By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 4, 1999; Page A23

Megawati Sukarnoputri says she was in grade school when she realized that she lived a privileged life in the presidential palace -- as the daughter of Sukarno, Indonesia's founding father and first president.

"I knew only since elementary school exactly who I am," she recalled recently. "I knew I had a big house -- I didn't know it was a palace."

She remembers other children telling her she lived in the palace and running home to ask family members, "Where is the palace?" They replied, "This is the palace!" And when she asked, "Who am I?" the answer was simple: "You are the daughter of President Sukarno."

"Maybe they just wanted us to grow up as normal children," Megawati said.

Sukarnoputri, 51, is hoping to return to the palace her family left more than three decades ago. Her Indonesian Democratic Party is widely considered the country's most popular, and Sukarnoputri is considered an early front-runner to become president after legislative elections scheduled for June 7. Parliament forms the core of an expanded body that will select Indonesia's fourth president later this year. The election was authorized by President B.J. Habibie, the handpicked successor of former president Suharto, who was ousted in May after ruling Indonesia for 32 years.

But first Sukarnoputri has to overcome one nagging problem; call it the Vision Thing. Her detractors, particularly members of Jakarta's intelligentsia -- the journalistic and academic establishment -- deride her as too cautious, too soft-spoken, too matronly in her demeanor. She lacks, they say, a grand vision of where to take Indonesia and how to lead the country out of its current economic morass.

It is a criticism that rankles Sukarnoputri's top aides. "We have grass-roots support, but not the students and intellectuals," said Kwik Kian Gie, her economics adviser. "The only group that is difficult and doesn't want to understand is that group of intellectuals."

Asked about accusations that Sukarnoputri lacks vision, Kwik said, "We hear that, too. But we ask them, 'what kind of vision do you have?' "

Kwik said the reason Sukarnoputri has not articulated any bold new plans is simple; there are no new solutions for Indonesia's problems, other than simply following the familiar economic orthodoxy of the open marketplace and the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund. It is a philosophy to which even president Suharto publicly adhered, while privately allowing the corruption of his family and cronies to eat away at the system and erode the country's earlier, much lauded economic gains.

"There's a reason we don't talk too much," said Kwik. "If people ask us, especially the foreigners and diplomats with whom we can be more or less honest, our answer is very simple: We don't want to reinvent the wheel. . . . The written speeches of Suharto were all very beautiful, but they were not implemented." The difference with Sukarnoputri, Kwik said, is that she will implement the policies without the corruption. "In our case," he said, "we will be very, very clean."

Sukarnoputri is characteristically taciturn when asked about the Vision Thing. During an interview over lunch at a downtown restaurant, she smiled and said only, "Wait and see."

As the campaigning begins, Sukarnoputri exudes a quiet confidence about her party's chances. The Indonesian Democratic Party has an estimated 30 million members nationwide, she said, with 311 branches in the country's 27 provinces. She said she is not worried that the proliferation of parties, as many as 200 at last count, will so atomize the vote that the next parliament will be too fragmented to coalesce behind a presidential choice.

She said also that she agrees with many foreign diplomats who say the election period is far too compressed, with crucial election laws and rules still being drafted and the vote due in less than five months. But the dilemma for Indonesia is whether to press ahead with elections that may be flawed and establish a new government quickly with a popular mandate or to take a few extra months to prepare under Habibie's unpopular transitional government of Suharto holdovers -- thereby delaying the start of an economic recovery.

"It's too short," she said of the election timetable. "But this nation has a very crucial problem. If we make it too long, the crisis -- and it's a total economic crisis -- will continue. How can we manage until we establish the real government of Indonesia?" She added, "Can you guarantee that if it [the election period] is prolonged, it will be better?"

Sukarnoputri owes much of her popularity to an affinity for her late father, Sukarno, who was ousted by Suharto in a de facto military takeover in 1966. Many of her party's trademark red T-shirts and posters bear the likeness of "Bung 'Karno" -- as he is fondly called -- alongside, or behind, Sukarnoputri. One slogan proclaims: "The daughter will follow the father!"

On the surface, this affection for Sukarno might seem odd, since it appears mostly among a younger generation not old enough to remember his sometimes chaotic rule. Also, for the last 32 years, Suharto has tried systematically to write his own version of history, playing down and at times effacing the accomplishments of the man he deposed.

Sukarnoputri said Suharto's efforts to erase her father's legacy may be partly responsible for the current "Bung 'Karno" revival. "That is why people want to know, 'Who is that man; why does he get that treatment?' Young people know he is our founding father."

As a woman and a popular opposition leader with a famous name vying for the presidency, Sukarnoputri is sometimes compared to former Philippine president Corazon Aquino, who ousted Ferdinand Marcos from power. But Sukarnoputri dismisses the comparison. "I'm always telling people, 'please, no; I'm not Cory.' "

Aquino was an unlikely president, a self-described housewife untrained in politics who ascended to power after her husband, Benigno S. Aquino, was assassinated and she was drafted to lead the fractured opposition.

Sukarnoputri, by contrast, was first elected to parliament in 1987 and was later elected leader of the opposition party. Suharto engineered her ouster from that post in 1996 when he feared she might challenge him for the presidency.

Unlike the novice Aquino, Sukarnoputri was an early student of politics and power. She got her hardest lesson in 1966, when she was a university student in Bandung at a time when the campuses were gripped by protests. It was then that she got word, on a police walkie-talkie, that her father had been ousted.

"We didn't know anything," she recalled. "Is he under house arrest? Is he a political prisoner?" It took two days for her brother and sister to arrive in Bandung with the message: "Poppa is safe."

Sukarno spent his final years under house arrest, dying mysteriously in a military hospital in 1970. Sukarnoputri remembers visiting him, but always with soldiers present and eavesdropping. He never spoke about the circumstances of his ouster, she said, and it was unclear if he was even aware what had happened.

In seeking to reclaim the presidential palace where she lived as a child, Sukarnoputri says she is not out for retribution against Suharto. At most, she says, she wants a revision of the country's official history, so that her father is accorded his proper place in history and some of the mysteries of his ouster and death are laid to rest. "There are so many missing links," she said.