Word: wahid
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Even as he tries to push forward with his grand vision of democratic reform, a malign undertow draws Wahid back into the corrupt old ways of Suharto and his cronies. Financial scandals have been creeping closer to his inner circle. Now his former masseur is being investigated for allegedly embezzling $4.7 million from the state rice-distribution agency...
...dictator's allegedly ill-begotten fortune is determined. Last month a court in Jakarta threw out a defamation suit brought by Suharto against TIME for a May 1999 article claiming that the President and his family had acquired some $15 billion during his rule. (Suharto has appealed.) Wahid cites the suit as proof of the dictator's hidden wealth. Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has accused cronies of Suharto's of inciting bloody riots to derail further investigations. Yet in the meantime, Wahid has been secretly negotiating with Suharto to return some money--for a presidential pardon...
...would dispute that Wahid is genuinely committed to democracy and free and fair markets. And nobody accuses him of being personally corrupt. But, says Muhaimin Iskandar, head of the National Awakening Party, Wahid's faction in the parliament, "from the beginning, management has been his problem...
...strokes and diabetes have left Wahid with no vision, so he relies on a group of close aides and family members to brief him, read documents and even describe the body language of people he is meeting. Many fear this system is open to abuse. "His inner circle poses the greatest threat," says Zastrouw Ngatawi, a former assistant and author of a book about Wahid. "People are [invoking] his name, and this will distract from the ideas he is trying...
There is little to fault in those ideas. On a recent trip to Lombok, a tourist island whose hotels were emptied after an outbreak of Christian-Muslim violence in January, Wahid preached a gentle message of tolerance to both sides of the community. In a mosque, one man angrily asked why Wahid and his 30 million-member Nahdlatul Ulama Muslim organization has not done more to base the new government on Islam. Wahid calmly replied that he is not going to make Indonesia into an Islamic country because that was never the N.U.'s intention and other religions need...