Ex-Dictator of Indonesia Suharto Dead Without Justice Being Done

By John Gee


	Indonesian protesters hold an anti-Suharto protest Jan. 19 outside Pertamina hospital in Jakarta where the former president was being treated. Suharto died Jan. 27, at the age of 86 (AFP photo/Adek Berry).

FOREIGN FANS of Mussolini used to say that he made Italian trains run on time. It was as if it didn’t matter much that he suppressed democracy, used thuggery to silence opponents, arrested thousands of his enemies, occupied Abyssinia, repressed Libya and took his country into a disastrous war at the side of Nazi Germany: punctual trains weighed heavily in the balance against such excesses.

Tributes to ex-President Suharto of Indonesia, who died Jan. 27, smacked of a similar attitude. He was said to be the “Father of Development” who brought stability and economic progress to his country. In Southeast Asia, much of the media dwelled at length on the supposed economic benefits of his reign and skated lightly over his record of bloodshed and brutality.

Born to a poor rural family in Central Java in 1921, Suharto began his military career with the Royal Netherlands Indies Army in 1940. After the 1942 Japanese invasion, he served in a militia sponsored by the occupiers: Japan played upon anti-colonial sentiment to win support from Indonesians. After independence in 1949, Suharto rose through the ranks of the army and in 1963 became head of Kostrad, the army’s strategic command.

The latter years of the rule of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, were turbulent. Indonesia sought to gain control of West Papua from the Dutch, who held it until 1962 before surrendering it to Indonesian control, pending a decision on their future by the indigenous people. (Selected West Papuan leaders, by an “act of free choice” exercised in the presence of Indonesian troops, voted for their homeland’s incorporation into its neighbor in 1969.) Sukarno pursued a policy of “confrontation” with newly independent Malaysia, saying that it was a neo-colonial project.

There were deep social rifts in the country, and conservative citizens were alarmed at the growing influence of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). The PKI was remarkable not only for being the largest communist party outside the communist-ruled states (and, with 20 million members, the third largest in the world), but the strongest in any predominantly Muslim society. It supported the seizure of land from big landlords and its distribution to poor farmers. In the Sino-Soviet dispute, the PKI took a pro-Beijing position; some Indonesians saw the country’s Chinese minority and the PKI as two agents of Chinese influence in Indonesia. Such factors made it many enemies.

On Sept. 30, 1965, six generals were seized and murdered by a small group of soldiers and air force personnel. It was later reported that the PKI had tried to grab power, but Suharto had rallied the military to defeat them. In fact, he knew about the “leftist coup” in advance and did nothing to prevent it. After his release in 1999, Colonel Latief, an alleged coup leader who survived 33 years in prison, claimed that Suharto orchestrated the coup. There have been arguments over exactly what happened ever since, but in the six months following the coup, half a million leftists, real or imagined, were slaughtered by the military and local gangs. Some 200,000 people were imprisoned; not only were those believed to have had any connection to the PKI blacklisted for the rest of their lives, but members of their families found their career prospects blighted. The outcome was a military coup in which Suharto seized power and gradually ousted Sukarno from office.

Suharto ended “confrontation” and quickly improved relations with the West. As a result, when he decided to send Indonesian troops into the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, Western governments mouthed opposition to the action but did nothing to counter the invasion. Then-President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met Suharto the day before the attack and gave it their support; Kissinger asked that Suharto make his move only after the two U.S. politicians had returned home. Nearly 200,000 people—or one in three of the population—died during the subsequent Indonesian campaign to deprive East Timor of its right to national self-determination.

Violent campaigns were also waged against the West Papuan independence movement and against the people of Aceh from 1976 onward. Dissent was strongly repressed and only three political parties were allowed to exist. Golkar, the military’s chosen instrument, was ensured victory in each general election.

Suharto’s economic achievements bear reconsideration. Under his rule, the country took on massive foreign loans: at his downfall, it owed $75 billion in foreign debt. Critics of the regime claimed that around 30 percent of the money that had been secured as aid was siphoned off by the Suharto regime through padded contracts and other crooked means. The country’s natural resources were opened up to foreign firms, and inroads were made into Indonesia’s rain forests as logging and expansion of plantations took place. Not only Suharto’s family, but also influential allies in the business and military, took part in the plundering of state revenues and the public at large; habits and networks of corruption still live on, hampering the consolidation of a more democratic and just society in Indonesia. This is Suharto’s legacy.

Increasing Ties With Israel

As far as the Arab world was concerned, Suharto maintained an official position of support for the Palestinian people, but there was an increase in ties with Israel from the late 1970s. In 1979, the CIA reported that Mossad operated a station in Jakarta using a commercial company as cover. A total of 28 Skyhawks, originally supplied to Israel by the U.S., were sold to Indonesia in 1979 and subsequently; this certainly took place with Washington’s approval.

With the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, some Arab and Muslim countries that had previously had few or no ties with Israel considered that if Yasser Arafat was talking to Israeli leaders directly, there was no reason why they should not. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visited Indonesia on Oct. 15, 1993, little more than a month after the ceremony on the White House lawn. He met for over an hour with Suharto, who was then chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, telling him that he sought non-aligned support for the peace process. An Indonesian diplomat was quoted in The New York Times as saying that the establishment of diplomatic relations was only a matter of time, but that first, Indonesia wanted to see progress in the peace process.

That did not happen. The next official Israeli visit was by a trade delegation in December 1999, well after Suharto’s downfall the year before. Again, there was talk of building ties and of diplomatic relations when the peace process concluded, but in September 2000, Sharon’s walk in the precincts of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the brutal reaction of the Israeli army to the consequent Palestinian protests resulted in the complete breakdown of that process.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Southeast Asia, and the author of Unequal Enemies: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.