Keeping An Angry Eye On Indonesia

Christianto Wibisono might have been sitting at Indonesia's head table. In the spring of 1998, then President B.J. Habibie offered to back him for a seat in the national legislature. A year later, the next President, Abudurrahman Wahid, asked if he wanted to be Finance Minister. Wibisono, a political scientist who headed an influential Jakarta financial research agency, had to decline: He had already fled his homeland.

Indeed, instead of helping Indonesia recover from the trauma of economic collapse and political upheaval, Wibisono has become one of the Jakarta regime's most persistent gadflies. An ethnic Chinese, he is now the informal head and chief organizer of a group of academics, professionals, and business people--numbering in the thousands--who left Indonesia after extensive attacks against the Chinese in the May, 1998, rioting. He and his fellow expatriates are waiting until the government puts a stop to continuing harassment against the Chinese. "I will not return to Indonesia unless there's a trial on the May incident and other crimes against humanity by the Nazi-type regime," vows Wibisono.