It was dark and humid when I arrived at the home of Megawati Sukarnoputri in the Jakarta suburbs. We stood for a while in the living room under a picture of her father, Sukarno, the man who led Indonesia to independence from the Dutch in 1949 and ran the country until deposed by Suharto in 1967. Megawati has not inherited her father's looks; she has the appearance of a stocky, round-faced housewife. But she has inherited his name-and that is the extent of her political programme. She wants to be all things to all people, like her father, who once said: "I have made myself the meeting place of all... ideologies."
Megawati is a democrat, but a democrat Indonesian-style: "We have a unique culture, we have formal and informal leaders... our culture is multi-dimensional." When I met her back in 1997, her answers to my questions were clumsy and without substance. That was before the Asian economic crisis, which brought down Suharto last year, and before the East Timor referendum and subsequent violence. Now, barring the unexpected, she is poised to replace BJ Habibie as president, having won the most votes (but no overall majority) in the June 1999 elections. But the unexpected is never barred in Indonesia. Further, the election of the president takes place not in the Megawati-dominated parliament but in the People's Consultative Assembly, where the army has a fixed number of seats.
It was in order not to disrupt this delicate democratic transition that the west (especially the US) was initially restrained in its reaction to the militia violence in East Timor. But if the army allows Megawati to become president, the west should be under no illusions about her. She is a democratic reformer on the side of the poor, but she strongly opposed self-determination in East Timor. She is a nationalist.
By sheer force of personality Sukarno succeeded (for a while) in unifying a fractious populace of 200m inhabitants of 17,000 islands, belonging to several ethnic groups (40 per cent Javanese, 16 per cent Sundanese, 12 per cent Malay) and religions (87 per cent Muslims, 10 per cent Christians). He wanted a "big tent," in which suspicious soldiers and socialist students, restless Muslims (Javanese) and rich Christians (Chinese), could all live together. After 1949 he consolidated his hold over the archipelago by driving the Dutch out of western New Guinea. He stopped short of East Timor, but Suharto had fewer inhibitions about third world imperialism, and grabbed it in 1975.
Megawati opposed the vote in East Timor, but she has now said the result must be respected. Will the army back her? She has some army supporters who see her as a nationalist. General Wiranto, Jakarta's strongman, was Suharto's adjutant, later his defence minister. But last year he persuaded the old man to go. He did to Suharto what the latter had done to Sukarno. This must have pleased Megawati. When Wiranto then sacked Suharto's son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, the youngest two-star general, he further endeared himself with Megawati, because Subianto had led an operation against her party's offices in 1996. Wiranto and Megawati could probably live with each other-but which will be the formal and which the informal leader?
