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| PICKING A PRESIDENT | |
 October 20, 1999 
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Indonesia's legislature chose Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid as the country's next president, passing over popular favorite Megawati Sukarnoputri and sitting president B.J. Habibie. Three people who know Wahid discuss the situation after a background report. |
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RAY SUAREZ: For more we get the views from three people who know Abdurrahman Wahid, the newly elected president of Indonesia. William Liddle is a professor at Ohio State University specializing in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Sidney Jones is executive director of Human Rights Watch Asia -- she lived and worked in Indonesia and has been going there often over the past 20 years. And Jeffrey Winters is an associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University. Well, Jeffrey Winters, how did it happen? This was a man who, up until a couple of days ago, wasn't even running for president. And just a few moments ago we saw him being sworn in. |
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| Only partly democratic | ||||||||||||||||||||
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JEFFREY WINTERS: It's a partial victory for democracy. I mean there's no doubt that today, October 20, 1999, the new order is finally finished, and Indonesia has had an election and they've gone through the constitutional process. There's no doubt that it is a democratic step forward. But it is a diluted one in the sense that -- and we saw it with the anger in the streets -- in the sense that there's a disconnect between what the people expected and what they hoped, the direct sentiment of demanding change and demanding someone like Megawati, and what happened in that assembly, where the opportunities for bringing in all kinds of interests and groups who don't necessarily represent people across the society, it was an opportunity for them to really take the lead and determine the outcome. |
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| A rarity in Indonesian politics | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Sidney Jones, you know Abdurrahman Wahid, maybe you could tell us what Americans should know of him.
RAY SUAREZ: By all accounts, William Liddle, a defender of democracy, a champion of minorities, but also someone called erratic. Why?
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| A new government | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Just a few days ago when B.J. Habibie was still a candidate, General Wiranto took himself out of the running for vice president. Now that Abdurrahman Wahid is president, can we see General Wiranto rise again as vice president? WILLIAM LIDDLE: Well, we could see him rise again. Basically, I think the greater probability is that Akbantagu, the leader of the Golkar Party, many of whose votes I think went to Abdurrahman Wahid in this presidential election, I think that there's there is a greater chance that Akbar will be asked to be the vice president, but Abdurrahman Wahid has pretty good relationship with the Indonesian military in the 1980s and it's conceivable that he will think that a good course to follow is to make Wiranto his vice president. JEFFREY WINTERS: I think I would throw in that -- RAY SUAREZ: Go ahead.
SIDNEY JONES: And it's not just a question of who he has as a vice president, which to some degree is out of his direct control because that's an election process that will take place tomorrow and there are other candidates whose names may come up, including Megawati and there are even some dark-horse candidates whose names have been mentioned. But it's going to be more interesting to see who he brings into the cabinet because there's a good chance that Wiranto would be kept on as commander of the armed forces. Even that would cause the some kind of outrage that Jeff was talking about before. There are key positions in foreign affairs. Who will be the foreign affairs minister? Who will be the defense minister? Who will have the very key position of home affairs minister at a time when there's a major effort to decentralize power in Indonesia and where there are major rebellions underway now that are challenging the central government in Jakarta? And then of course there's the Justice Ministry, which is also going to be key for transforming Indonesia's legal system into something more akin to that that we see in democracies. WILLIAM LIDDLE: I agree with Sidney. I think it's going to be very interesting to watch out this cabinet is formed. Abdurrahman Wahid himself said before he was elected president that there were only three cabinet positions that he wanted his own organization to have. One of them is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one is the Ministry of Education, and the third is the Ministry of Religion. So there are 30, 40 cabinet positions up for grabs. And I suspect that what he is going to try to do is to put together a broadly based coalition government by bringing in people from various political parties.
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| A host of unknowns | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: President Wahid's Muslim Party finished in third place in the national elections. It is mostly a party that's put its heft behind religious issues; by common consent this man is no economist, and before all the turmoil in Indonesia began, there were terrible problems with the IMF. Where will they stand in the shakeout of the next couple of months? JEFFREY WINTERS: If I could jump in here, I'd like to point out that one of the things underlying what my two colleagues have just said is that, with the selection of Abdurrahman Wahid, we're talking about a major unknown in terms of where this man is going on economic policy, foreign policy, domestic policy. I mean he did not contest the election himself, as a presidential candidate. There has not been talk in the newspapers for weeks or months about who his ministers would be. He has not put forward an economic plan of how he's going to jump-start the economy. Meanwhile, Megawati's team, of course Habibie was in government so we sort of knew what he was doing -- Megawati's team was well-known internationally, had recently attended the IMF meeting, had been putting together materials about what they were going to do across a broad range of policy areas. And so at a time when what Indonesia really needs is political and economic certainty, what they've gotten is someone who never even really contested the presidency in the first place and someone who we're going to have to spend the next several weeks guessing about. That is an inauspicious way, I think, to be coming out of this process. And it could spell trouble. One of the immediate reactions in Jakarta was a fall of the rupia and of the stock market upon the announcement of Abdurrahman Wahid's victory. We have yet to see how the international community is going to respond. SIDNEY JONES: But my guess is that he's going to ...
WILLIAM LIDDLE: I'd like to start with the glass half full, rather than the glass half empty. I guess the sense that Jeff is exaggerating the nature of the problems that the Wahid government is likely to face. I think Abdurrahman Wahid, compared to Megawati, I think we have to realize that Abdurrahman Wahid has a very long history here, as Sidney was saying before, of religious tolerance, of a commitment to democracy and indeed to a commitment to a kind of democratic socialism. So he has egalitarian goals for his society and so forth. I think we also have to remember that he's a very sophisticated fellow who's traveled around the world quite a bit, studied abroad and so forth. He's been a player also, a major player, which Megawati was never was in the political system for the last 20 years. So that I think he's fully cognizant of the demands that the IMF and the World Bank and other international, financial institutions have been making on Indonesia. He's aware of the Bank Badi scandal; he knows that he has to act quickly in response to that, and so forth. So I'm optimistic that he will pick the kinds of ministers who will be able to restore that economic confidence. RAY SUAREZ: A brief final comment, Sidney Jones? SIDNEY JONES: No, I just think that we need to wait and see. But everything he's done in his past history as head of the Muslim organization I think gives us hope that we'll be in the right direction, and we just hope that he can physically stay strong enough to keep it up. RAY SUAREZ: Sidney Jones, guests, thanks for being with us this evening. |
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JEFFREY
WINTERS: Well, it happened because there's a disconnect in Indonesia
between what happens in the voting in June and what happens in the national
assembly. The national assembly is only partly democratic. It had a
huge number of appointed people, and it turns out that in a direct election,
clearly someone like Megawati was favored. Her party, which she was
the identified leader of, won by a 12 percent margin over the next contender
behind. But the MPR, the People's Assembly, is a very different kind
of institution that disfavors someone like Megawati. It favors someone
who is a deal-maker, someone who is infinitely malleable, someone who
can cut deals with ... and also compromise principles, and that would
be someone like Gus Dur [Abdurrahman Wahid] and not someone like Megawati.
She simply, at a certain point, was unwilling to cut some of the deals
that she would have had to in order to win in that assembly. So her
strong, principled stand on a number of issues that gave her the victory
in the general election proved to be a liability in the People's Assembly.
RAY
SUAREZ: At the White House, Joe Lockhart and the president called this
a victory for democracy. Was it? 
SIDNEY
JONES: Well, he's now 59, and as you saw, he's very frail after two
strokes. But he's somebody who all of his life has had a record of taking
a very independent, very pluralist, very open stance, both toward religions,
other religions in Indonesia, especially Christians, but also toward
other minorities, including Chinese. And that's a rarity in Indonesian
politics. He's someone who's the leader of an organization called the
Naktulama, which has 30 million members, and because he's kind of a
traditional leader of that organization, he brought with him a huge
number of votes that could be used in this kind of political dealing
that Jeff was talking about. He's somebody who will have political debts
to pay to some of those who put him in power, and some of those people
have ties to the old Suharto and Habibie era. But the kinds of stance
he's taken in the past are ones that give us hope that human rights
will be a priority on his agenda. But he's got a huge number of problems,
obviously, that he's got to confront. 
WILLIAM
LIDDLE: Well, he is erratic. I think for his whole career, actually,
he's been such a skillful political infighter a good deal of the time,
that sometimes he outfoxes himself and takes some positions that get
him into trouble with his most basic supporters. In recent years, and
especially in the last couple of years, since his stroke in January
of 1998, most of the people who are close to him, when you ask them
how Gus Dur is doing these days, they say that his thought processes
are not as clear as they used to be. So he can make some decisions that
baffle people. An example just recently, just a few days ago, is that
he said that he is going to sue the news magazine "Tempo"
for misquoting him. And I looked at the quote and it's quite a harmless
quote, so I don't know what he's reacting to but it's that sort of thing
that he's done quite frequently recently.
JEFFREY
WINTERS: -- if he does do that, the kind of outcry that we saw in Jakarta
today and tonight could multiply and become government destabilizing
because this would really rankle the students in particular who have
demanded clearly and consistently that the armed forces not be given
a position in the government. And it would be, I think, a fatal mistake
on Abdurrahman Wahid's part if he does go ahead with Wiranto, who by
the way was one of the architects of the scorched earth policy in East
Timor and could face in the future war crimes hearings and so on related
to what happened in Timor. So that would severely complicate his relations
with the ... the government's relations with outside parties, like the
United States, Europe, Australia and so on, and it would also I think
severely compromise his position domestically. 
SIDNEY
JONES: But there's another factor that's quite interesting because he
has been saying this, that he wants those three ministries for a long
time, for at least since the early 1980s. I don't think he ever dreamed
that the presidency was a real possibility. That's clearly the best
of all, but what he wanted those three ministries for was that he wanted
proof that people of a devout Muslim background, what they call a Santri
background in Indonesia, could rise to political power. They've always
been excluded from those key positions, except for the Ministry of Religion.
And now he's got the ace, he's got the presidency, and it's going to
be interesting to see what he does with it.
RAY
SUAREZ: Let's go to William Liddle for a final comment.