Suharto

• 1. Introduction

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  Suharto ruled Indonesia for 31 years, longer than any other president in the country's history. He was born on the 8th of June 1921 in a plaited-bamboo-walled house in Kemusuk, a hamlet near Yogyakarta, the cultural heartland of the Javanese. By the time he died on the 27th of January 2008, the Indonesian government declared a week of national mourning. Yet international observers widely regarded him as a military dictator, and Transparency International placed him first on its list of the most self-enriching leaders of the preceding two decades.

  How did a boy from a poor farming village, shuttled between foster parents and relatives, rise to command the world's fourth most populous nation? How did a man who came to power promising stability and development come to preside over what the CIA described as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century? And how did a regime that reduced poverty from 45% to around 11% also manage to accumulate a family fortune that one estimate placed at $73.24 billion? These are the questions that make Suharto's story one of the most contested legacies of the Cold War era.

• 2. A Divided Childhood

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  Five weeks after Suharto's birth, his mother Sukirah suffered a nervous breakdown, and he was placed in the care of his paternal great-aunt, Kromodirjo. His parents, Kertosudiro and Sukirah, divorced early in his life and both later remarried. By age three he had been returned to his mother; by 1929 his father had taken him to live with a sister in Wuryantoro, a poor, low-yielding farming area near Wonogiri. Over the following two years he was passed back to his mother and then back again to his father. It was his foster-father Prawirowihardjo who finally gave him something like a stable home.

  In 1931, Suharto moved to Wonogiri for primary school, living first with a relative named Sulardi and then with another relative, Hardjowijono. It was in Hardjowijono's household that he encountered Darjatmo, a dukun, or practitioner of Javanese mystical arts and faith healing. The experience shaped him profoundly. Later, as president, Suharto surrounded himself with powerful symbolic language drawn from that Javanese world. Difficulty paying school fees eventually pushed him back to Yogyakarta, where he attended a lower-fee Schakel Muhammadiyah middle school until 1938.

  Unlike leading Indonesian nationalists such as Sukarno, Suharto had little contact with European colonizers and showed little interest in anti-colonialism. He did not learn to speak Dutch until after his induction into the Dutch military in 1940. That narrow, locally rooted upbringing meant he came to power without the ideological baggage of Indonesia's independence movement, and it shaped both his strengths and his blind spots as a ruler.

• 3. Soldier in Three Armies

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  Suharto's military formation began in June 1940, when he joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) after a bicycle mishap destroyed his only work clothes and ended a brief bank clerking job. He trained at the KNIL Kadetschool in Gombong, rose to sergeant, and was posted to a reserve battalion in Cisarua. After the Dutch surrendered to Japan in March 1942, he abandoned his uniform and returned to Wurjantoro.

  In October 1943, he transferred from the Yogyakarta police force to the Pembela Tanah Air (PETA), a Japanese-sponsored militia in which Indonesians could serve as officers. Training for the rank of shodancho, or platoon commander, exposed him to a localized version of the Japanese bushido. The ideology was anti-Dutch and pro-nationalist, though in service of Imperial Japanese militarism. That encounter with nationalistic and militarist thinking is believed to have permanently shaped how Suharto saw power.

  When Indonesian independence was proclaimed in August 1945, Suharto joined the newly formed Indonesian army based on his PETA experience. He was appointed a battalion commander when republican forces were formally organized in October 1945, and fought Allied troops near Magelang and Semarang. On the 17th of May 1946, he led his Division X troops to halt an advance by the Dutch T Brigade, earning the respect of senior officers who invited him to help draft guidelines for the Battle Leadership Headquarters. In dawn raids on the 1st of March 1949, his forces briefly recaptured Yogyakarta from the Dutch, holding it until noon. That single day cemented his reputation as a field commander and gave him a story to carry for the rest of his political life.

• 4. Seizing the Moment

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  Before dawn on the 1st of October 1965, six army generals were kidnapped and executed in Jakarta by soldiers from the Presidential Guard. At 7:10 am a commander named Untung bin Syamsuri announced on the radio that a "the 30th of September Movement" had forestalled a CIA-backed coup by power-hungry generals. Suharto was at a Jakarta army hospital that evening with his three-year-old son Tommy, who had a scalding injury. Colonel Abdul Latief, a key member of the movement and a close family friend, visited him there. According to Latief's later testimony, the conspirators assumed Suharto was loyal to President Sukarno and informed him of the impending kidnapping plan.

  Suharto moved immediately. He mobilized Kostrad and RPKAD special forces to seize control of Jakarta, capturing the radio station and other strategic sites without resistance. By 9:00 pm he announced over the radio that six generals had been kidnapped and that he was in control of the army. By the 2nd of October, his faction controlled the military. He was officially appointed army commander on the 14th of October.

  What followed was a nationwide campaign of killing that the CIA described as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. The most widely accepted estimates put the death toll at 500,000 to over 1 million. As many as 1.5 million people were imprisoned at one stage or another. Targets included alleged communists as well as ethnic Chinese, trade unionists, and others. Within eighteen months of the killings, Suharto had maneuvered Sukarno out of power through a combination of student agitation, parliamentary manipulation, and military pressure. On the 12th of March 1967, the MPRS named him acting president. Sukarno was placed under house arrest at Bogor Palace and died in June 1970.

• 5. The New Order's Economics

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  When Suharto took power, inflation in Indonesia was running at over 650% per year. He understood, as he put it himself, that defeating communism required defeating poverty. To accomplish this, he appointed an advisory group of mostly US-educated economists from the University of Indonesia, nicknamed the "Berkeley Mafia." Among its members were Widjojo Nitisastro, Ali Wardhana, and Emil Salim. They reversed Sukarno's tight regulation of manufacturing and trade, cut subsidies, reduced government debt, and reformed the exchange rate mechanism. By 1969 inflation had dropped to 19%.

  The first foreign investors to re-enter Indonesia included mining companies Freeport Sulphur Company and International Nickel Company. From 1967, the government secured low-interest foreign aid from ten countries grouped under the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI). Revenue from the 1973 oil crisis then allowed large investments in infrastructure under a series of five-year plans called REPELITA, running from 1969 to 1998. By 1996 Indonesia's poverty rate had fallen to around 11% from 45% in 1970. Real GDP per capita rose from US$806 to US$4,114 between 1966 and 1997. In 1986, the government won the FAO Ceres Medal after Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production. Life expectancy rose from 47 years in 1966 to 67 years in 1997, and the infant mortality rate fell by more than 60%.

  The industrialization was largely carried out by Chinese-Indonesian conglomerates, the largest of which included the Salim Group led by Liem Sioe Liong, the Sinar Mas Group led by Oei Ek Tjong, and the Astra Group led by Tjia Han Poen. Suharto favored these groups because their ethnic-minority status meant they would not become political rivals, but they provided the capital and skills he deemed necessary for growth. In exchange, they financed what he called "regime maintenance" activities.

• 6. Control, Corruption, Cronyism

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  Suharto's "Dual Function" (Dwifungsi) policy gave the military a formal role in every level of Indonesian government, economy, and society. By 1969-70% of Indonesia's provincial governors and more than half of its district chiefs were active military officers. Political parties were permitted only in a tightly managed form: in January 1973, the four Islamic parties were forced to merge into the PPP, while five non-Islamic parties were fused into the PDI. Golkar, the military-backed federation Suharto transformed into his electoral vehicle, won landslide majorities at every election. He was re-elected unopposed by the MPR in 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1998.

  The family business grew in parallel with political entrenchment. By the early 1980s, Suharto's children had become major economic players. His daughter Tutut monopolized the toll-road market; his son Tommy obtained a decree in 1989 granting him 75% of profits from toll roads his group operated jointly with state-owned Jasa Marga. Tommy Suharto started in 1984 with $100,000 in seed capital at age 22; within ten weeks his Humpuss Group had twenty subsidiaries. A year later he acquired Perta Oil Marketing, a subsidiary of Pertamina, which generated profits of $1 million per month.

  In 1997, Forbes listed Suharto as the fourth richest person in the world with a net worth of $16 billion, though his official annual salary had been just $21,000 in his last peak year. A cover story in Time magazine on the 24th of May 1999 estimated the total wealth accumulated by the Suharto family over three decades at $73.24 billion. Three-fourths of that was attributed to seizing oil, gas, and mining resources, or muscling in on state corporations. Transparency International placed Suharto first on its 2004 list of self-enriching leaders, alleging misappropriation of between $15 billion and $35 billion.

• 7. East Timor and Repression

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  In 1974, the neighboring colony of Portuguese Timor descended into civil war after Portugal withdrew following the Carnation Revolution. The left-wing Fretilin movement emerged dominant, and Suharto, with reported approval from U.S. President Gerald Ford and Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during their visits to Indonesia, authorized a full-scale invasion on the 7th of December 1975. East Timor became Indonesia's 27th province in July 1976. The "encirclement and annihilation" campaigns of 1977-1979 broke Fretilin's hold over the hinterlands. Estimated conflict-related deaths during Indonesian rule from 1974 to 1999 range from a minimum of 90,800 to a maximum of 213,600; Indonesian forces were responsible for about 70% of the violent deaths.

  At home, repression was systematic and multi-directional. From 1983 to 1985, army squads killed up to 10,000 suspected criminals in a program known as the Petrus killings. The Tanjung Priok massacre saw the army kill up to 100 conservative Muslim protesters in September 1984. Among those arrested in the aftermath of subsequent bombings was Abu Bakar Bashir, who later led Jemaah Islamiyah. Military operations against a resurgent Free Aceh Movement from 1989 onward killed an estimated 2,000 people and ended the insurgency by 1992.

  Suharto's treatment of ethnic Chinese Indonesians was similarly systematic. The government prohibited all public expressions of Chinese culture and language, seized Chinese schools, and forced Chinese Indonesians to adopt Indonesian-sounding names. From 1978, a Letter of Proof of Citizenship was required in practice almost exclusively of people of Chinese descent, creating barriers to university enrollment, civil service positions, and the military. Race riots against ethnic Chinese began occurring regularly from April 1994 onward.

• 8. Collapse and Aftermath

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  The 1997 Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia harder than any other country in the region. The Indonesian rupiah dropped from a pre-crisis level of 2,600 to the US dollar to around 17,000 in early 1998. The economy shrank by 13.7%. Between October 1997 and the following April, Suharto signed three letters of intent with the IMF in exchange for $43 billion in liquidity aid. In December 1997, he missed an ASEAN summit for the first time, later revealed to be due to a minor stroke.

  On the 12th of May 1998, while Suharto was on a state visit to Egypt, security forces killed four demonstrators from Jakarta's Trisakti University. Rioting and looting across Jakarta and other cities over the following days destroyed thousands of buildings and killed over 1,000 people. On the 16th of May, tens of thousands of university students occupied the grounds and roof of the parliament building. Suharto's political allies refused to join a proposed new cabinet. On the 21st of May 1998, Suharto announced his resignation, and vice-president Habibie, the same man who had grown up as his neighbor's son in Makassar in 1950, assumed the presidency.

  Suharto spent his remaining decade as a recluse in his family's compound in the Menteng area of Jakarta. Courts repeatedly found him medically unfit to stand trial. His son Tommy was sentenced in 2002 to 15 years in jail for ordering the killing of a judge who had convicted him of corruption. A civil lawsuit filed in July 2007 sought $440 million in state funds alleged to have disappeared from a scholarship foundation, plus $1.1 billion in further damages. On the 4th of January 2008, Suharto was admitted to Pertamina Central Hospital in Jakarta. He died on the 27th of January 2008 and received a state military funeral with full honors.