Terry McCarthy, Jakarta – 1,000 students rallied against the government at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta last month, one rebel climbed up to a sign near the main gates: welcome to the campus of the struggle of the new order. As the crowd cheered, the student took out a can of spray paint and blacked out the words new order-President Suharto's term for his 32-year-old system of government. The message the student left behind, truncated and ambivalent, was perhaps more appropriate than even he realized at the time.

The struggle has indeed begun in Indonesia, and universities are fast becoming a principal battlefield. In the last four weeks campuses across the country have seen growing crowds of students demonstrating against rising prices and political corruption. But two weeks spent interviewing participants in Yogyakarta, Ujung Pandang, Surabaya and Jakarta reveals that the sudden awakening of a student movement is neither as simple nor as spontaneous as it appears on the surface. It is a murky and ill-defined struggle, apparently subject to covert maneuvering and arms' length manipulation by powerful interests in the military and the Islamic movement. Some of the students are well-informed, but many have only the vaguest idea of why they are demonstrating or how they would like to see the country change. There is a general sense that the New Order of Suharto is coming to an end, but there is little agreement on what should replace it. And among some students there is a growing suspicion about authorities' new-found tolerance of their right to protest.

The spray-painting incident was widely covered by newspapers in Jakarta, and no move was made to detain the student involved. "Even a few months ago that would have been unthinkable," says Hermawan Sulistyo, a researcher at lipi, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences in Jakarta. Until recently student political activity had been effectively ruled out by the Campus Normalization Law, passed in 1978 after a period of mounting student agitation against Suharto's rule. Sporadic student protests afterward had been quickly suppressed. So there was some surprise two weeks ago when, on the day after Suharto was re-appointed President, the commander of the armed forces (ABRI), Gen. Wiranto, seemed to express some support for the demonstrators. "Their demands are normal," he said. "ABRI will respect their demands as long as they are constructive."

Students have been quick to seize on their new-found freedom to organize rallies-in Yogyakarta some even went as far as burning an effigy of Suharto. But beneath the euphoria, some of their leaders have a nagging sense of unease. Students have seen how anti-Chinese riots suddenly materialized after the signing of a tough agreement with the International Monetary Fund in mid-January, and just as suddenly stopped in mid-February when Wiranto became the armed forces commander. A report from Human Rights Watch/Asia last month said that, while there was no evidence of direct government instigation of the riots, nonetheless "senior government and military officials have fueled anti-Chinese sentiment through veiled references to 'rats' and 'traitors.'" Some student leaders are asking themselves if they too are being subtly controlled by the authorities. "It's clear that we have been given the opportunity to demonstrate on the campuses," says Iwan Hidayat, editor of the Voice of Airlangga student newspaper at Surabaya's Airlangga University. "But we have remained separated from the people because we haven't been allowed to take to the streets."

Sulistyo, who supports the student protests, is one of a small group of intellectuals in Jakarta who have been holding secret meetings with senior members of the military in an effort to find out just how far the students will be allowed to go. "They want to know our prediction and analysis," he says. "We want to know their limits." Among his contacts he numbers two serving generals, though he declines to name them. There were meetings in December and January, he says, as well as communication by phone. "But even the generals don't like to talk by phone. They ask for a clean line."

Sulistyo is not alone in his concern for the students. Other analysts point to the way student protests were used by Suharto himself in 1965-66 to put pressure on Sukarno to relinquish power. "Although the students are being encouraged to a certain point by the army, they are right to be suspicious of where it will lead," says John Sidel, a lecturer in Southeast Asian politics at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. "They could think they were leading a movement, get crushed and only then realize they were being used all along." Sidel says students risk becoming pawns in a power struggle that is developing in the military between armed forces commander Wiranto and Suharto's son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, who has just taken over as commander of the elite strategic command, Kostrad. A Wiranto-Prabowo split is widely rumored in Jakarta, with Wiranto seen as heading the "red and white" nationalist camp within ABRI, while Prabowo is regarded as closer to the Muslim networks and to Suharto himself.

In Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city, 10,000 students gathered on March 11 at the Institute of Technology to protest Suharto's appointment that day to his seventh term as President. According to Herwan Febriyadi, head of a local student forum, fkms, the rally was peaceful until the students tried to push past police and soldiers blocking the gate. "When we made contact, they held us back with riot shields while a second row were hitting us with rattan sticks." At least 40 people received flesh wounds, according to Febriyadi, and four were hospitalized. "But no one was arrested," he says. "We don't know why. We were expecting that, and since then we have been waiting for someone to come around with a list-but so far nothing."

Is the military giving a green light to the students, as long as they keep their protests peaceful and within campus walls? Daniel Sparringa, a sociology lecturer at Airlangga University and a popular figure among students for encouraging the protests, believes so. At the end of January, Sparringa was contacted by Maj. Gen. Djadja Suparman, the local military commander, and asked to come for a meeting. "When I went there, he said: 'I can understand what the students want, too, but the best thing is if we can work together to control the situation.'" The general said it would be best if students stayed on campus, but when Sparringa told him they wanted to march to the local parliament building, Suparman offered to provide them transport.

The military is not the only institution keeping close tabs. Since campuses were "depoliticized" after 1978, much student activism has been channeled into Islamic groups, and today the Indonesian Muslim Students Association, or HMI, is both influential and well-organized. Amien Rais, who leads the 28- million-member Muhammadiyah Muslim organization, has been courting students with his talk of leading a "people power" movement. "HMI is about to turn against the government," predicts Hotman Siahaan, who also teaches sociology at Airlangga. "But so far the ideological substance is missing. In all the protests there are not any key leaders, and there is not yet a platform."

With politics off-limits for so long, the students are only slowly learning how to organize. But already campuses are linking up by Internet - -which the authorities cannot easily control – and information is passing among groups around the country. Last week, for example, an article about the wealth of President Suharto's family that had originally been printed in a student newspaper in Yogyakarta turned up in the campus paper at Airlangga, 200 km away.

In Jakarta, students at the University of Indonesia have been printing a daily bulletin entitled Bergerak! (Move!) for the past two weeks with information on university demonstrations around Indonesia as well as times and locations of coming rallies. "Now we are optimistic because the succession is at hand," says Rama Pratama, chairman of the university's student senate. "This crisis has destroyed the pride of the New Order. Now we have to work on what comes next." Whether the students will be contributors to what comes next, or its victims, may not become clear for some time. The struggle has just begun.

[With reporting from David Liebhold/Surabaya]