to show for all
that money and all the effort spent?
As anticipated, a number of MPR decrees, drafted and prepared
beforehand by a specially formed working committee, were adopted
to ensure greater democracy and stricter adherence to the
Constitution. Some of those drafts underwent modifications to
better accommodate the public's aspirations. For example, a draft
decree on good governance was "improved" by the inclusion of a
directive to investigate the alleged wealth of ex-president
Soeharto and his family and cronies.
In a way the just-concluded MPR session did display a
performance that was a good deal better than that of 1997, when
it elected Soeharto to a seventh term in office as president of
the republic and passed decrees that were designed merely to
ensure he would continue to rule undisturbed. Nevertheless, there
are sure to be many among us who would consider this Special
Session a failure, at least in the sense that it has generally
failed to accommodate the aspirations of the people and turned a
deaf ear to the grievances and demands of reformers and critics
of the government and its ruling party, Golkar.
This, though, is not only understandable but expected since,
by and large, the present Assembly is despite some reshuffles
still essentially the same old New Order product that only eight
months ago reelected Soeharto and endowed him with extra powers
to cope with emergencies that could threaten his rule. The best
one could say is that considering such a background the MPR did
quite a good job making an about-face. The fact that this kind of
attitude on the part of the people's representatives is, to many
people, not very reassuring is, of course, another matter.
One issue that is sure to disappoint critics concerns the
presence of appointed members of the Indonesian Armed Forces
(ABRI) in the House of Representatives. Although their numbers
will be reduced, to many critics their continued presence is
proof of ABRI's reluctance to relinquish its dual (sociopolitical
as well as security and defense) functions, which many consider
to be not only unfair, but an obstacle to democratization and
could contribute to the feeling that ABRI is insincere in its
stated support of democratic reform.
One final comment that cannot be overlooked concerns the
excessive security precautions during the session. The deployment
of untrained civilian guards in particular, has drawn
considerable criticism from the public and observers, who see
them as having contributed, rather than prevented, to the
violence and the clashes during the session. Most unfortunately,
since many of those "guards" operate under the potentially
divisive banners of religion, their deployment and their actions
could inadvertently become the starting point of more and greater
conflicts in society.
What all this signifies for the current administration of
President B.J. Habibie is that these deplorable developments
could weaken rather than bolster his already inadequate
legitimacy. For those in power it should be remembered that their
right to use armed might is given to them by the people, to be
used with wisdom and restraint.