The Next Threat to Peace.(Indonesia)

Thousands of frenzied followers of Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid massed outside Parliament in Jakarta last week. They vowed to attack the building and fight to the death to defend the embattled president. But the angry protesters made little impression on the 500 lawmakers gathered inside. For the third time, they voted overwhelmingly to censure the president--and more important, to push ahead with his impeachment on charges of incompetence. For Wahid, it may be a final blow. The legislators mandated that a special meeting of the People's Consultative Assembly (or MPR, the country's supreme political body) be held on Aug. 1. The MPR has the power to boot Wahid from office, and experts say it will almost certainly do so. "He's finished," says Jusuf Wanandi, head of the Jakarta-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Adds a Western diplomat in Jakarta: "He's gone. It's hard to conceive of any survival scenario for him."

Wahid dug his own grave. He never took the legislators' outrage over his erratic leadership very seriously. In fact, he largely ignored the Parliament, arguing that in Indonesia's presidential system it didn't have the legal right to bring impeachment proceedings against him. When the 60-year-old president fought back, it was with threats to dissolve Parliament or impose a state of emergency. "He began acting like a tinhorn dictator," says another Western diplomat in Jakarta. "No one wanted to see him bring the whole country down with him." Last week, in a curious cabinet reshuffle, Wahid fired two of his smartest cabinet members, Security Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Attorney General Marzuki Darusman.

Popular Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri is preparing to take Wahid's job. She rejected a last-ditch power-sharing offer from the president and told her party, the Indonesian Democratic Struggle Party (PDI-P), to vote for the special MPR session. At the MPR meeting, Wahid will be required to give an accountability address, defending his less- than-two-year-old presidency. If, as expected, a majority of the 700 MPR members, including the 500 M.P.s, vote to reject the president's defense, then he will be automatically removed from office and Megawati will become president until the next election in 2004.

That may not bring stability to Indonesia. Megawati is worshiped by the masses, who recall the populist rule of her father, Sukarno, independent Indonesia's first president. But also like her secular father, she is regarded with suspicion by radical Muslims. Groups like Defenders of the Islamic Front (FPI) demand that Indonesia's longstanding doctrine of a multireligious society be scrapped in favor of Islamic law. Over the past year, young men wearing white robes and armed with sticks and machetes have been attacking popular Jakarta nightclubs and bars. They tear down Britney Spears photos and smash Budweiser signs as affronts to Islam. They confiscate beer out of warehouses and set fire to local brothels. Indonesian authorities often do little to stop them, lest they be considered anti-Islam.

Many Indonesians view the hard-line Muslim groups as thugs. The FPI claims that its vigilante raids are misunderstood. "We don't want to hurt non-Muslims, we just want to uphold morality," says Siroj Alwi, a spokesman for the group. "Before we smash up these places, we send them a letter warning them to shut down." To get a firsthand look at the FPI, NEWSWEEK's Joe Cochrane went along on a recent "religious raid." His report:

I show up at the FPI headquarters one night as the radicals prepare to visit what a group spokesman calls an "evil" north Jakarta bar. I stand in awe as hundreds of men age 15 to 70 pour into the tiny lower-class neighborhood. I lost count at 800 members. "There is much evil out ...