Broken by the Iron Fist.(Brief Article)

Indonesian children sound like kids everywhere when choosing their favorite jobs. Most want to be doctors, according to a recent poll, followed by engineers. It's in their least favorite job--president, a career goal chosen by only 0.4 percent of the young respondents--that Indonesians truly distinguish themselves and their neurotic, intractable archipelago.

The country's littlest citizens can perhaps be forgiven for looking askance at the chief executive's post. The memory of Sukarno's jetting around the world with one arm raised in defiance and the other wrapped around a shapely stewardess has long faded. By all accounts Suharto and his family pocketed dizzying riches during his 32-year reign, but he was deeply loathed and ousted ignominiously. Indonesia's current president, Abdurrahman Wahid, has spent most of his brief tenure putting out violent brush fires across the country or fighting parliamentary efforts to impeach him. More than one Indonesian, young and old, have been prompted to wonder why the man bothers.

Indonesia, as should be obvious by now, is a country of 17,000 islands and a thousand potential flashpoints. The nation is riven by religious divides that have devastated the once spice-rich islands of the Moluccas. Ethnic resentments have exploded into orgies of murders and beheadings in Kalimantan. Political frustrations are expressed in noisy street demonstrations in Jakarta--and mob violence in outlying provinces. Vast income gaps have sparked anti-Chinese riots; corruption and desperate poverty have prompted the clear-cutting of forests. Whole provinces like Aceh and Irian Jaya are fed up with having their natural resources siphoned off by Jakarta and are tugging at the threadbare fabric that just barely holds Indonesia together.

These troubles are partly the fault of history: the Dutch forcibly and quite unnaturally cobbled together a nation from far-flung island kingdoms. Differences were papered over, as one Dutch governor general said, with "the whip and the club." Only in the waning years of their rule did the Dutch attempt to build a trained civil service or a legal and educational system. Indonesia's first university didn't open until the 1920s. "We didn't come away like India with 100 years of British administrative tradition and functioning institutions," says presidential spokesman Wimar Witoelar.

The independent nation's first two presidents only deepened the country's fault lines. The admittedly beloved Sukarno nearly bankrupted the country. Suharto oversaw phenomenal economic growth. But he kept simmering tensions between the ...