'Mother Mega' leaves fans cold

Pius Lustrilanang says he's bled his last drop for President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

In 1998, as Indonesia's Suharto dictatorship fought to restrain the democracy movement Megawati had inspired, Mr. Lustrilanang was snatched off a Jakarta street and taken to a dank military interrogation center. His crime: leading a pro-Megawati student group.

Lustrilanang was beaten, given electric shocks, and held down in tubs of icy water until he almost drowned, then peppered with questions about the political organization behind the matronly future president. He says he survived by holding on to his dream of a Megawati presidency. "She was going to break up the old, corrupt system."

But today, a year after Megawati gained power, he calls his earlier expectations naive. "Megawati hasn't shown any commitment to stamping out corruption or establishing the rule of law," says the democracy activist. "She abandoned us."

All signs are that Megawati has stabilized the world's largest Muslim country four years after the US and others worried it was close to lurching badly out of control. This week, Megawati is expected to sail through the annual meeting of its highest legislative body. It met last year amid threats of riots and ended in the ouster of her mercurial predecessor, Abdurrahman Wahid. Later this week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell will pass through here on his tour of Asia and is expected to praise Megawati's cooperation in the war on terror. Washington, meanwhile, is considering reestablishing military ties with Indonesia.

Yet the calm that "Mother Mega" has brought to Indonesian politics belies the fact that the expectations for sweeping change haven't been met.

If Megawati the outsider was seen as a vigorous advocate for the poor, a believer in fast-track democratization, and a critic of the military's poor human rights record, Megawati the president has not led any antipoverty drives, has expressed unease with public votes in parliament, and has ordered troops to "carry out your duties ... without having to worry about human rights abuses."

Public rage at corrupt officials seethes just below the surface, and Megawati's failure to make a dent in poverty is costing her core support. The daughter of Indonesia's charismatic first President, Sukarno, has backed away from prosecutions of public officials and businessmen accused of stealing billions, and allowed the Army to regain some of the political clout it had lost. Nor has she moved to replace judges, despite a recent survey that ranked Indonesia's judiciary the most corrupt in Asia.

Perhaps worse, for the president's previously fervent supporters, is Megawati's recipe for stability: accommodating many of the politicians and generals who served Suharto.

"This is a reflection of Megawati's deep conservatism: She wants to hold on to what Suharto built rather than change it,'' says Jeffrey Winters, an Indonesia expert at Northwestern University in Chicago.

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