To Mr. Willem Oltmans

The Jakarta Post on March 27, 2000 published your letter titled Soeharto's crime.

Your wish cannot come true due to the role played by your country as a member of the dubious consortium called IGGI-CGI, and similarly in the United Nations.

In fact, your country planted the seeds of destruction long ago through the Netherlands East Indies (VOC) and the Nederlands Oost-Indische Regering (Netherlands East Indies Government). The way you let go of this colony is in dark contrast to how Great Britain did with our neighbor Malaysia. You did not prepare this colony for the post-colonial period, and we had to fight a bloody war with your government before we got the de facto independence.

And it is exactly these initial elements of our Armed Forces fighting your armed forces between 1945 and 1950, who claimed later their "seats" in the steering of our country's fate formulated by the "dual function" slogan, where they played a pivotal role in the downfall of Sukarno, and then became the praetorian guard of Soeharto.

My point is that you, as a de facto "shareholder" via the consortium above, nurtured the tenure of Soeharto all those long 32 years.

And now you call him names, etc. What an irony and shameful act for a country full of (pseudo) Christians, who has siphoned off our riches since the first landing of Dutch sailing ships 400 years ago.

If you are a man of principles, and you have fellow countrymen who also adhere to principles, then you should make a movement in Holland to get Mr. Soeharto transported to The Hague for an international trial. At least you could mount an effective campaign, mobilize the positive forces, and: 1. Write up all the major economical crimes of Soeharto and his cronies. 2. Get the bankers in Holland to cooperate and publish the streams of transactions and transfers done via ABN-AMRO, Pierson- Heldring, etc. 3. And name all those crimes plus the atrocities done under his regime by which commanders, under which governors, ministers.

Use all kinds of groups (religious, NGOs, Red Cross, accountants, political parties) to get hold of data and facts and prepare the j'accuse document made by your lawyers where Soeharto & Co. can be brought to court, both here (because many laws here are similar to those in Holland and jurisprudence can be used) and in The Hague.

In doing so, you can then help our President and his administration to move fast and focused, instead of lamenting and wishing.

This country is totally ruined, not in terms of cities and buildings except for those few burned down, but in terms of its human assets, which have been reduced to near zombies during those 32 long years via the educational policy, the media handling in a Goebbels way and your country "looking-on" and giving IGGI loans.

It was a prolongation of your colonial period with another twist: the people above doing this colonial job were Indonesians, not Dutch.

Y. SANTO

Jakarta