In Indonesia,
President Muhammad Suharto’s vast political and business operations flourished
for thirty-two years during a reign made rich by a peculiar combination of
repression, liberality, co-optation of different constituencies and mineral
resources. Until he resigned unexpectedly in 1998 under the pressure of the
Asian financial crisis, Suharto enjoyed enormous popular support, despite the
harsh and heavy hand off his military on dissidents. A small elite group of
business magnets, military officers, professional bureaucrats, and former
journalists around the president’s office controlled access to petroleum
resources and windfall rents from it while they managed an elaborate network of
political patronage that dispensed favors to businesses and local leaders in
carefully calibrated ways,
The
Indonesian nation itself had been forged in 1949, not even two decades before
Suharto came to power, after a small but determined armed struggle against
Dutch colonial rule. It was a remarkable transition for a profoundly
multicultural population spread out across an enormous archipelago of tens of
thousands of islands. The newly formed country was characterized by a strong
army, a politicized Islam, and centralized political power. It’s very identity
was built around the motto, ‘unity in diversity’ which became the basis for a
durable nationalist sentiment.
Suharto was
an army officer under Sukarno, Indonesia’s first President. He came to
prominence in 1965, when he led the military in a bloody purge of communist
dissidents with the active support of the US government. After he formally took
over the reins of government on March 11, 1966, he replaced military chiefs
with loyalists, purged dissidents in the parliament, changed the educational
system, positioned the military’s ruthless force to quell protests, invited
foreign investors to extract the country’s rich oil and mineral resources and
built a team of mostly Berkeley educated advisers to direct the regime’s
economic policy. The government only gave limited voice for the opposition and
was careful to distribute rewards widely to all those who participated in its
formal structures, while threatening sanctions against those who opposed them.
In the course
of three decades, Suharto stole as much as US $35 billion in public funds, but
he also helped them economy grow sevenfold in real terms by creating enormous
oil wealth that made many Indonesians rich, while carrying along a burgeoning
middle class. All thought there is little evidence to show that returns to the economy
were spread extensively, there is enough to inform us that money, political
favors, and sweet deals were carefully dispensed to sustain a complex but tight
web of military officers, legislators, advisers, political officials, and a
global network of company executes, bankers and world leader. Each of these
elite groups supported her through preferential deals and other forms of
patronage, whose patterns were reproduced across scales all the way down to
local gang leaders and thugs
The flow of
information was also carefully controlled. The Indonesian press, had a glorious
history of independent views dating back to the eighteen century, was mobilized
to serve as a partner of the government, with editors receiving periodic
telephone calls from the authorities on how to handle the news. Those papers
that resisted the official line, like the newspaper Indonesia Raya, the
news magazine Detik, and a few others, were banned, with some of their
editors facing incarceration by the state as well as vilification by more
pliant members of the forth estate, thereby breeding a culture of compliance
and self-censorship.
By 1990, the
Suharto family business was so big that any large project had to include one or
the other of its many subgroups. It was even involved in the country’s poverty
reduction efforts; the central government direct provided benefits to provinces
and villages thought the “Inpres” or “Presidential Instructions” programs,
which were executed at the discretion of the president and constituted a major
portion of the country’s development budget. The government’s semi-authoritarian
style meant that opposition was always circumscribed and co-opted by the
regime, whereas any open rebellion was immediately crushed. But Suharto did not
need to use violence to keep revolt in check. He relied on the elite’s fears of
religious extremism and social disorder to constrain opposition, even while he
pitted various factions that were loyal to him against each other.
As the
epigraph suggests, Indonesian society under Suharto had somehow become
distorted into bipolar stances that required radical adjustments be made to
everyday life. Either one blithely
ignored the brutal police violence of the government and its suppression of
human rights, or one found oneself in the extremely dangerous position of being
a covert dissident, “an underground subversive”; there was no middle ground.
For ordinary Indonesians, Suharto brought prosperity, for elites and the
military, much more. Only those concerned with human rights and democracy were
appalled at what was going on, but they too mostly kept their silence.
Throughout
history, publics have been critical or uncritical partners in most political
regime, often being misled into trusting their intentions and operations up
with. The average person’s success or failure in life is deeply interlinked
with how the economy as a whole performs, because everyone is codependent on a
well-functioning “habits-forming” machine, which standardizes almost every
element of human activity from education to work practice and home life.
