Tim Dodd – Which Asian political leader is blind, overweight and in delicate health, but likens himself to the celebrated Italian football star, Paolo Rossi? The answer? President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia.
In an act of hubris to rival Paul Keating – who famously compared his political skills to another Latin star, Placido Domingo – Wahid thinks his political style has the same explosive, match-winning quality as Rossi's football skills.
"I take the front [player], Paolo Rossi's role. Once I receive the ball, I dribble it and score a goal," he gleefully told a public gathering last month. For the sake of his presidency he has to hope that he is right. But at the moment there is scant evidence of it. Wahid has little to show for his 14 months in office except that he has survived in the face of obstacles, which many cynics thought would bring him down.
And this year, things are set to become more challenging. Among the thorny issues he faces in January are a report from a special parliamentary committee investigating his alleged corruption and growing pressure to compromise his widely-recognised human rights credentials by launching a military offensive against rebels in the province of Aceh.
In one respect Wahid may be on track in comparing himself to Rossi, who was the mainstay of Italy's successful World Cup campaign in 1982. He makes plenty of sudden, unpredictable moves.
In November, Wahid astonished Indonesia's close and very significant neighbour Singapore, with a tirade in which he said the island State was only interested in profits and suggested that Malaysia and Indonesia could team up and deny Singapore its water supply.
After the bombing of the Jakarta Stock Exchange in September he announced that Tommy Soeharto, the son of the former president was a suspect and ordered him arrested. When the police refused, on the basis of lack of evidence, Wahid sacked the police chief.
But the big difference between Wahid and Paolo Rossi is that the president's sallies have, of late, rarely put the ball in the back of his opponents' net. Since last August, when he fended off a move in Indonesia's supreme parliament to impeach him, Wahid has more often scored own-goals.
His Government's efforts to convict former president Soeharto were thrown out in September by a Jakarta court which accepted the defence's submission that Soeharto was "gaga".
Days later, Wahid had a major win when the Supreme Court found Tommy guilty of corruption charges and sentenced him to 18 months jail. But the shine was soon wiped off when the police delayed arresting Tommy, allowing him to slip into hiding. He is still at large in spite of a two-month search.
Wahid's efforts to gloss over this failure are becoming more and more absurd. First, he publicly announced that he had ordered the tapping of Tommy's mobile phone so that his whereabouts would be revealed. If Tommy had not already changed phone numbers no doubt he did so quickly.
Then, two weeks ago, Wahid topped this by claiming that the police had already caught Tommy at a roadblock in East Java but let him slip through their fingers. The police deny it.
More damaging to Wahid is the fact that he had an unexplained meeting with Tommy before his Supreme Court conviction, which only fuels public suspicion that the President was prepared to let Tommy off if the Soehartos would pay.
So much for Wahid's efforts to bring the Soehartos to justice. On other key reform issues he has been equally unsuccessful. He has made no progress in stamping out corruption. Some foreign business people say that it is worse now than in the Soeharto era because then there were fixed rules which governed the palm- greasing process and a word in the right ear could stop the worst outrages.
Neither has Wahid succeeded in controlling the two-year-old civil war between the Muslim and Christian communities in the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia which has killed as many as 6,000 people. Indeed his Government failed to prevent hundreds of "Laskar Jihad" Muslim extremists travelling from Java to join the fighting, although they had declared their intention to do so months beforehand.
In the province of Aceh on the north-west tip of Sumatra, Wahid has not come close to striking a settlement which is acceptable to the overwhelming majority who want to separate from Indonesia.
Hundreds have died during the cease-fire with separatist guerillas which has been in place since June and Wahid is now under pressure, from his defence minister and key elements of the armed forces, to go on the offensive after the "humanitarian pause" in the fighting expires this month.
In the other rebellious province of Irian Jaya, Wahid's efforts to find a negotiated solution have also stalled. A year ago he made a concession by bowing to local feeling and announcing a name change for the province to Papua. He also permitted the display of the independence flag, the Morning Star. Now he has reversed both decisions and leaders of the Papuan independence movement are in detention, even though they advocate non- violence. They are Indonesia's new political prisoners and their incarceration makes a mockery of Wahid's release, a year ago, of the last political prisoners of the Soeharto era.
Part of the President's problem is his haphazard management style. His spokesman, Wimar Witoelar, candidly admitted last year that "for this presidential office, the things that one hears outside basically are all true: you know, how disorganised it is [with] an uncontrollable president".
One example of Wahid's managerial failings is that he failed to get the Government ready for regional autonomy, a decision made by the Parliament more than 18 months ago to devolve more powers to the local level from January 1, 2001.
His effectiveness is not helped by the fact that he is blind. He cannot read policy papers or speaking notes. Everything he says is off-the-cuff.
Wahid also suffers from powerlessness. This is partly because under Indonesia's new democratic system, the Parliament is now a strong competing force to the presidency. But it is also because his capricious approach to the job has withered his authority.
Fortunately for him, his numerous political enemies are not yet strong enough, or united enough, to tip him out. His opposition includes:
- The so-called "Young Turk" parliamentarians, a cross party reformist group who lament Wahid's lack of reformist zeal;
- The more hardline Muslim parties who see him as too centrist;
- The forces of the old regime, Soeharto's former political vehicle, the Golkar party, which is still strong and well- resourced;
- The armed forces which, although divided and with only a shadow of its former political clout, has powerful elements suspicious that Wahid will not fight hard enough to keep Indonesia intact.
Although she is the most popular political figure in the country she is also a political enigma who says very little. Although she and Wahid are often at odds, she has not yet taken the opportunity to bring him down.
In order to fend off pressure to resign last August, Wahid promised her day-to-day control of the Government. She got far less than that in practice but there is still no sign of her withdrawing support.
However Megawati is a hardline nationalist, very firm on preventing any more provinces leaving Indonesia, and Wahid will be increasingly forced to listen to her views. This could present Wahid with a major problem when the Aceh cease-fire ends in a week's time. If he gives in to pressure for a military operation, the civilian casualties will be large and Indonesia will come under intense pressure from human rights organisations.
Another problem is just as pressing. This month a parliamentary special committee will report on Wahid's alleged involvement in two scandals from last year. There is Buloggate, in which the president's Chinese masseur absconded with about $A7.5 million dollars from the government's rice distribution agency Bulog. Wahid denies any involvement. And there is Bruneigate, in which Wahid received a personal gift of nearly $A4 million from the Sultan of Brunei. He says it was for humanitarian work in Aceh.
It's a situation which calls for some very clever footwork from the Paolo Rossi of politics.