Wiranto should resign
Wiranto should resign
The misfortune, if one can call it that, that has befallen our
former chief of the Indonesian Military and the current
coordinating minister for political and security affairs, Gen.
Wiranto, together with his reactions to the matter and the
consequences that the whole affair could have for this nation are
all illustrative of Indonesia's problems in this time of
democratic transition.
Elsewhere in the world, any high-ranking government official
caught in a situation such as Gen. Wiranto would probably have
promptly tendered his resignation as soon as his good name became
publicly tarnished. Cabinet ministers elsewhere are known to have
resigned for being merely implicated in financial, sexual or
other personal scandals that damaged their reputations.
In Wiranto's case, the crimes in which the coordinating
minister is being implicated -- even if only crimes of omission
-- are of course far more serious than engaging in illicit
personal affairs. The crimes for which he is being held co-
responsible -- arson, destruction, enforced disappearances, the
killing of hundreds of people and the forceful displacement of
hundreds of thousands more in the wake of last year's
independence referendum in East Timor -- is ranked by the United
Nations as no less than genocide, which is a severe crime against
humanity.
What makes it all especially dire, not only for those directly
implicated in the crimes but for the nation as a whole, is that
Indonesians are at present living in a world in which national
borders and the sovereign rights of nations seem in many
instances to have lost their relevance, and this is true
especially where human rights are concerned. Worse still,
Indonesia at present is definitely in no position to tell the
international community to mind its own business. Besides, the
nation is determined to move ahead with its program of democratic
reform, whatever the challenges. Hence, President Abdurrahman
Wahid's determination on his return from traveling abroad to ask
Wiranto to resign from the Cabinet and stand before a court of
justice to plead his case.
As President Abdurrahman Wahid remarked in Davos, a voluntary
resignation by Wiranto and his acceptance of a fair trial in an
independent court would of course be the most gracious way for
the general to end the current pressures from home and abroad on
himself and the government to allow justice to prevail by letting
the law take its course. At the same time, however, Wiranto's
recalcitrance is fully understandable. Not only is his career at
stake, he was raised and bred in a political culture in which
codes of honor often differed from those accepted in most other
parts in the civilized world. That old culture, developed and
carefully nurtured by Soeharto's New Order regime, has not
entirely vanished.
As things are at present, though, Wiranto's reluctance to
voluntarily relinquish his position as requested by the President
presents the nation with a number of awkward complications. For
one thing, the judicial authorities will have difficulty bringing
such a highly placed government official to court. For another,
it raises the menacing possibility of discontent spreading among
the military. A failure to try Wiranto and the others implicated
in the East Timor violence can only raise the pressure abroad for
a trial in an international court, with all the undesirable
implications of such a trial for the Indonesian military and the
nation.
All things considered, the best service Gen. Wiranto could do
for his country, his nation and his fellow soldiers in the
Indonesian military is to obey his supreme commander, the
President, resign his Cabinet post and prepare himself to present
his case in a fair trial in an Indonesian court of justice.
Certainly for Gen. Wiranto the experience will not be a pleasant
one. But as the highest military commander during the time of the
East Timor violence, there is no other way the general can
honorably extricate himself from his present difficult position.
As the French say, noblesse oblige.