Trust is the crux of national integration

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?