Suharto looks for friends to back his conflict with the IMF.
It is a Friday afternoon on a hot sunny day in March. About 1,000 white-collar workers have gathered inside the basement of a high-rise building in Jakarta's business district, waiting for Muslim preacher Ahmad Sumargono to begin his sermon.
After some ritual and announcement, the 55-year-old Sumargono rises to the rostrum, cites some Koranic verses and murmurs quietly: 'Our motherland is in disgrace. It has lost its honour and dignity.'
The audience, many of whom regularly spend their Friday lunch-times at the weekly prayers, listens attentively. 'Unlike other Muslim countries, for instance Brunei, which could proudly gives loans to others, we're begging loans,' Sumargono says.
The problem with being a borrower, he continues, is that it must obey the money lender, who sometimes makes requests of a political nature. Suddenly thunderous, he shouts: 'We are the play-thing of the IMF, the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.'
He becomes more and more agitated, peppering his 35-minute speech with rhetoric about the West. The Washington-based International Monetary Fund, which agreed in October to bail out Indonesia's ailing economy with a $43 billion loan, comes under particular fire.
A short, soft-spoken man who can sometimes be seen addressing anti-American rallies in front of the US embassy in Jakarta, Sumargono is voicing an opinion held by many urban Muslims in Indonesia who believe the West has been trying to weaken Islam through its financial assistance.
Just listen to Syarifuddin Harahap, a businessman, former parliamentarian and now the chairman of the Islamic Universities Association: 'We cannot implement the IMF programme. They're like a leech. We must not become subordinate to America. They want to colonise us. I don't want to depend on the American dollar even if we have to go back to riding bicycles.'
Even moderate Muslim figures such as Amien Rais, a leading member of the opposition in Indonesia, air such sentiments.
In a recent seminar Rais said the economic crisis was not simply a domestic matter, but had also been caused by Western perceptions of Asia and the region's success in building its economies.
He said Asia's success had made Western countries, especially the United States, feel threatened, and that the shake-up in the money market was a result of this feeling.
In these circles, a frequent topic of debate is Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's theory on the 'clash of civilisations'. Huntington believes that the end of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union will bring Western civilisation into open conflict with the emerging power of Muslim countries, and with the Confucians such as China, Japan and Taiwan.
In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, Huntington's theory is sometimes used to aggravate anti-American sentiment.
'There are not many preachers like Sumargono, but they're very active and they always deliver such rhetoric in their sermons,' says Muslim intellectual Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, who describes Sumargono's listeners as mostly middle-to-lower-class Muslims, college graduates, and enthusiasts who want to learn more about Islam.
'They see politics through Islamic values - real political issues are ignored,' Ulil says. 'They like to say that if Muslims do something the result will be good, without trying to analyse and compare why Malaysia, for instance, has less corruption than Indonesia.'
Presidential problems
This religious veil obscures the fact that part of Indonesia's problems lie with President Suharto, who has just 'won' his seventh five-year term in office, and whose cronies and children have partly contributed to the collapse of the economy.
It is an open secret that Suharto, who was initially hostile towards Islam as a political force, allowed the influential Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) to be set up in 1991 in a bid to mobilise Muslim support to counter growing opposition to his rule from his own generals.
At the time, his most serious opponent was the powerful armed forces chief Benny Moerdani, a Catholic officer who is widely believed to have advised Suharto to step down.
Suharto apparently did not like the idea. Moerdani was fired in 1993 and after a purge of the military, intelligence, civil service and parliament, Muslim figures such as Sumargono lobbied successfully for their representatives to fill the vacuum. An Islamic bank was opened and a number of Muslim newspapers were established.
The new commander of the army's elite Kopassus unit, Major General Prabowo Subianto, has also jumped on the nationalist bandwagon. At a January gathering between Muslim clerics and the army to mark the end of the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan, Subianto - who is also Suharto's son-in-law - asked Muslims to join him in the fight against 'traitors of the nation'. The widely-reported remarks were a veiled reference to Indonesia's Chinese tycoons (see story on page 42).
Journalist Wimar Witoelar says the 77-year-old Suharto is playing around with a 'very extreme narrow nationalism', and creating scapegoats - the IMF, the US, the Chinese, and next, perhaps, the intellectuals - to divert public attention from the real cause of Indonesia's crisis. He says the IMF is being 'groomed' to take the blame if the economic situation gets worse.
Suharto may also regard nationalism as a useful bargaining chip in his dispute with the IMF. Now that Indonesia is in a serious economic crisis and the president has come into open conflict with everyone from the IMF to Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Suharto could use the threat of anarchy and Muslim extremism to continue resisting reforms demanded by the IMF's bailout package.
Quarrelling with the IMF - which delayed a US$3 billion disbursement scheduled for March 15 partly because Suharto had failed to keep his promises - is risky, but the president's choice of new cabinet members appears to show he has the stomach for a fight. A number of the newly appointed officials are linked to the first-family's business interests.
One new member, his eldest daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, is on record as saying that Indonesia needs foreign funds but 'those which would not tie us. If the funds sacrifice and degrade our nation's dignity, we do not want them'.
Siti runs a conglomerate which would almost certainly lose out if the IMF's proposals to enforce fair public tenders for contracts were instituted.
Sitting cross-legged and enjoying his Japanese lunch in a five-star hotel after the sermon, Sumargono cites the West's opposition to newly-elected vice-president Baharuddin Jusuf Habibie as further evidence that 'the Western world doesn't want to see an emerging Muslim power in Indonesia'.
'They don't like Habibie because he is a good Muslim and he is not corrupt,' he says.
In fact, Habibie's critics view him as a Suharto crony who wasted vast amounts of money in his 20 years as research and technology minister - much of it on IPTN, a national company set up to produce Indonesian passenger jets.
Wielding influence
Worse, they charge that just like the Suharto's, Habibie's wife and siblings allegedly use his influence to win huge state tenders.
'I asked him about the allegations and he says they are not true,' Sumargono says. The cleric defends Habibie's profligency on the grounds that the sheer size of his projects demanded vast sums of money.
'IPTN has recently won a tender to sell its planes in the United States,' Sumargono says. He says only two countries in the world could penetrate the US aircraft market: Israel and Indonesia. 'The West is worried [about Habibie]. He is a good Muslim and he wants to change the status quo,' he says. For him, this is another reason to be suspicious of the IMF.