The APEC summit

Jakarta's main roads are much cleaner these days. Perhaps for the first time in history flowers are arranged at many strategic points, particularly along the city's major thoroughfares. Beggars and street vendors have vanished overnight from crossroads.

It is not often that one see such a thorough facelift in this capital city.

All those cleaning-up measures are, of course, in preparation for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings which are scheduled to start rolling this week. As the organizer, the Indonesian government is apparently determined to do its best to be a good host.

It seems that nothing is being left to chance. Thousands of troops are to be deployed to ensure that the conferences and meetings will proceed in complete safety. Hundreds of pricey brand new gleaming cars have been imported to transport the visiting heads of government and their entourages during their stay here. New telecommunications lines and facilities have been installed to assist the thousands of journalists who are expected to converge here to cover the meetings.

One top official has even gone as far as to propose that the people of Jakarta and Bogor simply take a holiday on Nov. 14 and 15, when the APEC summit will be held. This, supposedly, is to ensure that no traffic jams will occur during the conferences.

It is very apparent that the government is ready to go all out to ensure that the APEC summit will be a success.

Of course one may wonder why it takes an international event such as the APEC summit for the capital city to be cleaned up.

Why it is that it always requires some major excitement like this, or the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in 1992, to move the authorities into action to put things in order? One might be led to believe that all this is a reflection of the lack of a real will on the part of the powers that be to make things more livable in the capital.

Of course, the residents of the capital themselves should be expected to make efforts to ensure that Jakarta will be a good host and that the summit will proceed in a most satisfactory manner. But it seems sad that the authorities may well have to issue a reminder to the public to behave properly during the summit.

For example, we have heard too many stories of taxi drivers cheating their unsuspecting foreign passengers. Or there are traders who double or triple their prices when dealing with foreign customers.

Strict measures against perpetrators of such practices should be taken on a routine basis, and not only during, or before, a big international event.

As for the little contributions many of us may already have made to the preparations for the summit, as good hosts we all surely feel no regrets at doing our part to see that all goes as smoothly.

Clean streets, discipline and business integrity aside, the next logical questions would be: Are all those undertakings worthwhile? Are there any accepted criteria by which we will be able to determine if the upcoming APEC meeting is really a success?

Anyone with a sensible mind would surely agree that to be a good host and to ensure that the conference goes as smoothly as possible are things that we are capable of doing. But what about the true substance of the event itself? For instance, would we be able to call the APEC summit successful if the final declaration does not set a timetable for a free-trade program?

One could easily conclude that it is beyond our power to make sure that the coming APEC summit produces a satisfactory decision, since all decisions must be reached by consensus.

Still, whatever decisions the summit might produce, the fact that a meeting of 18 heads of government -- or their delegates -- representing a combined population of 2.2 billion and accounting for 41 percent of world's trade, is a spectacular event in itself. Surely there will be a lot of positive results from such a conference and the bilateral meetings between the summit.