Faced with food riots and student protests, Indonesia's President is tainted by his links with the hated former regime. David Jenkins reports on a country in crisis. When President Habibie ventured out of his palace recently for a one-day trip to Surabaya, he was greeted by thousands of student protesters, one of whom carried a placard with the mocking message "Bring down the price of leaves".
Habibie has barely completed his first 100 days as President of the world's fourth most populous nation. But the honeymoon, such as it was, is well and truly over.
Food prices have risen sharply in recent months – rice has almost doubled since Habibie came to office – and there is no indication that the Government knows how to deal with the problem. Indonesia faces a shortfall of nearly 4.5million tonnes of rice, due to an El Nino-related drought and a collapse in the value of the rupiah. To make matters worse, the food distribution system has been in disarray since mobs turned on the ethnic Chinese minority in May, blaming them for the nation's economic ills.
The Government has tried to redress the distribution problems by inviting pribumi (indigenous) Indonesians to step into the breach, but that has not helped. It may only have made matters worse.
As a result of all this, Indonesians are increasingly hungry, increasingly angry, increasingly willing to take matters into their own hands. In the past three weeks, mobs have looted and burned in a string of cities across the country, sacking rice warehouses and carting off cooking oil and canned food.
Nor do the distortions caused by a weak currency and subsidised food prices do anything to improve matters. In Indonesia rice costs between 2,000 and 4,000 rupiah (35 and 70 cents) a kilo, depending on quality and type. In the Malaysian State of Sarawak, just across the border in Kalimantan, it sells for two ringgit a kilo, equivalent to about 8,000 rupiah.
In Tawau, Sabah, it is selling for the equivalent of 10,000- 12,000 rupiah, many times the price in Pare Pare in Sulawesi, less than a day's sailing up the Straits of Makassar.
"It is very ironic," says Lieutenant-General Zen Maulani, who has just relinquished his job as chief of staff to Habibie to become head of BAKIN, the State Intelligence Co-ordinating Board. "At a time when our farmers sell their rice abroad to Malaysia, to meet the needs of our people we have to buy rice in Vietnam and Thailand at high prices. And because nearly 100million Indonesians are now below the poverty line, we have to subsidise the prices of our rice."
As if all this were not bad enough, students have returned to the barricades, demanding that prices come down and that Habibie step aside. The resources of the police and the army are under increasing strain. "You just wonder how much patience there is out there," said a diplomat who had just returned from a trip outside Jakarta, where he went around markets noting the price of rice, eggs and tahu (tofu).
"The situation is deteriorating rapidly," said Harry Tjan Silalahi of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank set up in the early 1970s by two of President Soeharto's army cronies which later took on an anti-Soeharto and anti-Habibie colouration.
Some Indonesians go further, saying they fear their nation is on the brink of social revolution. "I foresee a great chaos," said Rosihan Anwar, an Indonesian editor and commentator who has followed national affairs since the proclamation of independence in 1945. "The people will no longer go against the Chinese. That is the past. They will go against their own people. Here in the Mentang area [a wealthy suburb in the heart of Jakarta] they will go against their own people. They will burn down [the houses of the wealthy]."
Conversations with ordinary Indonesians suggest that those concerns may be premature. For the moment, at least, it is still the ethnic Chinese who seem to bear the weight of popular resentment. "The Chinese live in heaven in this country," said a waiter in a moderately priced restaurant. "They have so much. I think it is fine for people to rob the Chinese shops if they are starving."
Not that some members of the indigenous elite seem to be far behind in the hate list. "I would just like to punch Soeharto in the face," said the waiter, expressing a view that would not have been broadcast only four months ago. "He is a thief. I don't earn enough money to buy enough rice for my family. All of this is his fault. He should be brought to trial."
For Habibie, the priority is to bring prices down and stabilise the rupiah. But in the eyes of many Indonesians Habibie lacks legitimacy, having been left in the job by Soeharto, his long-time mentor and a man now widely spoken of with hatred. Nor, the critics feel, has Habibie done nearly enough to rein in an army that has run wild in recent years, kidnapping, torturing and killing those deemed enemies of the state.
Like Soeharto before him, Habibie has included a generous sprinkling of military officers in his Cabinet. Many have black marks against their names.
The Co-ordinating Minister for Political Affairs, General Feisal Tandjung, was the Armed Forces (ABRI) commander between 1992 and 1998, when the army began a bloody crackdown on separatists in Aceh, the staunchly Muslim province in the far north of Sumatra. He was in the same job in 1996 when the Government sent soldiers and hired thugs to seize control of the Jakarta headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri.
The important Home Affairs Minister, Lieutenant-General Syarwan Hamid, is cut from the same cloth. He was the head of the Lhokseumawe Korem (District Military Command) in Aceh during some of the worst killing in the province. Later, as the ABRI Chief of Staff for Social-Political Affairs, he applauded the takeover of the PDI headquarters.
The secretary-general of the Department of Education, Lieutenant-General Sofian Effendy, was the Korem commander in Lhokseumawe in 1989-90, immediately before Syarwan. Aceh was not an issue in 1990. It quickly become one in 1990-91, with, as one source puts it, "terrible reports of bodies showing up alongside rural roads," especially in Lhokseumawe and Pidie.
Sofian, a red beret officer, was present in October 1975 when Indonesian troops stormed the sleepy coastal town of Batugade in Portuguese East Timor, the first time that Jakarta had occupied and held a foreign town and the curtain-raiser for the brutal, full-scale invasion of East Timor two months later. The Batugade attack was led by Captain (now Major-General) Sutiyoso, the current governor of Jakarta.
Habibie's Minister for Transmigration, Lieutenant-General Hendropriyono, was the Korem commander in Lampung, South Sumatra, at the time of a notorious massacre of Muslim villagers in which scores, if not hundreds of people were killed.
The Minister for Information, Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, led Indonesia's illegal 1975 occupation of Balibo in Portuguese East Timor, an operation in which five Australia-based journalists were killed. In 1978, Yunus played a central role in killing the East Timorese President and guerilla leader Nicolau Lobato. One of his hobbies, he once told an Indonesian magazine, was to play a home video of Lobato's death.
"These are all people from the old elite," noted a diplomat in Jakarta. "You can't clean a floor with a dirty mop and essentially Habibie has set himself that challenge." Syarwan Hamid, it is true, turned against Soeharto at the 11th hour, helping to bring him down. But he and Feisal remain opposed to Megawati and her efforts to regain control of her party, which has been taken over by Government-linked figures.
"The Habibie regime has embraced the Soeharto blunder," the diplomat said. "The same unnecessary confrontation with Mega. "Why? It would have meant walking away from the 1996 policy of Feisal, and Syarwan. It would have been a loss of face for them. They funded the recent congress of the PDI rump in Palu. Syarwan went up there and read the keynote speech."
If many of the old army faces are still to be seen in the corridors of power, others have dropped from view. The most notable casualty in the post-Soeharto wash-up was Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto, who was cashiered after he admitted kidnapping nine political activists. But Prabowo has not been brought before a court and it is not at all clear that he ever will be.
"The Government doesn't want to bring Prabowo to trial because it would open up a Pandora's box," said a source in Jakarta. "It wasn't only Prabowo [who kidnapped people]. People say that if you were to put him on trial and he was sentenced, then those who are sympathetic to him [would call for others to be brought before the courts]."
All of this creates a painful dilemma for the Defence Minister/ABRI commander, General Wiranto. He needs to show that he is serious about burnishing ABRI's tarnished image. But he knows that it could be dangerous to push for too much too soon.
While the Government wrestles with these problems, the security situation worsens. On Monday at least 35 shops and warehouses were burned and dozens of other buildings damaged when mobs rampaged through the central Java town of Kebumen.
The next morning, five people were injured, two seriously, when police and soldiers pushed several hundred radical students out of the grounds of the national parliament in Jakarta. The day after, Habibie was jeered by thousands of students during his visit to Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city. Widespread looting continued in Pontianak in West Kalimantan.
On Thursday, several hundred students staged a noisy protest in front of the presidential palace in Jakarta, demanding that Habibie step down and prices be reduced. There was another demonstration near the palace last Tuesday, despite warnings from the army that the area is off limits to protesters. Student rallies are now an almost daily occurrence in the great cities of Java.
Nor is the trouble confined to Java. There have been protests in South Sulawesi, a crippling bus strike in the north Sumatran city of Medan, and the looting of 1.5tonnes of rice from a government warehouse in East Timor. So far, the students from the big mainstream universities who played a key role in the downfall of Soeharto appear to be staying their hand. But there is a mounting sense that Indonesia's problems may soon get out of hand.
Indonesia may have enough food for now. But it doesn't seem to be able to get it to people in sufficient quantities and at affordable prices. That is a recipe for disaster. As Mao Zedong once said in another context, a single spark can start a prairie fire.