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Web-only Exclusives
November 30, 2000

From Our Correspondent: Hirohito and the War
A conversation with biographer Herbert Bix

From Our Correspondent: A Rough Road Ahead
Bad news for the Philippines - and some others

From Our Correspondent: Making Enemies
Indonesia needs friends. So why is it picking fights?

home home millennium century 1999

DECEMBER 31, 1999 - JANUARY 7, 2000 VOL. 25 NO. 52


photo illustration by Manodh Premaratne
Insider- Outsider
B.J. Habibie was an unlikely and much-criticized president. But he helped make Indonesia a better place
By JOSE MANUEL TESORO Jakarta

Oct. 14, 1999 was the day B.J. Habibie argued for his place in history. That day, he gave his lengthy accountability speech to the policy-making People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), defending his record as Indonesia's president for 17 months. Over the next few days, Habibie sat quietly and listened attentively as each of 11 MPR factions delivered their critical appraisal of his self-appraisal. Then, in the time allocated to him, he laboriously rebutted them, point by point. Why? Because he thought people were actually weighing the content of his administration, not its character. Yet backroom wheeling and dealing were taking place in and around the MPR to forge a future without him. In the end, Habibie's speech was narrowly rejected 355 to 322, implying rejection of the man himself. Habibie was forced to withdraw from the presidential race. "I have done everything within my capabilities," he said, "but it was not enough."

    1999: THE YEAR
The Year
A mass of surprises from the unruly masses

Newsmakers:
• Habibie How the grand plans of an Indonesian president fell before the unpredictable whims of voters
• Son Masayoshi The founder of Japan's Softbank empire shows the online way to zillionairehood
• Wan Azizah A wife-turned-oppositionist lends voice to Malaysia's reform hopes
• Li Hongzhi The qigong master who gives nightmares to China's rulers and inspiration to millions of followers
• Pokémon From video game to kiddie craze, a Nintendo original captivates a world of young minds

Deaths
Final farewell to Morita Akio, Eugenio Lopez and other figures who left the scene

Personalities
Jackie Chan, Imelda Marcos, Rupert Murdoch are among the big names that caught our eye

Innovations
Palm V, iBook, AirPort and other products that presage the post-PC era

Lows
Recognizing outstanding acts of underachievement
• Dear Santa What Bill Gates really wants for Christmas

Movies
Superb cinema from around the region
• The Two Samurai Kurosawa is dead; long live Kurosawa

In & Out
Trends here today, gone yesterday

Books
The year's best written by Asians or about Asia

It was not enough because, in too many ways, B.J. Habibie was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. As political scientist Indria Samego, one of his advisers, puts it: "He wanted legitimacy based on performance. But he played in an environment that does not accept rationality. You are legitimate if you have an emotional relationship." Such as that wielded by Habibie's divided but potent opposition: Abdurrahman Wahid linked with traditional, rural Java Islam; Megawati Sukarnoputri with Sukarno nationalism; Amien Rais with urban Muslims. This year, they all turned out winners. Habibie was the loser. He thought performance mattered. In Indonesia, it doesn't always.

Far more unkind than kind things have been said about president Habibie. Among the worst epithets thrown at him was that he was incompetent, corrupt, a clown. Even his staunchest supporters relied on a negative to spin a positive. They would say their biggest frustration with Habibie was that he was politically naïve. But maybe it wasn't just spin to cast Habibie as an untraditional politician. Both his victories and defeats in 1999 were symptomatic of the scientist, the thinker, the visionary, the one whose head is so far in the clouds he's not sure where his feet are on the ground. Not the strategist or the demagogue or the conspirator or any of the figures that prosper in Indonesian politics. Habibie tried to rule rationally what is still largely an irrational country.

His expertise as a technocrat was all he had. Habibie did not have a power base. That made him extremely vulnerable. Here he was, a man almost European (born 1936, he had lived in Germany for 21 years), placed by history and chance on the throne of a Javanese court. There were intrigues all around him, especially as many didn't think he could last, or didn't want him to last. He was there not because the masses (or Suharto or the military) wanted him there, but because the Constitution said so - as vice president when Suharto resigned, Habibie could not help but be president.

The most controversial issue of his tenure was East Timor. On Jan. 26, Habibie raised the option of giving the province independence if it refused a special autonomy package. Thus he seeded the clouds for the horrific storm that broke there after the Aug. 30 referendum. In his mind, it was the most sensible solution to a two-decades-old problem. The territory was both a drain on scarce resources and a foreign-policy millstone. But he was too naïve to realize the impact this "rational" decision would have on the psyche of pro-integrationists. And too naïve to realize you had to keep a tight rein on the military. Being commander-in-chief does not automatically mean being in command. The Bank Bali scandal illustrated another of his failings. He thought he could hand over a task to his aides and trust they would do it well, just like an engineer, just like a manager. He wasn't schooled in Indonesian politics. He didn't realize what abuses family and friends were committing in fighting for his re-election.

Habibie's successes were not in practical politics (East Timor, his own re-election) but in the realm of forms and models. Habibie's biggest accomplishment, says Samego, was "to desacrelize the institution of the presidency." When Suharto was in charge, he couldn't be criticized. You couldn't make a move without his say-so. You couldn't talk of a future without him. Habibie, because he was so eccentric, so candid, so open, did away with all that. On Feb. 1, parliament passed revisions of three key political laws governing elections, political parties and the composition of the national and local legislatures. In June were the landmark elections that those new laws made possible: 48 parties participated and 93% of registered voters turned out in what was a victory for democracy, if ever there was one since Suharto stepped down. In September, parliament passed a new law taking away government control of the press, an important step toward securing the media freedoms that had developed since 1998. The kind of freedoms that exposed Bank Bali and other scandals, in fact.

That's Habibie's legacy: free politics and a free press. For Habibie, it wasn't Machiavellian machinations or strategic diplomacy. What mattered were principles. In that sense, he was the right man in the right place at the right time.

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