After fervently voicing support for alleged terrorists last year in the name of Islamic brotherhood, Vice President Hamzah Haz has ventured onto safer ground by braying about the dangers of communism.
Forget the big problems facing Indonesia, such as corruption, terrorism, religious extremism, poor law enforcement and human rights abuses.
As political altercations intensify ahead of next year's direct presidential election, the vice president is playing it safe by digging up one of the favorite scapegoats of ex-president Suharto's regime.
"If a communist movement still exists in the country, let's crush them together," Haz was quoted as saying by state news agency Antara.
He was speaking Friday in his home province of West Kalimantan at the opening of a conference on a national economy based on Islamic Syariah law, organized by the Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals Association (ICMI).
Haz said Indonesia has no room for communists because it is a country of religious adherents. But the attitude of some Indonesians often runs opposite to religious tenets, he added.
In the past, such warnings about the scepter of communism were used to stifle freedom of expression, particularly criticism of the government and military.
Communism, Marxism and Leninism were banned by the Suharto regime in 1966 and remain illegal. Former president Abdurrahman Wahid did his best to revoke the ban but was thwarted by Muslim hardliners and moderates, as well as remnants of the Suharto era.
Incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri has shown no desire to lift the ban, even though some of her staunchest supporters from her days as an opposition figurehead were radical left-wingers.
Communism was the favorite bogeyman of the Suharto regime, which came to power in 1965-66 by crushing the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and slaughtering an estimated 500,000 people ? mostly leftists and their alleged supporters or sympathizers.
Throughout the Suharto era, pro-democracy activists and other opponents of the regime were often labeled communists, tried for subversion and thrown in jail.
Following the fall of Suharto in 1998, book titles featuring Marx, Engels and other communist figures began appearing at many campus bookstores across the country.
But Che Guevara T-shirts and dog-eared copies of Das Kapital didn't quite manage to become de rigueur among Indonesian students – except supporters of the tiny People's Democratic Party (PRD) – mainly because of the stigma still attached to communism.
Major Indonesian publishing houses in 2001 stopped printing books on communism and many titles were pulled off the shelves following threats of violence by anti-communist groups affiliated to remnants of the Suharto regime. At least one university suspended students suspected of being communists.
Protests Hamzah Haz's warning about communism comes after weeks of mass demonstrations and growing government criticism that forced Megawati's administration to roll back prices of public utilities.
The policy reversal came too late to stop the emergence of a loose coalition of nationalists, socialists, Muslim leaders, student groups, trade unionists and disgruntled politicians aiming to force the president to resign.
In response to the coalition, the nation's top political parties and the military have stood united behind Megawati, warning that it would be unconstitutional to overthrow her.
This bonding among the big parties and the military lends credence to the "elite pact" theory that Indonesia's top politicians and officials will look out for each other, as long as it serves their mutual interests to certain extents, nevermind if that means reneging on pledges to eradicate corruption.
Although Haz stopped short of saying those who want to overthrow the government are communists, observers say he has tried to revive the old fear of communism to discourage radical public expressions of discontent.