TERNATE, North Maluku, Indonesia: Indonesia's first direct presidential election was held peacefully last Monday. That fact alone spelled success in a troubled country with an authoritarian past. As vote totals mounted at election headquarters in Jakarta, observers could project not only the outcome--they could also look forward with some confidence to a democratic future for the fourth most populous country and largest Muslim society on earth.

Seen from below, however, the world's biggest and most complex democratic experiment amounts to a set of promises still waiting to be fulfilled.

Half an hour by speedboat from Ternate and two more hours by jeep on damaged roads across the remote island of Halmera lie two adjacent villages, Sosol and Tahane. A clash between them on the night of August 18, 1999 had triggered near-anarchy here in the northern Maluku archipelago. Muslims fought Christians, then Muslims fought Muslims. More than a thousand died.

An Indonesian colleague and I went there on election day. We wanted to know whether the balloting would help heal or reopen North Maluku's wounds.

Sosol is a Christian village. In a near-whisper that reflected the sensitivity of the topic, the village secretary blamed the 1999 outbreak squarely on Muslim militants in Tahane. They had attacked Sosol en masse, he said. They had thrown rocks and torched homes while screaming "Allahu Akbar"--"God is great." Christian villages had counterattacked.

Interviewed in his home just down the road, the village chief of all-Muslim Tahane remembered differently: "They acted first," he said. People in Sosol had been drinking alcohol, forbidden to Muslims. From his side of the border he could hear the shouts of drunken Sosolans abusing Tahane; the Sosolans began seizing Tahanean houses, slashing the furniture, he said. He admitted that the first to die was killed by a Tahanean, "but they started it," he insisted. "They had weapons - arrows, bombs. What was I to do? Let them roll over us?"

Ever since the chief and his fellow villagers had arrived in Tahane in the 1970s, evacuees from a feared volcanic eruption on their home island in the south, the Sosolans had hated them and tried to get them to leave. Or so he said.

The roots of this conflict embrace many issues. They include religion, migration, ethnicity, customs, and access to land. But it was an action taken by the central government in far-off Jakarta that lit this volatile mix in 1999--a decree that transferred Sosol and several other largely Christian villages to the jurisdication of a new and mostly Muslim subdistrict, including Tahane. What looked in Jakarta like a purely administrative arrangement appeared to Sosolans to threaten their identity.

It has never been realistic here to expect the national government to understand what goes on in and between particular villages--not in a country this vast, diverse, and underdeveloped.

But democracy raises expectations. What happened on July 5 linked the electorate directly, almost personally, to individual candidates running for president and vice-president of the entire country.

Throughout our election-date tour of polling stations in northern Maluku we came across evidence of disappointment and hope in roughly equal measure.

Every villager we met either was or had been a refugee from the violence of the 1990s, and nearly every one had suffered. Yet when we asked who had supplied them with emergency food and housing materials to survive the crisis and rebuild, our informants rarely mentioned the Indonesian government.

We also found good news. Although Sosol and Tahane voted for opposing slates, old wounds stayed closed. The villagers were not about to let political rivalries between presidential candidates rekindle calamity. There was no violence on voting day, and turnouts were high in all the villages. If democracy requires civility and participation, the people of northern Maluku are ready and willing to do their part.

But will Indonesia's new president, when finally elected in a run-off this September, be willing and able to his or her part? Will campaign promises be kept?

Perhaps the most poignant hint of this country's fragility occurred when I asked the Sosol village secretary, "What is Indonesia?" For the first time in our conversation, he fell silent. Try as he might, he could not answer.

At the risk of wishful thinking, one can hope the election itself was a kind of answer.

Below are excerpts from the Straits Times piece. The piece is not reprinted in its entirety due to copyright reasons. Please visit the link below below to read the whole article. "...Said Indonesia specialist Donald K. Emmerson at the Institute for International Studies at California's Stanford University: 'My sense is that the election will be primarily about crime, stability, prices, not about religious issues.' Many Indonesia watchers in the U.S. have been surprised that Islam has not appeared to be a dominant factor in the campaign. Said Dr Emmerson: 'It's quite remarkable that in the Malaysian election religion was very important with respect to the PAS factor, but in Indonesia that is just not the case. And that is a huge relief to the US as it seeks to win the hearts and minds of moderate Muslims in the war against terrorism. ..."

Question: Politicians, experts and the public differ on how they view Indonesia's achievements in the reform process. Your comment? Answer: Most prominent have been the political reforms: Four constitutional amendments, decentralization, laws on elections, and so on. But how will these work out in practice? That is still unclear. Economic reforms, by comparison, have lagged. And what about corruption? Perhaps the least progress has been made on that front. What are key areas that governments after Soeharto have yet to deal with in the transition process? One could make a list. But another response would be to note the gap between the laws already on the books and their implementation. It will not be easy. But doing so will be crucial for success in the transition process. How would the results of next year's elections affect the process of reform? Optimistically, one can picture a healthy concentration of legitimacy at the top of the system, enabling decisive remedial policies. Pessimistically, one can picture a struggle between a popularly mandated presidency and a popularly mandated legislature to the detriment of effective policies. I slant toward optimism. I doubt that the next president and the next DPR (legislature) will be eager to repeat the circumstances in which president Abdurrahman Wahid was removed from office. Whatever happens, 2004 will be a "Year of Voting Frequently" -- at least two elections (April, July) and possibly three (if a second-round presidential vote in September becomes necessary). Let's hope for the best. What are the basic conditions for Indonesia to succeed with reform and to bring the country of 220 million people out of the current crises? When I was in Jakarta in August, the answer I heard most often from Indonesians was: Leadership. Could there be a whiff of nostalgia for Soeharto's leadership in that response? Among the multiple conditions for success in overcoming the current difficulties, one of the most important will be the actual performance of democratically chosen governments, including the one scheduled to emerge from next year's elections. It is, unfortunately, possible that democracy as a method can succeed but wind up discredited by the failure of resulting governments to provide security, ensure justice, reduce poverty, and so on. And there is a sense in which the competitive electoral process itself tends to raise public expectations as to what can and should be done by government. But I am hopeful. Experience of governmental transition often suggests two options, either success and an emergence of democracy, or failure and a return to a militaristic regime. How do you see this? There are not "always two options" in such transitions. Within the category "democracy" alone there are many types and gradations. As for militarism, it is striking how much the image and therefore potential leverage of the military has changed from the immediate post-Soeharto period. Could it be that by not intervening blatantly, army leaders have built up enough credit to allow for subtler forms of influence? Not to mention the more security-conscious atmosphere since Sept. 11, 2001 and Oct. 12, 2002 (terrorist attacks in the U.S. and in Bali respectively). Interesting, too, is the increasing mention of men with army backgrounds as possible presidential candidates next year. But just as democracy is internally diverse, so should we avoid putting everyone who has had an army career in a single box labeled "militarist." I live in California. The voters of my state just fired one governor and hired another. I may be naive, but I hope that as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger will not treat complex and intractable socioeconomic problems in the same way that the Terminator treated enemy robots! In any case, it is far too early to predict the outcome of any of next year's national elections in either Indonesia or the U.S. Whatever the result, let's hope it's for the better in both countries.