Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they remain the same. This unpleasant truth reared its ugly head once again in President Bacharuddin Habibie's interview with the Sunday Morning Post on August 30, headlined, 'Be realistic about rapes'. The man who loudly professes to be a 'true-blooded democrat', and who only two weeks ago denounced the barbaric attacks on Chinese women during the racial riots in Indonesia, now says that he has no evidence that any such rapes did take place - because nobody has come to see him about it. The week before last, his military 'intelligence' chief claimed that Internet accounts of gang rapes were fabricated. Mr Habibie should take his own advice and be 'realistic'. Does he seriously expect victims of racially motivated sexual assaults, some (allegedly) involving the armed forces, to be foolish enough to come forward to talk to him, an Indonesian politician previously known for anything but racial fairness and equality, and patron of the armed forces? And does he know anything about the trauma suffered by rape victims, especially in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation? As an academic, I would have found his professions of 'objectivity' laughable, were it not for the tragic nature of the atrocities involved. 'As an intellectual' and 'as a scientist', he says he can only believe what he 'sees'. One can only be thankful that his brand of intellectualism and scientific inquiry has not infected the intellectual community as a whole, or else much of modern science as we know it, and many other fields of knowledge, would vanish overnight. Enough details of the 'alleged' rapes, including grisly pictures, have been made known to human rights groups and independent bodies, and disseminated over the Internet and mass media, for anyone with an open mind to believe that they did take place. But sadly, there will always be people who - through prejudice and moral bankruptcy - claim that all this is a 'conspiracy', just as there were those who maintained that the Holocaust was a conspiracy. Mr Habibie's protestations of Indonesian society's 'peace and love for the ethnic Chinese' are disingenuous beyond belief. Surely he is old enough to remember the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Indonesians in the late 1960s? Or the racial riots and persecutions that have flared up from time to time in the last few decades? Why does he think tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese have fled Indonesia recently, some losing their entire livelihoods? Mr Habibie condemns the term 'Chinese Indonesians' as 'insulting and embarrassing'. Their counterparts in free and civilised societies are proud to go by such names as 'Chinese Americans' and 'African Americans', because they have a sense of respect for their own and each other's culture and heritage, while remaining loyal to the same country. It is too easy to put the blame for the recent atrocities solely on the Indonesians who committed them. (Even then, none of them has been apprehended, let alone prosecuted, and none is likely to). But in the larger perspective, the fact that brutal persecutions of ethnic Chinese Indonesians have persisted over such a long span of time and over such a wide geographical area, is an indication that the problem is much more pervasive than that. Native Indonesians would not forgive or accept their Chinese countrymen for working so much harder and achieving so much more success than they do - not through any privileges but quite the opposite, in spite of all their handicaps. Unless there is a fundamental change of ethos, and a willingness to bring the criminals to justice, Mr Habibie's promise to 'take care that this will never happen again' is completely hollow. TONY HUNG Sha Tin