Hoping for the best

By this evening, President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid may or may not have made real the threat which he has been holding over the head of legislators in both the House of Representatives and the People's Consultative Assembly.

Six p.m. is supposed to be the deadline Gus Dur has given legislators to accept a compromise settlement of his current political fracas with politicians of practically all political factions in both houses. But, as so often before, with Gus Dur nothing can be taken for granted. Uncertainty seems to be one of the President's major weapons to keep his enemies on their toes.

The most recent news from the presidential palace had it on Thursday that the beleaguered president might be retreating from his plan to issue a decree to impose a state of emergency and an edict to dissolve the national legislature. After all, according to a presidential spokesman, a compromise was in sight and the conflict might yet be resolved amicably.

On the face of it, it may indeed look as if Gus Dur, and the Indonesian people with him, have some reason to be optimistic. In the past week or so, the President has been seeing two of the most important leaders of the opposing camp -- Akbar Tandjung of the Golkar Party and Hamzah Haz of the United Development Party (PPP) -- presumably to work out such a compromise.

Both those party politicians eventually admitted they had held talks with the President and Coordinating Minister for Political, Social and Security Affairs Agum Gumelar, with the apparent objective of working out a compromise in the form of a clear division of powers between himself and his Vice President Megawati Soekarnoputri.

All this sounds quite hopeful. To many Indonesians, though, it must at this stage look as though they have been there before. Talk about a power-sharing scheme between the President and Vice President is in fact nothing new. Such a scheme was initially, and in good faith, accepted by the Vice President. As it turned out, however, this did not work as expected because, it was said, the President went back on his word and in reality continued to keep all his presidential powers to himself.

Considering that the President has been successful in lobbying two major figures of the opposition, he may have some reason for optimism. Whatever one may say or think about the move, it must be said that he has been quite shrewd in his choice of whom to talk to.

Golkar controls the second-largest block of votes in the legislature while PPP, though lagging rather far behind Golkar and Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan), is the third-largest faction in the legislature. That being the case, the others -- including PDI Perjuangan and the Reform Faction -- will at the very least have some careful calculating to do before they can reject a compromise outright.

Nevertheless, these latter two major opposition factions have made it quite clear that no compromises are possible at this stage of the proceedings. Neither can it be taken for granted that Gus Dur would go along with the kind of compromise Akbar and Hamzah seem to have in mind as it would, in practice, turn him into a mere figurehead president.

So, in the final analysis, very much will depend on what positions Megawati and Gus Dur himself will take in all this. To put it briefly, not much seems to have changed, at least at this stage. Indonesians, it seems, will be asked to bear with their quarreling political elite and endure all this uncertainty a while longer -- unless, of course, some unexpected developments occur today and things get settled, hopefully for the better.