Rowan Callick – Was it to be the plain old criminal or the polished war criminal?
Delegates choosing the presidential candidate for Indonesia's biggest party, Golkar, on Tuesday night had to pick between an unelectably dull figure convicted of misappropriating funds intended for poor relief before winning an appeal on technical grounds, and a charismatic retired general accused of war crimes in East Timor. They overwhelmingly went for the latter, Wiranto, over party chairman Akbar Tandjung, who is now stranded in a no-man's-land.
Wiranto's appeal inside Indonesia is straightforward. He comes from the national heartland (central Java), he is rich, and he represents as a military man some of the qualities people have missed under President Megawati Soekarnoputri – security and decisiveness.
Voters had the opportunity, in the first parliamentary round of elections on April 5, of going the whole hog and inviting the Soeharto dynasty back into power by backing his daughter, Tutut, via her PKPB party.
But she gained only a desultory 2per cent support. The voters don't want to go that far back. But the military, the TNI, is just about the only institution besides Islam still standing after half a century of nationhood, and it is widely trusted.
Wiranto's appeal, beyond this, relies not so much on the ruthlessness with which he is associated in Australia and other Western countries, as on his claim - however perverse it may appear – to be the man who ushered in Indonesian democracy.
As TNI commander, Wiranto did not step in to keep Soeharto in power or to seize it for himself when the nation's students took to the streets in 1998 to protest against the dictator's New Order rule, but helped ensure a smooth transfer to the country's third president, BJ Habibie.
"Reform was a necessity for Indonesia," he has said. "I felt the process had to happen gradually and constitutionally." Wiranto was sacked in 2000 by the next president, Abdurrahman Wahid, after a tense stand-off which some see as Wahid's finest hour.
What happened between those events, in 1998 and 2000, will now frame Wiranto's place in history and his capacity to represent Indonesia to the world.
Kevin O'Rourke writes in Reformasi, a leading history of that tumultuous time: "While Wiranto served as armed forces commander in 1998-99 various elements of the military perpetrated the Trisakti shootings, the Semanggi killings, the Bantiqiyah massacre, clashes with police in Maluku, the East Timor scorched-earth campaign, and assorted other abuses."
East Timor's chief prosecutor, Longuinhos Monteiro, complained a week ago about the failure of international judges working for the United Nations in Dili to issue an arrest warrant for war crimes against Wiranto.
Since Jakarta refuses to extradite Indonesians to face East Timorese courts for crimes against humanity, the prosecutors are instead seeking Interpol warrants, now that East Timor has joined the international police body.
In Wiranto's case, this would probably prevent him risking travel to Western countries – including Australia and the US – if he were to be elected president. Only Wahid, of Indonesia's five presidents, has made it to Australia.
This would not, even if widely appreciated inside Indonesia, inflict much damage on his campaign. Given the country's anti-American consensus, it might indeed do him some good in his electoral stand-off with his former colleague - another handsome retired general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY). For SBY is clearly the West's preferred candidate, although no one will admit as much for fear of damaging his prospects.
And SBY also appears to have been the TNI's favourite. His Democratic party scored well wherever there were polling booths in barracks, although the commander, General Endriartono Sutarto, urged soldiers not to vote. The army's own reserved seats in parliament were abolished last year.
Wiranto is wealthy, thanks to business deals and networks built during his army career. As worrying as his human rights record, he appears to have maintained extensive connections with extremist Islamist groups, also developed in the corrupt closing days of Soeharto's New Order. He would claim an intention to "domesticate" these latter contacts, but the true purposes are unverifiable.
Professor of Asian Studies at Melbourne University, Merle Ricklefs – who is conducting research in Singapore this year – says the TNI's expertise and experience comprise, essentially, a capacity to fight the country's own civilians.
It is now fighting a bloody civil war in Indonesia's own province of Aceh.
When Wiranto testified at one of the Human Rights Court hearings instituted in Jakarta into the East Timor debacle (no military figures were convicted) he argued that the East Timorese had been fighting each other "for 23 years" since the Indonesian invasion, and that the TNI had sought to provide protection and peace.
He said he told Habibie that the independence referendum there would not be understood by the uneducated, and could lead to an "emotional reaction". There is evidence, however, that Wiranto knew of orders – or dispensed them - leading to the militias raising hell as Indonesia withdrew.
But within much of Indonesia the villains of this grim episode are viewed as the UN and Australia, with Wiranto a hero pluckily and reluctantly withdrawing from an impossible situation with honour. His crooning CD of 2000, titled For You, My Indonesia, was well received – without irony – and sales went towards refugees from East Timor.
But while Wiranto may be paraded as a strong man, his military decisiveness delivering the investment needed to produce the jobs desperately sought by young Indonesians, Ricklefs points out that today's currents are flowing in the opposite direction – towards local centres of power, as the radical decentralisation devised by Habibie takes root.
"Such initiatives will not readily be surrendered," Ricklefs says. "Indonesian politics are largely local politics now. Its weak centre may prove its saving grace."
Even if Wiranto were to win, he would have to reinvent himself as a master of compromise. His Golkar party, although marginally the biggest in parliament, has only a fifth of the seats.
Indonesian democratic politics remain new and thus unpredictable. The odds, for now, appear against a Wiranto presidency. But Canberra will be quietly sweating on it until the election on July 5.