The Year of Living Nervously
When Abdurrahman Wahid in his drawstring trousers waved his hand from the veranda of the Merdeka Palace, people knew time had come for him to leave. It was July and he had been holding out against the inevitable during a six-month impeachment process. Now he had lost.
January 1, 2002
May 1998, with its riots and the long awaited resignation of Suharto, indeed signalled a new political era with new freedoms. But it did not quite signal the end of an era. It was just the start of an intermezzo in a long and general continuity.
Political freedom, alias democratisation, was marked by a reduced role for the state. In the process it exposed the social ulcers which had been hidden underneath. Long-latent violence boiled out to such
...