BY MAX LANE
Between 100,000 to 500,000 supporters of President Abdurrahman Wahid are expected to gather in Jakarta for a mass prayer meeting on April 29, just one day before the Indonesian house of representatives meets to discuss a censure motion against the president over corruption allegations.
If the house votes for the censure memorandum, the way is opened for a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly, the MPR, in three months time. Such a session could feasibly remove Wahid and replace him with Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri, or even somebody else. The censure motion is the second presented this year.
The motion against Wahid has been pushed through the parliament by the same forces that voted him into the presidency: Golkar, the party of the Suharto dictatorship, the right-wing Islamic Central Axis coalition and the TNI, the Indonesian armed forces, who have representatives in parliament.
Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), dominated for the moment by its right wing, has also followed the Golkar-Central Axis-TNI coalition.
In response, Wahid has sought the high moral ground, supporting a proposal for a meeting between himself, Sukarnoputri, Golkar head Akbar Tanjung and other senior party leaders to end what is publicly seen as infighting within the "elite politik".
Wahid has also played with the idea of mobilising his massive numbers of supporters, especially the members of the Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, of which he is the former head.
While the president's own pronouncements have wavered, sometimes calling for mobilisation, sometimes opposing it, Nahdlatul Ulama has now decided to proceed with the mass prayer meeting in Jakarta's largest stadium on April 29.
Wahid has, however, called on the Prepared to Die Brigades, his most fanatical supporters, not to come to Jakarta, for fear that other parties will mobilise their private armies.
Reports from activists in contact with the Nahdlatul Ulama rank and file say that the mood is very angry. There is also a conflict developing within the organisation, between the mass base and the formal hierarchy of Islamic teachers and preachers, called kyai.
A layer of younger kyai, outside the formal NU structure, are exercising more and more influence over the mass base and are more supportive of mass action.
The formal leadership of Nahdlatul Ulama is calling on supporters coming to Jakarta to return to their regions, mainly in East Java, immediately after the mass prayer rally on April 29.
However, the younger kyai and the masses themselves seem to be committed to rallying again the next day at the parliament building, to demand that MPs not proceed with the censure motion. They will also likely to raise the demand for the dissolution of Golkar, for its complicity in the 30 year dictatorship of Suharto.
Such a mobilisation, of 100,000 or more fanatical Wahid supporters, mainly peasants, could turn into something even larger, depending on whether the rally raises any clear demands other than opposition to the censure motion and on the mood within the mass base of Sukarnoputri and the PDIP.
If the NU masses rally with a clear anti-Golkar focus, it is possible that they may draw along with them thousands of Jakarta's urban poor, who also hate Golkar but who are now mainly backers of Sukarnoputri.
The hierarchy of Nahdlatul Ulama is attempting to prevent any drift in that direction. It has denied requests from other anti-Golkar forces, such as the radical Peoples' Democratic Party (PRD) and progressive student organisations, to bring their banners or flags to the mass prayer meeting.
The PDIP is deeply divided, between a right-wing anti-Wahid faction comprising of MPs who have only recently joined the party from backgrounds in Golkar, the military and business and a wing closer to the traditional nationalist stance of Sukarnoputri's father, Sukarno, who was Indonesia's first president. The Sukarnoists are vehemently opposed to any ouster of Wahid, as they believe it would strengthen the right-wing Muslims, their traditional enemy.
The PDIP's primarily urban mass base has as yet shown no enthusiasm for replacing Wahid with Sukarnoputri by manoeuvre. A call by the party's leadership to set up posko, or neighbourhood command centres, the technique used to mobilise massive support for Sukarnoputri in the 1999 elections, has enjoyed little backing from party supporters.
Sukarnoputri herself has maintained her silence, not stating what stance she will take on the censure motion and not rescinding her standing commitment to support Wahid as president until his term expires in 2004.
The armed forces are clearly collaborating with Golkar to dislodge Wahid. The TNI's 38 parliamentary representatives voted to censure Wahid in February and seem very likely to do so again this time around.
The military is at loggerheads with the president over its operations in the northern Sumatran province of Aceh, where people are demanding a referendum on independence.
Military figures have repeatedly called on the government to give them the go-ahead to crush the GAM, the Free Aceh Movement. But while Wahid has approved some measures, such as dispatching extra forces to guard ExxonMobil's oil refinery in the province, he has so far avoided making any commitment to the all-out offensive the TNI wants.
There are now rumours circulating in Jakarta that some elements in the military may attempt to provoke the kind of anarchy that exploded in the capital in July 1996 and in May 1998, providing them with a pretext for a major crack-down.
There is also some evidence that the ground is being prepared for another scapegoating campaign against the PRD. Right-wing Muslim students have launched a wave of attacks against the offices of PRD affiliates since early April and there are fears that they have more in store.