Withdrawing recommendation is an act of inconsistency

Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): The permit or surat izin is a very important commodity within the Indonesian society. For any important act you want to carry out, you must have a permit. And to obtain a permit, it is absolutely imperative that you attach a letter of recommendation to your request for a permit.

For a letter of recommendation to be effective at all, it must come from the right quarter, i.e. from a person or an institution that is respected by the office issuing the permit. If your letter of recommendation is issued by "the wrong party", it will kill your request instantly. On the other hand, if it is issued by "the right party", it is just like having your request accompanied by an unassailable escort. Your request will no longer look like a request. It will look like a command.

Recently my school submitted a request for a permit to organize a small seminar to be attended by twenty people. Attached to it was a letter of recommendation issued by "a right office". For some reason, our request was rejected. It was explained to my staff that no seminar or any other public gathering can be conducted during this period of APEC preparation, as well as later during the APEC meeting itself.

We were desperate. All the invitations had been sent out. And this seminar had been postponed three times before. If it was postponed again, we were afraid that no one would still be interested in participating in this small seminar.

I had to find another recommendation, a really strong one. I called a friend, a senior officer in the police corps. I explained to him my situation, and asked for his help and his advice. He said he would discuss my request with his colleagues, and asked me to wait for a call from him.

He phoned me about an hour later. He told me that an arrangement had been made, and gave me instructions concerning a number of steps that I had to take the following morning.

I went to the police office the following morning, at the agreed upon time. A junior officer was already there, waiting for me. He took me to the office of the commanding officer, and introduced me to him. Then he left us alone. I explained my situation to this senior officer, and begged for his assistance. After a short discussion, he wrote a memo, a disposisi, and asked me to accompany his secretary and give this memo to the officer in charge of issuing the permit. The whole matter was solved.

I realized it was the intervention of my police friend that made this reversal of decision possible. All the arrangements he made for me contained the strongest recommendation I could possibly get.

You can see from this example that obtaining an effective recommendation is not a simple matter. So what should you do, if after a very arduous process, a recommendation you have obtained is withdrawn?

In my opinion, withdrawing a recommendation is either an act of inconsistency or an act of moral surrender. Writing a recommendation is a matter of trust. You don't write recommendations for persons you do not trust. Thus withdrawing a recommendation is withdrawing trust. Is it possible that in our life we trust someone at one moment, and suddenly distrust that same person the next moment?

Once I was asked to withdraw a recommendation I had made for a candidate, and was asked instead to support another candidate favored by the office issuing the permit. I refused to comply with this request, because I strongly believed the alternate candidate did not meet the requirements. As a compromise, another candidate of my choice was nominated. But I let it be known in no uncertain terms that I remained in support of the rejected candidate. This led to a relationship charged with animosity between myself and certain key persons within that bureaucracy.

I never regretted that decision. The way I see it, it is better to be alienated from a bureaucracy rather than to be looked upon as a person who can be persuaded to betray a principle. If there is one thing I really hate to do, it is to admit making a mistake I did not make.

The writer is rector of the Muhammadiyah Teachers Training College (IKIP), Jakarta.