|
THE
FALL OF SUHARTO: THE LEGACY;
Suharto Fostered Rapid Economic Growth, and Staggering Graft
New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: May 22, 1998
Like the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, President Suharto was a reforming autocrat who
clung to power so long that he undermined his legacy and considerable accomplishments.
Asia's economic crisis was the catalyst that pushed Mr. Suharto, 76, from his throne after 32 years. But in his
family's unrestrained corruption and his increasingly aloof efforts to manage the forces of education and modernization
he had unleashed under his ''new order,'' Mr. Suharto alienated large parts of the military and the business class.
Mr. Suharto has been unceremoniously pushed from the presidency he insisted on keeping barely two months ago, when
he was sworn in for another five years in the midst of enormous economical and financial turbulence. But he will
be remembered for deeds and events that have little to do with the turmoil of the last few months.
He brought stability and economic development, family planning and widespread literacy and made Indonesia self-sufficient
in rice.
After he overthrew Sukarno, who was a strong member of the nonaligned movement and made an alliance with Communists,
Mr. Suharto made Indonesia an anti-Communist bulwark, which brought him Washington's support and indulgence. Like
the Shah and Marcos, Mr. Suharto played the anti-Communism card, throwing his lot in with the Americans in the
revolutionary struggle that absorbed Southeast Asia in those years.
Later, when the Vietnam War ended, he was an important player in the foundation of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations, which promoted capitalism in the region and helped prevent the Communist victory in Indochina from
spreading. He helped keep China at bay and also was vital to a negotiated solution to the Cambodian war.
But at home Mr. Suharto suppressed freedom of speech and of the press, and his military cracked down ruthlessly
on domestic dissent. He allowed his friends and his family, especially his six children, to become unimaginably
rich in a country with large pockets of poverty, and as the years went by, he clearly stopped listening to criticism,
even from his closest allies.
His regime was built on the pillars of anti-Communism and economic development, notes Daniel Lev, an Indonesian
scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle. The end of the cold war made one pillar nearly irrelevant,
and the economic contagion that swept Asia this year -- a function of ''crony capitalism'' and unregulated loans
-- undermined the other pillar.
So an important part of Mr. Suharto's legacy, Mr. Lev says, will be the political reaction to it: the mistrust
of a strong presidency and the strong popular desire for new controls against corruption, collusion and nepotism,
the themes of the student uprisings against Mr. Suharto's regime.
While Mr. Suharto's recent record is mixed, his accomplishments were remarkable in the years after he took power
after a failed coup attempt in 1965. In the months of anti-Communist blood bath that followed, hundreds of thousands
of people died.
Even today, his role in the coup is a mystery. As the commander of the Strategic Army Reserve, Mr. Suharto met
the night before the coup with the leader of the Communist Revolutionary Council, Abu Latief, who still sits in
a Jakarta jail and has never disclosed what happened.
As the alleged coup unfolded in the night, Mr. Suharto and his troops stepped forward and took control of Jakarta.
He quietly emerged to become President only in 1967, easing aside Sukarno, the nationalist who led Indonesia to
independence from Dutch rule after World War II.
Sidney Jones, an scholar of Indonesia who is executive director of Human Rights Watch/Asia, notes that if a new
Indonesian leadership wishes to make peace with the past, it would probably have to investigate Mr. Suharto's role
in the coup and its aftermath, which remains Indonesia's ''greatest national trauma.''
''While his record is clearly mixed, he brought order, peace, stability and economic development to a fractured
and desperately poor society,'' said Adam Schwarz, a journalism fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
author of ''A Nation in Waiting'' (1994), a study of Indonesia in the 1990's. ''Suharto presided over one of the
most durable developmental stories of this century, and he brought enormous numbers of people out from life underneath
the poverty line.''
Calling himself Bapak Pembangunan, or the Father of Development, Mr. Suharto succeeded in delivering at least 7
percent annual economic growth for three decades in a huge island country of 210 million, the fourth-most populous
in the world. He initiated a family planning program that has been studied everywhere as a model of educated self-interest,
and which did not use any significant measure of coercion, in contrast to India and China.
And he made the Indonesian economy one of the most open to foreign investment, winning friends at the World Bank
and at the International Monetary Fund.
At the same time, Mr. Suharto and his children built up assets that the Central Intelligence Agency estimated at
$30 billion in 1989.
''Despite the growth figures, which stick in the head,'' notes Mr. Lev, ''it is also impressive that the family
is worth $30 billion to $40 billion. And you have to ask what other uses there were for that money, and what the
hidden costs were of that corruption.''
Mr. Suharto also suppressed the growth of politics, believing the country too fractious and immature for democracy,
Mr. Schwarz said. Mr. Suharto preached unity and quiet compromise, and kept political institutions neutered: there
were no roll calls in Parliament, only decisions reached by ''consensus'' that was clearly engineered from above.
His ''new order'' was a collaborative system of co-optation, a prominent Jakarta editor said in 1990, when the
corruption and nepotism were becoming visible for all to see. People lived and profited by the five D's: datang,
duduk, dengar, diam, duit -- come, sit, listen, silence, money.
In what was a monopolistic state, there was quiet criticism of Mr. Suharto's wife, Siti Hartinah Suharto, known
as Tien, and sometimes known as Mrs. Tien Percent. But after the rapid rise of world oil prices in the mid-1970's,
Mr. Suharto's Western-educated economic advisers -- known as the Berkeley mafia, since many of them attended school
there -- urged diversification and a further opening to Western investments.
The progressive deregulation of the economy and large public works projects -- praised in the West -- also led
to more opportunities for graft and family privilege. And foreign companies quietly paid the necessary bribes and
put the necessary Suharto children in charge of projects and monopolies.
The country moved from the ''generation of 10 percent to the generation of 20 percent,'' said one Indonesian scholar
who was careful to speak on the condition of anonymity. He estimated then that 80 percent of major contracts went
to Mr. Suharto's children or friends, and even Suharto loyalists were becoming disgruntled.
But the long economic boom -- when all of Asia seemed a merrily ringing cash register and annual growth rates hit
double digits -- created a lot of wealth and a growing middle class.
And with the pressure for political liberalization stemming naturally from economic development and generational
change, there grew apace a vivid embarrassment and anger over Mr. Suharto's inability to distinguish between his
family's interests and those of the state.
But as the society changed, politics did not, and the country was unable to engage in any public debate over key
questions, Mr. Schwarz said. These included the role of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesian life; the relation of
Islam and the state; the degree of Government intervention in the economy; the relationship of Java to the outer
islands, and of course the role of the Suharto children.
In the 1990's, noted Ms. Jones, of Human Rights Watch, the corruption and
the anger only worsened. Popular anger grew sufficiently that when Mrs. Suharto died in 1996 of a heart attack,
many Indonesians preferred to believe rumors that she had been caught in a gunfight between her two younger sons
over a national automobile project.
The 90's were also the period when Mr. Suharto began to make political mistakes, listening less to the Berkeley
mafia and more to the trusted ally who became his heir, President B. J. Habibie. Mr. Habibie, a German-trained
engineer, filled Mr. Suharto's head with a high-tech vision of a modern Indonesia, prompting hugely expensive boondoggles
like Government support for Mr. Habibie's effort to build an Indonesian jet aircraft.
Mr. Suharto began to lose touch with his military, and he created a tame Association of Muslim Intellectuals, led
by Mr. Habibie, to try to provide a different kind of support and legitimacy in the largest Muslim country in the
world.
In November 1991, Indonesian troops opened fire in an East Timor cemetery on mourners for a young independence
advocate shot by the army. At least 50 and probably 100 people died, Ms. Jones said. The massacre brought international
condemnation of Indonesian policies in East Timor, which it had annexed by force in 1975 after Portugal retreated
from its empire. In 1996 two proponents for democracy in East Timor won the Nobel Peace Prize. The killings also
turned a small insurgency into widespread revolt throughout East Timor.
With no cold war and no Communist threat, the killings and oppression in East Timor, and the less visible repression
in Irian Jaya, Indonesia's half of the island of New Guinea, turned the American Congress against Indonesia, leaving
Mr. Suharto little protection when the Asian boom collapsed and the I.M.F. that once loved him demanded that he
choose country over children.
Mr. Habibie, who has little popular backing, may last only a few months.
As Mr. Suharto's heir, he is perceived as the man appointed to protect Mr. Suharto's children.
Ms. Jones hopes he will begin a new dialogue with the Indonesian people, release political prisoners, repeal repressive
laws, set free elections and begin a serious discussion of the issue of East Timor. ''But even if he does move
out boldly,'' she asked, ''will anyone trust him?''
|
