BusinessWeek.com: Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesian President, Dies at 69

By Agus Suhana

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, the country’s first democratically elected leader, died yesterday in a Jakarta hospital following a long illness. He was 69.

“We don’t have anyone else of his caliber,” Hasyim Muzadi, chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, the Muslim organization founded by Wahid’s grandfather, said in comments broadcast on TVOne news.

Wahid was elected president Oct. 20, 1999, succeeding B.J. Habibie, who took power a year earlier following four decades under the military dictatorship of Suharto and Sukarno. Wahid won respect as a moderate who helped bridge sectarian divides in the world’s fourth-most populous nation as it emerged from the worst recession in a generation.

He showed it “was possible for the Islamic community to cooperate with non-Muslims at a time when other Islamic activists were moving more in the direction of fundamentalism,” R. William Liddle, political science professor at Ohio State University and a former Fulbright scholar in Indonesia, said by phone. “He was much less successful as a politician.”

Wahid didn’t spell out his economic policies in detail, limiting himself to general statements about the future of Indonesia. Markets reacted negatively to his election, with the rupiah falling 6.3 percent the next day. Investors favored Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of the first president, Sukarno.

Worsening relations with lawmakers climaxed when security forces refused to obey his declaration of a state of emergency. On July 23, 2001, Wahid was impeached and forced from office following allegations of involvement in two financial scandals.

‘Unstable,’ Impeached
“Wahid’s presidency was unstable and you could characterize it as drift,” Razeen Sally, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics, said by phone. “The Indonesian economy wasn’t doing well while he was in office and real reforms were not put in place during his presidency.”

Megawati succeeded him
Born in Jombang, East Java, Aug. 4, 1940, Wahid was the oldest of six brothers. His father, Wahid Hasyim, was minister of religious affairs for Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno.

As a young man, Wahid, popularly known as Gus Dur, studied at a number of Islamic boarding schools, before moving on to Cairo’s Al-Azhar Islamic University in 1964. In 1966, he left Egypt to study literature at the University of Baghdad, Iraq. He married his wife, Nuriyah, in 1968, and had four children.

In 1970, he returned to Indonesia and from 1972 to 1974, was dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Hasjim Asyari University in Jombang, Java.

Muslim Party
After moving to Jakarta in 1978, Wahid became involved with the Nahdlatul Ulama or NU, then Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, which claimed more than 30 million members.

As one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Suharto, he earned the respect of many reformist figures, though he was always careful to couch his criticism in enigmatic terms. In 1994, he won another five-year term as chairman of NU, over the objections of Suharto, who tried to oust him again in 1996.

“Gus Dur is a symbol of a particular era,” said Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a political analyst at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and a former adviser to Habibie. “This was the era of transition from an authoritarian rule to a democracy.”

The moderate form of Islam that Wahid practiced left another legacy, said Ernest Bower, director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Moderate Islam
“He embodied that moderate Islam that really characterizes the type of Islam that is practiced in Indonesia today,” Bower said. “He respected civil laws and wanted to keep religion and jurisprudence and governance separate.”

By the time Wahid took office, he had already suffered two strokes and was almost blind. Wahid had been in hospital since Dec. 26, Jusuf Misbach, a member of the presidential medical team, said, according to the detik.com news Web site. Yesterday morning his condition worsened due to complications brought on by stroke, diabetes and heart disease, the site said.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said last night that Wahid will be buried today in a state ceremony. Yudhoyono called on Indonesians to fly the national flag at half mast for a week. (December 30, 2009, 08:44 PM EST)