JOHN STANMEYER--SABA FOR TIME

There is a tendency in Indonesian political affairs to mistake patience for passivity. Last week's massive show of dissent during the special session of the People's Consultative Assembly demonstrated once again that even long intervals of quiet in Indonesia can be deceiving. After months of relative calm, foreign governments and investors began to push scenarios predicting that the status quo might linger, that there would be more continuity than change. Insiders, too, were lulled into such thinking. President B.J. Habibie and leaders in the Golkar political machine started believing their own spin that they really were Indonesia's new reformers and not simply desperate leftovers from a corrupt and violent Suharto dictatorship.

Then, with little warning, the trance was broken as hundreds of thousands of students and other protesters poured into the streets, the only genuine venue for democratic expression they have. The movement was vastly larger than the demonstrations that forced Suharto from office last May. The limits of patience had been reached. The problem at the center of the turmoil was fairly clear. The de jure government led by Habibie and represented by the Assembly--known by its Indonesian acronym MPR--has operated without a shred of legitimacy since Suharto's fall. Meanwhile, the country's de facto leaders, the ones supported across Indonesian society, had no place and no voice in an MPR session that was supposed to prepare the way for free and fair elections next May. The MPR itself was the child of a 1997 election that was typical of Suharto's New Order. The people had been cheated, and the opposition undercut. The problem last week was obvious: Could an illegitimate MPR make legitimate decisions? According to the students and their supporters, the MPR could do so only if it made decisions that also dug its own political grave.

As the protests intensified in the streets, members of the MPR droned on inside parliament. They granted piecemeal concessions to the forces assembling outside but still did not fully grasp the political implications of the moment. Disunited and reacting to wildfire rumors, the delegates lurched forward and backward but ultimately went nowhere. The armed forces, which are politically weaker now than at any other time since the early 1950s, are not able to dictate the terms for restoring stability short of unleashing a wave of violence. Reliable sources in Jakarta say that army colonels phoned the country's four leading opposition figures--Megawati Sukarnoputri, Abdurrahman Wahid, Amien Rais and Sultan Hamengkubuwono--and warned them that unless the protests subsided, a military junta would be installed. But martial law and a military government could not possibly rule Indonesia with stability, nor hold it together geographically.

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