What Makes Megawati Run

TERRY McCARTHY JakartaShe was a housewife. He was a dictator. Yet Megawati Sukarnoputri was the one person in Indonesia Suharto feared. To the superstitious Javanese leader, she represented the ghost of her father Sukarno, whom Suharto overthrew in 1966. He tried to exorcise her. She grew stronger. Now, as Indonesia adds up the votes in its first free election in 44 years, Megawati has come back to dance on Suharto's political grave.

After three decades of Suharto's iron-fisted rule, during which his children and their cronies got rich at the expense of the majority, Indonesia's 200 million people are demanding a fairer deal. By adroitly wrapping herself in the banner of the downtrodden, Megawati the housewife has defied her critics and come to symbolize the demands of the oppressed. At week's end, Megawati's Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) was projected to win a plurality, though not a majority, of the vote. That puts her in a strong position to succeed B.J. Habibie, Suharto's hand-picked successor, when an expanded parliament convenes later this year to select a new president. From the standpoint of Javanese culture, Megawati is the Queen of Justice, says Josef Kristiadi of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. Someone who will right the wrongs of the past.

Before this year, few thought the 52-year-old mother of three who grew up in the presidential palace had either the strength or the determination to emerge as the queen of the reform movement. Widely regarded as aloof and devoid of ideas, Megawati had been dismissed as an ephemeral shade of her charismatic father, trading on little more than her famous name. Only recently have her detractors begun to sense something more durable and determined beneath the palace-princess faade. Megawati doesn't say much, but she rarely makes wrong judgments, says Wimar Witoelar, a prominent TV talk-show host. She is like a big sister or a mother--somebody you can trust.

Although she entered politics in 1987 as a PDI party candidate, she had limited grasp of policy, was uneasy in public meetings and showed no appetite for confronting Suharto. She might never have done so--if he had kept his superstitious fears bottled up. In June 1996 Suharto manipulated a PDI party congress in Medan to remove her as chairwoman--even though she posed no direct threat to him in the rigged elections he staged every five years. When her supporters protested and occupied the party headquarters, he sent in thugs to remove them forcibly. Five people died in the ensuing riots. It was one of Suharto's rare misjudgments. Having deftly sidelined all other threats to his one-man rule, he had finally created an enemy he had no defense against, a figure with whom all the other victims of his regime could identify. Like Ferdinand Marcos' Cory Aquino, Suharto had engineered his own nemesis. To Megawati's advisers, it was a gift from heaven. The idea was to promote martyrdom, explains Laksamana Sukardi, a close Megawati adviser. We were faced with a psychopathic regime--if you confront it frontally, you can't win. So her advisers pushed her to operate on a different level: she became a symbol of Suharto's oppression. The more the President raged against her, the stronger she became.

The bloody events of 1996 also showed a new side of Megawati, an inner strength few knew she possessed. Don't waste your tears, she told an aide who came to her sobbing after witnessing the beatings of her party members that July afternoon. We are going to fight for our rights, and tears will get us nowhere. About that time she cut her hair short, and has kept it that way ever since. Before, she was motherly, says Subagio Anam, a businessman and aide to Megawati. She became tougher. Says Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, a former environment minister and now informal adviser to the Megawati camp: Her biggest achievement was getting her party to survive the repression of '96. It is the source of her support, because she stood up for her rights. In the face of Suharto's attack, many of Megawati's friends advised her to compromise. But she refused and announced she would sue, which she did, over and over again, in every courthouse that would accept her complaint. It was a Gandhian tactic, and Suharto could do little in response.

In total Megawati filed some 230 cases in courts around the country challenging her removal from the PDI leadership. Only seven verdicts went in her favor, says Laksamana, but each case gave her a political stage, and no one could stop her supporters from attending the court hearings. It was a case of 'even if I lose, I win,' he says. She won people's hearts, if not the verdicts.

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