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BY MARK MCDONALD - Mercury News Vietnam Bureau 18/06/99 (07:30) JAKARTA (SuratkabarCom) - Her friends say she doesn't want to be the next president of Indonesia. They say she'd rather cook her favorite Javanese dishes and arrange flowers, that she's a reluctant leader who only got into politics -- at age 40 -- at the urging of her overly ambitious third husband. They say she rarely talks about politics, that she hates speech-making and that she often feels as if she's channeling the ghost of her father, Sukarno, the nation's founding president. Nevertheless, Megawati Sukarnoputri, 52, appears to be the presidential heiress apparent as her Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle strengthens its lead in the parliamentary election held June 7. ``She's calm, never nervous, not emotional at all,'' said Sri Harsono, a longtime Megawati friend who opened a Jakarta flower shop with her 20 years ago. ``She has positive and negative aspects, like anyone else, but she's a good housewife. She can do anything. But she told me she doesn't really want to be president.'' The presidency -- which the new parliament will fill in the fall -- could well be hers for the taking. By Tuesday morning in Indonesia, 58 percent of the votes had been counted and Megawati's party, known by the acronym PDI-P, was far ahead with 37 percent of the 67 million votes counted so far. In second place was the ruling Golkar Party with 19 percent, followed by the National Awakening Party (PKB) with 16 percent. As the counting has proceeded at a laborious pace, Megawati has barely been visible -- just as she was during the election campaign. Surprisingly little is known about the would-be leader of the fourth-most-populous country in the world and the nation with the most Muslims. She refuses interviews with the press and rarely speaks in public. Her campaign speeches were filled with homilies and platitudes, and she ended many rallies by leading the crowd in a children's song. For the record, Megawati has pledged to keep Indonesia together, echoing her father's nationalist principles, which would mean taking a hard line against separatist sentiments in Aceh and other restive provinces. She's pledged to follow an international plan for economic recovery, while hinting that she would favor fixing the value of the national currency, the rupiah. And she's made it clear that she wants Indonesia to remain united and secular. For millions of religious Indonesians, however, only a man will do. Tuesday, the leaders of the United Development Party, which was polling 12 percent of the vote, issued a decree stating that they could only support a male Muslim for president. Many have suggested that Megawati's silences have been the best thing for her image, that she's a political naif, that she has no platform, no vision, no depth. (This is, after all, a woman who is said to have watched the movie ``Beauty and the Beast'' 50 times.) Critics say her handlers have conjured her into a cult figure by playing upon her political DNA and her persecution by Suharto, the disgraced former president. Suharto, in 1996, engineered her ouster from the leadership of the erstwhile Indonesian Democratic Party. ``Intellectually she's not a heavyweight, to say the least,'' says Jusuf Wanandi, perhaps the nation's best-known political scientist. ``As a member of parliament, she was medium.'' Wanandi, who worked with Sukarno and is a friend of Megawati's, acknowledges that she is roundly and rightly criticized for her lack of public support for the student uprising that brought down Suharto in May 1998. But in a woman who is often described as matronly, dull and dour, Wanandi sees a special gift. ``She has a charisma she got from her dad. Megawati's incredible with crowds. At a rally here in Jakarta, the crowd was 200,000, very rowdy as usual, and she told them to be silent and sit down. And they did! I've never seen anyone else able to do that -- except her father. ``Megawati has become the symbol of all the oppressed and the entire opposition in general. The small people who got left behind have taken her as a symbol, and that explains the enthusiasm.'' Much of that enthusiasm comes from the linkage to her father. She was a doting daughter, her friend Harsono says, and she particularly cared for him after Suharto ousted him in 1965. After its eviction from the plush presidential palace, the Sukarno clan was forced into much bleaker surroundings, after which Megawati left college, where she was studying agriculture. ``Because of Suharto she couldn't finish,'' Harsono says. ``No children of Sukarno were allowed to go to university. They had no money, no educations, no jobs. The family was so poor then.'' When Megawati married an Indonesian Air Force pilot, her deposed father had to ask Suharto's permission to attend the wedding. Sukarno died in 1970, and friends say his death sent Megawati into a depression. Then, another death: Megawati had given birth to two boys and was pregnant with her daughter, Harsono says, when her husband's plane went down in the early 1970s. ``They never found him,'' she says. Megawati's second marriage is something of a family secret, according to Harsono. ``It lasted just one day,'' Harsono says. ``One day she was married, the next day divorced. She said she was hypnotized. I have never asked her any more about it.'' Her third husband, Taufiq Kiemas, runs a chain of six gas stations that are said to be well-located in the Chinatown area of Jakarta. Together they live in a comfortable, well-fenced and well-guarded house on Kebagusan Street in south Jakarta. The relatively modest house is surrounded by lush gardens, and the Mercedes and the four-wheel-drive Pajero are kept in back. Inside the house are two large portraits of Sukarno. A candidate for parliament from southern Sumatra, Taufiq reportedly pressed his wife for years to get into politics. ``No one likes him because he's so jealous of her,'' says a friend who asks not to be identified. ``When a wife's career gets bigger than the husband's, the husband changes.'' After their father died, the Sukarno kids -- Megawati and the four eldest siblings -- took a vow that they would not be active in politics while Suharto was still alive. But the oldest brother, Guntur, 54, a photographer, and younger brother, Guruh, 46, a choreographer, both briefly entered parliament. Sisters Rachmawati and Sukmawati also were politically active. (Both Guruh and Rachmawati are standing for parliament in the current election.) ``We are not cut out for politics. It's Mega who has the staying power,'' Guntur has said. ``She resembles my father the most. She has guts.'' In 1979, Megawati, Harsono and three other friends opened a flower shop that they named Seruni -- chrysanthemum in the Indonesian language. They supplied flowers to a number of the city's fanciest hotels, and the proceeds went to a foundation that supported a kindergarten in a poor section of Jakarta. The business now only rents plants to offices and will soon be closed. ``She loves nature and all sorts of flowers,'' says Harsono, sitting in the front room of her house, which fronts the nursery area of Seruni. ``She liked arranging the flowers. She didn't know anything about the business part of it.'' That's one of the criticisms of her as a would-be president: No original ideas about rebooting the locked-up Indonesian economy. Then again, no other candidates offered much either, and all have said they would continue with the reforms ordered by the International Monetary Fund to pull the country out of the 18-month-old Asian economic crisis. ``Megawati's people are a mixed bag,'' says Wanandi. ``Kwik Kian Gie (her economic adviser) is a little behind in his theories. On the political side, it's mostly old guys, narrow-minded nationalists and some military people who are good with the masses. There are problems internally, but the coalition will bring some expertise.'' ``The coalition'' -- that would be the amalgam of smaller political parties that Megawati must assemble if PDI-P is to effectively govern the fractious archipelago of 210 million people. Coalition-building will be the order of the days, weeks and months ahead. Tuesday, Megawati's brain trust outlined a series of policies the party planned to implement if it pulled together a coalition government, including a possible fixed rate for the rupiah, the Indonesian currency. (The rupiah surged Tuesday to 7,170 to the dollar, its highest closing since November; Wednesday its slipped slightly to 7,290.) But it's unclear whether Megawati will be an active player in the coalition politicking. She is said to remain quiet in the meetings of PDI-P leaders, more an active listener than a debater. ``She's quiet, but she's not timid,'' says her old friend, Harsono. ``She won't talk unless she has something to say.'' If there has been one clear message delivered in her party's campaign, it has been that the PDI-P wants an Indonesia where mosque and state are clearly separate. Although her paternal grandmother was from Bali, the predominantly Hindu tourist mecca, Megawati is a practicing, although hardly devout, Muslim. ``She's very religious inside, but she doesn't emphasize it,'' says Harsono. ``She trusts in God.'' And she trusts in her father's legacy. When she made her first public speeches, she told Harsono, she often left rallies not remembering what she had just said. ``She told me: `I just felt like I had guidance from my father. He was
speaking through me.' '' HOME | Today's News | Shopping Copyright 1999 © SuratkabarCom Online |
Title: SuratkabarCom Online | (6) Megawati: The reluctant heiress apparent
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