Suharto

Suharto: The Smiling General's Long Ledger

In 1966 Indonesian inflation ran at 660 per cent. By 1969 it was 19 per cent. That collapse in a single figure is the closest thing to a defence brief that Suharto's thirty-one years in power will ever have, and his admirers have leaned on it for half a century. It sits alongside another set of numbers from the same three years: between 500,000 and more than a million Indonesians killed in the anti-communist purge that put him in office, an episode the CIA later described as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century. Both figures belong to the same man, and any honest account has to hold them at once.

A Village Childhood

He was born on 8 June 1921 at Kemusuk, near Yogyakarta, into a Javanese Muslim family of modest means. His parents divorced shortly after his birth and he was largely raised by foster parents — an unglamorous provincial upbringing that separated him sharply from the cosmopolitan, Dutch-educated nationalist elite of Sukarno and Hatta. He had no European degree, no exile abroad, no reputation as a writer or orator. What he had was the army.

The Soldier

He enlisted in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army in 1940, switched to the Japanese-sponsored PETA militia in 1943, and joined the new Indonesian Army after the 1945 proclamation. He built his reputation in the revolution, leading guerrilla operations against the Dutch and taking part in the recapture of Yogyakarta in 1949. He rose to command the Diponegoro Division in Central Java, and by 1962 was a major general leading Operation Mandala, the campaign that pressured the Netherlands out of Western New Guinea. He was competent, patient, and — crucially — unspectacular. Nobody in Jakarta regarded him as the coming man.

October 1965

On the night of 30 September–1 October 1965, elements of the armed forces kidnapped and killed seven senior generals. Suharto, commanding the strategic reserve, was not among the targets. Within hours he had mobilised troops, secured Jakarta and declared himself in control of the army. What followed over the next months was not a coup in the conventional sense but a slow, deliberate transfer of authority away from a living president. The army blamed the Communist Party and unleashed a purge across Java, Bali and Sumatra. In March 1966 Suharto obtained the Supersemar decree granting him emergency powers; the circumstances under which Sukarno signed it remain disputed. The provisional assembly made him acting president on 12 March 1967 and elected him to a full term in March 1968.

The New Order

The regime he built called itself the New Order, and its logic was the inverse of Sukarno's. Where Sukarno had offered rhetoric, prestige projects and non-alignment, Suharto offered growth and quiet. He handed the economy to a group of Western-trained economists nicknamed the Berkeley Mafia, opened the country to foreign investment, and turned Indonesia back toward the West and the international lenders Sukarno had insulted. Real GDP growth averaged around five per cent a year. The poverty rate fell from about 45 per cent in 1970 to roughly 11 per cent in 1996. Indonesia, a chronic rice importer, reached self-sufficiency in rice by 1984 — an achievement that won him genuine international admiration in development circles.

The political machinery was equally deliberate. Golkar, the state's electoral vehicle, won every contest. The doctrine of dwifungsi gave the armed forces a permanent role in civilian administration. Pancasila indoctrination was made compulsory. The press operated under licence. Student politics was curtailed by decree in 1978. And the state killed: the Petrus campaign of extrajudicial shootings of alleged criminals between 1983 and 1985; the Tanjung Priok massacre of 1984, in which up to a hundred Muslim protesters died; the sustained persecution of Chinese Indonesians through forced assimilation; and, most consequentially, the invasion of East Timor in 1975 and its twenty-three-year occupation, with death estimates ranging from a minimum of about 90,800 to a maximum of roughly 213,600.

The Family Business

Corruption under the New Order was not incidental; it was the constitution. Suharto's children were awarded monopolies in toll roads, automobiles and commodity trading. By 1997 Forbes ranked him the fourth-richest person in the world with some $16 billion in assets, against a nominal presidential salary. Transparency International later estimated the family had embezzled between $15 billion and $35 billion; Time put the accumulated family wealth over three decades at $73.24 billion. The figures vary because the accounting was designed to.

Collapse

The 1997 Asian financial crisis found Indonesia structurally defenceless. The rupiah collapsed, GDP contracted by 13.7 per cent, and the bargain at the heart of the New Order — prosperity in exchange for silence — was void. Riots swept Jakarta in May 1998. On 21 May 1998, after thirty-one years, Suharto resigned. He died in Jakarta on 27 January 2008, aged 86, and was given a state military funeral; the corruption cases against him were never resolved in court.

Why Suharto Is Called a Genius

The word, applied here, has to be narrowed almost to vanishing point before it can be used at all. What Suharto possessed was tactical political patience of an extremely high order: the capacity to read a chaotic situation, wait, and take power without ever appearing to seize it. Between October 1965 and March 1967 he displaced a president-for-life who was the founding father of the nation, and did it in incremental legal steps, never once declaring a coup. That is a rare and cold skill. His second real talent was delegation — the recognition, unusual in a general, that he did not understand economics and should hand it to people who did. The Berkeley Mafia's stabilisation programme, the green revolution in rice, and three decades of compounding growth are the result, and they lifted tens of millions of Indonesians out of poverty.

But this is not intellect, and it must not be dressed as such. It is a talent for power, and it was exercised on a foundation of mass murder. He entered office over the bodies of at least half a million people; the killings of 1965–66 are the precondition of everything that followed, not a regrettable prelude to it. Growth was purchased with censorship, a militarised state and an occupation of East Timor that killed on a scale still being counted. And the final verdict on the economics is that the family looted it — billions extracted while the model he is credited with building proved unable to survive a single currency crisis. A ruler who leaves office as one of the richest men alive, in a country that has just contracted by nearly fourteen per cent, has not been a good manager. He has been a successful one.

What Remains

Indonesia's argument about Suharto is unfinished. Some Indonesians remember cheap rice, stable prices and roads that got built, and say so publicly. Others remember 1965, Tanjung Priok, East Timor and the family's monopolies. He was a founding member of ASEAN in 1967 and a fixture of Cold War Asia. He was also, in the plain judgment of most historians outside Indonesia, a military dictator. Both sentences are true, and the country has spent every year since 1998 deciding which one it wants to teach.