Tokyo – US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the lack of public participation in Indonesia's government aggravated the effect of the Asian financial crisis.

"We do not fully understand the causes of the financial crisis," Albright said.

"Not every country that was hard hit is authoritarian, not every country that escaped is a democracy," Albright said in a speech at Sophia University here.

"And yet in democracies like Thailand and South Korea, newly-elected governments have been able to work with a clean slate, in a climate of openness and with the legitimacy to call for shared crisis," she said.

"Indonesia has had a harder time, at least in part because it lacks similar public participation in decision-making."