ASIAN AFFAIRS INTERVIEW WITH BACHARUDDIN HABIBIE President of Indonesia STATISTICS ARE POLITICAL COMMODITIES Serge Berthier.- Everyone has something bad to say about you and the press is not very kind about whatever you do. Does that affect you? Bacharuddin Habibie.- I know. In a democratic system, politicians get bad press all the time. Look at Europe. I am used to it because I went to live in Europe when I was 17 years old, and I left twenty years later. All my formative years were spent in Europe. As a result, the values of human rights and the value of democracy, that is the value of the ancient world became a greater part of my own moral system. But Indonesia is my country, and has a different culture. I respect it; it is also my culture. That is why sometimes my own people don't understand my attitude or do not want to understand it. But it does not bother me. It is normal. SB.- I understand but politics is, maybe unfortunately, primarily a matter of perception rather than substance. BH.- I am not a politician. I am a scientist by training but I have learnt to understand the politicians. You know when I came back, I had to exist there and to understand afresh my own people. Sometimes I had to contain myself. I had in a way to blend my own values with their values. My values became a reference point and sometimes some values fall short of my reference point. I don’t think I can be criticized on my values, even though I am often told that I am not allowed to criticize Indonesian values. In my mind, these two sets of value are reversed. But I realize the situation and I am pragmatic enough. I cannot do as I please. I am not saying it does not put a strain on one's attitude. Sometimes I felt I could explode, but it is important to be tolerant. It is not science. I am dealing with people. It is much more difficult. But I am very much aware of that fact. SB.- Do you consider your position as a difficult one? BH.- No, I am not in a very difficult position. Of course, any president has to face and solve problems. There are people who stay 20 or 30 years in power, but then the changes are not necessarily faster than what can be done in six months. It is not the time that is the essence. Changes are a response to problems to be solved. If there are no changes, one can assume that there are no problems to solve, but in fact it may mean that they are swept under the carpet. So one cannot talk about difficulties because difficulties, for a former scientist, have a specific meaning. SB.- Your opponents say that you are just a caretaker President, and not even a legitimate President. BH.- I am aware of those comments. The point is that I am a legitimate President. I was appointed in accordance with our constitutional rules. Theoretically, if I were fool enough to want to glue myself to my present seat, I could use the Constitution to do so, since the last assembly decided that the next election would be held in 2003. And I am not a caretaker either. Every government has to face elections and to be a caretaker is to take care on behalf of somebody else. I am not taking on on behalf of somebody else. SB.- Then why do you take the risk of calling an early election? BH.- Because I can hear the resonance of the people’s sovereignty, otherwise I would not be a democrat. It would be unfair to wait until the year 2003. It would not be democratic. SB.- People wanted the election held last summer, in June 1998. Critics say that any delay will help you engineer it in your favor? BH.- The conclusion that I am preparing myself to stay here forever, that I am an ambitious man, is unwarranted. If you look at my position, you can see, if you are rational, that I cannot act differently. You might be sure that I try to get the people’s aspiration really implemented, and I know that the people insisted that I had to make the election in June or July 98. That, I could not do. It would have been unfair to the people themselves because they did not have the time to consolidate and socialize their ideas and their freedom. They had to compete against three entrenched parties (1). Of course, every opponent was thinking he would win against the three parties because, in Jakarta, all three of them were disliked. But Jakarta is not Indonesia. Jakarta is less than 5% of the people of the country, and the people who are going to influence the election are not the Jakarta people. SB.- So what you wanted was to have more fairness, to give more chance to the newcomers on the political scene to challenge the old entrenched establishment and to avoid the winner, if there were one, to be ruling Indonesia from a Jakarta stronghold once again? BH.- What I have done is to allow the freedom to form as many parties as the people want, and so to prepare for an early election. I said it in June 1998 because I was planning to have the Presidential election held in May 1999. I told the members of the House of Representatives (DPR) (2) of my wish. But to get there, I needed a special People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) (3) to revise the rules laid by the former MPR. The first rule is that everybody is allowed to form a party and the second one is that a new president will be elected. These are in fact two different issues. Today, I am confident for the coming election that, we, myself, the government and all the people of the Republic of Indonesia will work together so that we have a fair and transparent election. Based on that, whoever is the elected winner has to be recognized and accepted by the people. SB.- In the past, elections were a formality. The winner was always Golkar by a wide margin. Do you foresee one party winning more than 50% of the seats of the House of Representative (DPR)? BH.- No. In June 1998, when the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) was sticking to the decision of the previous one that there be only Golkar, PPP and PDI to dispute the election, I put myself as a guarantor that the people would have the right to make as many parties as they want. I gave everybody the right to organize a party, under one condition: it must abide by the Constitution. The result is that now we have about 130 parties. It is of course unmanageable and we will take care of that. Parties will have to comply with some minimum criteria (4). A law will be issued so that about 20 parties might fulfill the requirements. It means 110 will drop out. The criteria is made by a committee. The parties left out should not protest because the criteria is not made by me, but reflecting the people’s sovereignty. Now with 20 parties contesting the election instead of 3, if every party has 5%, we will have a maximum of twenty parties. It may be too many. We may have to decide on a criteria. In any case, I don't see a single party ruling the DPR. SB.- The only common goal between all the parties seems to be the desire to topple the existing government and to replace you. Isn't it a bit narrow a platform for a coalition once the election is over? BH.- That is correct. This is democracy. They have their say. You know how many demonstrations have been held since I have been in power? More than 900! More than one per day! But I told the DPR, demonstration is the greater part of democracy. If the people want to have cooking oil for free, just demonstrate but don’t commit crimes. But actually people don’t understand democracy. SB.- What do you mean? BH.- Let me try to explain what is happening. For 330 years this society was under a colonial master and the first 53 years of the Republic was repressed under a strong power. As an engineer, you learn that any kind of constraint has a cost effect. A force in one way will create another one, etc... This is valid in any field. What I have engineered is a relaxation of the system. The boundaries are being pushed back far away. Now remember that the first president (Soekarno) came to power when he was 44, with zero experience in government because there was no government and zero experience in dealings with the parliament because there was no parliament. The second president (Soeharto), as he came in, had 21 years experience as a General. He was used to commanding, he commanded for 32 years. But as I came in, I had the experience, being a member of the cabinet for 20 years, in and out of the parliament, being accountable, and even before being an adviser to the President, I knew exactly what I had to do based on what I knew was not done. SB.- But it is precisely because you spent so long a time within the corridor of power that people argue that you are not a reformer, because you did not reform anything in those days… BH.- People forget I was a small minister. I was just concentrating on my duties in Science and Technology. I was told I was not an economist, just a crazy engineer doing airplanes. The President was surrounded by excellent professors in economy but he was too powerful and he would not listen until he had to go. The first President was the same. He would not listen. But let me finish. Now that we are in the relaxation process, people have not yet realized that a number of boundaries have moved because they have not reached the new boundaries. SB.- In your budget speech, you criticized the attitude of the press. Has the press reached the new boundaries? BH.- The fact is that the country is dominated for the time being by preachers of all kinds. Preachers is not my word, it was a word used by one of my old friends from Europe. One day, he came to see me and started to tell me how bad he felt about the situation. "The problem of your country is", he told me, "that the preachers get too much attention and the limelight. The doers don’t get any attention. You are totally ignored. You cannot run a society like that. Can preachers rule a country? Preachers are not accountable. They are not consistent. They go easily from hell to utopia and back again". There is some truth in that remark. The real problem is that the mass-media and people are making money out of the preachers' actions. But if you ask the preachers, what would you do to build a nation? They have no proper answer because you need planning and you have to be accountable. To build a nation, inter-mesh ideas, you need a greater system than a sermon. And the problem with the press is that it is a buyers' market. Truth is not essential. You know I just listen to all these criticisms but I have to be pragmatic. What is essential is to be dedicated to solving our problems. Otherwise, I will create new problems and those who will suffer are neither me, nor the preachers, but the people. SB.- Public perception is that Indonesia has not solved half of its problems, and so you have achieved little. Is that an unfair assessment? BH.- The passengers have not yet realized they nearly crashed. One day, I took a symbol to explain to a local newspaper what had happened. I said, imagine Indonesia is an aircraft with 210 million passengers. I was in the cockpit for a quarter of a century, responsible for Sciences and Technology, then I became copilot. At that time the captain was maintaining the plane at a normal cruising altitude. But then, we went into super-stall. The lift became zero and we went into free-fall. The captain lost consciousness. The copilot took over, not knowing if he could save the plane. Now, at that stage, you can do two things. One is to go to the cabin and explain to the passengers what is going on and that a crash is imminent. The other is just to shut up and try to catch up. In September 1998, I was asked: “when do you expect to catch up?”. There was no way of knowing. I only knew that we were a few meters from the ground, so to speak but out of the stall. Today we are far from the cruising altitude, but I expect to be there by the end of this year. Whoever is the pilot in such a situation, he cannot do as he wants. He has to deal with the situation. During the six months it took to regain some control, I had no time to go and see the passengers. And what for? I had to concentrate on what to do, even with the preachers on my back. Otherwise, the crash was certain. If I had not done it, today Indonesia would be like former Yugoslavia. What I want to say is this, that we have just caught up, and you are right, the people here do not realize it because they are currently too dominated by, using the name given by my friend, the preachers. And the preachers and the press are taking advantage of the freedom they now have. But they need commodities to sell. They only think of how they can increase what they want to sell. And they expect to sell. It is normal. The Indonesian press complains that I do not give press conferences or do not speak to them. They are not listening. I prefer the television, you talk directly to the people. SB.- Isn't it a bit dangerous to speak about the freedom of press as it is nearly a taboo, especially among foreign journalists? BH.- Although my remarks were criticized, from what I know, the common people didn't react negatively as it was reported. You wait and you will see. The local press is a buyers' press as I mentioned. The publishers have never enjoyed so much freedom and so they think they can sell anything and they would sell anything. Truth is not exactly the standard. One has to keep in mind that the press is not objective since every newspaper is more or less defending the views of a political group. SB.- The same press and the preachers are saying that you are defending the views of the Golkar, which was the political apparatus of the former president. So everyone is more or less defending the views of a political group. BH.- I was the Executive chairman of Golkar twice. I was not the President of Indonesia. Today, I am the President of the country. It is a different thing. I am not willing to become an executive of the Golkar, or anyone for that matter. Of course, I cannot say that I hate Golkar, having been one of its members for twenty years. This would make no sense. I have friends in this party but today I must put the national interests above the interests of any particular party. That is my goal. People only take things to extremes. They will need time to see the difference. Even Golkar did not understand my position. SB.- You admit that the country is divided and that no real leadership will emerge from the election. To avoid fragmentation, do you think that the idea of a national reconciliation committee as proposed by Abdurrahmann Wahid, one leader of the opposition, is a sensible idea? BH.- Some want to have a reconciliation dialogue (5). They want to have such and such a person part of it and so on. The preachers seem to select who they want. Four, five people for them would be enough. They want to include me and others. They said I am part of it. But they cannot decide that. They have no legitimacy for the time being to decide such a thing. The next reconciliation and the national dialogue they seek will precisely be done in the new MPR among the elected members. That is where the legitimate representatives of the people can debate and reach a consensus. Before that, it is all talk and propaganda. There is no legal basis for any kind of People's committee. It is not in the Constitution. We cannot take liberties with our own Constitution. There is a process for what they say they want to do. They have to adhere to it, otherwise it is anarchy. I cannot buy it. I am not a dictator, I am not Louis XIV le Roi-soleil. SB.- The idea of a splinter assembly does not faze you? BH.- It will be the will of the people. No party will have a majority. At the DPR level, it is normal. The most important thing is this point: In my country, the President is not directly elected. His election is based on consensus or, if the consensus cannot be reached, based on an election. But it is only the MPR that elects the President. What are the duties of the President? He is entrusted with two things: the vision of the people which constitutes the guidelines of the people. He is the guarantor of state policies. The second thing he is entrusted with is the preparation of the next election. He must of course be accountable for all decisions on both counts. In effect, the President calls himself the mandatory of the People’s assembly (MPR). SB.- Former President Soeharto was the mandatory of the People's assembly, but it was basically a one-party assembly, the assembly of his own political organization with a sham opposition (6). BH.- That is precisely the point people miss. You are right. The former President only took Golkar in his assembly. But we are different. I took everyone from the assembly, the Golkar, the PDI, the PPP, the military and people from regional assemblies for my government (7). People are not used to that. Actually those who argue for democracy even criticize such a government. The Golkar was of course unhappy. They asked me why I was doing such a thing. But as I said, I am not the mandatory of the Golkar. I am the mandatory of the People’s assembly, and it is not the Golkar’s assembly. SB.- A lot of observers are saying that you cannot win the election in June. But from what you say, I understand that Golkar cannot win, but it seems not to concern you directly? BH.- Let me explain the basic principles of the Indonesian constitution to which we have to adhere. It is the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), an enlarged body of 750 members, that elects the President and gives him the mandate. A Vice-President is also elected at the same time. That is how I became Vice-President. The President as well as the Vice-President cannot be fired by the House of Representative (DPR), only by MPR. And the ground for dismissal is only if they have been making decisions against the Constitution or against the decisions made by the MPR. But the President cannot dissolve the DPR either. And such an assembly cannot act against the President, only the MPR, that gives him the mandate to implement all its decisions, can. Those decisions explicitly include the implementation of the five-year economic plan, the preparation of the new election and the new MPR as a mechanism of change of the President. The President cannot just deliver whatever he fancies. If he believes that, he deceives himself and will be fired by the MPR. To answer your question about Golkar and the election, it is not written in our constitution or in any decision from the MPR that to become the President, the mandatory of the MPR, he should be a member of the DPR or the MPR or a chairman of a party. The MPR can choose anyone from outside. Due to that fact, it is my conclusion that any person in that position must be loyal not to the ideas of a party but loyal to the ideas of the MPR. As I said he is not at the service of a party, but at the service of the Nation. That is a very different thing. SB.- However the President needs cabinet ministers acceptable to a majority of the DPR, I suppose? BH.- The President is given the right to form his cabinet, or to dismiss his cabinet. He cannot dismiss the Vice-President but he can dismiss the chief of Armed Forces. Any general is only there because of his signature (8). He can call the chief of staff of the Air Force, the chief of staff of the Army. He can call to account and ask why such and such things happened. People criticize my current ministers who have different backgrounds. But my government is in its own way efficient and pragmatic, otherwise how would you explain the changes since I took over? We had an inflation rate of 62% and one dollar would buy about 15,000 rupiah. Bank Indonesia told me that we had very little financial reserves (9) and that the food supply was limited. We were on the verge of hyper-inflation. Today, if we were not doers and not pragmatic how could we achieve on the inflation front, minus 0.28% in September, minus 0.08% in November? In December 98, because of Christmas it was too high, 1.42%. How is it that today one dollar is worth about 7,500 Rupiah, and not 20,000 as the people had predicted while I was Vice-President, if I were ever to become the president of the country? You have to remember that everyone was saying the dollar would go up and the rupiah would sink should I take the position vacated by Mr. Soeharto. The reality is totally different. Today we have an economic revival although, as I mentioned in my budget speech, the economy is far from normal. However, our stock market was basically a wreck when I assumed my position. Today, it is coming back. Is that possible by chance, as some would like to believe? I don’t think so. SB.- What was your first decision when you assumed power in May 1998? BH.- I told you that a constraint always creates another one. This is valid in any field. In the economy, it creates inefficiency. Inefficiency has a cost. What did I have in front of me? 99% of all the companies in my country are small and medium enterprises, cooperatives and households. Only 1% are large. I also know that 88% of the work-force is created by the 99%, and that the 1% employ 12% of the work-force. And it is the monetary problems of the 1% that has toppled the economy. Because of that the priority was to take care of the rupiah. We needed to make it a high quality currency. For that, you need a strong Central Bank that has to be like the Bundesbank, the Federal Reserve or the Banque de France. Our target must be a depreciation of, say, 1-2%, and because of the depreciation it will cause an inflation of maybe 5%, then the interest rate should be 8-9%. How to achieve that? As I said, with a strong monetary authority. Our first constraint was on Bank Indonesia. The constraint was the government. I split the Bank Indonesia (Central Bank) from the government (10). I cut it off immediately so that it would no longer be a matter of discussion. I told the members of the cabinet not to influence the Bank Indonesia in its dealings with the IMF and I told the Governor not to be influenced by anyone. I told him he has three years to create a respectable rupiah. Then I looked at the distribution sector and I broke it up. The principles are simple and elementary. That is what happened and by doing that, I started the relaxation process. To relax everything will lower the cost, in politics and in economics. SB.- What was wrong with the distribution system? BH.- Monopoly is wrong in essence (11). I had ample time to see what was wrong since I had been in there for a quarter of a century. But when I was a member of the old government, I was alone in my view. I was saying : "don’t subsidize companies who have a monopoly of any sort". I was told I was not an economist. There is no longer a monopoly of food supplies. And we must focus on our national economy, on our 99% economy which has been badly affected. It means for the time being that, in order to build a social safety net, we have to subsidize those small and medium size companies that employ 88% of the work-force. Of course, the goal is to get back in the shortest time to a sustained development path, but with a market-oriented economy and more democracy at all levels. SB.- Are you optimistic on the economic front? BH.- The economy should be better in the coming months. The political environment should also be better and social friction should ease. In any relaxation process, the pressure goes down in time. SB.- One of the key factors you have not mentioned is the problem of the ethnic Chinese. On the economic front, every financial analyst concluded that no foreign investments on a large scale will come back as long as the Chinese themselves have not started to invest again in Indonesia. Do you agree? BH.- I agree. SB.- What do you intend to do to alleviate the concern of this community? BH.- The handling of the present situation is critical. Let me say first that in my set of values, I make no difference between our people. The ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are Indonesian. There is no question about that. And one of the first things I did when I took my position was to remove from the identity card of an Indonesian the mention of his ethnicity. Before, the Chinese descendants had the word “Chinese” on their ID card. I find this disparaging. They are as Indonesian as I am. I provoked a lot of protest, but so what? I had to do it. The point is that the Chinese have been hijacked for political purposes and they have been misused by my predecessors and there are still people willing to misuse them. SB.- Can you do something publicly to emphasize further your point? BH.- I do. The other day, in my house, I was praying with the Chinese descendant community. They are Muslims. I also had at the same time people from the Aceh descendant community (12). I received forty people from that province because we have problems there. I want them to explain the situation to me. I want to understand. So I asked all of them to come so we can pray and break the fasting together (13). And they came. There we were: my family, the ethnic Chinese, the ethnic Aceh and I. And the one who preached was actually an ethnic Chinese. Don't think I am doing this just as a political gesture. European values are entrenched in my system, through my upbringing in Europe and I really want the people of Indonesia to understand that we are all part of the same country. I don’t want people to use ethnic origins as a political argument. SB.- The government has not published anything about the ethnic riots that have taken place in Jakarta and your critics say that it is because you have something to hide or people to protect. BH.- Of course, that is nonsense. What we have seen in May is not the face of Indonesia. We are still ascertaining what happened, who engineered it. We know it was engineered. That is all we know (14). As you mention, they have been using the Chinese ethnic to character-assassinate and to make a bad situation even worse. SB.- How come it takes so long to find out? BH.- Look at the problem of the alleged rapes. We had official reports from non-governmental organizations that 180 rapes were committed during the riots. We formed a commission which could only find 54. Based on that 54, only 15 had a witness. The others, we have no proof. And out of the 15, only 3 have been substantiated by medical doctors. That is the problem. I don’t have the full picture of what happened. I am not sure we will have it before the election. SB.- And if you have it, say, before the June election, would you use it to quell the criticism? BH.- That is a tough question. But, no, I won't use it. I am not allowed to destabilize further the country before the election. Even if I have the full picture and even names before the election, I will not take a public stand and take action at that stage. It will be a difficult decision to make, but it would be wrong to take any public action. SB.- Because it might create more factions, more arguments... BH.- Not only that. The immediate result would be to bring attention to the Chinese community again and it would be counterproductive for a fair election. Furthermore the losers might argue afterwards that they lost because of the brouhaha due to such action. It would be divisive rather than productive. But after the election, it will be different. SB.- The Chinese community might be under the spotlight again soon, and that is before the election with the recapitalization program of the banking sector, since most of the private banks are Chinese-owned banks. Some rumours are already spreading that the government should not bail out a rich community when there are so many poor. BH.- Statistics are political commodities. So people use them the way they want because they have an agenda. If people are arguing that the banks’ shareholders are Chinese, it is not a valid argument. Those people are Indonesian, whatever my political opponents might say. SB.- But in the newspapers, you will see Chinese in big characters and Indonesian in very small ones. BH.- Yes, because they have to sell papers, but it is not a valid point. SB.- We have very conflicting figures about poverty in Indonesia. The other day I read that more than 100 million Indonesian people were now on an income below the poverty level. Is that true? BH.- Statistics are just political commodities. SB.- Will you run for a new mandate as President at the end of this year? BH.- If the people want me to, I will do it. It would be a sin to refuse. It would be amoral just to leave them in the lurch because it is a challenging task. I am a religious man, and the other day, when I was reading my speech to present the budget in front of the DPR, something strange happened to me, I had prepared the speech carefully, I had read it several times and I thought it was alright. I went to the DPR in a good mood. There, everything was normal for a few minutes but suddenly, looking at the people sitting in front of me, listening quietly, I had this feeling that we had to thank God for what was happening here. My mind was wandering to where we were in May with all the doom surrounding everyone and everything, and how it was now. I was overcome by that feeling so much so that I stopped my speech and told the assembly that it is not an achievement of one will, of the government, but it is an achievement of the government through the people of Indonesia guided by God that we were there. We had to thank God. As I was mentioning that I became too emotional. I could feel it. Looking at the audience, I was aware that God had blessed these people and this assembly to overcome the problems and to prevent the implosion of the country into pieces. If that had happened this region would be the most de-stabilized and critically wounded in the world. The negative effect of more than 200 million people tearing each other apart would easily have unbalanced the 600 million people in this region. In spite of everything, we made it. It could not have been the work of just a man, just a government. Notes: 1.- The three parties were: Golongan Karya (Golkar), Indonesia Democratic Party (PDI), a federation of former Nationalist and Christian Parties and Development Unity Party (PPP), a federation of former Islamic parties. The Golkar enjoyed an absolute majority among the 400 elected representatives. Furthermore it had the absolute support of the 100 appointed military representatives in the House of Representatives. 2.- The House of Representatives is the legislative branch of the government. Its Indonesian name is Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat or DPR. It was made up of 500 members, 425 being elected and 75 military representatives being appointed. The DPR approved at the end of January a radical reform of the system. In June 1999, an election will be held to elect under a different format. Of the 550 representatives, only 38 will be appointed military representatives. The remaining members will be elected under a proportional-style election to the DPR and to regional parliaments. Civil servants who were obliged in the past to vote for Golkar today have to quit their job to join political parties. 3.- The People's Consultative Assembly is made up of the DPR plus 500 indirectly elected members. Its Indonesian name is Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat or MPR. It convenes every five years to elect the President and the Vice-President. Its format will be altered. The new MPR will be made up of 750 delegates, 550 members being the DPR representatives plus 200 indirectly elected members. It will elect a new President and Vice-President on December 1999. 4.- The Indonesian government has set up a body to select political parties in elections. Parties must have branches in nine of the country's 27 provinces and at least half of the districts in those areas. The worries are that many new parties have been established along religious lines. There are currently thirty-three new Muslim-based parties established on platforms which range from moderate to fundamental. At least one Catholic party has been established. So far the sole party established along ethnic line is the Indonesian Chinese Reform Party. 5.- The reconciliation committee is known as the Ciganjur Group, or the Ciganjur Four. It consists of Abdurrahmann Wahid (see interview in this issue) who proposed it, Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party, Amien Rais, leader of National Mandate Party (known as PAN) and the Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono X, whose regal privileges are enshrined in the constitution of the country since his family keeps the title of governor of Yogyakarta which is a special region. 6.- Golkar controlled at some stage more than 80% of the DPR. 7.- The current cabinet, called the Reform Development Cabinet consists of 36 ministers (instead of 38 for the last Soeharto government). Only four ministers were Golkar members. Since then, Adi Sasono has left Golkar, leaving the party with only three ministers. The Armed Forces (ABRI) have six portfolios, the PDI, one and the PPP, two. Twenty ministers have no affiliation to any party. 8.- President Habibie implies here that the major reshuffle that took place in January 1999 could not have gone through without his explicit support. Whether he was instrumental in the reshuffle or merely approved it is a matter for speculation but, making his point, he reminded me of President Jiang Zemin who forcefully explained to me (it was just a few days after Deng's death) how he had become the Chairman of the Central Military Commission at a time when his authority was supposedly challenged. The most significant event was the nomination of a Christian officer, Mj. General Johnny Lumintang as Deputy Army Chief of Staff, a position which puts him in line at nș2 or nș3. Early in his presidency, President Habibie agreed to the nomination of Maj. Gen. Johnny Lumintang as special-forces commander, a powerful position, but less important than the position of Deputy Army Chief of Staff, which was held by Soeharto's loyalists, only to be forced to replace him within hours by a Muslim officer. This time, the nomination was not challenged by anyone. Another important appointment outside the normal pattern has been the nomination of a Protestant, Lt. Gen Luhut Panjaitan, as the next ambassador to Singapore. 9.- The foreign reserves are US$14.3 billion. Total foreign debt is about US$138 billion. 10.- However the laws governing Bank Indonesia have not been changed to make such separation a legal principle. 11.- The trade in basic commodities such as wheat, soybeans, sugar and rice was handled by the State Logistics Agency known as BULOG. The Agency was a way to subsidize politically sensitive crops and to tax at the consumer level a population that otherwise paid no tax at all. Hence, for example, the price of sugar was 58% above world prices. With time, BULOG became a source of patronage funds. In January 1998, Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the IMF, announced that BULOG's monopoly will be limited solely to rice and that the existing monopoly over import and distribution of wheat flour and sugar will be eliminated and that domestic trade in all agricultural products will be fully deregulated. However, the removal of established monopolies is a complicated affair and it will not be done the way the IMF hoped since part of BULOG's responsibilities will be passed at the cooperative levels and at the provincial levels. 12.- Aceh is one of the two special regions of Indonesia (the other one being Yogyakarta) and therefore is not administered as the 24 provinces of the country. Aceh is at the extreme West point of Sumatra. The region has been wrecked by a low-key independence war for years. 14.- Suharto resigned on May 21st, 1998. On May 12, there was a demonstration in Trisakti University campus in Jakarta. As the protest was winding down, four students were killed by bullets. During the next two days, Jakarta was torn apart, most likely by design. Stores and homes of ethnic Chinese were targeted and burned or damaged beyond repair while neighbouring houses and buildings were left untouched. It is said that 1,000 people died although that number might be greatly exaggerated (however one shopping centre was torched with customers inside). Rapes were reported (see comments from President Habibie on the subject).
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