II
East Timor’s torment
There were other fronts on which Suharto’s grip was slipping. Of these the most important was ‘internal security’, with East Timor as the exemplary case. When the Portuguese dictatorship finally fell in April 1974, he was persuaded that his intelligence agencies’ ‘black’ operatives could manipulate the internal politics of the decolonizing entity to prevent the ‘communist’ Fretilin party from taking power. But the gamble failed. After a brief, bloody and Indonesia-instigate d civil war, Fretilin did take power, and hastened to forestall Jakarta by declaring the ex-colony an independent state. After some initial hesitation, Suharto, basking in a sea of oil money, decided on military invasion, followed by annexation. All the messages from the us were positive. Ford and Kissinger arrived in Jakarta on the eve of the expedition, and the latter is said to have told Suharto: ‘Just do it quickly.’ Virtually all the armaments used for the invasion were American, but Washington
winked at what was a clear violation of the existing arms agreement between the two countries, which specified that they could not be used externally. The Americans had another reason to be complaisant: in a secret agreement Suharto had permitted (against international law) us nuclear submarines to pass through the Timor Strait without surfacing, thus evading Soviet monitoring from the heavens. A few weeks before the invasion, a high-level team of military and civilian intelligence operatives, on a propaganda tour in the us, dropped by Cornell University. When I asked one of them about plans for East Timor, the cheerful reply was: ‘Don’t worry, it will be over in a few weeks.’
The initial invasion was a disaster, with Indonesian planes bombing their own ground troops in several places. Two years later, Fretilin still controlled more than half of the demi-island’s territory. Jimmy Carter, the ‘human rights’ president, then secretly sent Suharto some of the ov-10 Broncos that had had so much to answer for in Vietnam. They turned the tide. Thousands upon thousands of Timorese fled to the Indonesian-controll ed lowlands. There they were herded into ‘resettlement camps’, and large numbers died of hunger and disease. But the resistance never gave up, gradually regained strength, and started a steady underground penetration of the lowlands.
Suharto tried everything he could think of, but nothing really worked. The land of East Timor, famously arid, had no mineral resources and scarcely any forests; its people were desperately poor and largely illiterate. Teachers hated being assigned there, as did bureaucrats. Attempts to settle migrants from other islands failed in the face of popular hostility and intermittent sabotage. The territory’s one high-class export, coffee, became a military monopoly. The deeper problem was that in East Timor, Indonesians, often half-realizing it, were in the position of colonialists. Hence the regular colonial complaint that the East Timorese were ‘so ungrateful’, language that would have been taboo anywhere in Indonesia itself. Furthermore, East Timor could not be accommodated in the standard ‘our centuries-long struggle against the Dutch’ narrative of nationalist ideology and school textbooks. Worse still, they were Catholic in a 90 per cent Muslim national population.
Irritatingly, the Vatican refused to merge East Timor’s priests into the pliant and often cowardly Indonesian Catholic hierarchy.
But there was still another factor which has not generally been much noticed. Virtually all the soldiers at the time of the 1945–49 Indonesian revolution were in their twenties. So large and so young was this force that a military academy was not opened until 1957. The first class graduated in 1960, with only childhood memories of the struggle against the Dutch. They had been green lieutenants, with no important role to play, during the massacres of the Left in the mid-60s. East Timor, their first experience of war, came ten years later when they were in their thirties. Since the invasion was justified to them as a campaign against communism, the model they were given was 1965–66: no mercy, torture, burning of villages, rapes, crude intelligence operations and, most notoriously, in the spirit of 65, the organization and financing of lumpen pro-military militias among the local population, who got accustomed to using methods from which even the army officers occasionally shrank. Characteristically, Army hq prepared a secret manual on effective torture techniques and how to avoid being caught trying them. One of the best-known younger commanders, who had successfully ambushed and killed Fretilin’s first military chief, Nicolau Lobato, had himself camcorded with his triumphant booted feet on his enemy’s corpse. He would tell occasional reporters that he fought off boredom of an evening by replaying the videotape.
In November 1991, increasingly bold demonstrations by youngsters in Dili, the small capital city, were answered by a characteristically brutal and stupid outburst of killing. Unfortunately for Suharto, a brave young English journalist called Max Stahl managed to film the bloodshed and smuggle the videotape out of the country. The film’s international circulation destroyed overnight the Suharto regime’s constant assurances to the ‘international community’ that the East Timor problem was ‘over’, and enormously encouraged the resistance. The capture of Xanana Gusmão, the heroic successor to Lobato, could not be handled any more by a quick execution. Jailed in Jakarta, his prestige undamaged, he became a hero even to some Indonesian youngsters in the opposition, who would joke, ‘If only we had Xanana as our president.’
The same methods and the same lack of success marked the regime’s military suppression campaigns in Acheh and West Papua. Acheh had been a quiet and prosperous province in the 1970s and early 1980s, but the discovery of a vast field of natural gas led to the creation of exploitation enclaves, heavily guarded and filled with workers and managers brought in from other parts of Indonesia. Military rule set in; armed resistance followed, responded to by East Timorian methods. The end was a terribly costly stalemate in which neither the military nor the resistance had the power to come out on top. It turned out that some of the Acheh resistance commanders had earlier had some Red Beret training. More or less the same was true in West Papua, where timber-mad cronies and Western mining conglomerates worked in a vast forbidding terrain where a small armed resistance continued right through the era of the dictatorship.
In the long run, all these adventures undermined the prestige and self-confidence of younger-generation military leaders, not one of whom ever emerged as a hero in the mould of some of the veterans of the older generation. The Asian Crisis of 1997 gave striking evidence of how the institution had been hollowed out. The military newspapers, which no one but military people willingly read, and which depended on large subsidies, were forced to close down and never re-emerged. After Suharto fell, newspapers reported that the head of military intelligence was being investigated for forging large amounts of currency. When reporters questioned the general about this, he engagingly replied: ‘Look, what could I do? Our budget had been cut to nothing, and the high command couldn’t give me any more money, but there were all these militias in East Timor who hadn’t been paid for a long time and were getting really upset.’ So he went on to become, briefly, the Army Commander.
Father of bankruptcy
The secrets of the ultra-secretive President—security failure, industrialization failure, financial failure, moral failure, parental failure (all his children either monsters or nonentities) , even political failure—came oozing out bit by bit. For the irony of Suharto’s story is that he was finally undone by the forces that had made his long dictatorship possible. In the early 1990s, he had been persuaded by Washington to ‘open up’ his country more widely to global financial capital. A lot of fast money flowed into a plethora of shady new banks created to take advantage of this sudden bonanza. By then Suharto was living on borrowed time. Indonesia had become a net importer of oil, and the forests were largely gone. Local industrial development was weak, and the education system had been decaying for years. When the ‘Asian Crisis’ broke out, Indonesia was hit harder than any other country. Within a few weeks the rupiah lost four-fifths of its exchange value. Dozens of banks went bankrupt. Millions of people lost their jobs. The national debt climbed dizzyingly. His toadies had long flattered him with the title of Bapak Pembangunan (Father of Development) but by the beginning of 1998, bitter local wits had turned it into Bapak Pembangkrutan (Father of Bankruptcy). Nothing more cruelly demonstrated this Waterloo than the photos of the haggard dictator at his desk while the capo of the imf, arms akimbo, stands behind him, ultimatum symbolically in hand.
What was he to do? The thinking that led to Suharto’s stepping aside in 1998 could be formulated in two quite separate ways. The first is cultural. Suharto had no oratorical gifts whatsoever—almost always he scrupulously droned his way through tedious, statistic-filled, cliché-ridden speeches written for him, in bureaucratic Indonesian, by the State Secretariat. As John Roosa has pointed out, no one remembers a single phrase Suharto coined in thirty-three years in power. (Siad Barre? Franco?) Probably he did not even think in Indonesian, which he had had to acquire in his late teens. Occasionally, however, he would let his guard down, especially when he was furious. A few braver souls would mock his Indonesian for its Javanese accent, imported Javanese grammar and Javanese moral clichés. Once, enraged by student criticisms of one of his wife’s more extravagant ‘projects’, he blurted out that he would gebuk anyone who dared to criticize her. Gebuk is Javanese for ‘beat the hell out of someone’. On another occasion, privately addressing the group of ambitious toadies who ran his National Youth League, many of them non-Javanese, he astounded his listeners with a long digression about the mystical meanings of the names for the letters in the Javanese alphabet (the State Secretariat made sure this curious rant was never published). Late on in his dictatorship Suharto was seduced into helping an experienced journalist ghost-write his autobiography. What blazes out from the pages is burning resentment—resentmen t of all those who thought he was stupid, uneducated, a mystical novice, manipulated by his aides, and so on. The central motif is ‘I, and only I, decided everything’. But rancune led him uncharacteristicall y to claim—correctly— that in 1983 he had personally ordered the execution of several thousand small-time thugs. [7] The book was barely out when Suharto had second thoughts and ordered its recall, a rare case of a dictator banning his own book.
In fact he was Javanese to the bone, secretly consulting shamans and astrologers, and visiting magically powerful caves, tombs and so on. In late 1997, shaken to his core by the financial collapse, Suharto let it be known to the press that he was prepared to lèngsèr kaprabon and become a pandito. The Javanese words are a kind of cliché drawn from the old chronicles of Javanese kings and from the even older shadow-play repertoire, based on the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Lèngsèr kaprabon can be translated as ‘abdicate the throne’, while pandito means Great (Mystical) Sage. In effect, the Great King, in old age, passes the kingdom to his successor and ends his days as a Revered Sage and Counsellor. This utterance was received with bitter mirth among his many young enemies, who believed not a word of it. In fact, he probably meant it, at least at that moment. For Suharto here let slip what many had long suspected, that in some moods he thought of himself as a monarch, and maybe really expected to play a key further role as the Wise Man of whatever-next.
Calculating the succession
The second reason for Suharto’s decision to retire was straightforwardly political, seasoned with several tablespoons of rancune-concentrate . Stalwart to the last, he would show ‘them’ what would happen without him. Re-elected president for the last time—unanimously, as always—in March 1998, he had picked as his running mate the aeronautical engineer Habibie. [8] This was something new and remarkable, since over the past two decades the vice-president had always been an (unthreatening) retired general. Habibie, who came from Celebes, was often regarded as an amiable, lightweight gasbag, who had persuaded the dictator to spend untold sums of money on building an export aviation industry along the lines of the German company Messerschmitt, where the engineer had worked for many years. The us (in the person of Boeing) made sure that these planes would never meet ‘international’ standards, and in any case the Crash of 1997 had ended the whole enterprise.
But Habibie’s candidacy also served another purpose. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Suharto increasingly felt that the armed forces might be slipping out of his control. So he started to manipulate high-level promotions in the military: in the first instance Tientje’s nonentity brother, and later a visibly unbalanced and fascist-minded son-in-law; and in the second instance former personal aides, whom military wits joked about as prawira piningit. Prawira is Javanese for officer, while piningit refers to the old aristocratic tradition of putting daughters, after their first menstruation, into seclusion until they were successfully married off. In effect, ‘virgin officers’.
But Suharto was also thinking about how to create a political counterweight to the active senior officer corps, a generation younger than his own. The solution was remarkable. Throughout much of his dictatorship Suharto had been visibly hostile to political Islam. In the 1970s, his political spymaster Ali Murtopo had created a Komando Jihad, partly formed by released and desperate prisoners from the failed Islamic-state rebel movement of the 1950s and early 60s. Some of these sad mercenaries had carried out an amateurish bombing of part of Borobudur, the famous 9th-century Buddhist stupa in Central Java. It suited the regime’s book to have ‘Islamic terrorists’ secretly on its payroll. Then, suddenly, in his old age, Suharto took his family on a highly publicized, deluxe pilgrimage to Mecca, from which he returned not only as a ‘Haji’ but with an entirely fictitious, new first name—Muhammad!
Habibie was now instructed to create what was briefly known as the League of Muslim Indonesian Intellectuals (icmi). The engineer learned fast. He had previously astonished pious Indonesian Muslims in the us by telling them that the Prophet was akin to a television set, faithfully transmitting Allah’s programmes to serious viewers. But Muslim intellectuals, excluded from power for decades, rushed to join the icmi, also with Machiavellian intentions. Suharto might wish to use them, but they would also use him—and they were much younger. As it turned out icmi, which had no social or religious base, disappeared in a puff of smoke when the dictatorship collapsed. But Suharto’s calculation had been that, although Habibie would have general Muslim support in counterpoise to the army, he would be too weak not to need to turn to the Great Sage for instructions and help.
In this the ex-dictator would be gravely disappointed. Habibie, an affable, garrulous figure, quite aware of the enormous public hostility to Suharto after his fall, struck out on his own—and Suharto is said never to have spoken to him again. He released almost all surviving political prisoners (including Col. Abdul Latief) and ended virtually all mass media censorship. Out of this came a torrent of abuse for the Great Sage, demands that he be tried for his crimes, and a strong push for ‘total reform’ of the political system. Habibie also made a start at organizing the first free elections that Indonesia had experienced since 1955. More strikingly still, he agreed that the East Timorese should be allowed a referendum on their future, monitored by the un. The military were at first furious about this; but then told Habibie that, with the help of their notoriously violent militias, they could guarantee that the natives would opt for Indonesian citizenship. Unfortunately for
them, they had not reckoned with Xanana’s guile. Against vehement opposition within the resistance, he had sent word from jail that all East Timorese should massively support the ex-dictator’s electoral machine in the national ballot held in June 1999. So huge was this machine’s success in the territory that military intelligence let down its guard; they were livid and bewildered when the great majority of the population voted for independence in the referendum two months later.
In retrospect Habibie’s brief presidency had many good moments. Unluckily, he believed that these earned him a full term as a real president, at which point his stock plummeted and he felt compelled to return to his second patria, a Kohl-created united Reich. From this moment on, Suharto disappeared from public view, successfully fending off demands that he be put on trial thanks to faithful doctors’ reports that he was too ill or too senile to face the courts. Nor was the political elite he had created eager to go after him—he knew all their miserable secrets.
ii. some legacies
From the later 1980s on, I used regularly to ask young Indonesian visitors and new students arriving on the Cornell University campus: ‘Who is the living Indonesian that you most admire?’ Almost invariably, the reaction was merely a puzzled scratching of the head, as if the question were ridiculous. Sometimes a youngster would hesitantly name a popular folk-singer whose lyrics were mildly critical of the way things were. One or two would mention Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the country’s greatest writer, whose oeuvre was banned throughout Suharto’s New Order.
If the same question had been posed in the 1950s, the answers would have been completely different: many ‘heroes’ of the colonial-era nationalist and Islamic movements and the revolution were still alive and publicly active. The contrast points to a central legacy of the long dictatorship— the production of an overwhelmingly timid, corrupt and mediocre political class. Resentful, suspicious and cunning, the dictator made sure that no potential rivals, military or civilian, could develop any independent social or political base. Even his abject cabinet ministers believed they were under surveillance. The amiable, intelligent son of one of these ministers studiously avoided me during his first three years at Cornell—on parental orders. But in his last year, now socialized to American campus norms, he suddenly became very friendly. His father, he reported, had forbidden him ever to mention anything political when he telephoned home, since he was sure his lines were tapped. Well-educated in some ways, the boy turned out to know almost nothing about his country’s history and had never read the many important books about Indonesia’s politics.
Suharto terrified people, not only on the basis of his blood-stained record, but by his demeanour—chilly, silent, masked, except for occasional eruptions of real or staged rage. But with international backing he also acquired the resources to buy people on a massive scale. In the early years of the regime, it was his fellow-generals who were the main beneficiaries of his largesse, but after 1973 and opec it was increasingly the so-called technocrats, economists and engineers of many different types who became the richest (non-Chinese) people in the country, as they were given control of the ministries of oil and gas, basic and light industry, finance, foreign trade, employment and so on. They had no political base and were reliably loyal and compliant.
In his final years, however, it was Muslims (often of Arab descent), especially Muslim technocrats and intellectuals, on whom the cornucopia fell. A whole generation and a half of politicians grew up within and absorbed the authoritarian, corrupt and clientelist political culture that Suharto created. He liked to play them off against each other, but would tolerate no substantial or inflammatory rhetoric. Deliberately or not, he created over time the Indonesian national oligarchy of today: quarrelsome, but intermarried; competitive, but avoiding any serious internal conflict; without ideas, but determined to hang on to what they have, at all costs. This is the main reason why Suharto remained above the law after his fall, and why his children, except for the murderer Tommy, continue to control many of the country’s television stations, tollways and other strategic assets. The crucial thing is that this national oligarchy and its hangers-on are largely incapable of thinking outside the old regime’s box. Cynics joke that there used to be one big Suharto; now there are hundreds of little ones.
How did the oligarchy survive the popular demands for reform after the mass protests that erupted as a result of the 1997 financial crisis? One reason was the deep-seated fragmentation of the electorate, reminiscent of the elections of 1955. The biggest winner in 1999 was the ‘secular nationalist’ party led by Megawati, a lazy and overweight daughter of Sukarno. But it failed to get even one third of the votes, and lost support in succeeding elections. All governments since then have had to be coalitions.
Second, under the constitutional rules inherited from the Suharto era, the president was not popularly elected (until 2004), but rather selected by the party-dominated Supreme People’s Consultative Assembly. After the national elections of 1999, when the reform tide was still high, this body elevated Abdurrahman Wahid, whose party won 10 per cent of the vote—partly because of his popularity with the reformers, but mainly because he was too weak to prevent his cabinet being packed by nominees from all the other political parties and the military, with Megawati as his vice-president. Rather full of himself (‘I got a message from Allah summoning me to be President’), Wahid felt humiliated by his position, and tried to extract himself by conspicuous interventions into internal army affairs, a drastic reshuffling of his cabinet and various other manoeuvres. He lasted only a year and a half, at which point all the parties except his own agreed to impeach him and remove him from office. When Megawati succeeded him, she promised and delivered a ‘rainbow’ cabinet, in which all the parties (if one includes a renegade from Wahid’s who became Defence Minister) had their quotas. The target of the oligarchy had been achieved: a parliament without an opposition, and every party clique sharing in the perquisites of power. Sukarno’s daughter was not an energetic figure in any case, but the absolute lack of any creative initiatives during the three years of her presidency was also due to what Dan Slater has nicely termed the cartelization of the political system. [9]
A third factor was the general outlook of the oligarchy, which feared popular mobilizations outside their control, fully accepted the neo-liberal international order, and had no interest in anything that smelled of the left. The army leaders not only accepted the cartel but were important players within it. Nonetheless, as the popularity of the parties visibly declined, the oligarchy felt forced to change the method of electing the president, by opening the office to the sentiments of the national electorate. This is how, in 2004, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, an unassuming but intelligent Javanese (retired) general, a key behind-the-scenes member of the oligarchy and Megawati’s Senior Minister for Security and Defence, became Indonesia’s first popularly elected president. But the party he created for himself did not do well, and he has largely succumbed to the logic of cartelization: passivity, systematic incorporation of any possible parliamentary opposition, and catholic division of the emoluments in his gift. It is not very likely that he will be re-elected in 2009, but his replacement will not be very different, barring some popular upheaval which seems for now over the horizon.
(bersambung)
