Regimes change, but activist keeps fighting

In a quirk of history, two very different Indonesian women won honours recently.

Megawati Sukarnoputri became President, and 28-year old Dita Indah Sari won a newly created gong - a women's category added this year to the annual Magsaysay Emerging Leaders awards, presented by a Philippine foundation in honour of former president Ramon Magsaysay.

While Ms Megawati was the acceptable middle-class face of opposition to Suharto, it was Ms Sari and her colleagues who ran the underground cells, bore the brunt of oppression and saw friends die and disappear.

While Ms Megawati represents the core of unitary-state nationalism, which would retrieve East Timor from independence if it could, Ms Sari was the lone Indonesian voice two years ago speaking in support of East Timor's right to self-determination. When even many of her progressive friends were in shock at the insult to Indonesian nationhood, it was Ms Sari who said the sooner Jakarta let go of East Timor the better.

Both women are university dropouts. But whereas Ms Megawati's lack of academic achievement resulted from the vagaries of her father's career as founding president, for Ms Sari the end to her studies came through activism and imprisonment.

Ms Sari's career as a labour organiser and member of the small, legal and left-leaning People's Democratic Party was strangely intertwined with Ms Megawati's. Just before military-backed thugs attacked Ms Megawati's office in 1996, dozens of activists such as Ms Sari were rounded up, beaten, jailed and blamed for the attack and resulting unrest.

Sentenced in 1997 to five years in jail for subversion, she was released in mid-1999. While Ms Sari was in jail, her mother died but she was not allowed out for the funeral.