Wasted 60 years

Wasted 60 years

Indonesia as a nation reaches a milestone today with the
celebration of 60 years of independence. There is every reason to
rejoice at this achievement: we have survived as one nation in
spite of the many forces that constantly threaten to divide us.
In spite of our diversity, we have overcome trials and
tribulations, and come out intact as one nation.

But therein probably lies the real problem today.

We as a nation have been too consumed with forging unity out
of a collection of peoples who cannot be more divided in terms of
race, ethnicity, language, culture and religion, and who live in
thousands of islands stretching from Sabang to Merauke.

Our national leaders' obsession with unity, and at times even
with conformity, has come at the expense of a genuine nation-
building process that would have made Indonesia a democratic and
pluralistic nation that is, in the very words of our founding
fathers, including Sukarno, "just and prosperous".

Today, we are a nascent democracy, a process that only began
in 1998, but we are still a long way from becoming just and
prosperous.

Looking back, we can find very little in the way of nation-
building efforts to celebrate. It would not be an exaggeration to
suggest that we have squandered time, opportunities and resources
these six decades.

Sukarno helped to liberate the nation from the shackles of
colonialism, but he squandered the next two decades trying to
fulfill his personal ambitions, which ultimately brought the
nation to near bankruptcy, and precipitated his own ouster.

Soeharto spent a good deal of his 30 years in power
suppressing our freedoms. He brought about economic development,
only then to allow his relatives and cronies could plunder the
nation, bringing us right back to where we started out from in
1965.

The years of reform from 1998 up to now have been occupied
largely with undoing the damage inherited from decades of misrule
by Soeharto and Sukarno, and only now we are emerging slowly as a
democratic society.

But there is still a nagging feeling that we are not making up
for our lost time in nation-building as we should. Instead, our
leaders constantly engage in petty bickering. Often times, this
sort of incestuous infighting erupts in open conflict among
supporters at the grassroots level.

Meanwhile, many people are still struggling to fight for their
rights as citizens. Some are treated as second-class citizens,
others have been completely marginalized; and many others face
discrimination and prejudice.

Economic development has widened rather than narrowed existing
inequalities, and millions of our people still live in abject
poverty. This is in a nation that is blessed with fertile land
and an abundance of natural resources.

We are squandering the resources that belong to our children and
grandchildren even as we speak. The Rp 130 trillion in domestic
fuel subsidies that the government will fork out this year in
order to sustain the cheap oil policy is symptomatic of how we
are wasting resources when such a huge sum could be better spent
on education, health and investing in the nation's future.

Anyone celebrating today will really be celebrating our false
sense of nationhood. We are united as a nation, but inequalities
in many areas are still the order of the day. And justice for
most people remains a distant dream.

Our unity is more symbolic than anything else, and statements
like "Unitary Republic of Indonesia to the death", as uttered by
officials recently, only serve once again to divert our attention
away from the real and substantive nation-building issues to the
question of national unity.

If a part of the nation-building process is the formation of
national character, then pity Indonesia for what we have become.
Today, the characteristics that typify Indonesia are mostly
negative, ranging from corruption and greed, through cruelty and
increasing intolerance, to laziness, unreliableness and
incompetence. You might want to throw in hypocrisy for good
measure given that we keep proclaiming ourselves to be very
religious in spite of all these negative characteristics.

Today, as we mark our 60th Independence Day, it is worth
asking ourselves: What have we really achieved as a nation in
these six decades? The honest answer is not a whole lot,
unfortunately. And our children and grandchildren will have every
right to curse us for squandering those precious 60 years.