With Indonesia's President Wahid fighting for his political life and supporters vowing to lay down their lives for him, aid agencies and others are preparing for a humanitarian crisis.
US forces in the Western Pacific, while viewing the prospect of widespread bloodshed as a worst-case scenario, are making sure that they are able to help the region cope with any flood of refugees.
Mr Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam Community Aid Abroad, said the Australian charity came up in March with full contingency plans for a humanitarian catastrophe.
We are ramping up, Mr Hobbs said, adding that the scale of any potential crisis was impossible to predict.I think it's terribly important that official multilateral organisations and governments keep a very close brief on what's happening.
US commanders agreed in March they were more likely to have to deal with a tide of refugees in the Western Pacific than a war.
"I don't think that there is any particular thought that it's going to be necessary to do a humanitarian operation in the near term," Vice Admiral James Metzger, commander of the US Seventh Fleet, told reporters on today.
"But I know that it's a capability that we need to make sure that we have and continue to exercise and continue to be prepared for and continue to plan for because there is that real concern," he said after briefing journalists on his command ship, the USS Blue Ridge.
Security analysts say the danger of bloodshed spreading across the Indonesian archipelago, the world's fourth most populous nation, and sparking a huge outflow of refugees, spiralling piracy and economic chaos, remains remote but real.
Five thousand Wahid supporters, some trained in martial arts in the rice paddies and sugar cane fields of his East Java stronghold, tried to storm parliament yesterday as legislators voted for an impeachment hearing against the half-blind cleric.
Pro-Wahid mobs rampaged in East Java, where one protester was shot dead, keeping alive the threat of violence that some political observers say may be Mr Wahid's last card and one which security analysts increasingly doubt he can control.