Salam Permias, Tampaknya Wiranto masih memegang peranan penting pasca PEMILU. Setidaknya, begitulah analisa WSJ dibawah. Jabat erat, Ahmad Syamil Toledo, OH ***************** June 7, 1999 Wiranto-Led Armed Forces Could Seal Habibie's Fate By RAPHAEL PURA Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Last year, Indonesia's top soldier, Armed Forces Commander Gen. Wiranto, was elemental in replacing President Suharto with B.J. Habibie. This year, he could determine whether Mr. Habibie keeps his job. In the contest to select Indonesia's next president, Gen. Wiranto holds a possible trump card -- the complex electoral process still gives the military a potentially decisive voice. "The armed forces will become a beauty queen," predicts Indria Samego, a military analyst and adviser to Mr. Habibie. "Everybody will want to have a special relationship with her." Indeed, Gen. Wiranto is already being mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate for either Mr. Habibie or Megawati Sukarnoputri, the popular opposition leader who is expected to make a strong bid for the presidency. Some analysts say he could even emerge as a compromise nominee for the top job, under the right circumstances. Taking a Neutral Stance The 52-year-old Gen. Wiranto is coy about such speculation. A careful, tight-lipped officer, he has promised that the military -- which openly worked for Mr. Suharto and his Gololongan Karya Party, or Golkar, in past elections -- will be "neutral" this year. But he has also declared that Indonesian political parties are free to nominate anyone they want, and he hasn't said he would reject a nomination for either top job. Staying neutral might be hard for the military, which has been involved in politics since its inception almost 55 years ago, during Indonesia's fight for independence from the Dutch. The military's combination of defense and political roles was enshrined in a doctrine called dwi-fungsi, or dual function; under Mr. Suharto, military officers served as provincial governors, ran state-owned businesses, pervaded the bureaucracy, and performed a raft of other nondefense tasks. That is partly what makes Monday's parliamentary vote a milestone: it formally breaks Mr. Suharto's three-decade military-backed rule, and is Indonesia's first free vote in 44 years. But in terms of selecting a president, it is just the beginning of the battle. In coming months, the president will be picked by the People's Consultative Assembly, a 700-member body made up of elected representatives, indirectly selected members, and 38 military appointees. If Monday's poll doesn't produce a clear-cut favorite, Gen. Wiranto and his armed forces could swing the presidential ballot, which is currently set for November. Test of Will "This is the great exam for the military -- does it really have the strong will, the strong confidence to be neutral?" asks Maj. Gen. Agus Wirahadikusumah, a senior aide to Gen. Wiranto. The military will take its cue from its commander. "If Wiranto says 'A," it's 'A,' " says Maj. Gen. Agus. What will he say? Gen. Wiranto and Mr. Habibie -- who is Golkar's current presidential candidate -- weren't natural allies a year ago. In fact, Mr. Habibie traditionally had been closer to the general's rival camp of aggressively pro-Islamic officers. But the two men have stood by each another in various crises since. Last month, for example, Gen. Wiranto helped Mr. Habibie secure Golkar's nomination as its presidential candidate. "Habibie believes that Wiranto is loyal to him," says a senior adviser to the president. Still, Ms. Megawati's party, the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle, or PDI-P, and its allies reckon that they can lure Gen. Wiranto to their side by stressing their credentials as nonsectarian nationalists to the like-minded general. "If you ask if a man like Wiranto is basically acceptable [to us], he is," acknowledges Kwik Kian Gie, a key Megawati adviser and secretary-general of the PDI-P. Gen. Wiranto declined to be interviewed for this article. Some analysts expect the military to back whichever political coalition appears likely to provide the most popular, and, therefore stable, new government. "It's logical for the armed forces to be neutral at present," to see who does well in Monday's vote, says Harold Crouch, a military specialist at Australian National University. "If it's equal, Wiranto will be in a wonderful position to get concessions for the military." Gen. Wiranto's prize might be even bigger. If the presidential contest deadlocks in the People's Consultative Assembly, competing party coalitions might ask Gen. Wiranto himself to join them as a compromise nominee for the No. 1 post, say some political analysts. There is irony in all of this. By the time Mr. Suharto quit a year ago, the once-proud armed forces had become Indonesia's most reviled institution. Many Indonesians saw its officer corps as venal and riven by internal politics, enmeshed in a web of patronage tacitly condoned by Mr. Suharto -- himself a five-star general. The troops were poorly paid, demoralized and considered inept, ill-disciplined and sometimes brutal. The last thing many Indonesians wanted was a continued military role in politics, let alone another general as president. "Wiranto inherited a rotten legacy from his predecessors," says J. Kristiadi, a military scholar at Jakarta's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Under Suharto, the armed forces was a tool of control." Links to the Past Gen. Wiranto himself appeared tainted by his close ties to Mr. Suharto, whom he served as personal adjutant (top personal military aide) from 1989 to 1993. After that tour, Gen. Wiranto's career soared: He served as commander of the strategically crucial Jakarta garrison, and later as army chief of staff before Mr. Suharto named him armed commander and defense minister in early 1998. The former president even appointed Gen. Wiranto's wife and young daughter to the People's Consultative Assembly that convened in March 1998 to elect Mr. Suharto president for a seventh term. (They resigned after Mr. Habibie became president.) In five years, Gen. Wiranto went from colonel to four-star general. "His feet barely touched the ground," says Bob Lowry, an Indonesia specialist at the Australian Defense Study Center. "He didn't have his own political network, he progressed on the Suharto connection as adjutant." When Mr. Suharto quit in May 1998, Gen. Wiranto immediately and publicly pledged to protect his personal security. "It's impossible for Wiranto to ignore Suharto, especially in Javanese culture," says Mr. Kristiadi. "Wiranto served him for four years and was groomed by Suharto. He can't forget it." Many Indonesians suspect Gen. Wiranto -- unlike Mr. Habibie, who was also a Suharto protege, and cabinet minister for 24 years -- still maintains contact with the ex-president. That Wiranto still wields the influence he does is testament to political survival skills: He has played down links to the past, while derailing his most dangerous internal rivals and sponsoring modest, but image-enhancing reforms in the military, such as prohibiting military officers to serve in civilian posts, and separating the police force from the military. "He moves very slowly, like Suharto," says Mr. Crouch. "Sometimes it's hard to see what he's driving at, but in the end it works." The military's enduring power also illustrates the weakness of Indonesia's civilian institutions -- including political parties, the civilian bureaucracy and the judiciary -- all of which atrophied under Mr. Suharto. The military remains one of Indonesia's few institutions with a national presence. "The armed-forces system is still much more coherent and efficient than the bureaucracy," says one Asian diplomat. "The point is, Wiranto is important because he's the leader of a relatively effective organization." Gen. Wiranto, like Mr. Suharto, hails from central Java, where reticence, patience and external calm are admired leadership qualities. He graduated at the top of his 1968 class at Indonesia's military academy. But acquaintances say Gen. Wiranto is neither a brilliant commander nor a driven visionary. They describe a man who enjoys singing karaoke (an English-language favorite is the syrupy ballad, "Feelings") and tending his collection of pet birds. "He's not a charismatic general," says Australian military analyst Mr. Lowry. "We're not talking about MacArthur here," referring to the flamboyant, corncob-pipe-chomping U.S. general who won glory in World War II and Korea. Shrewd Tactics Still, Gen. Wiranto's tactics were sharp last year when Mr. Suharto's chaotic final days could have destroyed his career as well. He was sensitive to rising popular demands for change well before protesters drove Mr. Suharto from office. It was Gen. Wiranto who allowed students to occupy Indonesia's parliament building in May 1998 in their campaign to oust Mr. Suharto, thus possibly avoiding a bloodier confrontation on Jakarta streets already wracked by rioting. Gen. Wiranto then helped engineer the critical compromises that led to Mr. Suharto's peaceful transfer of power to Mr. Habibie. The effort meant outsmarting army hardliners, notably former Lt. Gen. Prabowo Subianto, a Suharto son-in-law, who pressed Mr. Habibie to oust Gen. Wiranto. Gen. Prabowo and his Muslim military allies saw Gen. Wiranto as indecisive, too soft on protests and too close to Christian officers. Gen. Wiranto eventually won that battle; he sidelined Gen. Prabowo -- who is now retired in self-exile in Jordan -- and has since slowly pushed his allies from key posts. But the moves aren't enough to persuade everyone that the military can clean its own house or that Gen. Wiranto is the man for the job. Critics complain he has been unwilling or unable to investigate an array of violent incidents, including the kidnapping of political activists during the last months of Mr. Suharto's government, the killing of student protesters by rogue troops last year and a spate of mysterious murders in East Java late last year. They say the army has been tardy in putting down flare-ups of communal violence in Kalimantan and Ambon, and has failed to defuse an increasingly violent separatist movement in Aceh province. Diplomats in Jakarta also say Gen. Wiranto has condoned, at least tacitly, the military's arming of brutal East Timorese militias that oppose independence for the violence-torn province. East Timor is due to hold a United Nations-supervised referendum on independence in August, but killings and intimidation by the pro-Jakarta militias threaten the vote. -- Puspa Madani contributed to this article.
