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.