OBITUARY Suharto leaves an
iron-fist legacy By Michael
Vatikiotis
SINGAPORE - Indonesia's
long-reigning second president Suharto, who held
the office from 1967 to 1998 - who died in Sunday
- will be remembered as one of the more complex
and contradictory autocrats of the last century.
Born to a poor peasant family in Central
Java in 1921, he ruled Indonesia for more than 30
years from 1965 until his downfall in 1998, but
hardly with an iron fist. There were no legions of
jailed dissidents or disappearances in the night,
and there was a considerable improvement in the
livelihood and welfare of the average Indonesian.
There is no question that Suharto brought
prosperity and development to Indonesia; his
principal failing was not to see the wisdom of
gradual political reform or the danger posed by
his family's business empire. Suharto's
ignominious resignation in May 1998 as students
occupied his rubber stamp parliament and looters
burned Jakarta's business district suggested
another people's power revolution. The reality was
less idealistic or elegant.
In a
later interview, Suharto himself pinpointed the
withdrawal of economic support by the United
States and the International Monetary Fund as a
trigger for rampant inflation and punishing price
hikes - ironically more or less the same economic
circumstances that led to the downfall of his
predecessor, Sukarno in 1966.
Once
weakened, Suharto became vulnerable to the
machinations of Indonesian elite politics; his
cabinet abandoned him and the army quarrelled over
who would take over. Ordinary people died in the
crossfire and the students were manipulated and
then let down by a selfish elite unwilling to
surrender their wealth and privileges. Ten years
on, many of Suharto's associates from the business
and political world remain in influential
positions and the power of his patronage lives on
in the form of charitable foundations that he
established.
Suharto squandered his own
legacy. He should have seen the sense of letting
more light into a political system that he
controlled with the skill and determination of a
latter-day Javanese sultan. Reserved and somewhat
aloof, the always smiling Suharto skillfully
wielded power using a mix of introspection,
strategic timing and cleverly managed personal
networks.
He made sure that everyone
reported directly to him; he even made sure that
village-level funds were earmarked as coming
directly from him. As the self-proclaimed "father
of development", he never allowed anyone else to
take credit for Indonesia's progress, a style that
stunted the country's institutional and
bureaucratic development and left it wholly
unprepared for democracy when it finally came
after his downfall.
Suharto took pride in
his humble rural origins as the son of a village
irrigation inspector form a village called Kemusuk
on the outskirts of Jogyakarta. He liked nothing
better than to tell farmers what to do - he would
become animated about new techniques for bovine
artificial insemination as national television
broadcast wide eyed looks of wonderment on the
faces of poor farmers ushered before him to hear
these pearls of agronomic wisdom.
He
carefully cultivated an image of humility that
masked his family's fabulous wealth, wearing the
same drab safari suit and keeping punctual office
hours. He shunned the grand stuccoed presidential
palace for a dowdy single story house filled with
cheap glass kitsch. He had no weakness for fast
cars or women. He rather preferred to go fishing.
All in the family But he did
have a weakness for his family. Suharto's three
sons and three daughters were given carte blanche
to build corporate empires, which in turn foreign
investors were required to do business with. Using
licensing and monopolistic practices the army had
fashioned after Dutch colonial rule to fund its
operation, Suharto simply allocated his family
enterprises choice areas of economic growth and
then ordered state run banks to lend them money.
He used an arcane foundation law, which once
provided a loophole for the independence movement
to acquire funds under Dutch rule, to stash away
billions of dollars and forced poorly paid civil
servants to make donations.
It is perhaps
most telling that when the late Sultan
Hamengkubuwono IX of Jogyakarta was told about
Suharto's rise to power in 1966, he responded: "Is
he still in the habit of stealing?"
Major
General Suharto, then in his mid-forties, crept
into power on the back of a failed army-led putsch
that has never been fully explained. It took this
former rural credit clerk who joined the army,
like so many of his generation during the Japanese
occupation, more than three years to assume full
power after the coup, and another decade to
overcome factional rivalry within the military.
The army later felt abandoned and weakened under
his rule - and there were several attempts to
cross him by senior officers.
Although his
regime was not characterized by the blatant
state-sanctioned violence of other contemporary
autocrats, Suharto had blood on his hands. He
allowed perhaps at least half a million
Indonesians to die at the hands of anti-communist
vigilantes in 1966; he jailed many thousands of
suspected communists on a remote island the Dutch
had used as a prison - although he later ordered
their release. He oversaw the occupation and
brutal suppression of East Timor in 1975 in which
up to 200,000 people may have died, and sanctioned
a brutal crackdown on organized crime in the
mid-1980s.
All the same, many, perhaps
most, Indonesians will choose to remember the good
times Suharto ushered in. He was supported by the
middle class in the 1960s who were fed up with
Sukarno's bombastic confrontation with the West
and neighboring countries, which was ruining the
country.
Suharto delivered economic
stability, encouraged foreign investment,
prudently spread the wealth and fostered
development that fed and educated people, giving
poorer Indonesians the best standard of living
they had ever had. By the mid-1980s, Indonesia was
growing at more than 6% a year and had a
per-capita income of more than US$500. In the
1990s, Indonesia was riding high, the darling of
the World Bank's East Asian economic miracle.
Although crippled by strokes, Suharto
lived on after his fall from power to see the real
legacy of his rule, which was a chaotic scramble
to shake off years of paternalistic rule and forge
a workable representative democracy. In the wake
of his fall, four presidents have struggled to
eliminate rampant corruption in the public sector
and build strong institutions that adhere to the
rule of law rather than personal fealty and
patronage. If only Suharto had seen the need for
more openness and started the process of change
earlier, the country's transition would have been
less costly and less painful.
Complicated legacy With the
passing of Suharto, many will be tempted to
declare a close to the authoritarian chapter of
Indonesian history. So long as Suharto lived,
there was no hope of closure or compensation for
the more egregious excesses of his three decade
rule because of the impunity he enjoyed. Now that
he is gone, the danger is that people will all too
easily forget and lull themselves into believing
that Indonesia is on an irreversible course to a
freedom, equality and justice.
Sadly, this
goal is far from assured. For a political culture
that nurtures selfish, corrupt elites and tends to
ignore or trample on popular demands for justice
and equality remains very much in place. Democracy
as a system has been in effect for a decade, but
democracy as a belief is still rather tenuous. How
are we to be assured otherwise when the sitting
vice president describes democracy as a means and
not a goal of national development; or when no one
can be held accountable for the mudflow from a
rogue gas field owned by an influential family
that has displaced tens of thousands in East Java;
or when no one is punished for the murder of a
prominent human rights activist.
The
tenacious survival of what Indonesians call the
"feudal mentality" helps explain the historical
cycle of revolution, liberation, dictatorship,
leading eventually back to revolt and liberation
which has characterized the past sixty years.
Indonesia's founding president Sukarno led a
revolution that established one of Asia's youngest
multi-party democracies at independence in 1949;
the 1955 general election is still considered a
benchmark expression of popular will.
But
Sukarno's vanity and bombast convinced him that
his leadership was sufficient to guide the
country, and democracy withered and died. In 1965
General Suharto seized the reins of power amid
protests and student unrest calling for an end to
Sukarno's dictatorship. Two decades later, a new
generation of students was calling Suharto the
dictator, and another ten years on in 1998 he was
forced from power after students occupied
parliament allowing his cabinet to abandon him and
the army to withdraw support.
The period
since then has generated hope that the country's
political system is firmly on a democratic path.
One optimistic sign has been the ability to vote
in and vote out a series of chief executives -
four presidents in a decade compared to just two
in the preceding half century. Elections have been
held freely and fairly at all levels and the army
has retreated from the political arena.
So
why worry about the future? It is virtually a
truism in Southeast Asia that elections are not a
good measure of democratic health. Look at
Thailand where more than a decade of democratic
advancement that most observers confidently
considered a corner turned ended in a military
coup. In Indonesia there has never been a
tradition of military coups, but there is a long
history of patronage and paternalism that has
tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few
who squander national resources that could be
deployed to benefit the many.
What
Indonesia desperately needs to establish is a
system of government that cares for all of its
citizens and nurtures a culture of equality. What
use is a democracy when many ordinary Indonesians
remember that Suharto the authoritarian delivered
welfare and prosperity, yet in Jakarta today -
where the city governor is now elected - low
income families suffer higher levels of chronic
malnourishment and disease than a decade ago. As
the late writer and social critic Y B Mangunwijaya
once sadly observed: "The little man in Indonesia
will only be helped by the power of the outside
world because in Indonesian culture there is no
tradition of helping the little man."
It
would be comforting to believe that the decade
Suharto spent in virtual isolation at his Jakarta
home after his fall was justice of sorts for a man
who allowed the country to descend into violence
and ruin because he could not bring himself to let
a little light into the system. But instead, the
ailing Suharto commanded strong loyalty and
respect from the majority of people who now lead
the country - many of whom rushed to his bedside
each time he was hospitalized because they owe
their wealth and position to his patronage. Why
last year he even won a libel case against Time
Magazine over an article alleging that he and his
family had illegally amassed billions of dollars
and stashed them overseas.
Instead of
fretting over the old dictator's residual power,
it would be prudent to focus on the obstacles that
lie ahead. For no matter how freely and fairly the
next president is elected, if social justice isn't
delivered, we will surely see new signs of the old
political cycle that has burdened Indonesia since
independence: protests, prompting crackdowns, the
promulgation of emergency powers in the interest
of stability, and eventually dictatorship.
Isn't this just what happened in the 1960s
when Sukarno faced popular demands for reform and
offered his people rhetoric instead of rice? The
passing of Suharto should not pull the wool over
outsiders' eyes and lull Indonesians into a false
sense of security. Let us instead worry about the
future and prevent the country's current and
future leaders from assuming they can benefit from
Indonesia's abundant riches without sharing the
wealth and governing in the interests of all,
rather than a few.
Michael
Vatikiotis is the Asia regional director for
the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue.
He is the author of Indonesian Politics Under
Suharto.
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