Commentary: Cairo riots jolt our memories of Soeharto’s fall in 1998

Kornelius Purba, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 02/02/2011

For residents of Jakarta who followed the massive riots and demonstrations before Soeharto’s fall in 1998, watching TV reports on the ongoing demonstrations in Cairo may revive a sense of bitter, painful and sorrowful nostalgia. Even now many Indonesians still have to live with the trauma caused by the violence. But we know that the sacrifices of those who lost their lives and futures in the struggle to regain the people’s sovereignty is very fruitful.

We know for sure that the bumpy road the Egyptians have to pass through is still very long, and the journey will be very exhausting, life threatening and demand huge sacrifices. Many nations and multinational corporations do not want to see a democratic Egypt, because for them dealing with dictators is much cheaper and more profitable.

Jakarta and many other cities experienced lootings, killings and torture by Soeharto’s ruthless security forces 13 years ago. We do hope that the Egyptians do not experience the barbaric acts of organized groups in Jakarta who burned alleged looters to death and raped Chinese-Indonesian women.

And just as Soeharto did to no avail in 1998, President Hosni Mubarak is now trying to buy time. What the Egyptians need to know is that Mubarak’s ousting does not mean much if they do not patiently and stubbornly fight to restore the huge damage caused by Mubarak, his cronies and families. Now opposition groups are united but after their president’s departure they will fight each other and often act more brutally than Mubarak.

Soeharto and the gang robbed the state and many Western banks were willing to offer their deposit boxes as safe havens. Most of them still remain untouchable. Soeharto also ensured that the nation inherited unbelievable practices of corruption, abuse of power and violation of human rights.

Western countries condemned the corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN) practices under Soeharto.

But then they pretended like idiots when Indonesians demanded the scrapping of billlions of dollars granted by Soeharto to Western companies. They said that they should honor the contract although they knew very well Soeharto received bribes for the contracts.

The dictator has ruined almost everything and we have to build our nation from zero, if not minus. They were the laws, they acted like gods. The nation was their absolute property. The killing of innocent victims, who had to lose their lives just because of their belief in the principle of democracy and human rights, or just because Soeharto and his cronies wanted to butcher people for reasons that remain unexplained, remains a dark case.

Very few international media and genius Western scholars believed that Indonesians — most of them uneducated Muslims — could turn their country into a full democracy. Now we are the world’s third largest democracy after India and the United States.

The leaders of Malaysia and Singapore at that time laughed at the nation’s determination to become a full-fledged democracy. “You cannot feed your people with democracy, ha ha ha ha ha,” they jeered at us. Do they still laugh at us now?

In 1999 we proved our determination: We held a very democratic election. But our leaders fought each other just to grab power for themselves. In 2004, we had the first presidential elections and also in 2009. They won international applause. But our leaders again betrayed the trust of their people.

Soeharto resigned on May 21, 1998. Vice President B.J. Habibie — Soeharto’s golden boy — took over his position and led the transitional government until September 1999. The Egyptians will likely have to follow our path.

But if former president Soeharto were still alive, he would be among the first of foreign leaders to offer his courtesy to host embattling Egyptian President Mubarak. In May 1998, just several days before his fall on May 21, Mubarak offered Soeharto to stay longer in Cairo. Soeharto was determined to attend an international summit in Cairo although the situation in Jakarta had become chaotic. Mubarak consoled Soeharto with the words “Don’t worry, be happy”.

As a journalist who covered the Cairo meeting, I still remember Mubarak’s preach about the 1997/1998 Asian financial crisis. According to Mubarak, “The crisis had shown the social cost of global integration and the contagious effect of weakness from one economy to another.” Now Mubarak has to abide by his own advice on the globalization of democracy.

We do hope that Egypt will soon join Indonesia in the top list of the world’s democracies. The price it has to pay indeed will be very expensive.

But are Western countries ready to accept the decision of Egyptian voters on who should lead them? If they decided overwhelmingly on a fundamentalist Muslim as their president, the world should accept their choice. Like it or not it is not your business.