Just over a year ago, on a dismal wet May evening, Indonesian soldiers shot and killed four students at Jakarta's Trisatki university. As hundreds of frightened students sheltered against the walls of university buildings that night from army snipers it was clear that Indonesia had reached a turning point. The army, or some elements of it, appeared to have decided on a crackdown and the nation teetered on the verge of a Tiananmen-style bloodbath.
But President Suharto's regime had been undermined by widespread disaffection from within. Unlike the Chinese leaders in 1989, he did not have a revolutionary ideology to stiffen the army, or a symbolic location to recapture.
Next day the students gathered again at universities throughout Jakarta. There was wild excitement when Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's charismatic founder, emerged from self-imposed seclusion at the Trisatki campus to urge continued defiance. The students' protest became a popular insurrection, they occupied parliament with support from retired generals and Islamic leaders, and within two weeks Suharto had gone.
Thus ended the 32-year "status quo", as the political culture of Suharto's era was popularly called. Since then his successor, the impish and sometimes impetuous President B.J. Habibie, has made sweeping changes in the huge archipelago of more than 200 million people. The media is no longer censored. Blacklists of foreign correspondents have been scrapped. Liberal laws have been passed. Political prisoners have been released. East Timor is to have a referendum on independence.
And now Indonesians are going to the polls today after a carnival-like campaign, in which 48 political parties have competed for 462 seats of a 500-member lower house of parliament. Still President Habibie has not won widespread popularity, because of his failure to take strong action against his predecessor and father figure.
"Maybe people hate me now," he told an aide recently, "but in 30 years they'll all be saying that I'm the one who restored democracy to Indonesia."
All these positive achievements raise hopes that the world's fourth most populous country is about to follow other Asian societies like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand in making a successful transfer from dictatorship to free-wheeling democracy.
But alongside the loosening of controls, independence and autonomy movements have been gaining strength, raising fears that Indonesia is becoming Asia's Yugoslavia, after only 50 years as a post-colonial nation. The country has 300 languages and hundreds of ethnic groups. The desire of many parts of Indonesia to break off from the centre has resurfaced with the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian rule.
In Aceh a separatist guerrilla war is intensifying, and talk of independence is common in Kalimantan, Ambon, Irian Jaya and Riau. East Timor is having a referendum in August which could lead to its freedom.
The concept of being an Indonesian has never taken hold in places like Irian Jaya, where the people call themselves Papuans. Small religious and ethnic wars have broken out in many parts of Indonesia, often provoked by sinister forces who see unrest as the necessary precursor to their desired aim.
For millions of Indonesians the only result that really matters is that the unpopular Golkar Party loses so badly that Mr Habibie, its nominee for president, is forced to step down. Any other result would be seen as a denial of the popular will and could lead to new violence.
The Golkar Party existed for decades only to give Suharto legitimacy and despite reforming itself is associated with the evils of the ancien regime.
The new president will be chosen in August from a 700-member electoral college comprising the 462 directly elected members and 38 members nominated by the army, in the lower house, and 200 delegates from provincial parliaments and ethnic, religious and social groups in an upper chamber.
Thus Golkar could elect the next president with only a quarter of the popular vote. It still retains huge financial clout and is gearing up to buy off unelected delegates to the electoral college, according to a disaffected Golkar vice-president.
Manoeuvring in the background is Gen Wiranto, commander of the armed forces. All presidential candidates want him as their vice-president, judging that an alliance with the military is better than a confrontation.
Ms Megawati has emerged as the most popular opposition leader, mainly because of a longing for the pluralist past represented by her father, President Sukharno, through she is uninspiring and uncertain about her policies.
If her party, the PDI-P, secures more than 40 per cent, it would be difficult to deny her the presidency. With a nationalistic, pluralist outlook appealing to everyone from workers to Chinese shopkeepers, Ms Megawati could be about to emerge as a new player on the Asian political stage. But her anxiety not to take risks could leave the student revolution unfinished. Like fellow opposition leaders, Amien Rais and Abdurrahman Wahid, she will support continued IMF reforms and modest autonomy plans, and none have committed themselves to jailing Suharto.
"Don't talk about radical change in this place," she told Time magazine. "Radical change will only make things more difficult."