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.

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.

Our national leaders' obsession with unity 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, "just and prosperous".

Today, we are a nascent democracy, a process that only began in 1998, but we are still a long way from being 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 wasted 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 to allow his relatives and cronies plunder the nation, bringing us right back to where we started out from in 1965.

The years of reform since 1998 have been occupied with undoing the damage inherited from decades of Soeharto's and Sukarno's misrules, and only now we are emerging as a democratic society.

But there is still a nagging feeling that we are not making up for lost time in nation-building as we should.

Instead, our leaders constantly engage in petty bickering. Meanwhile, many people are still struggling to fight for their rights as citizens. Some are treated as second-class citizens, others are marginalized; and many face discrimination and prejudice. Economic development has widened rather than narrowed inequalities, and millions still live in abject poverty.

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

Any celebration today will really be celebrating our false sense of nationhood. We are united as a nation, but inequalities in many areas are the order of the day. And justice for most people remains a distant dream. We have yet to learn that genuine unity is based on visible social justice and appreciation of each other's ethnical background and religious affiliation.

Our unity is more symbolic, and statements like "Unitary Republic of Indonesia to the death" only serve once again to divert 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 most typify Indonesians range from corruption and greed, cruelty and intolerance, to laziness, unreliableness and incompetence. Add hypocrisy for good measure given that we keep proclaiming ourselves to be very religious in spite of all these negative characteristics.

We wished those few Indonesians who are committed to good governance and the pursuit of justice would come out more forcefully and set the tone of our national characters.

Today, as we mark our 60th Independence Day, it is worth asking ourselves: What have we really achieved as a nation?

The honest answer is a mixture of gratitude, disillusionment and hope: Gratified because we have come this far in laying down the foundations of a democracy, but disillusioned and at times even despaired because we have squandered historical opportunities to push Indonesia forward.

But we are also hopeful that there are many Indonesians who are truly and sincerely committed to the goals of a just and prosperous nation and who are working hard to achieve them. It is to them today that we turn as we mark Independence Day.