[Book review. In the Time of Madness. Author By Richard Lloyd Parry.]

Freedom has its darker side. The fall of communism in eastern Europe saw Yugoslavia disintegrate into warfare and atrocity. On the other side of the world a decade later, when the aged tyrant Suharto was driven from power by unarmed democratic protesters, the suffering of Indonesia was only just beginning.

You could not hope for a better guide to the strange and terrible transformation that befell Indonesia in 1998 than Richard Lloyd Parry, a British journalist who, though he nominally lived in Tokyo, spent most of his time in the mighty archipelago, writing for the Independent and the Times. The shortage of good books in English about Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous nation but one of its most under-reported, has often been remarked on. Mr Lloyd Parry's volume fills a crucial space on the bookshelves.

What happened, alas, after Mr Suharto departed was that the hatreds and conflicts that his iron rule had long suppressed boiled over. Some of these were religious: though Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country, it has a sizeable minority of Christians. Others were ethnic. Indonesia is a vast and highly diverse country, and the dominance of the Javanese isresented elsewhere.

Still other conflicts are economic. Migrations, whether forced or voluntary, have bred tensions and resentments. Mr Suharto's fall, and the hapless reign of his successor, B.J. Habibie, were played out against the backdrop of the Asian economic crisis, which hit Indonesia far harder than any other country. Other conflicts, again, are purely political in nature.

Contained within Indonesia, an artificial country that owes its existence mainly to the accident of Dutch colonisation, are a goodly number of islands and regions that resent their incorporation: from Aceh, an ancient and powerful Islamic sultanate, to West Papua, a land of Christians and animists that was only incorporated into Indonesia in 1963.

And then, of course, there is East Timor, the only part of Mr Suharto's vast empire that contrived to break free after his political demise. Mr Lloyd Parry was there for the referendum, in 1999, that precipitated the bloodiest and most systematic violence in Indonesia's post-Suharto trauma.

His account of the destruction of Dili, East Timor's capital, by militias, egged on, armed and assisted by Indonesia's forces is harrowing: the more so, perhaps, because, besieged in the UN compound there, he could report at first hand only grim fragments. He saw desperate refugees trying to push their children over the compound walls, and understood only then the magnitude of the terror that could compel a mother to push her baby through razor-wire. To his lasting shame, he confesses, he ran away.

Mr Lloyd Parry had seen horror like it many times before. In the course of this well-written but deeply bleak book, he observes mayhem in Borneo and in Jakarta itself, before the sad conclusion reached in East Timor. A longer book, though, might have offered more context. The bloodletting in 1998 and after was mercifully minor compared with the hundreds of thousands who perished in the anti-Chinese slaughter of 1965/66, or in East Timor itself after the Indonesian invasion in 1975. And Indonesia now, despite many terrible events, has found a kind of peace. It suddenly seems like a stable democracy, with an economy that is doing reasonably well, and (poor Aceh aside) no real inclination towards secession. Perhaps the time of madness really has passed.