The FEER Forum

by Jeremy Wagstaff

The only time Suharto was seen crying was when his wife, Ibu Tien, died in 1996. As with most the key watersheds in the New Order, the moment is cloaked in mystery. But his tears told us more about the man than anything else he said or did in 31 years of being Indonesia’s president.

    Some time between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Sunday, April 28, Ibu Tien had awoken. She slept alone: They had been married 48 years but in recent times had grown apart. She had grown tired of the trappings of power, and had watched as her children’s avarice destroyed the family and as her husband renege on promises to step down. The previous day she had visited her beloved horticultural garden outside Jakarta. None of her family was with her and, to those who accompanied her, it seemed as if she was saying goodbye.
She died on the way to hospital. Word quickly spread and Javanese began to whisper: the spiritual mandate, or wahyu, was with her. Suharto cannot last long without her. Even his own guards talked of it among themselves. Suharto wandered around in a daze as the nation, nursing an affection for her that seemed to transcend the gossip about her dark influence, was swept by mourning.
When a camera crew arrived at Suharto’s office to record his message to the nation a week later, he had trouble finishing the prepared speech. Choking on his tears, his eldest daughter Tutut rushed to comfort him. He managed to complete the third take, but it was dry and hollow, his voice expressionless. A minister suggested they use the first recording. “It shows the public how you love your wife,” the minister said: “How you feel your loss.” Suharto was adamant. “No,” he said. “I should not cry in front of my people. It shows weakness.”
Suharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years. His fall, amidst an economic crisis that bled into a violent, political one, was in circumstances almost as mysterious as his rise. Back then, in the early hours of 1 Oct. 1965, an attempted coup by a group of officers linked to the Communist Party began with the abduction and murder of six generals and then, inexplicably, lost momentum. Suharto, probably forewarned that something might happen, stepped into the vacuum, moved quickly to secure the important levers of power, and then waited the day out. By nightfall the coup—if that’s what it was—had collapsed and Suharto had emerged as the most powerful man in the land, a position he didn’t relinquish until 21 May 1998.
He learned much in the early years, but he instinctively understood that real, lasting power should not require the appearance of desire or effort. The real coup against President Sukarno took place on 11 March 1966, when Suharto, by now army chief, sent his officers to intimidate President Sukarno into fleeing the capital and then, in his Bogor palace, signing a letter which Suharto used to cement his power. All this was done as Suharto stayed at home nursing a cold.
His downfall was in some ways an echo of that day. Suharto had failed to understand the severity of the economic crisis that swept Indonesia in late 1997; by the time he did it was too late, and those who might have helped him stood back. By May 1998 the United States, his ally since the 1960s, had lost interest, as had the International Monetary Fund; both watched on the sidelines as the domestic drama played itself out. While cities across the country burned, politicians who owed their position and fortune to him conspired against him, withdrawing their names from his cabinet list.
Still none dared do it to his face; Suharto only found out slowly and indirectly that his lieutenants were deserting him. Generals who were once his bodyguards tried to find a way to persuade him to step down without ever saying as much. In the end, it fell to General Wiranto to administer the coup de grâce with a promise of protecting him against whatever might follow. But perhaps the bitterest blow was saved for last: His vice president and favored protégé, the German-trained engineer Bachruddin Habibie, rose like a rebellious son and took his place.
Suharto created the New Order, and it was best defined by what it wasn’t. After years of chaos under Sukarno and grandstanding at the expense of rice to eat, Suharto knew that Indonesia needed economic and political stability. Indonesians didn’t need a figurehead, they needed a manager, and he, and his kitchen cabinet of Machiavellis and technocrats, provided that. The economy grew while politics was steered into a sheep-pen of stage-managed elections and mass organizations. The political party Golkar grew from an obscure army subcommittee to a powerful political machine that dominated general elections from 1971 to 1997.
But just in case the electoral manipulation didn’t work, Suharto had some extra levers at his disposal: via a special board he controlled Golkar’s funds and via appointments to the assembly he controlled the body that elected, and re-elected him seven times. Most important, perhaps, he kept a tight grip on military and civilian appointments, which he monitored via a ledger in his study. This not only allowed him to dispense patronage; it helped keep in check religious and ethnic rivalries.
He also had the army. Within days of the aborted coup, soldiers, Muslims and nationalist gangs were leading pogroms against suspected communists. This was done with the knowledge, and, sometimes on the instruction, of Suharto and his fellow officers. It started within days of the coup, often on the initiative of local officials. Perhaps half a million people died. Rivers ran red, or, clogged with corpses, stopped flowing.
But after those early killings a strange peace swept over the country. Memory of this episode—reinforced by a propaganda film played on national television every year—kept a generation of Indonesians fearful and in line. For many the threat was enough.
Indonesia’s economy recovered from the hyperinflation and scattered starvation of the Sukarno years to be an economic model of sorts. Once the world’s biggest importer, it became self-sufficient in rice in 1985. Literacy shot up. Maternal and infant mortality fell. Population growth dropped with the introduction of family planning. Suharto called himself “The Father of Development.” The title stuck because many Indonesians felt he was just that.
There was corruption. But he was no kleptocrat like Marcos; Suharto amassed wealth, but as grease for the wheels of power. This is not to understate the crime: Via presidential edict he overrode constitutional safeguards against misuse of public funds. But to think he was feathering his own nest is to misunderstand the man and absolve those, many of them still in positions of influence, who benefited from his largesse. He amassed large amounts of money via dozens of foundations—the Habibie government found more than $600 million—but this was oil for the New Order machine: to pay off minions, prop up crony companies and to lubricate Golkar. But even here Suharto exhibited a strange kind of piety: When money from two foundations sank without trace in 1990, he demanded vengeance. He was a man who could compute complex sums in his head, and he had a clear idea of where the spoils should go.
That is not to say he didn’t help create vast rent-seeking opportunities for his children and cronies. His offspring would think nothing of flying to London to shop, but he himself lived throughout his presidency in the same cluster of houses in Menteng, a strangely ramshackle compound that hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s. His tastes, apart from an interest in Harley Davidson motorcycles, remained simple. He ate Indonesian warung food, fed his parrots and watched television.
The threat of force, the legitimacy that sprang from providing economic stability and his slush fund created acquiescence, making the terms “dictator” and “tyrant” less useful in describing Suharto’s rule than they usually are. Hundreds of thousands of people in Aceh and East Timor died under the jackboot, but after 1970 elsewhere there was relatively little bloodshed, and the few outbreaks in the next 25 years were relatively minor —the student protests of Malari in 1974, the killing of Muslim protesters at Tanjung Priok in 1984, the assault on the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) headquarters in 1996.
True, the lack of violence was in large measure the result of a system of military control down to the village level that kept the populace docile, but those who fought the New Order head-on were surprisingly few in number. A disproportionate chunk was from East Timor, the half-island Suharto’s soldiers had invaded in 1975. For those others, such as students, the media and trade unions, battle was only occasionally joined.
That’s not to say Suharto was not vindictive: He loathed criticism, purging, ostracizing and curtailing the freedoms of anyone who criticized his rule, whether they were retired VIPs like the Petisi 50 group in 1980, labor activists or marginal figures like Soebadio Sastrosatomo, whose 23-page booklet was banned on 6 May 1998 in possibly the last repressive edict of the New Order. Such an act seemed both petty and typical of Suharto: crush the insignificant.
But Soebadio knew something others didn’t. Suharto’s thin skin was not just vanity. He had removed Sukarno by stealth, one rivet at a time, and his most potent weapon had been undermining Sukarno’s aura. Perhaps Suharto feared this fall more than others. What would be left if Indonesians no longer believed he carried the wahyu?
Soebadio understood this. He chose to sign his pamphlet on Mount Lawu, where legend has the last king of Majapahit had died, and where the Suharto tomb had been built, in the shadow of Ibu Tien’s Mangkunegara line. For Soebadio mysticism was the only way to fight Suharto.
Mysticism was not enough in itself to secure power for Suharto, nor was it enough to bring it down. But the loss of Ibu Tien in 1996 upset the delicate balance in Cendana and, as importantly, in the public eye. Suharto was not isolated thereafter, but he lost much of his political deftness. The attack on the PDI was poorly handled, reducing Suharto to replace several key generals and supervise the attack himself. He failed to check the rise of Habibie’s Islamic intellectuals association, known as ICMI, as it emerged from a tool to corral Islamic support for Golkar to become a political force in its own right. He failed to appreciate how promoting his own daughter united those who had to make room for her, while the rise of Islamic generals in the armed forces weakened the power of traditional officers who he belatedly recognized as the more loyal. These mistakes could largely be put down to the generation gap that grew the longer Suharto was in power: His last armed forces commander, Wiranto, was more than a quarter century his junior. Few of his comrades from 1965 were still alive. Few of the wiser economic heads were nearby to awaken him to the reality that globalization left Indonesia vulnerable to the fickle winds of free trade and hot money.
In the end, however, he fell for the very reason he feared: He no longer appeared to those around him to have the wahyu. Suharto fell because he had no allies left. One by one they deserted him; some through self-preservation, some for longer standing grievances. Some just stood by and watched, switching off their phones when Suharto’s last few aides called for help. Suharto’s skill in balancing such forces had deserted him. Finally, recognizing he could not maintain power even with bloodshed, he resigned, hoping Wiranto’s promise of protection would be enough for him and his children. It almost wasn’t: Four of his six children have been questioned by police and one of them, Tommy, was jailed. Suharto himself was under investigation for corruption from soon after he stepped down until the end.
But he never appeared in court, was never chased into exile or never had his house ransacked by an angry mob. Indonesia’s elite shuffled to his deathbed. This probably tells us all we need to know about how he may be remembered. His image abroad will mostly be as a Cold Warrior and unwanted tyrant, but most Indonesians see him through a more complicated filter. His death may now mark the beginning of a journey to a greater understanding of his legacy. Or Indonesians may prefer to quietly turn the page, leaving him wrapped in the mystery he made his strength.

Mr. Wagstaff is a free-lance writer based in Singapore.

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