Jakarta – Indonesians are bracing for a stormy countdown to the August 1 national assembly session which will decide the fate of embattled Abdurrahman Wahid, the country's first freely-elected president.
With two weeks to go, most eyes will be focused on Friday, July 20, the deadline set by Wahid for the assembly (MPR) to drop its impeachment plan. If it does not, he has warned, he will at 6pm declare a state of emergency, allowing him to dissolve parliament and call new elections.
Until this Saturday, despite warnings from the military that it would not back him on the emergency, that threat stood – as did a counter threat by MPR chairman Amien Rais to call a snap impeachment session on Saturday, July 21.
General Saroyo Bimantoro, whom Wahid sacked as national police chief in June, has remained defiant and cut short a planned 10-day leave on Saturday after Wahid ordered his top security minister to seek legal actions against him.
Both publicly and privately Wahid insists that even if the session were held, he would be able to survive through a compromise – won in part through pledging key cabinet seats to hostile parties.
Palace sources say he has spent much of the past week quietly meeting his political foes, reportedly including Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the woman who would succeed him should he step down. Megawati, who has publicly snubbed Wahid in the past month, has not confirmed the meeting took place.
Among the others in talks with him have been lower house speaker Akbar Tanjung, who heads the second-strongest party in parliament, the Golkar party of former dictator Suharto.
Megawati's group, the Democracy party of Struggle (PDIP) is the strongest bloc in parliament and led the vote to call the impeachment session.
But its MPs are reportedly deeply divided on the issue, and it is fear of a PDIP back-benchers' revolt, some members say, that lay behind the party's insistence that if a vote were taken on August 1, it must be open – and not by secret ballot.
"Some in the party argue that maintaining the current national leadership is still the most feasible for the country and the nation," Sophan Sophiaan, the PDIP parliament faction chairman told the Jakarta Post Saturday during a national party meeting in Jakarta.
And no one is laughing off the 60-year-old Wahid's compromise efforts as the dying twitches of a politically spent force. Wahid has proved a wily back room plotter and survivor, and is a past master at cashing in on the divisions and suspicions rife among his foes, analysts say.
And Megawati, though showing all the signs of preparing to sit in the president's chair, remains suspicious of her current backers. Those she distrusts most are the so-called Muslim axis. Despite her party's overwhelming win in the first post-Suharto pollsin 1999, they insisted that Indonesia as a predominantly Muslim country should not be led by a woman and threw their votes in favor of Wahid.
She also knows she would face the disappointment of her until-now fanatically-loyal grassroots followers if she were seen holding hands with Suharto's old Golkar party.
A daughter of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, she was a legislator under Suharto for a decade until her growing popularity forced the dictator to try, but to no avail, to push her out of politics in the second half of the 1990s.
As tensions rise, some fear that the followers of Wahid, a cleric who headed the 40-million-strong Muslim Nahdlatul Ulama organization until 1999, may flood the capital.
But there is a depressing sense in Jakarta that whether Wahid goes or stays, the real loser is the reform movement. "Don't forget reformasi" read a forlorn banner posted in the city Saturday by the same students who helped overthrow Suharto in May of 1998, high on hopes of an end to dirty politics and corruption.