A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  The Indonesian government had been watching events in East Timor with a considerable degree of discomfort. They had backed a third, minority party, Apodeti, which called for Timorese integration with Indonesia, and they had no intention of allowing Fretilin, with their avowedly socialist rhetoric, to establish a turbulent left-wing state within the Archipelago. On 7 December 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. It was a messy, ugly war, but in July 1976 East Timor became Indonesia’s twenty-seventh province.

  The invasion of East Timor received the tacit approval of America and Australia: the Cold War still had a lot of heat at this stage, and the Indonesian government had impeccable anti-communist credentials. But in time this new addition to the Indonesian fold would become a permanent irritant, a financial burden, a military conundrum, and an international embarrassment. It was an albatross slung around the nation’s neck, set to ensure that Indonesia would end the twentieth century with an episode of squalid violence, even as it finally achieved true democracy…

  By the time that East Timor was made the twenty-seventh province of Indonesia, Suharto had been in power for ten years. During that decade the stocky, smiling general had proved himself to be the perfect counterpoint to his flamboyant predecessor. There were no more rabble-rousing rallies and verbal pyrotechnics. When Suharto gave a speech people tended to fall asleep. Sukarno could conjure up literary quotations in French, German and Italian. The best Suharto could manage was a rather hesitant and broken English. Even his Indonesian had the thick, rounded vowels and blurry edges of a man who preferred to speak Javanese at home. The presidential lifestyle had changed, too: there were no more multiple wives and multitudinous mistresses, and Suharto wouldn’t have been seen dead with a Japanese bargirl. In short, when compared to the mercurial man he had ousted, Suharto was boring. But he had a peculiar charisma all of his own. It came, as much as anything, from the fact that no one really knew what he was thinking.

  Suharto was born on 8 June 1921, in a poor hamlet called Kemusuk in the countryside west of Yogyakarta. Suharto’s parents divorced before he could walk, and he spent his childhood orbiting through the households of relatives. For a village boy there was nothing out of the ordinary about such an upbringing. Divorce was common in Java, and many children lived in the care of uncles and aunts. But there was something strange about Suharto’s childhood: he started school at a young age; at one point he actually moved households just to continue his studies, and he didn’t finish his schooling until he was seventeen. This was not only a highly unusual level of education for a child from a farming community; it was also well beyond what Suharto’s father, a landless irrigation official, could have been expected to afford. Inevitably, then, there have always been rumours of secret patronage. There are tales of an illegitimate royal descent and money for schooling secretly sent from the Yogyakarta kraton. But there is also the recollection of a former neighbour from Kemusuk, who claimed that Suharto was really the son of an itinerant Chinese trader who passed through the village from time to time.

  Whoever his real father was, and whoever had paid for his education, Suharto left school just in time for war. He was caught up in the last-minute frenzy of recruitment by the Dutch colonial army on the eve of World War II. Once the Japanese arrived, he shed his Dutch uniform and joined the ranks of Peta, the paramilitary youth group, and when the war was over he found himself in the vanguard of the makeshift army of the Indonesian Republic. At the height of the revolution, in 1947, he was married, decidedly above his station, to a young woman called Siti Hartinah. She was short, stocky and by no means glamorous, but she came from an aristocratic family, distantly related to the Mangkunegaran, Surakarta’s secondary royal house.

  By the time he was forty, Suharto was a quiet family man in the middle ranks of the officer class of the Indonesian army. He had proved himself an effective regional commander, despite getting into trouble on one occasion for some over-enthusiastic commercial activities on the side. But he seemed unremarkable, as a soldier and as a personality. Few people would have expected him to make true top brass. But then came 1 October 1965, and all Suharto’s superiors ended up dead at the bottom of the Crocodile Hole…

  The New Order that had ousted Sukarno was, at the outset, a genuine coalition of the willing, and its first task was to do something about the economy. When Suharto came to power Indonesia owed a staggering US$2,358 million to foreign creditors; inflation was heading for 700 percent; and the annual income for the average Indonesian was no more than US$50. The country itself, meanwhile, was falling apart. Roads and railways, bequeathed by the Dutch and battered by years of war, were in tatters, and there were famines in this, one of the most fertile places on the planet.

  By the end of the 1960s, however, Suharto, his first finance minister, Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta, and a coven of American-educated economic advisors—later dubbed ‘the Berkeley Mafia’—had managed to turn things around. They had quietly renegotiated the country’s debt and politely invited back the American aid that Sukarno had sent to hell. A new law was drafted to make space for foreign investors scared off by Sukarno’s anti-Western posturing, and soon the oil fields of eastern Sumatra were thick with rigs and the logging camps of the Kalimantan jungles were roaring with the sound of chainsaws. Out in the rice fields of Central Java and Bali, meanwhile, peasant farmers suddenly found themselves inundated with new seed types, pesticides, chemical fertilisers and technical advice from the denizens of the ‘green revolution’. By 1969 inflation was in single figures. Incomes were rising, and for the next decade Indonesia’s gross domestic product would grow at a steady rate of almost 8 percent per annum. The New Order had found its theme: Pembangunan, ‘Development’.

  The New Order had also tackled several other problems. They quickly brought the Konfrontasi with Malaysia to an end, and in September 1966, with the sporadic killing of suspected PKI members still going on in the more remote corners of the country, Indonesia re-joined the United Nations, which Sukarno had left in a fit of pique over Malaysia’s inclusion in the Security Council the previous year. Suharto’s government also deftly dealt with the question of West New Guinea. The UN’s transfer of the territory to Indonesia in 1963 had been dependent on an ‘act of free choice’. The New Order cannily declared that West New Guinea—now known by its Indonesian name, Irian—was not ready for democracy. The territory amounted to 200,000 square miles of forest and mountain with hardly a single road. Many of the inhabitants had had no contact with the outside world.

  In 1969, instead of holding a referendum in West New Guinea, Suharto’s government carefully selected a thousand local leaders and asked them, with UN observers looking on, for a show of hands if they wanted to join Indonesia. The architect of this rather compromised act of free choice was a loyal Suharto lieutenant, General Ali Murtopo; the practicalities were managed by none other than Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the man who had sent the people of Java and Bali out to kill communists four years earlier. Unsurprisingly, the New Guinea leaders did what was expected of them. Every hand went up.

  At the start of the 1970s it looked as though the New Order had dealt with most of the mess that Sukarno had left behind, and tied up any number of other loose ends, too. Thousands of alleged communists were still locked up in prisons and labour camps, but they were out of sight and out of mind, and the killings of the previous decade had taken on the air of a bad dream. Indonesia was calm, and development was underway. What Suharto needed now was some kind of democratic mandate, and he got it with the election of 1971.

  It was more than fifteen years since Indonesia’s last—and only—national election, and Suharto’s government did a certain amount of tinkering before the polling stations opened. Firstly, the make-up of the parliament, the DPR, was fixed so that a quarter of the 360-strong membership would be appointed by the government, rather than elected by the people. This parliament would form a part, as it always had done, of the larger MPR, the Consultative Assembly, which also appointed the presid
ent. But now a full third of the MPR membership was appointed by the very president it was tasked with electing.

  Next, the New Order created an electoral vehicle for itself in the form of an enormous pseudo-party called Golkar. The name was short for Sekretariat Bersama Golongan Karya, the ‘Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups’. It was, in fact, a relic of Guided Democracy, an umbrella organisation for the apolitical ‘functional groups’ that Sukarno had made so much of—the farmers, the trade union members, the housewives, and the government workers. Now it was lavished with funds. Golkar had no individual membership and no declared ideology, but it automatically accounted for a huge swathe of society. A new regulation banned civil servants from being members of proper political parties, but their automatic attachment to the civil service union made them all de facto members of Golkar.

  Finally, Ali Murtopo, fresh from his successful stage-management of the New Guinea vote, was tasked with getting the real political parties into line. Independent candidates were banned from contesting elections, and the remaining nine parties had their leadership firmly nudged in a pro-government direction.

  Golkar won 62.8 percent of the vote in the 1971 election. The nearest runner up was the traditionalist Muslim group, Nahdlatul Ulama, with its loyal constituency in rural Java, but it trailed in a very distant second with only 18.7 percent. Even the government was taken aback by the scale of this victory, which was at least in part a genuine expression of popular approval for its developmental achievements. But they wanted more tinkering before the next election. In 1973, the surviving political organisations were corralled into just two umbrella parties: the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, the ‘United Development Party’ or PPP, for all the Muslim groups, and the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, the ‘Indonesian Democratic Party’ or PDI, for everyone else.

  The New Order had presented itself as an absolute break with the chaos of the Sukarno era, but the new system was, in some ways, simply the perfection of Guided Democracy. Sukarno had wanted rival ideologies held in a balance that permitted consensus and progress, and that was also a feature of the New Order’s system. But instead of feuding openly in parliament, the rival political factions now bickered within the two umbrella parties, which were hobbled and acquiescent as a consequence. The New Order had effectively taken the politics out of frontline politics, and elections were nothing more than a formality.

  Suharto’s critics have often told tales of electoral corruption, of voter intimidation and ballot-stuffing. But while such practices doubtless did occur from time to time, there was ultimately no need for them. The vote of 1955 had proved that Indonesia was unlikely ever to elect a majority government from amongst the parties, even in truly democratic conditions; they were even less likely to do so now. Every five years throughout the three decades of New Order rule, there was a general election that was ostensibly free and fair. Every five years the PPP and the PDI got to campaign openly, actively and occasionally violently. And every five years Golkar won. There was no way they could lose.

  But even if the New Order had no need to practice electoral violence, it was by no means entirely benign. The state security services had a long and ominous reach, watching over the general population for signs of rebellion. The unspoken memory of the 1965 nightmare lingered, and virtually any dissent could, with a little imagination, be interpreted as ‘communism’—and to be accused of communism in New Order Indonesia was no joke. At best it could mean a ruined career; at worst it meant imprisonment and even execution. The press was watched closely too, and any newspaper publishing unfavourable reports was liable to be shut down. Protests, which did occur from time to time over all manner of complaints, were dealt with aggressively by the omnipresent army. For most Indonesians the New Order was not some crude and brutal dictatorship, and outside a few restive territories at the fringes of the country most people went about their daily lives unmolested. But there was a sense, a presence, a dull ache born of the 1965 killings, which engendered quiet compliance.

  The unspoken demand for compliance was bolstered by the national philosophy. In lieu of a proper political or religious creed, the Pancasila, Sukarno’s set of bland ‘national principles’, was firmly established as Indonesia’s national ideology. Pancasila’s five vague requirements—belief in a non-specific god, nationalism, humanitarianism, social justice and democracy—were hardly demanding for the average Indonesian. But their very blandness meant that virtually any opinion could be deemed anti-Pancasila if needs be. Every single organisation in the country, from sports clubs to political parties and religious groups, was obliged to make Pancasila its sole ‘guiding principle’.

  The national motto was the Pancasila slogan, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. It was an Old Javanese phrase, taken from a Majapahit-era poem on the topic of Hindu-Buddhism, and it is usually translated as ‘Unity in Diversity’. But a more accurate translation would be something along the lines of ‘From Many One’. What Suharto’s ‘Pancasila Democracy’ really demanded was not a boisterous, multifarious diversity, but a uniformity.

  By the 1980s Jakarta looked nothing like the gimcrack capital of the Sukarno era. The potholes had been filled in and the street lights were working. Multi-storey office blocks and apartment buildings were beginning to appear. The first toll road, a six-lane strip of tarmac stretching thirty-seven miles (sixty kilometres) from Jakarta to the old country seat of the Dutch governors-general at Bogor, had opened in 1978, and there were plenty of new cars to make use of it.

  Indonesia weathered a sharp drop in oil prices in the middle of the 1980s. Over the course of 1986 and 1987 the banking sector was deregulated. New private banks blossomed, and with licensing regulations and tariffs reduced, business was booming. Smiling beneficently over all this was the fleshy visage of President Suharto, who now liked to be portrayed as Bapak Pembangunan, ‘the Father of Development’. He had considerable justification for being proud, for his rule had brought tangible benefits to many Indonesians. At the start of the 1980s annual per capita income, which had been a measly US$50 just fifty years earlier, stood at US$600. Around 100,000 new schools had been built and virtually every primary-age child, even in the remotest of eastern islands, was getting some sort of education. There had also been a remarkably successful family-planning campaign—carried out mostly without the coercion that had marked similar programmes in India and China—which had brought the fertility rate down to levels similar to those of Western Europe. But in private, out of print and out of earshot of the authorities, there was another word beside ‘development’ associated with Suharto’s regime, and that word was ‘corruption’.

  The graft started close to home, within Suharto’s own household. Even in the earliest days of the regime there had been low-level grumbling about the irregular business benefits enjoyed by the aristocratic Mrs Suharto, Siti Hartinah, now better known Ibu Tien. Jakarta wags started calling her ‘Ibu Tien Percent’ for the cuts she was believed to take on all manner of projects and contracts. The couple had six children, and they, too, had sprawling business interests. Just beyond the family circle, meanwhile, was a cabal of tycoons, many of them of Chinese origin.

  The lot of the Chinese Indonesians had been a strange one for centuries. Their role in the Dutch colonial economy, running tollgates and tax concessions as well as private businesses, had bolstered both their disproportionate wealth, and a near-permanent current of hostility towards them. In independent Indonesia, they remained a tiny proportion of the population—probably no more than three or four percent of the total. But there was no denying the fact that a disproportionate number of private businesses were Chinese-owned. Even in the remotest of island outposts in Maluku and Nusa Tenggara, chances were that the local hardware store was run by an ethnic Chinese family. Mindful of the ancient hostility towards the Chinese, the New Order had created oppressive anti-Chinese rules in the name of forced assimilation. From the late 1960s, Chinese script was banned in public places; Chinese-language newspapers and schools were clos
ed down; public celebration of Chinese festivals was forbidden; and ethnic Chinese were pressured to take new ‘Indonesian’ names.

  Yet despite this official oppression, and despite New Order efforts to further the lot of pribumi or ‘indigenous’ businessmen, some of Suharto’s closest cronies were ethnic Chinese magnates of astronomical wealth. Amongst them were Sudono Salim (real name Liem Sioe Liong), head of the vast Salim Group conglomerate, and Bob Hasan (originally known as The Kian Seng), chief of the sprawling Nusamba Group, with its timber concessions and banks. Both of these huge groups had Suharto children as partners in many of their constituent businesses.

  Suharto himself did not really regard any of this as corrupt, or even problematic. Patronage had always played an important role in Javanese culture, and Suharto was now occupying the position of some great king of Mataram or Majapahit, dispensing favours to those around him as part of his royal prerogative. And crucially, there was a sense that as long as the development continued year by year, as long as the growth figures stayed high and as long as the little people felt some tangible benefits of all the economic progress, then everyone would be happy.

  Canny observers pointed out that a burgeoning middle class, an educated generation born under New Order rule and increasingly connected to the wider world, might eventually grow tired of being treated like children by their government. But for the moment things were quiet. In February 1991 the first branch of McDonalds opened in Jakarta, three blocks south of Lapangan Merdeka. People queued for hours to buy their first Big Mac.

  There was no McDonalds in East Timor.

  The former Portuguese territory had not come quietly into the Indonesian fold. In the aftermath of the 1975 invasion, the Indonesian army had found itself mired in exactly the kind of guerrilla campaign it had fought against the Dutch in Java in the heady days of the revolution. Now, however, the boot was on the other foot and the insurgents were the ragtag troops of Falintil, the military wing of Fretilin, the Timorese independence movement. In an effort to isolate the rebels from the populace, between 1977 and 1979 villagers from across East Timor were rounded up and herded into new, supervised settlements around the towns. It was hardly a move designed to win hearts and minds, and though Fretilin’s campaign was never more than a badly armed effort by a handful of hungry men, hostility to Indonesian rule had never gone away.