A general in his labyrinth

The patronage he extended to his family and friends was to make Indonesia the target of international ire, but he kept the populace largely quiescent by raising the economy to unprecedented heights.His children were given an ample share in the panoply of power, his eldest daughter — Siti Hardyanti Rukmana — even being anointed minister in the last cabinet, and his two sons, Tommy Timorputra and Bambang, granted licences to start their own car projects. The manner in which he nurtured his crony, Mohamad Bob Hasan, to establish his timber monopoly, is, of course, legendary.

But in the end, nemesis was waiting for him. The economy went bust, and Suharto had to face the humiliation of accepting largesse from the International Monetary Fund — an institution he had expressed the deepest contempt for until then.

An unknown military general of peasant stock but immense self-confidence, Suharto, who was born on June 8, 1921, in the village of Kemusuk near the ancient Javanese city of Yogyakarta, took over the fortunes of Indonesia when he was just 44, ousting the country’s founding president, Sukarno, in 1965 in a bloody coup. He invoked the spectre of communism to legitimise his action.

It wasfortunate that he called it a day when he did, or he may have been subjected to the same fate as his predecessor as the groundswell of popular dissent became more apparent as the days wore on. For a man who had until then done only what suited his interests, it was the first show of acquiescence to the people’s will. It is said that his parents’ divorce had nutured a strong streak of independence, even as a child. As a result of it, he was a loner, until his marriage which was an unusually happy one. His wife died a couple of years ago.

This ability to tolerate loneliness helped shape his style of politics one that favoured control, capitalism and calculated ruthlessness. From time to time, however, he would let in a breath of fresh air by making pronouncements about the ushering in of keterbukaan (openness). But he never hesitated to pull the doors shut the moment popular sentiment threatened to turn against him.

He developed an extraordinarily centralised system of decision-making, and consciouslyselected lightweights, or his own cronies, as vice-presidents. His choice of his successor reflects precisely such thinking. B.J.Habibie is a man with negligible mass support, little liked by the army and the business community. By a clever balancing of the forces that controlled modern Indonesia — the army, the Javanese elite, the ethnic Chinese he played his machiavellian game to perfection.

Yet, he has always maintained a modest pose publicly.“I never prepared myself to become president. Honestly, not only that I had never been educated to hold such a high position, I never even dreamt of it,” he wrote in his biography, Soeharto — Pikiran, Ucapan, dan Tindakan Saya (Suharto — My Thoughts, Words and Deeds).

Ironic words, indeed, coming as they did from Asia’s most enduring leader to date. But once he did ascend the presidential throne, Suharto ruled the country with an iron grip, letting no criticism dislodge his equanimity. But without the sedative of economic growth and rising livingstandards to buttress his authority, Indonesia’s burgeoning middle class student community, facing the most uncertain future in three decades, rose in protest — letting loose an orgy of violence that quickly rippled through the archipelago.

The time-worn exhortation of their long-standing president –“Bear in mind that national stability should be maintained, because it is a prerequisite to national development” — had lost their lustre. The ruling political dispensation he had so assiduously put together began to disintegrate. Like the dramatis persona of a wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre), his own actions began to backfire on him. Suharto began to lose his grip on the nation’s destiny.

A tough military strategist who fought for his country’s independence in the 1940s, Suharto became something of a legend after he took over Dutch-controlled Yogyakarta in June 1949 — a city that was, ironically, the scene of some of the most intense anti-Suharto rioting in recent times. Military trainingwas a legacy he inherited from childhood when, after completing his secondary schooling in 1940, he enrolled in the military school in Gombong, Central Java.

But even his most vociferous opponents cannot not but grant Suharto credit for one achievement. When Muhammadiya leader Amien Rais, the most reasonable voice to have emerged from the protest movements of the last few weeks, conceded that Suharto had indeed helped Indonesia develop its economic muscle, many in the multitude of dissenters would have agreed with him.

It is not without justification that the 76-year-old former president was dubbed `Bapak Pembangunan’ (father of development). When he took over the reins of power in 1965, Indonesia’s per capita gross domestic product was a mere US $50. Before last July, when the economic crisis erupted, it stood at an all-time high of US $1,000. It was a period of spectacular development for the fourth biggest nation, as also one during which Indonesia earned the reputation of being the most corruptcountry in the world.

Under Suharto’s authoritarian regime, poverty levels plummeted, infant mortality went down, rice production went up, drinking water became accessible. He also achieved the seemingly impossible task of uniting the archipelago’s 13,700 islands. But, in the end, for all the contributions he made towards catapulting Indonesia’s economy to its place in the global order, Suharto, sadly, will be remembered best as an autocrat, one who trampled on the destinies of not merely his own people, but also those in neighbouring Timor.

No wonder Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta could only rejoice when news of Suharto’s resignation came in, saying that “the great dictator, the emperor, the untouchable, who invaded and destroyed our country, has fallen.”

The tragedy of Suharto was that the Pancasila democracy he preached was aeons removed from the political order he practised. And the irony of the Suharto saga was that the man who pronounced that only the MPR (the people’s consultativeassembly) had to right to topple the president, ultimately had to bow to the people.