Gus Dur suffers ignominious defeat

Gus Dur suffers ignominious defeat

John Mcbeth, The Straits Times/Asia News Network, Singapore

In the final decade of president Soeharto's rule, Abdurrahman
Wahid emerged as a towering figure on the Indonesian stage,
championing democratization, religious tolerance and moderation.
But ill health and even democracy, when it finally came to
Indonesia, have not been kind to the blind cleric, who later went
on to parlay 15 years as head of the 40 million-strong Muslim
organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) into an ill-fated presidency
that left deep scars on Abdurrahman and his country.

The final blow came on Dec 1. In what may spell his end as a
public figure of stature, the man best known as Gus Dur stumbled
numbly from the NU Congress after the organization he had ruled
for so long spurned his single-minded campaign to take charge of
NU's powerful 11-man syuriah governing body -- and then handed
his bitter rival, Hasyim Muzadi, a second five-year term as NU
chairman.

Popular cleric Sahal Mahfudz, who also heads the Indonesian
Ulema Council (MUI), was re-elected unanimously as the syuriah
chairman after Abdurrahman was ousted in the first round of
voting at the five-day congress in Solo, Central Java. Sahal's
win meant the former president could not use the position to
block the re-election of Hasyim, who had defied Abdurrahman by
standing as running mate to failed incumbent Megawati
Soekarnoputri in the presidential elections.

Muslim scholars say they doubt Abdurrahman will recover from
what has been an immense blow to his influence and, perhaps more
importantly, to his pride. 'This was such a massive win by both
Sahal and Hasyim, no one can seriously argue it was purely the
result of money politics,' said Australian National University's
Greg Fealy, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the NU. 'Delegates
were fearful of what Gus Dur might do if he won power again
within the organization.'

Uncomfortable with the way the NU has been sucked deeper into
politics since the onset of the so-called reformation era in
1998, congress delegates later voted to revoke a thinly disguised
directive, issued before the 1999 general election, binding NU
members to support the newly formed National Awakening Party
(PKB). Although its base remains largely rooted in East Java, PKB
came third in that election, behind Megawati's Indonesian
Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P) and the former ruling
Golkar party.

In more recent years, Abdurrahman -- the party's chief patron
-- has sown confusion in PKB ranks in his determination to unseat
Hasyim, whose lackluster performance has not won him many
admirers either. 'Everyone can see the utter mess that Wahid has
made of the party, freezing or sacking branches, forcing out
rivals and unilaterally overturning democratically made
decisions,' said Fealy. 'The disillusionment with him, if not the
outright exasperation at his behavior within his home
constituency, is now exposed for all to see.' What remains to be
seen now is whether the PKB board begins to show more resolve in
opposing his arbitrary decision-making.

Abdurrahman has threatened to establish a splinter faction of
NU, but even he seems to acknowledge he does not have the
strength to go through with it. Hasyim's post-election call for
unity has already borne fruit, with several senior pro-
Abdurrahman clerics accepting his re-election and saying they
will not support any moves to set up a breakaway organization.
Still, damage has been done. 'This congress has diminished the
spirit of our brotherhood,' Sahal declared at the end. 'I promise
to consolidate support from all figures to settle this internal
conflict.'

It has also diminished Abdurrahman, whose fall from grace can
be traced to the onset of total blindness and two strokes he
suffered before he outmaneuvered Megawati for the presidency in
October 1999. The Asia Foundation's Indonesian director, Douglas
Ramage, remembers him in his glory days, particularly on one
night in 1992, when he publicly defended his ground-breaking
visit to Israel. 'You saw the best of him then,' he recalled
sadly. 'It was the way he took on his critics based on an issue
of principle, the way he linked progressive interpretations of
Islam with the imperatives of political secular democracy.'

Today, he is only a pale shadow of the visionary and
intellectual who cut such an impressive figure in the 1980s and
early 1990s. Perhaps the most unappealing thing about him these
days is his willingness to engage in demeaning political
mudfights, demonstrating a mean-spirited and vindictive side for
anyone he thinks has done him wrong.

The Dec. 1 congress seems to show the NU may have at last
moved beyond Abdurrahman, a process that probably began with his
impeachment as president in July 2001. However, much will depend
on who Hasyim and Sahal choose for the 11-man syuriah and
executive boards and whether they are prepared to usher in a new
generation of officials, particularly from among the younger
activists who sympathized with Abdurrahman's arguments that
Hasyim had politicized the NU. That same charge could be leveled
at the ex-president himself, of course, which only goes to show
how difficult it will be to prise the organization away from
politics. After all, a number of senior clerics are already
lining up to contest next year's first round of direct elections
of mayors and district chiefs.

Abdurrahman has always had his quirky side. Back in the early
1990s, he would startle interviewers by dropping a juicy, but
hardly credible, piece of gossip into what up to then had been a
perfectly logical discourse on the political issue of the day.
That side of him bubbled more forcefully to the surface after his
strokes -- as did his increasingly erratic behavior. That all
culminated in his efforts to get the military to declare a state
of emergency and freeze Parliament in February 2001, the final
act that precipitated his humiliating impeachment five months
later.

The former president's critics take no pleasure in his demise,
saying he has missed an opportunity to become a guru negara, an
elder statesman with the respect and authority to act as the
nation's moral compass. But they are confident his legacy of
pluralism and moderation will remain, a still-dependable bulwark
against fundamentalism in the world's largest Muslim nation. It
will live on through the Wahid Institute, opened just a few
months ago with a mission to ensure interpretations of the Koran
are left to the individual. And it will live on through the NU
itself. In one of its final acts, the congress last week re-
affirmed its opposition to all forms of extremism.