Jakarta diary: Suharto beware: the one-legged man knows when the end is nigh

The historians will see it as the stake driven through the faltering heart of President Suharto's government. His economy is crashing around his ears. Students are on the march, calling for his resignation. But most chilling, from the point of view of the regime, is the emergence of a new genre of samizdat literature: the anti-Suharto joke.

For weeks they have been bouncing around the Internet, but recently they have been published as an underground joke book, a copy of which has been viewed by The Independent. To be honest, Suharto jokes aren't that funny. Try this: A poor street vendor is hawking satay at a food stand outside the President's palace when Suharto passes by in his limo and motorcade. Minutes later, a plump old man runs by, clutching two squawking chickens under his arms. Then comes a policeman on his bicycle, pedalling hard and looking furious. "Have you seen a fat old thief just pass by here, brother?" he asks the satay man. "He went that way officer," the vendor replies. "But you'll never catch up with him - he's in his limo."

ONE of the pleasures of Indonesia is reading the Jakarta Post, Asia's most ingenious English language newspaper. The Post is not alone in existing at the sufferance of a dictator who can close it down and sack its journalists at a moment's notice. But no other paper overcomes this handicap with such ingenuity.

Stories even indirectly critical of the President have been the doom of many Indonesian papers in the past, so the key to survival lies in great subtlety. One trick is to leave the sting in the tail until the end of the story, by which time the official overseers of such things will have stopped reading. Take the familiar report of the robbery suspect shot by police after he "attacked" them with a knife. The police spokesman was quoted, justifying the incident with a description of the villain's frenzied assault. In the final sentence, the pathologist was quoted revealing that the man had bruises on is body and appeared to have been handcuffed at the time of his death.

Foreign news is another technique: limited in its freedom to comment on domestic politics, the Post is a tireless champion of democracy overseas. During the coverage of Tony Blair's election victory, there were detailed reports on every aspect of the elections. And after Labour's victory, the Post's leader writer was irrepressible: the British were to be congratulated for throwing off the yoke of one-party rule, under a single, hated and overbearing leader. If this version of Thatcher's Tories doesn't ring many bells in Britain, it certainly does in Jakarta.

AVID for insight into the future of Suharto, I arranged to see a dukun - a Javanese mystic who provides advice and prediction by means of communication with the gods. Disconcertingly, he had only one leg (he didn't see that coming). Although delivered with great confidence, his pronouncements were a little underwhelming.

Summoning his mystic powers, he scolded me for neglecting my mother, and urged me to contact her immediately. Most unfair! I had spoken to her less than an hour before. My companions were a newlywed couple, about to go on a delayed honeymoon to Bali. The mystic correctly told the wife that she would soon go on a journey, but rather spoiled things by patting her on the knee and assuring her with a leer that she would soon meet someone special.

Finally, we came to the point of our visit: how long would Suharto remain in power? "Three and a half," came the confident reply. Three and a half what, we asked. But the information from the spirit world was incomplete. "Three and a half years, perhaps, or three and half months. Three and a half weeks maybe, but not three and half minutes or three and a half seconds." In three and half something's time, be sure to remember: you read it here first.