A mega-symbol of resistance

It is in Bali, where surrounded by the crowds that testify to her wide appeal, that she is expected to come out with the outlines of a party policy ahead of promised elections next year.

The PDI Congress comes five months after the fall of former military strongman Suharto, the man she considers her father’s usurper, and two months after a violence-marred congress by the rival but official PDI.

It also comes amid political confusion and deepening economic unrest in the world’sfourth-most populous country since Suharto’s fall.

A symbol of defiant resistance during the last decade of Suharto’s 32-year-long rule, the turnout in Bali Thursday testified to Megawati’s grass-roots country-wide popularity, even among sections of the armed forces.

But while her most ardent loyalists say they trust her, whatever her policies, with elections promised for 1999, many are becoming impatient to learn more solid details of her platform.

The country’s leading news weekly Tempo

this week, in an article entitled `What if Mega were to become President’, said: “To have become a symbol is not enough, she needs to engage in active leadership.”

“Mega cannot remain simply a symbolic leader, she must become an active leader. Her personal limitations need to be overcome and her organizational skills be honed.”

“Perhaps she would not be lost in the corridors and rooms of the Presidential palace, because after all that is where she grew up. But maybe she does not yet understand themachinations of government politics.”

The article went on to urge Indonesians not to be governed by blind emotion and loyalty to Mega, who days before winning a moral victory over the government with Jakarta’s grudging approval for the congress inducted some 60 retired navy officers into the party.

One of the many diplomats that Mega speaks to regularly told AFP

this week that he understood she was deliberately playing it close until the government of Suharto’s successor, B J Habibie, who has said he himself may throw his hat into the ring for the presidency, comes out with clear rules on political parties.

Mega herself in July slammed Habibie for what she called foot dragging on the party laws, in an insinuation — quickly denied — that the government was awaiting party developments to be able to legally curtail their chances in the 1999 polls.

Among the few basic policy points that she has made clear is a staunch opposition to moves towards federalism, or any move to make Indonesia anIslamic state — both positions that were enshrined by Sukarno in the 1950s.

But, one diplomat cautioned, Mega does not always agree on policies with her own party officials, especially on the military’s role in Indonesia’s political life — she is for it, a position that alienates her from the students in the front line when Suharto was toppled on May 21.

To many of them she is “an old Merah-Putih” (the red and white colours of the Indonesian flag) — an outdated nationalist in a modern world.

The same Western diplomat also warned that old Suharto loyalists and the ruling Golkar Party were hellbent on stopping Mega, and breaking up a loose alliance she has with another opposition grouping, the Moslem Nahdlatul Ulama.