Volume 47, Number 8 · May 11, 2000
Indonesia: Starting Over
By Clifford Geertz
Since Indonesia's sudden reversal of fortune, globalism interrupted, a great deal more has happened there than capital flight, currency collapse, and a tripling of the poverty rate. The regime has changed twice—the regime, not just the government—once abruptly, in a spasm of violence, once glacially, with troubled and unnerving hesitation. The first time, in late 1998, Suharto, the architect, or anyway the godfather, of both the expansion and the collapse, walked away amid wild disorder—race riots, looting, bloody clashes between students and the army, Jakarta on fire, Surakarta ransacked—leaving B.J. Habibie, his just- appointed crony vice president, haplessly behind to sort through the ruins. The second time, a protracted, vastly complicated, ultimately indecisive, but, so it seems, fair and open national election (ninety million voters, forty-eight parties, seven hundred electors) ended last autumn with the midnight designation, by a half-dozen arriviste kingmakers, of Abdurrahman Wahid as the new president. An ill, erratic, nearly blind religious intellectual, he had been written off by almost everyone as too frail to serve.
Feature, 4932 words
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