He was the victim of over-expectation, media hype and elements of Suhartos New Order government, which ruled Indonesia for three decades.

At least that is what two new books  one written by an academic and the other by a former presidential spokesman  tell us about former president Abdurrahman Wahid, ousted from power last year.

Gus Dur: The Authorised Biography of Abdurrahman Wahid by Greg Barton and No Regrets, Reflections of a Presidential Spokesman by Wimar Witoelar, both released recently, assert that Wahids doomed presidency was not his own fault.

Indonesias first democratically elected president faced challenges that were not only greater but also more insidious than first thought, writes Barton, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria in Australia.

Among these challenges that Wahid, popularly known as Gus Dur, faced were grossly inflated expectations, a politically charged press, weak civil society, lack of political capital, and an antagonistic military unused to civilian authority given its key role under the Suharto regime.

Externally the Parliament, the political pressure groups and the press all had a hand in arranging the destruction of the Wahid presidency, states Witoelar, who worked for the mercurial president for 10 months.

Disillusioned public

Wahid was impeached on July 23, 2001 by the Peoples Consultative Assembly (MPR), the countrys highest legislative body, for incompetence and corruption. Majority of MPR members come from the New Order regime of Suharto.

Barton writes that the overblown expectations of millions of people in this country of more than 220 million people, who greeted Wahids presidency with great enthusiasm and goodwill, was partly because under Sukarno and Suharto, the president was the state and the state was president.

Many Indonesians assumed that during his first year in office, Wahidwould be able to bring peace to warring provinces, rebuild investor confidence, roll back decades of corrupt practice and legal abuse, rein in the military, restore economic growth and deliver Indonesia into a new period of prosperity.

Consequently, it was unavoidable that disillusionment would quickly replace the euphoria of late 1999, after he assumed power.

Throughout his presidency, the respected leader of the countrys largest Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, Barton and Witoelar say, received very bad treatment from the media. It was his (Wahids) own lack of media savvy that set them against him, Barton argues.

Although Wahid often spoke out about his disappointment with the media and occasionally suggested suing journalists for false information, his record on press freedom, according to Barton and Witoelar, was unparalleled.

It was Wahid who, after becoming president, abolished the ministry of information, the bane of many journalists. However, President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who came into power after Wahid was ousted, revived this ministry.

Barton and Witoelar also go into Wahids human side  indeed, his appreciation of football forced him to neglect his academic studies and repeat his first year in junior high school.

Likewise, his love for the sport presented Witoelar with an opportunity to discuss politics with him in 1994.

He recalls that during his first encounter with Gus Dur that year, when he was recording his talk show, he approached him from the soccer angle since the government censors during Suhartos time would have never permitted the broadcast of a political discussion with him.

To my pleasure he responded beautifully, drawing subtle metaphors to bring across some very strong political points, Witoelar says of Wahid, who at the time was doing World Cup soccer analysis for Kompas , an independent Indonesian daily newspaper.

Eratic leadership

Barton and Witoelar, however, blame Gus Durs weak management and erratic leadership style, together with his propensity for miscommunication, for his downfall, in addition to the dozens of problems that plagued his presidency.

Both authors attest that one trait, which irks people about Wahid, is his penchant to shoot from the hip  a weakness which Barton and Witoelar think was exploited by the national and international media.

All too often, Wahid would make a public statement about something close to his heart  the substance of which he assumed was self-evident  only to get himself in trouble by failing to explain what he was thinking.

He kept telling jokes which we thought were funny until we realised that the economy was not going anywhere and that the economy isnt something you can cure with jokes, Witoelar says, referring to Gus Dur, who is practically blind.

One statement, which Gus Dur said was a joke when people complained to him about a certain Cabinet minister, was, Why complain to me? He was put there by Akbar Tandjung (chief of the Suharto-era ruling party called Golkar). I dont even know the guy.

Second-rate choices

Wahids choice of Cabinet ministers was a product of appeasement to the coalition that had elected him president on Oct 20, 1999. Many of his Cabinet members were second-rate choices in terms of competence.

However, Gus Dur, as a true intellectual, was well read and speaks five languages, including Javanese, according to Barton and Witoelar. When his eyesight was better, he used to read French novels in French, Dutch novels in Dutch, German novels in German and Russian novels in their English translations.

He knows the books of Karl Marx almost as well as he does the Quran.

But Gus Dur, according to Barton and Witoelar, has lived most of his life in an environment in which he has few intellectual friends with the same breadth of knowledge and interests as himself. This, they say, produced in him a sense of confidence that many argue is so great as to be dangerous.

Yet both books show Wahid as a remarkably humble and genuinely unpretentious person. As president, he had little time for the protocol of being head of the worlds third largest democracy and fourth most populous country.

Still, there has been criticism of Bartons biography and Witoelarsbook, both printed by the same publisher.

Bartons lengthy biography and Witoelars horribly edited book fail to let us get to know Gus Dur better, or provide more information about him than what we already know from the news, says Silvester Doni of Jakartas Atma Jaya Catholic University.

Others find the two books too favourable to Gus Dur. It is as if Barton started out to write a leisurely academic work and suddenly found himself thrown into a biography of a major political figure, says Keith Loveard, author of the book Suharto: Indonesias Last Sultan .

Wimars No Regrets is essentially a whitewash, Loveard asserts. Barton makes a more honest stab at recounting the facts, inevitably coloured by his own sympathy for Wahid.

In the end, Indonesia can hardly agree with Wimar that there should be no regrets about Wahid: the prevailing judgment to this time is that this eccentric president, by way of his refusal to build coalitions in the belief that only he knew what was right for the nation, threw away more opportunities for change than he ever created, Loveard adds. (IPS)