Soeharto retrospective: Perils of power

Soeharto retrospective: Perils of power

Hartoyo Pratiknyo, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia in the Soeharto Years

John H. McGlynn, Jeffrey Hadler, Bambang Bujono, Margaret Glade
Agusta, Gedsiri Suhartono, et al.

The Lontar Foundation

507 pp

In this age of the instant book, seven years seems like a long
time for somebody to come up with the idea of publishing a volume
on what it was like to live and work in Indonesia through 32
years of what might be called the country's era of enlightened
despotism.

Certainly, there is no lack of material on Indonesia's second
president. After all, he was, up to the moment of his forced
resignation on March 21, 1998, not only one of the longest ruling
and most influential leaders in this region, but he was also one
of the most fascinating figures in the history of modern
Indonesia -- his leadership style, the scope of both his failures
and accomplishments, the shrewd rationality that complemented his
traditional Javanese weltanschauung, the continuing mystique
surrounding the man and his background.

But if sheer bulk and number of contributors -- including some
of the country's most respected scholars, activists,
academicians, government officials, intellectuals and
photojournalists -- are a measure of value, Indonesia in the
Soeharto Years certainly does make up for this lapse in civic
memory.

The book measures a good 22 by 30 centimeters and runs 483
pages from frontispiece to index, with sections structured in
chronological order preceded by brief commentaries and a foreword
by former United States president Jimmy Carter.

As the poet, writer and journalist Goenawan Mohamad notes in
his preface, the book makes no attempt to give a comprehensive
account of the era. Rather, its aim is to present the Indonesian
public with "an album of Indonesia from 1965 to 1998, ... an
aide-memoire put together with enthusiasm and with a sense of
inadequacy."

Perhaps this, and the abundance of material it attempts to
cover, is why it takes some effort for readers to find details
and hard information about certain subjects. The general index at
the end is of little help. Some of the hundreds of pictures, many
of which are previously unpublished, did not come out too well in
print, while others lack impact.

But any discourse on Soeharto -- or on life under his all-
pervading leadership -- must of necessity be inadequate. Soeharto
came to power on the wave of one of the most crucial watershed
episodes in Indonesia's modern history. A peasant boy by birth,
unfamiliar with the particulars of modern Western thought but
steeped in the wisdoms passed from generation to generation
through traditional Javanese texts, he astounded the nation and
the world by the swiftness and the thoroughness with which he
quashed the October 1965 communist "uprising" -- and thereby
saved the nation from its gradual slip into Marxist-Leninist
totalitarianism.

And while ruthlessness was not uncommon among rulers in
ancient Java, the way in which Soeharto tacitly condoned the
hunting down and killing of hundreds of thousands of members of
the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and communist sympathizers
was entirely true to the dictum stated by Machiavelli in his
famous little book, The Prince: "...it must be noted that men
must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge
themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones;
the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we
need not fear his vengeance."

Nor did he seem averse to using trickery and deceit to attain
what, according to his beliefs, were morally justifiable ends.

For example, it has been asserted that, as commander of the
Army Strategic Reserves Command (KOSTRAD) at the time, Soeharto
had deliberately overstepped the limits of authority given to him
by Sukarno's March 11 order (Supersemar) to take whatever
measures deemed necessary to restore order and safeguard the
president. Instead, Soeharto used the opportunity to take the de
facto national leadership into his own hands.

In spite of his authoritarianism, however, many observers
believe that it would be a mistake to assume that Soeharto had
nothing but his own personal interests at heart. Rather, many
contend, it was his belief in the traditional Javanese concept of
manunggaling kawulo gusti -- the "oneness" of the ruler and the
ruled, of man and divinity -- that led him to foster, in
practice, what he saw as a benevolent and necessary form of
authoritarianism for the sake of the common good.

This concept of "benign" dictatorship gradually came to
pervade every aspect of societal life. All forms of dissent were
nipped in the bud and political stability became the key phrase
in New Order Indonesia.

Political parties were realigned and the media put under
strict government control. All institutions of state, including
the judiciary and the national and regional legislative bodies,
were subordinated to the executive branch through a resourcefully
conceived system of "Pancasila Democracy" that preserved the
outward appearance of participatory rule, but in fact, left all
decision making in the president's hands.

In this climate of sustained stability, the economy flourished
and grew at an average of almost 6 percent to more than 7 percent
between 1989 and 1994. As GDP and per capita incomes grew, the
number of people living below the poverty line decreased from
roughly 60 percent in 1966 to less than 14 percent at the end of
that period. International praise was heaped on the country and
the regime.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point out
the mistakes and the misconceptions in Soeharto's grand design. A
new generation of Indonesians had begun to emerge, imbued with
the ideals of personal freedom and human dignity. Soeharto's
greatest mistake, it appears in retrospect, was that he failed to
take into account these growing aspirations and so failed to
anticipate the force of the combined onslaught of multiple crises
and discontents that, in the end, collaborated to bring him down.

In this sense, this "aide-memoire" can serve as a reminder of
how easy it is to digress from the true spirit of the manunggal
doctrine once power is firmly in hand, and of the perils that are
inherent in authoritarian rule, however "benevolent".