Jakarta – Indonesia's best-known writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is a surprise critic of the country's new President, Mr Abdurrahman Wahid. Pramoedya dismisses the President as "part of the elite ... that implemented fascism and ran the country by terror ... everyone became afraid and those who wanted to live had to become a hypocrite".

Chain-smoking kretek cigarettes and blackened after stoking a rubbish fire in the narrow street outside his house in east Jakarta, Pramoedya talks about what he sees as the revolution still to come in Indonesia.

"There will be social unrest," he says. "For example, those farmers whose land was taken away from them have started to rebel. These are the seeds of social revolution ... until now Indonesia has not had a real leader so I cannot imagine what will happen."

Aged 75 and hard of hearing after a soldier, years ago, hit him in the head with a rifle butt, Pramoedya dismisses Mr Wahid's overtures to him, including being one of the first dissenters invited to the palace to meet Indonesia's first democratically elected president. "It was not important to me," he says.

Although both men spent years opposing the military-dominated rule of former President Suharto, Pramoedya says that Mr Wahid is not a break with the elite who have always ruled Indonesia.

Best known for the Buru Tetrology, a series of novels written while he was on the Buru prison island, the slightly stooped but still sprightly Pramoedya says he complained to Mr Wahid about the injustices inflicted on him during Mr Suharto's rule, including the taking of a family house and destruction of eight unpublished scripts. "That's not all ... I lived for my writings and during the New Order [Suharto] era my writings were forbidden," he says.

Mr Wahid asked Pramoedya to write down a list of what he had lost and give it to his protocol people. "I didn't do it. I have lost confidence in Indonesia's elite," he says, pulling hard on another kretek and cupping his ears to hear the questions.

Pramoedya says that Mr Wahid wanted to talk about his writings of a long-ago maritime Indonesia. "He said he had established a maritime ministry," Pramoedya says. "After that he didn't have anything to talk about. It seems he only wanted to embrace all groups."

Pramoedya's words are steely, uncompromising. There is no acknowledgement that Indonesia is going through a difficult transition from dictatorship to democratic rule, the military is being reformed and pushed out of their dominant role in society and Mr Suharto is under a renewed Attorney-General's investigation for corruption.

Asked whether he would go back to Buru, the island where he spent 12 years struggling to survive with thousands of other alleged leftists after being arrested on the night of 13 October 1965, in the shadow of a nationwide purge, Pramoedya shakes his head. "No."

He reaches for his faded book, The Mute's Soliloquy, which includes parts of his clandestine writings and has for years sat on a coffee table in the lounge room of his large timber bungalow. "Here are lists of my friends who were killed or are missing," he says. "Until now no case has been taken to court. I hope there is international concern. These people were unarmed, forced into labor. It was difficult to find food and they were killed."

He recalls the day that guards machinegunned 11 prisoners "just for entertainment." He recalls how he and other prisoners had to grow food not only to feed themselves but their guards.

Pramoedya's knuckles tighten when asked about Mr Wahid's promise to pardon Mr Suharto if he is found guilty by a court. "Suharto must be held responsible for the things he has done ... he should be taken to trial," he says. "Perhaps it should happen in East Timor because that is where there were the latest mass killings."

After his release from Buru in 1979, Pramoedya was banned from receiving visitors and remained under state surveillance. It was not until late last year that he left Indonesia for the first time in 40 years, visiting the United States, Canada and Europe.

Even then he thought he would be arrested at the airport. "I went with many people ... if I was not allowed there would have been big demonstrations," he says.

In 1992 Pramoedya stopped reporting to the East Jakarta military command post, although officers until several years ago still regularly checked up on him, and foreign visitors, especially journalists, still risked getting put on the Suharto regime's notorious immigration black list if they dared call on him.

Now the Pramoedya living room is a magnet for young writers and activists. The old man receives them with cups of steaming Javanese coffee and a wide and relaxed smile, revealing a gap in his teeth.

But visitors now never hear the tap of his typewriter. The man whose writings and books are still being translated and published around the world and have been world best-sellers, pauses and looks to the ground when asked how long it is since he wrote a book. "I can't remember, maybe 1984," he says.