Suharto Fanned Flames of Dissent in Indonesia

He had it all. Limitless wealth. International respect. Unquestioned power. A loyal family. But what President Suharto didn’t have was the common sense to see that he was creating the conditions for his own downfall.

If Suharto, who has reigned in Indonesia as a sort of CEO in monarch’s clothes, is forced to step down, as now seems likely, he will join a long list of deposed dictators who mistook public obedience for adulation, thought that nepotism and corruption were perks of power and didn’t understand the need to open democratic vents so people could let off steam.

Suharto, 76, could have left office in March with his legend intact. Instead, he engineered his reelection to a seventh five-year term. Having stifled opposition for 32 years--he ran unopposed all seven times--and having never prepared for succession, he had no one to tell him that people were starting to talk openly about the abuses of the Suharto family.

Though he was a tough soldier who could face down a foe, he could never say no to his six children. He showered them with monopolies and tax-free business deals, and they ran wild, amassing a family fortune estimated at $40 billion and becoming the symbol of everything Indonesia’s 200 million people came to detest about Suharto’s nepotistic, corrupt rule.

Rigid and inflexible, Suharto referred to himself as a “simple soldier” when he came to power in the mid-1960s. And, indeed, those who know him say he is neither sophisticated nor particularly bright. But what he lacks in brainpower he more than made up for with an ability to lead and manipulate, juggling military leaders to keep them off balance and playing the role of anti-Communist warrior even after the Cold War was over.

“Suharto never fully appreciated that the world and Indonesia have changed,” said Jeffrey Winters, an Northwestern University expert on Indonesian affairs. “He could not grasp that the time has passed for military dictators, or that the world has embraced trends toward democracy and civilian rule.

“He is a living fossil, and his fall, when it happens, will come about because he enriched his family and cronies, because he grew old and out of touch and because he couldn’t adapt to a world that has changed in 30 years.”

Suharto (who, like many from the island of Java, has only one name) was born June 8, 1921, in the village of Kemusu. An only child of divorced parents, he grew up in poverty and spent his first 10 years living with a succession of relatives. By all accounts, he was a loner who learned self-reliance. His greatest pleasure as a youth was hunting birds with a slingshot.

“In my childhood,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I had to endure such suffering which perhaps others could not imagine. But if I draw a lesson from my past, then I would say it is because of this suffering that I have become who I am. I have become a person who can really think about and feel what hardship is.”

His guardians were so poor that they could not buy him the uniform required at his junior high school, forcing him to leave school. He later finished his formal education, at the age of 18, at a school run by an Islamic organization.

His first job was as a bank clerk. But riding his bicycle to work one day, he ripped his sarong, the traditional Javanese garment that was required dress for work. He didn’t have the money to buy a new one and lost his job.

Nine months later, he found his calling, enlisting in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. After Indonesia declared independence in 1945, Suharto rose quickly through the ranks of the army.

In October 1965, dissident army units abducted and killed six generals serving President Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding father. For reasons never explained, Suharto was not among them, although he was a major general and key army leader at the time. Suharto moved quickly to crush the revolt and take command of the army. He kept Sukarno under virtual house arrest until his death in 1970.

The words Suharto used in 1967 to explain why Sukarno’s regime had gone astray have a ring of irony today: “The principle of a just and civilized humanity was abandoned. Basic human rights had almost vanished because everything depended on the will of those in power. Legal guarantees and protection were almost nonexistent. We should not accept those mistakes, should not allow the country to sink once more into the morass of these evil practices.”

In addition to muzzling the media and jailing opposition figures, Suharto was willing to use any means to secure his lock on the presidency. His purge of Communists, real and imagined, in the mid-1960s took 500,000 lives. His incorporation of Irian Jaya into Indonesia in 1969 and his annexation of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, in 1975 were exercises in brutality.

But wiping out Indonesia’s Communist Party, the world’s third largest after those in China and the Soviet Union, won him the admiration of Cold Warriors in Washington. At whatever price, Suharto had brought stability to his Alaska-sized archipelago of 13,700 islands. Foreign investment started pouring in and, given Indonesia’s resources in gas, oil, gold and timber, creditors were happy to provide whatever Suharto requested.

While the middle class watched in horror, Suharto started carving up segments of the economy and handing the chunks to family and friends. Key generals, for instance, gained timber concessions, which they subcontracted to foreign firms.

The ‘70s and ‘80s were boom times for Indonesia, with the economy growing at 7% a year. Suharto built schools and a university system whose enrollment reached 2.5 million. Expressways went up around Jakarta, the capital (with daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, known as Tutut, getting a slice of each toll paid), and agriculture was industrialized. The world pointed to Indonesia as a model of development and stability.

Though exacerbated by the Asian economic crisis, the conditions unraveling Suharto’s presidency have been in place for years. But while times were good, Indonesians were willing to ride the tide of prosperity, and the world was willing to look askance in order to protect its investments.

Suharto’s presidency is sliding toward history now with dizzying speed, propelled by the shooting deaths of six students last week, calls for his resignation from every segment of society and deadly riots by Jakarta’s poor and unemployed.

And that too is a common-sense lesson that Suharto never learned: A hungry mob--hungry for food, or hungry for freedom--is every dictator’s ultimate nightmare.

* TAKING NO SIDE: U.S. officials are moving cautiously on Indonesia. A12

* JAKARTA EXODUS: Thousands of businesspeople have fled to Singapore. D1