Hoping for the best

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.