also Bahasa Indonesian:
Tentang
Soeharto
see also
Accountability for Suharto’s Crimes Must Not
Die With Him Also in Bahasa Indonesia;
Tetum
East Timor and Indonesia Action Network
Backgrounder on Suharto
Suharto, who ruled
Indonesia from 1966 until he was ousted in 1998, decisively shaped
the post 1965 political and economic trajectory of Indonesia. His
supporters credited him with maintaining Indonesia’s stability and
setting it on the path to stable economic development. Suharto’s
more numerous critics condemn his decades-long pattern of
authoritarianism, human rights violations, corruption, and political
stagnation, a legacy from which Indonesia is still trying to
recover.
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Clinton and Suharto, |
Nixon and Suharto. |
Suharto was born in 1921 in central Java near Yogyakarta. He joined
the Royal Netherlands' Indies Army, KNIL with relatively little
education at the age of nineteen. His rise to power occurred
entirely within the Indonesian military, particularly during
Indonesia’s war for independence from the Dutch (1945-49). In 1962
Indonesian President Sukarno appointed Suharto to head the Mandala
command for the “liberation” of West Irian (West Papua) (1962-1963),
and later the Trikora command responsible for the military
confrontation with Malaysia (1963-1965). While not a particularly
skilled military leader, Suharto used his commands to build
patronage networks and secure the loyalty of his soldiers, skills he
later used to consolidate his own power. In 1964 Suharto, now a
Major-General was named commander of KOSTRAD, the Army's Strategic
Reserve Command.
It was as KOSTRAD commander that Suharto took control of the
Indonesian Army following the alleged Untung coup attempt of
September 30, 1965. Using the September 30th Movement as a pretext
for mass murder, in the words of historian John Roosa, from October
1965 to March 1966 he oversaw the extermination of the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI), the murder of between 400,000 and one million
alleged PKI members and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands
more. He finally forced Sukarno to transfer authority to him on
March 11, 1966.
Suharto’s first task, in addition to overseeing the mass killings of
alleged PKI members, was salvaging Indonesia’s shattered economy and
gaining the confidence of foreign investors and Western governments
who controlled the aid and capital that Indonesia desperately
needed. Lacking expertise of his own, he turned the task over to a
group of predominantly US-trained economic advisers, who developed a
major foreign investment law welcoming Western capital back to
Indonesia on enviable terms.
Human rights activist Usman Hamid holds a poster at an
activists' forum against pardoning Suharto in Jakarta . The
poster reads: "We will not forgive you if you don't return
the lives of our parents, brothers and friends, and the
money you have stolen, the houses you emptied and the
dignity that you destroyed." (JP/Ricky Yudhistira) |
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Suharto assumed the Presidency in 1967, and in 1968 becoming supreme
commander of the army as well. He was reelected to the presidency in
tightly scripted elections in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, and
1998. Throughout his rule successive U.S. administrations provided
extensive political, military and economic support, considering
Suharto a valuable anti-Communist ally and a bastion of stability in
a strategically vital and unstable region.
Suharto’s New Order could best be described as a military
bureaucratic regime, with a military administration running parallel
to the civilian administration down to the village level. This
politico-military administration proved adept at maintaining order,
often through the brutal repression of political dissent. Lacking an
independent mass base, the regime adopted a political organization,
Golkar, comprised of functional groups including peasants, workers,
business, and the armed forces, in order to mobilize political
support.
Through the New Order period Indonesia experienced steady absolute
economic growth, fueled in part by increases in oil revenues. While
the World Bank and other regime supporters pointed to such figures
as validation of their support, the numbers were seriously
misleading, often invented out of whole cloth to mask rapidly
increasing inequality. Suharto’s family and their allies, using a
vast network of military and state controlled businesses and
foundations, diverted a substantial fraction of that growth to
themselves, stealing $15-30 billion in the process and making
Suharto, according to the United Nations and the anti-corruption
group Transparency International, one of the world’s richest men and
perhaps the most corrupt of recent history.
This corruption and unaccountability extended to the realm of
foreign policy. In 1969 Indonesia annexed the territory of West
Papua in a fraudulent UN-sponsored “Act of Free Choice,” with
subsequent military action against a deeply rooted independence
movement leading to the deaths of tens of thousands. Similar
repression in Aceh, where the armed forces killed tens of thousands
of civilians in a savage counterinsurgency war beginning in the late
1970s, and elsewhere in the archipelago cemented Suharto’s position
as one of the most brutal leaders of the postwar era.
In December 1975
Suharto authorized the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of
East Timor. Nearly a third of East Timor’s population died as a
result of Indonesia’s invasion and occupation. Yet despite
substantial U.S. military and diplomatic support, Indonesia never
fully consolidated its rule in East Timor, and the territory
eventually regained its freedom in an UN-sponsored referendum in
August 1999, after which Indonesian troops burnt East Timor to the
ground and displaced virtually the entire population.
By the 1990s mounting social and economic inequality and the regimes
heavy-handed repression of dissent had fatally undermined Suharto’s
domestic legitimacy, which was based on the promise of political
order and steady economic growth. The regime’s enormous corruption
and lack of transparency likewise undermined economic stability,
with currency stability and the expectations of foreign investors
built upon largely fictional assumptions.
The Asian economic crisis of 1997, which hit Indonesia’s economy
particularly hard, detonated the tinder of nascent opposition to
Suharto’s rule. A mass movement of students, street vendors and the
urban poor emerged, demanding Suharto’s ouster. The withdrawal of
Western - particularly U.S. - support from Suharto and the
splintering of Army unity in the face of widespread and growing
protest forced his resignation from power after 32 years in May
1998. Since his ouster Suharto has successfully fended off attempts
by Indonesian civil society and pro-democracy organizations to hold
him accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.
Prepared for ETAN by Brad Simpson, a historian of U.S.-Indonesian
relations at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
see also Inside Indonesia:
Suharto (8 June 1921- 27 January 2008)
by
John Roosa.
A career soldier who commanded a country.
