Trust is the crux of national integration

Preserving patience, as the President urged last week, is not a realistic way to escape from the crisis, writes Mochtar Buchori.

JAKARTA (JP): I felt quite appalled reading the report of President Abdurrahman Wahid's speech on Dec. 13. This speech sounded more like a sermon delivered by a cleric, rather than a presidential address calling urgently for collective endeavor, to save the country from bankruptcy and paralysis.

The speech was delivered to commemorate Nuzulul Qur'an, the night when the first verses of the Koran were revealed to Prophet Mohammad. The President's speech was thus meant to convey a religious message.

The main theme of his speech was that Indonesians must be patient and persevering in their efforts to overcome its multitude of problems.

"We will be able to create political stability, to have domestic security, to bring about improvements in various branches of our life, as long as we are patient and consistently tenacious ... We will be able to overcome all the difficulties we have been facing," he said.

The President went on to say that the people should be able to avert the danger of national disintegration, because the nation has received support from various foreign countries.

At one point he said, "Praise be to God, with dogged perseverance we should be able to solve our economic problems." At the same time he lamented that we have been lagging so far behind other nations in spite of our being blessed with so many rich natural resources.

To conclude his speech he expressed his hope that the nation will have the capacity to implement the quintessence of the teaching of Islam, i.e. never to lose our devotion in God while enduring whatever trying experiences may come to us in a whole- hearted way, and at the same time to resolve in unwavering manner that it is our patience which is our main asset in moving forward.

As long as we steadfastly cling to this resolve, he assured the audience, we will come out of our trying experiences safe and sound.

What annoyed me most is that the President seemed to want people to believe that patience and perseverance alone will take care of our national problems.

Does he really believe that we would be able to avert disintegration merely because other countries promised to support us in defending our territorial integrity? I don't think he really meant everything he said.

He must know quite well that the source of our economic problem, for instance, is corruption. As long as we cannot significantly corruption we shall never be able to make long- lasting economic progress.

I am also quite sure that he knows as well as we all do that the danger of disintegration is quite acute.

It is only if Jakarta is willing to change its basic attitude toward Aceh and other dissenting regions that the danger of disintegration can eventually be averted.

No amount of foreign sympathy can restore the trust of the dissenting areas towards the central government. And trust is exactly the crux of national integration.

Why didn't the President mention that we must mend our ways? Why didn't the President tell us that in the final analysis it is our selfishness and our greed, specially those of our political leaders, which plunged us into this miserable condition?

I suspect that the President deliberately omitted those very obvious causes of the present chaos; that he consciously wanted to hide the ugly side of our political and economic systems, and also that of our government.

He wanted the public to think that no matter how corrupt our systems may be, we will at the end be all right as long as we remain patient.

But isn't this misleading the nation into believing in a naive and irresponsible way of looking into the future?

I am afraid there is a wicked political design behind the silence about the political causes of our current multifaceted crisis; a political design in not mentioning the realistic way to drag the country out of paralysis.

I don't have an intelligent guess on what this design may be, but such a glaring omission can mean only one thing: To divert the public from the principal issues on how we should come out of the crisis.

Will the public think the way the President wants us to think? I don't think so, and I am sure the President knows this. So what will be the impact of this speech on the public?

The public might be divided into two camps: those who have absolute belief in him, and those critical towards his leadership.

The first camp will do whatever the President wishes, even to say "the sky is yellow" if he says so.

But the others will follow their own reasoning and may come to conclusions which are not only unsupportive, but may also be contradictory to the President's and the government's policies.

They may do things the President does not want them to do. This will further erode public trust in him.

It would be much wiser if the President addressed the public honestly without hiding anything that cannot be hidden from the public eye.

When will our political leaders realize that it is useless to conceal "public secrets" from a public armed with both reliable information and gossip?