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The old soldier dies
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| The Editor |
Tue, Jan 29, 2008
The Jakarta Post, ANN
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>Indonesia has gone into mourning with the passing away of former president Suharto on Sunday (Jan 27). He was 86. The Indonesia's second president, he led the world's fourth most populous country for 32 years.
When you rule a country as huge, diverse and complex as Indonesia for as long as 32 years, there are bound to be controversies.
Inevitably, Indonesia has mixed feelings about the former Army general, evidenced by the way it has followed his struggle against illness in the years since he stepped down from office in 1998.
In a sense, Suharto's death represents a double loss for Indonesia.
We have lost a great leader who did so much in his time, including bringing political stability and economic prosperity to an otherwise impoverished nation. But we have also missed the opportunity to hold him responsible for the deaths and torture of thousands of people, and for the legacy of violent and corrupt political culture he left behind.
Ever since his retirement from public life in 1998, Suharto managed to avoid setting foot in court to account for his deeds, whether the issue at hand was corruption or human rights abuses. He had his chances to come clean, but his family and team of expensive lawyers decided otherwise.
He could have ended his life known as the hero he really was. Instead, he will be remembered by those who lived through his iron-fisted rule as both a hero and a villain. Let later historians decide on his proper place in the history of modern Indonesia.
Suharto will be credited as the man who saved Indonesia from communism. His rise to power in 1966 was the result of years of power struggles between the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the Indonesian Army. He emerged clean and strong out of the chaos that ensued after the abortive coup on Sept 30, 1965, against then president Sukarno, which the military blamed on the PKI.
Suharto will also be remembered as the man who restored political stability from the chaos that characterised Sukarno's last years in power.
The mass killing of suspected communists and sympathisers between 1965 and 1966 was a dark page in the history of Indonesia. While there are many people willing to say the killings took place, they were never officially documented. Suharto and his Army friends led a bloody campaign to crush the communist forces. In the absence of any reliable record-keeping, estimates of number of dead range between 200,000 and three million. Even the lowest estimate would have qualified as a genocidal killing.
The political stability that came at such a high price to a large extent paid off, in terms of economic development. He brought inflation under control in 1966, and thus began a long and almost uninterrupted period of economic growth through the 1970s, aided by the oil money, that ran well into the 1990s.
He won international accolades for introducing universal education, inexpensive and accessible health care, and for bringing food self-sufficiency into Indonesia. If his predecessor Sukarno was called the "Father of the Revolution", Suharto was the "Father of Development".
But the Smiling General, as the title of his biography in the 1960s aptly named him, was ultimately nothing but a dictator.
There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator, although he may have been close to being one.
Suharto suppressed freedom and democracy in the name of development. He invaded East Timor (with the consent of the United States and Australia), and his regime was responsible for recurring human right atrocities in East Timor, Aceh and Papua.
And then there is the corruption, first practiced by his cronies and children, that later became so chronic and systemic that it spun out of control and unraveled just about every economic gain he had painfully made since 1966.
The endemic corruption meant the 1997 Asian financial crisis hurt Indonesia much more than its neighbours, turning it into a political crisis that eventually forced Suharto to step down in May 1998.
One good outcome of that unhappy episode nearly a decade ago was the ushering in of political and economic reforms and democracy in Indonesia.
Suharto's failure to use the remaining years of his life to come clean is highly lamentable. Here is a man who could have explained his role in the 1965 coup attempt and the ensuing mass killings, detailed the unusual circumstances of his transfer of power from Sukarno, explained some of the controversial decisions he made (his autobiography missed out on a few of those), and illustrated the rationale behind his decision to quit in May 1998.
Ever a mysterious Javanese leader, he will take with him to the grave many of the answers that our historians need to write about a large passage of Indonesia's modern history.
There is an old saying that says, "an old soldier never dies, he just fades away". Suharto faded away and then he died.
Good-bye, Pak Harto.
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