A protest to God

Could this be Gus Dur's final maneuver? To many people who read Tuesday's newspapers or watched the news on TV, it must have sounded like it. Most ordinary people, after all, would have found it rather irreverent to publicly take their protest to God for what was essentially their own failure to resolve their worldly problems -- unless the situation looked hopeless.

To many Indonesians, President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid's words on Monday were nothing short of shocking, especially since they came from a respected and acknowledged Muslim scholar and a man who was once chairman of the country's largest Islamic organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama.

"Frankly speaking," the President said on Monday, "I am now lodging a protest with God. I am protesting because everyone says there should be no state of emergency, but those same people are also closing the door to compromise. They are all lousy!"

Frankly speaking, too, Gus Dur's frustration over the situation he is facing is both easy to understand and to forgive, even though it could be argued that he could have long since chosen the one way out of his current problems that was both obvious and elegant. That is, to accept the fact that he had lost his credibility and voluntarily step down.

Why, under the circumstances, he insists on staying on as President, is everyone's question. He is hardly able to see and seems to be totally dependent on others -- who, it is said, are mostly members of his own family and trusted confidants. Considering his high standing among prodemocracy activists before he became President, many people believe that he could have taken the right decision long ago, had he listened to the right people from the beginning.

But be that as it may, it seems that now he has been driven into a corner, Gus Dur feels that he must use each and every opportunity to defend his position and attack his enemies, which unfortunately will not only lead to more mistakes, but to his aggravating the situation even further. Monday's statement, for example, was out place, both in choice of platform and of content. The President aired his pent-up frustrations in an address to participants of a short course given by the National Resilience Institute -- not usually a platform for attacking political enemies, but one for making erudite policy statements.

As it was, Gus Dur attacked even the institution that he was addressing, accusing it of meddling in politics and of "95 percent" of its lecturers being against him. The President once again warned of outrage on the part of his supporters, should the special session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), slated to be held in August, impeach him.

Pointing to recent events in Sampang, Madura, where local people torched the local legislative council building after news spread that the House of Representatives had decided in May to proceed with its censure of the President, Abdurrahman repeated his warning that the same might happen to the MPR building in Jakarta.

It is of course tragic for this nation that Gus Dur has not lived up to the public's expectations of him as a champion of tolerance, democracy and plurality. Furthermore, warnings of possible violence came not only from the President, but were once again voiced by members of his camp on Monday. We can only hope that Gus Dur and all those who support him will still come to see reason and let the democratic process take its course.

That could still happen if Gus Dur decided to step down at the last moment. The possibility of that actually happening is not that great, but with President Abdurrahman Wahid, one must always be prepared to expect the unexpected.