Seventeen months after the resignation of President Suharto and the elevation of B.J. Habibie as Indonesia's third president in May 1998, the new government under President Abdurrachman Wahid has finally come into being. Whither Indonesia now, the regional power in Southeast Asia with a population of 210 million?

　It is useful in this connection to look back at Indonesia's recent past under Suharto's long dictatorship and ask why it collapsed in 1998 and how Indonesia has been trying to cope with its legacies in overcoming the current crisis.

　Suharto's New Order regime was built on one assumption and two operating principles. In the early days of the New Order in the late 1960s, Gen. Ali Murtopo, who played a crucial role in fashioning the regime as Suharto's intelligence chief, made a remark to the following effect: The people are like the tiger. The hungry tiger should not be left free. It is best to cage and feed him. When he is well fed, he may eventually learn to perform a trick or two. This was the guiding philosophy of Suharto's New Order.

　Caging the tiger meant using state power politically to demobilize the population and to control their participation in the political process. This was accomplished in the mass killings that took place in the transition from Sukarno's Guided Democracy to Suharto's New Order in which perhaps half a million people were killed in Aceh, Central and East Java, and Bali. This experience instilled deep-rooted fear among Indonesians about state violence.

Slaughter in the '70s

　After that, the state continued to brandish its terrifying power on many occasions. In the late 1970s, perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed in East Timor in the brutal colonial war, while in the early 1980s thousands of people were killed by "mysterious gunmen'' in Java.

　Hundreds were killed in the Tanjung Priok incident in 1984, the Lampung incident in 1989 and the Dili massacre in 1991, while tens of thousands were killed in Aceh in the 1990s.

　This enormous state terror silenced the population, while the regime was run on two principles. The first was what we may call the politics of stability and development. Suharto's New Order made development the national goal and tried to legitimize itself by its achievements. The logic behind it was pretty straightforward: Political stability would lead to economic development, which in turn would result in an improved standard of living, which in turn would lead to legitimacy of the regime and political stability.

　The second was the family principle. As the president was/is called "Father President'' (Bapak President in Indonesian), the president as well as heads of government agencies and divisions such as ministers, regional military commanders and provincial governors were/are expected to look after their subordinates as their "children.'' Bosses thus established foundations and teamed up with their mainly Chinese business associates to raise money.

　The New Order regime started as a military regime in the late 1960s, and the military provided its power base until the end of Suharto's dictatorship. Its power lay in its territorial structure, an apparatus for territorial and internal security operations.

　Indonesia was (and still is) divided into 10 military regions, each region into military resorts, each resort into military districts, each district into military subdistricts, to which the non-commissioned officer stationed in each village report. The army thus has its men on the village level, all over Indonesia, as its eyes and ears, while even the ministry of the interior and the police reach only the subdistrict level.

　The military had a dual function in the New Order: its defense and security function and its social and political function. The political role of the military was institutionalized in the name of this doctrine.

　Its representative constituted the government party in parliament along with Golkar, the functional representatives group, while officers on active duty who were seconded to civilian ministries as district chiefs, director-general and secretaries-general formed the "backbone'' of the New Order Indonesian state.

Suharto's fall from grace

　Indonesia's macro-economic management was the responsibility of "technocrats,'' American-trained economists who were in almost constant tussles with bosses and their mainly Chinese business associates. In boom times, bosses and their business associates had their field days, while in tough times technocrats ran the Indonesian economy in textbook style.

　In the 1990s, however, Indonesia under Suharto's dictatorship started to show many signs of failing. The military lost much of its political power because of Suharto's intervention in the internal affairs of the military, while its leadership became increasingly split and lost the political will of its own. This eventually led to the split between the group led by Gen. Wiranto and the one led by Lt. Gen. Prabowo, Suharto's son-in-law, with its base mainly in army special forces.

　Suharto's family business also ran amok in the 1990s as demonstrated by Suharto's third son, Tommy, whose family car project imported ''national'' cars from the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Each of Suharto's children received a business empire and exploited their special privileges to go into any area of business that looked lucrative, from petrochemical and automobiles to power generation, mobile phones and expressways.

　U.S.-trained technocrats lost their power in the face of Suharto's ever-expanding family business. This was partly because the engine of Indonesia's economic development shifted from the government to the private sector, making their traditional economic policy instruments less effective. It was also partly caused by Suharto's unwillingness to listen to them because his children with their own business interests had far larger influence on him than technocrats.

　By the mid-1990s, the Indonesian people were already asking whether Indonesia belonged to the Indonesian people or to the Suharto family. In effect, they were questioning the national legitimacy of Suharto's New Order.

　Then the Asian monetary crisis dealt the final blow to the regime. The collapse of the Indonesian economy led to social crisis, which in turn led to political crisis. The tiger could no longer be caged. The social crisis manifested itself in riots, lootings and violence. The student movement revived. Reformation became the word of the day. The old man had to go. The transitional government under President B. J. Habibie called for "reformation and development'' and paved the way for democratic transition to the new government.

　In an unexpected turn of events, K.H. Abdurrachman Wahid, the founder of the National Awakening Party and the chairman of the orthodox Islamic social and economic association, Nahdlatul Ulama, was elected the fourth president with Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia's first president Sukarno and the chair of the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle, as his vice president.

Threat of division

　As his honorific title Kyai shows, he was supposed to be "a wise man'' to advise the men in politics. But the bitter struggle for the presidency between Megawati and President Habibie threatened to divide Indonesia.

　This was perhaps the most important reason that Gus Dur, as Abdurrachman Wahid is commonly called, could not sit back as the wise man. He decided to run for the presidency to achieve national reconciliation and to restore popular trust in the government.

　The establishment of a new government under President Abdurrachman Wahid marked the completion of the transitional process from Suharto's dictatorship to the new democratic Indonesia. But this is only the first step in overcoming the current crisis. The question is whether the new government, which now enjoys popular trust, can seize a small window of opportunity to take initiatives in restoring popular trust in the state.

　The government and the state are not the same. The government is like a driver, while the state is the car. However excellent the driver is, he/she cannot go very far if the car is in a sorry state. Under Suharto, the Indonesian state was transformed into a huge racket, rotten from top to bottom. The military as its guardian killed many people.

　Yet those who made billions of dollars and killed tens of thousands are still in positions of power and wealth. Who would trust the state if basic justice is not done, even if the man you think you trust is now the president? The new government has to show that it is serious in restoring justice and putting the state apparatus back in order.

　If not, popular support for the government would be gone in a year or two and the small window of opportunity the new president has right now would be lost.