SUHARTO: 1921-2008
Rise and fall of an autocrat
By Michael Vatikiotis, For The Straits Times
FAMILY CAME FIRST: Mr Suharto (front) with sons Sigit Harjodjudanto (left) and Bambang Trihatmodjo (back), as well as his bodyguard (right) in a 1998 file photo. His three sons and three daughters were given carte blanche to build corporate empires, leading to much public resentment. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
FORMER president Suharto of Indonesia will be remembered as one of the more complex and contradictory autocrats of the last century.
He ruled Indonesia for more than 30 years - from 1967 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.
Mr Suharto brought prosperity and development to Indonesia; his principal failing was that he did not see the wisdom of gradual political reform or the danger posed by his family's business empire.
His 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, Mr 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 increases - ironically more or less the same economic circumstances that led to the ousting of his predecessor, Mr Sukarno, in 1966.
Once weakened, Mr Suharto became vulnerable to the machinations of Indonesian elite politics; his Cabinet abandoned him, and the army quarrelled over who would take over.
HOGGING THE GLORY
Mr Suharto squandered his own legacy...As the '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.
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 Mr 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 set up.
Mr 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. He made sure that everyone reported directly to him; he even made sure that village-level funds came directly from him.
As the '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 came.
Here was a president who liked nothing better than to tell farmers what to do - he would get 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- storey house filled with cheap glass kitsch. He had no weakness for fast cars or women. He preferred to go fishing.
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, Mr 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 Yogyakarta was told about Mr Suharto's rise to power in 1966, he responded: 'Is he still in the habit of stealing?'
Major-General Suharto 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 by senior officers to cross him.
Mr 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 then- East Timor in 1975, and sanctioned a brutal crackdown on organised crime in the mid-1980s.
All the same, many, perhaps most, Indonesians will choose to remember the good times Mr Suharto ushered in. He was supported by the middle class in the 1960s, who were fed up with Mr Sukarno's bombastic confrontation with the West and neighbouring countries.
Mr 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 per cent 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 miracle. An Indonesian entrepreneur bought the Italian sports car company, Lamborghini.
Although crippled by strokes, Mr 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 Mr Suharto had seen the need for more openness and started the process of change a lot earlier, the country's transition would have been less costly and less painful.
The writer is the Asia regional director for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and author of Indonesian Politics Under Suharto (Routledge, 2nd edition, June 1994)
FAMILY CAME FIRST: Mr Suharto (front) with sons Sigit Harjodjudanto (left) and Bambang Trihatmodjo (back), as well as his bodyguard (right) in a 1998 file photo. His three sons and three daughters were given carte blanche to build corporate empires, leading to much public resentment. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
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