Jonathan Manthorpe – The evidence is building that Indonesia 's new, reformist president, Abdurrahman Wahid, is prepared to shield the country's repressive military from its past misdeeds and cater to its rampant nationalism in order to preserve the fledgling democracy.
In the six weeks since the popular Muslim cleric unexpectedly became Indonesia's first freely-selected president in over 40 years, Wahid's statements and policies show a marked shift towards favouring the military.
Wahid, who is better known by his affectionate nickname, Gus Dur, seems willing to brave deeply-felt popular demands for an accounting of past human rights abuses as well as for open and accountable central and regional administrations.
He appears to have calculated that keeping the support of the military is crucial to the survival of his government, at least through its first, tentative months.
His main acknowledgement of popular demands for reform has been to threaten to fire allegedly corrupt ministers in his philosophically and politically ungainly government coalition. There are also moves to re-open the shelved investigation into charges of corruption and cronyism against former dictator president Suharto.
The trail of Wahid's revised views from his first days as president may also describe a learning curve as he comes to grips with the reality of administering the world's fourth-most-populous country with 210 million people of 250 ethnic groups living on an archipelago of 16,500 islands.
But some observers in Jakarta see more cunning than fumbling in Wahid's manoeuvres. They see him playing off the diverse political interests in the government against each other in order to strengthen his own position.
There is no doubt Wahid can hope to achieve little without the backing of the army which for generations has played a key political role and regards itself as the last sanctuary of national integrity.
At worst, the generals might invoke their perceived duty to preserve the state and take power, as they have done in the past.
Wahid's trimming recognizes that a country like Indonesia cannot make an overnight transition from a military dictatorship to an elected civilian government. Time, patience and diplomacy will be required to embed civilian rule and keep the soldiers in their barracks.
There are two key issues on which Wahid and his government have moved rapidly and radically towards the views of the generals.
The first is on how to deal with the overwhelmingly separatist sentiments of the 4.1 million people of the northern province of Aceh.
The second is how high up the chain of military command to look for culprits in the killings and other human rights abuses committed by the army during the over 30 years of dictatorship by former president Suharto, who resigned in May last year.
Within hours of being selected president at the beginning of October Wahid said he saw no reason why Aceh should not have a referendum on independence, as happened in August in East Timor. That territory, illegally occupied by Indonesia in 1975, opted to separate.
When Wahid first offered Aceh a referendum he seemed convinced its people would vote to stay with Indonesia if offered a high degree of autonomy.
A rally in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, at the beginning of November by about a million people demanding an independence referendum raised alarm signals in Jakarta.
It also brought warnings that Acehnese independence would fuel separatist sentiments in other unhappy provinces, like the southern Irian Jaya, and goad sectarian violence in Ambon in the Spice Islands.
In the weeks since Wahid has back-peddled furiously from his first statement. This comes after not only disquiet expressed by the military, but also firm backing for keeping a unitary state from vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, Wahid's main coalition ally.
Wahid now says he will allow Aceh, a staunchly Muslim province, to hold a referendum on whether or not to introduce Islamic law, a move he thinks will buy off the highly influential religious leaders. But a plebiscite on independence, he says, is out of the question.
"Any attempt to separate Aceh from Indonesia is an act that cannot be tolerated," he told a parliamentary committee this week. "Aceh is part of our domain." Wahid warned that "repressive efforts" might be necessary to quell the separatist movements in Aceh and Irian Jaya. With this Wahid is almost echoing the new head of the armed forces, Admiral Widodo, who like many Indonesians only has one name.
The military, he told a gathering of senior officers on Thursday, "will uphold and maintain the union and sovereignty of Indonesia". Widodo is prepared to rapidly deploy significant reinforcements in Aceh if the security situation deteriorates further.
Even so, Wahid has so far resisted demands by the military to declare martial law in Aceh, where most of the central government's administration no longer functions and the separatists' guerrilla army, the Free Aceh Movement, controls about 70 per cent of the territory.
This has not stopped the army killing people, mostly unarmed civilians, and adding to the body count of about 4,000 people over the last 10 years.
The repression in Aceh and the brutal rampage by army-backed militias after the independence vote in East Timor are at the heart of demands that senior officers be brought to account for human rights abuses.
Here again Wahid's government seems to have concluded it is not ready to confront the military by putting generals in the dock.
Two independent Indonesian human rights commissions have looked at the army's record in East Timor and Aceh.
The full reports are still being studied by the government, but the investigators appear to have concluded there is enough evidence to say the systematic abuse of human rights in both territories was on the orders of generals in Jakarta.
The report into military repression in Aceh says atrocities were carried out "under the knowledge of the headquarters in Jakarta". It adds that some of the actions "were reported back to Jakarta with some of the military officers being rewarded with rank promotions". One such promotion was given an officer for killing a woman and her two children, suspected of being Acehnese separatists.
The inquiry into the rampages in East Timor has reportedly come to the conclusion that the pro-Jakarta militias were not inspired simply by loyalty to the central government, but were purposefully directed by the army in their rampages of killing and burning.
In both Aceh and East Timor there is more than a suggestion that the trail leads to General Wiranto, the former head of the armed forces, who was a key figure in the downfall of former president Suharto and who is now Coordinating Minister for Politics and Security.
"I believe Wiranto could be charged with omission or failure to take action [to stop the violence]," said Albert Nasibuan, head of the investigating team. This is a more than difficult situation for president Wahid, who has freely admitted that his selection to the top office by the country's electoral college came in part from a political deal for Wiranto's support.
Indonesia's first civilian defence minister, Juwono Sudarsono, has, however, more or less ruled out the prosecution of senior officers.
"We are willing to accept there was misuse of power," Sudarsono said on Wednesday. "But you cannot go into the higher ranks, much less question their legitimacy." "In the formal sense, the policies were legitimized through parliament and [former president] Suharto." "If we start disregarding that there would be no end to it. We cannot win through democratic absolutism." Sudarsono said Indonesia is at the beginning of a process of removing the military from politics and making it subservient to the government. The new government must move carefully but purposefully.
"If we don't put substance into the notion of civilian supremacy, then sooner or later the military will return in full force," he said.
And, just because there is now a civilian government it doesn't mean "the system has turned democratic overnight – it's not that simple," Sudarsono said.