The Voice of Jusuf Wanandi

The Jakarta Post | Mon, 12/22/2008 6:10 PM

Jusuf Wanandi is still speaking his mind, and he still has dreams. Jamil Maidan Flores profiles the business tycoon.

The voice. That’s what Jusuf Wanandi’s friends call him.

His is a loud voice that speaks passionately of things he believes in. It speaks of what the world and the Asia-Pacific region could be. Of the disarray in the Indonesian economy, with 104 million Indonesians languishing below the poverty line, and what should be done about it.

It speaks of a man’s frustrations with the country that he loves, but it also speaks of hope that the Indonesian dream may yet come true.

It takes courage to wield so loud a voice. More than once, it has angered the powerful. But men of power have also listened to it, and because they listened, have used their power wisely.

Today at The Jakarta Post office where he is a member of the Board of Directors, the voice reminisces about momentous events. Of a coup that fizzled in October 1965. Of how he and other young activists of the Catholic Students Union helped topple a charismatic founding president, who mesmerized a nation with his oratory, made a mess of the economy and then crumbled into a fleck in the dustbin of history.

And how, in place of the dethroned, rose a new president who was the exact opposite: a self-effacing son of the soil whose public speaking style could cure insomnia. Yet this one understood the economy and had a taste for a good business deal.

Wanandi recalls that after the political tumult of the mid 1960s, he wanted to go back to the academe. He wanted to teach law again. To read, write and study. That was his idea of fun and personal fulfillment.

But Gen. Ali Moertopo, the personal assistant to the new president, Soeharto, had other ideas. “Why do you have to go back?” he told Wanandi. “Why don’t you just join my staff?”

Then Moertopo added, “It’s outside the government but we are developing Indonesia politically.” It was the siren call of politics, and irresistible.

Once more Wanandi was immersed in politics. Now a member of the legislature, he had a hand in reshaping and consolidating Golkar, the working group that helped Soeharto run the government. He helped mold it into a political machine that would contest the national election of 1971 against an array of established parties. Golkar won 62 percent of the vote in July 1971.

What next? In September of that same year, he and a small circle of friends established the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the first think tank in Indonesia. The purpose was to “think of the future of Indonesia.” That meant long-term planning.

In the small circle that made up the early CSIS were Indonesians who were trained in Indonesia and those trained abroad. All were anti-communist, all worked for the downfall of Sukarno and the ascendancy of Soeharto. Among them was his younger brother Sofyan Wanandi.

Looming in the background, not too invisibly, were the generals Ali Moertopo and Soejono Humardhani, political and economic assistant respectively to then president Soeharto. They were the guarantors that the CSIS would not turn against the president.

Like all think-tanks, the CSIS was research oriented but it soon assumed other roles: it became the place for people of different persuasions to meet one another and get a hearing for their views. Thus conferences, public lectures, seminars and workshops became its regular activities. Later it assumed still another function: educating the public through books and magazines.

Meanwhile Indonesia was embarking on a period of economic dynamism. But the surging prosperity had ominous undercurrents.

In early May 1984, Moertopo called Wanandi to his office. “Kie,” he said, addressing Wanandi by his Chinese name. “A dangerous ball game is going on. His children are growing and they are getting all these projects. This is bad and dangerous for himself and the whole nation.” He was referring to the children of the president.

He then asked Wanandi to go and see Gen. L. B. “Benny” Moerdani.

“We have to control that. And the only one now inside the system is Benny. Ask him to see to it that that the children do not go overboard, otherwise this regime cannot last.”

He did see Gen. Moerdani, then he flew to Honolulu to assume his first term as member of the board of governors of the East-West Center. He had been there only a week when news came of Ali Moertopo’s death.

The loss of Moertopo was emblematic of the fading away of the Generation ’45 of Indonesian generals.

These generals came from among the people. They had other professions and callings before they became military men. The range and scope of their minds were broad. “You can discuss things with them, argue with them. They listened and were open to suggestion,” he recalls.

Not so the military leaders who came after them. These were trained in the military academy and they had been in the military all their lives after that. “They became the Praetorian Guard of Soeharto,” he says, “the instrument of his repression. They listened to no one.”

Even more worrisome to him was that there were no new national leaders on the horizon. Soeharto was human; he could not possibly be around forever. There was an increasingly urgent need for a new team, a new generation of leaders for Indonesia.

And so, after 20 years of the New Order, he wrote a memo to the president proposing the training and preparation of a new team, “because society has become so complex as a result of Soeharto’s successes in national development.”

The leader did not take kindly to that memo. He could only read it as the first intimation of a bid to oust him. He would have nothing to do with Wanandi and the CSIS after that. And Wanandi suddenly found himself in the ranks of the political opposition.

Today when he makes an assessment of Soeharto’s legacy, he says: “He built the economy for 20 years and then damaged what he built in the next 10 years.”

His tragedy, says Wanandi, was two-fold. “Corruption and failure to prepare the country for a new leadership.”

Now 70, Jusuf Wanandi has not mellowed. You see more vintage than age on his face. He has a gentleman’s zest for paintings, classical music, the theater, wine, tennis. And the cuisine of Padang.

Padang was where he grew up listening to his father in some coffee shop dissecting the politics of the day. There he felt the first stirrings of the political animal in him.

But none of his four sons went into politics. They all went into business, which tells him something about the future of the country.

“I am more optimistic about the new generation,” he says. “They can take care of themselves. During our time we had to be political animals. But today the struggle is economic. The need is to be globally competitive.”

Maybe the economic problems of the country will be solved, if the next generation works hard at it. But that, he says, will not be enough. “At the end of the day,” he asks, “where is your social conscience?”

If a nation becomes globally competitive by forgetting about social justice, it has achieved nothing. It has merely sold its soul. Considering the dismal state of education in the country today, he sees a long and hard struggle for the nation to keep its soul.

Yet he remains optimistic. “We have also achieved something,” he says. “We have found the right formula of democracy and decentralization. These will keep our country together. There is a more widespread sense of ownership of this country now. There isn’t any more Javanese imperialism. We are better off now, at least politically.”

Because it has got at least its politics right, Indonesia, to Jusuf Wanandi, remains the possible dream. And for as long as he has a voice, he will speak out loud and passionately of that dream and how it can be attained.

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