Ian Timberlake, Jakarta – Petrus Hariyanto sees the fate of his tiny political party as a symbol of what's to come under Indonesia's new president, Megawati Sukarnoputri.

In the hilltop city of Bandung, about 60 miles southeast of Jakarta, the office of his leftist People's Democratic Party (PRD) remains closed several weeks after police used the pretext of violent demonstrations against rising gas prices and new labor laws to shut them down.

Though the PRD is a social democratic party with no seats in parliament and just 10,000 members nationwide, Hariyanto, its secretary general, insists it is "an official party, a valid party."

That has made no difference to police officials. They seized documents and arrested seven PRD members as well as 13 representatives of other left-wing political groups who remain in jail charged with inciting violence.

Numerous observers say that as the political campaign to impeach Megawati's predecessor, Abdurrahman Wahid, escalated this year, the PRD was the target of an ongoing campaign by police, radical Islamic groups and opposition political parties as part of a strategy to weaken the reformist Wahid's support base.

Some observers fear that persecution of such democratic leftist groups will continue under Megawati. They say she is too close to the military and the Golkar party, which was the political vehicle for former strongman Gen. Suharto during his repressive 32-year regime.

During Wahid's 21-month attempt to strip the military of its influence, "the room for them to operate was relatively tight," Hariyanto said. "But now it is more open to act against democratic groups." Despite Wahid's erratic behavior and failure to successfully prosecute members of the Suharto regime for corruption and human rights abuses, some Indonesians saw the 61-year-old, nearly blind Muslim cleric as the best hope for democratic reform. Before Wahid flew to the United States late last month for medical treatment, thousands of supporters turned out to say farewell to the first democratically elected leader in Indonesian history.

With shouts of protest, they voiced their concern that the Golkar-military alliance would return to power under Megawati.

Journalists have protested across the country about reports that Megawati's party is considering the reinstatement of the Ministry of Information, which Suharto used to censor and control the press. Wahid dissolved the ministry in 1999. In a recent letter, the Committee to Protect Journalists, in New York, asked Megawati to "ensure publicly that your new administration will not take any steps to curtail the hard-won freedoms of the Indonesian press."

Megawati's apparent closeness to the military and her staunch nationalist views – she was a vehement opponent of independence for East Timor – also have left observers in fear of an all-out war against separatist movements in gas-rich Aceh and mineral-rich Irian Jaya provinces.

"[The military] is the source of conflict," said Smita Notosusanto, who heads a group seeking to revise Indonesia's vaguely worded constitution, which doesn't clearly define the division of powers between the executive and legislative branches. The document was a major source of contention between Wahid and parliament.

Yet many military officers say they are no longer involved in day-to-day politics and are committed to the democratization process. "We are not politicians," said Major Yunus, a navy officer. "We don't care if it's Megawati or Wahid. We are different than before."

Although the police were removed from the military's direct control under Wahid, leading figures in both structures maintain an ideological aversion to nongovernmental organizations and democratic leftist groups – especially the PRD – which they believe are "subversive," analysts say. The PRD is led by the bespectacled Budiman Sudjatmiko, a 31-year-old former student activist who was sentenced to 13 years in jail for subversion in 1996 by the Suharto regime and freed by Wahid in 1999.

In an interview with Detik.com, an Internet news service, police spokesman Col. Anton Bachrul Alam said he suspected an unnamed nongovernmental organization had bombed a Jakarta church a day before legislators voted unanimously to impeach Wahid and install Megawati as the leader of the world's fourth-most populous nation. "This group is always trying to pit security forces against the people," said Alam.

In June, police detained 32 foreigners attending a seminar on economics and politics organized by Sudjatmiko on suspicion they had violated the terms of their visas. The foreigners – including 20 Australians and one American – were carted off in police trucks, held in jail until early morning and sent back to their hotels without their passports.

The police also allegedly allowed an Islamic militia, the Ka'Bah Youth Movement (GPK), to rough up the conference's Indonesian participants, witnesses said. "The use of thugs by the police and military to do their dirty job was normal practice during the Suharto era," said an editorial in the Jakarta Post after the raid.

In March, the Islamic Defenders Front took to the streets of Jakarta to rail against "communist elements" in the PRD and student groups. In June, two bomb blasts went off at Sudjatmiko's parents' home.

Unless Megawati can control military and police abuse, harassment of the PRD and other democratic groups is likely to continue, observers say. In fact, although the PRD is a small party with no political muscle, it could become a convenient "whipping boy," said political analyst Bob Lowry of the International Crisis Group in Jakarta.

"We regarded Megawati as a symbol of the oppressed, a symbol of the people's resistance," said Ribka Tjiptaning Proletariyati, who leads a minority faction within the new president's Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle that believes the party has made too many compromises with former Suharto supporters. "Now we see it's far from all that."