After Suharto, New U.S. Vision Is Needed

In early 1986, as Ferdinand E. Marcos was clinging to his hold on power in the Philippines, officials in Washington helped hasten his downfall by drawing a spotlight on the huge sums of money he and his family and friends had stashed overseas.

Most of the information on Marcos’ fortune was developed by a congressional committee headed by then-Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.). Marcos’ corrupt practices “have made him one of the world’s richest men, while impoverishing millions of people in his country,” Solarz asserted.

What was said then of Marcos is even more true of President Suharto of Indonesia. Indeed, the wealth of Suharto and his family almost certainly exceeds that of the Marcoses (although there may be nothing as eye-catching as Imelda’s shoe closet).

The Suhartos are one of the world’s richest families. Much of their money is parked overseas--by some reports, about $8 billion in family assets were moved out of Indonesia, through banks in Austria, in late 1997 and the beginning of this year.

During Indonesia’s crises of the last few months, the Suharto family fortune has been not a sideshow but, in a way, at the heart of the problem.

Indonesians have angrily spurned calls for economic sacrifice from a president who is a multibillionaire. And the calls for Suharto to give up power have been complicated by the fact that he is no doubt afraid of what would happen to his family’s assets after he steps down.

“He’ll want some guarantees [that his wealth would be protected], and he’ll drag out his departure to get them,” observed Douglas Paal, a former Bush administration official.

Yet Suharto and his wealth have largely escaped the rigorous scrutiny once given to Marcos’ assets. So far, there have been no congressional investigations.

That may be changing. On Tuesday, two members of Congress, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Los Angeles) and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), wrote to President Clinton, urging that the U.S. government “identify Suharto family assets in the United States which might later be the source of claims upon it by a future Indonesian government or individual Indonesian claimants.”

At least until the last week or two, the Clinton administration has treated Suharto with the utmost respect, supporting him on the theory that there was no alternative.

The disparate American treatment of Marcos and Suharto was on display at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday, when the administration sought to explain its Indonesia policy. The primary witness was Stanley O. Roth, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific.

Roth was one of the congressional investigators working for Solarz in the aggressive 1980s investigation of Marcos’ wealth. This week, his job was to fend off senators who wanted the administration to call upon Suharto to resign.

Why doesn’t the United States call for elections, one senator wanted to know. “They just had one,” responded Roth coolly, apparently referring to the stacked process by which Suharto last March arranged to stay in power.

For months, administration officials had argued that they must treat Suharto differently from Marcos because Indonesia is different from the Philippines.

There is no organized opposition movement in Indonesia as there was in the Philippines, they contended. The Indonesian military is not divided as the armed forces in the Philippines were, they said. Above all, the officials argued that the United States does not play the influential role in Indonesia that it had in the Philippines.

Left unmentioned are the other differences between the two countries. In the Philippines, the United States had two huge military installations (Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station) it wanted to keep. It feared that if Marcos were left in power, the Philippine support for the bases would erode, and that a Communist insurgency would gain in strength.

In Indonesia, by contrast, these old Cold War interests are absent. America has no military bases, there is no insurgency. And on the whole, Suharto has been good to some leading U.S. businesses.

And so, the administration stuck with Suharto far longer than it did with Marcos. It calculated, erroneously, that he would and could hold onto power for a few more years, and that there was no need for the United States to distance itself from him.

Early this year, as Suharto was preparing for a new term in office, critics like former U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz urged the administration to call for the Indonesian ruler to broaden his base and bring political opponents into his government.

Administration officials testily rejected these suggestions. They concentrated on urging Suharto to carry out economic reforms, deciding not to push for political change. Even when Suharto stacked his new Cabinet with old cronies and his eldest daughter, the administration made clear it would not object.

Not until last week, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called for political reform and “dialogue” did the administration begin to back off from its support for Suharto. It was clearly too little, too late.

Clinton and his aides will now have to come up with a new Indonesia policy to deal with a post-Suharto leadership. Supporting democratic reforms would be a good place to start. Helping the Indonesian people track down the assets of the Suharto family wouldn’t be such a bad idea, either.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.