After decades of official supression, Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority is now able to openly celebrate the Lunar New Year but discrimination remains for the rest of the time.

In the spirit of reforms that followed the resignation of Indonesia's autocratic president Suharto in May 1998, the government revoked a ban on the public display of Chinese culture and religion that had been in place since 1967.

The red, gold and orange colors of the Chinese New Year festival festoon major commercial districts of cities across the archipelago while congratulatory messages fill newspapers, television and radio as the new year approaches.

Accounting for about three to four percent of the some 214 millions inhabitants of the world's largest Muslim nation, ethnic Chinese have remained practically aliens in a country where their ancestors had settled generations ago.

"Under the Dutch civil registry law, we were labelled "eastern foreigners" and as the Indonesian republic took on the laws of the Dutch, this official, legal segregation has remained," said senior rights lawyer Frans Hendra Winarta, himself of Chinese descent.

He said this "state-sanctioned discrimination" was reflected in the de facto obligation of ethnic Chinese to possess the "Letter Proving the Citizenship of the Republic of Indonesia" (SKBRI).

It is needed to apply for various official documents such as identity cards, passports and marriage papers.

Suharto, who imposed the ban on Chinese culture but was not adverse to using ethnic Chinese to enrich his coffers, scrapped the document in 1996, a move reinforced by President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid in 1999.

"But in the real world, the SKBRI is still being required for various purposes in the formal and informal bureaucracy," Winarta said. More than 50 laws and regulations remain that discriminate against ethnic Chinese, he said.

Thung Yu Lan, a social researcher at the state Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI), has kept her Chinese name despite the pressure to adopt an Indonesian-sounding one during the decades under founding president Sukarno and Suharto. She said the problem was not just about discriminatory laws.

"One can issue thousands of new laws and rules, or revoke an equal number of laws, nothing would change much. It is a matter of rearrangging our nation building," Thung said.

She said that the more privileged status of ethnic Chinese under the Dutch, and the economic success of the community, has only strengthened jealousy.

The government, Thung said, has also preferred to avoid the sensitive issues of ethnic groups and religions. "Both ethnicity and religions are major elements of the life of the society and as long as theses are not touched, do not expect much change in discriminatory attitudes and practices," she said.

Thung still welcome the government decision to make the Chinese new year a public holiday. "It is, in the least, a recognition of the existance of the ethnic Chinese community in the country." But she said that attitudes towards ethnic Chinese remained basically unchanged, forged into the nation's psyche by decades or even centuries of segregational policies under the Dutch colonial administration and the following Indonesian governments. "The difference may only be that while before it [the discrimination] tended to be vulgar, now it is softer," she said.