Andrew Burrell, Jakarta – Indonesia's former military chief, Wiranto, tried yesterday to pin the blame for his probable election defeat on Western poll observers, including a group headed by former US president Jimmy Carter.
In a bizarre statement released to the media, Mr Wiranto's campaign office suggested that foreign institutions, including the respected Carter Centre, had been able to influence the result of Monday's presidential election.
The desperate move suggests Mr Wiranto's advisers may have privately conceded defeat at the hands of President Megawati Soekarnoputri and former security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who will both advance to a second round of voting in September.
Mr Wiranto, an indicted war criminal who is backed by the giant Golkar party and is rumoured to have been funded by the former ruling Soeharto family, is facing a loss that would end his political career.
The statement came after one of Mr Wiranto's senior advisers, former general Fachrul Razi, told The Australian Financial Review he did not believe the results of a national quick count released by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, showing Mr Wiranto in third place.
He said these results were only believed by "bules" – the sometimes condescending word used by Indonesians to describe Westerners.
The Wiranto statement alleges that Western observers who came to Indonesia for the vote had engaged in "strange conduct" at polling stations outside the major cities before and during Monday's vote.
Without referring to specifics, the statement claimed this operation was conducted "silently" and was allowed by the Indonesian authorities to become "out of control".
The statement also claimed that similar "operations" had taken place in East Timor in 1999 – when East Timorese voted to break away from Indonesia - and in the 1999 parliamentary election in Indonesia when Golkar was thrashed.
However, it said this conduct did not occur at parliamentary elections held in April, in which Golkar won most votes.
When contacted about the statement, an official in Mr Wiranto's media centre, Despen Ompusunggu, said it was not the official attitude of the campaign team but was based on reports received from supporters in the regions.
The head of Mr Wiranto's campaign team, Slamet Effendi Yusuf, said Golkar's own manual count showed late yesterday that Mr Wiranto and Mrs Megawati were neck-and-neck.
Partial results released yesterday by the General Election Commission showed Mr Yudhoyono clearly leading the count, with 33.7per cent, ahead of Mrs Megawati (26.5) and Mr Wiranto (22.1), with about half the vote counted.
An administrative bungle led to millions of votes being wrongly declared invalid. Indonesian voters marked their ballot papers on Monday using a nail to pierce a hole in the box next to their preferred candidate. But because they received the papers folded in half, with the names of the candidates on the top half, many ended up punching two holes.
Many polling officials decided these votes were invalid, but the General Election Commission later issued a decree that they must be counted as legal.
Many polling stations did not receive notice of the decree, and some booths had already closed and completed their count.