Suharto — 32 years of the New Order, undone by financial collapse

Summary

At nine o'clock on the morning of 21 May 1998, in a brief televised statement at the presidential palace in Jakarta, General Suharto announced that he was resigning the presidency of Indonesia. He had held it for thirty-two years, the second-longest rule in modern Asia, over the world's fourth-most-populous nation. He left not to a coup or an invasion but to the collapse of his own economic legitimacy: a currency crisis that had wiped out the prosperity his "New Order" was built to deliver, mass student protests that ended with troops firing on demonstrators, days of deadly rioting in the capital, and the final desertion of the cabinet ministers and generals on whom his power rested.

Suharto, born in 1921 near Yogyakarta, was a career army officer who came to power in the bloodiest circumstances. After a murky coup attempt on the night of 30 September 1965, in which six senior generals were killed, he seized military control, blamed the Communist Party, and oversaw — together with the army and allied civilian groups — a campaign of mass killing in 1965–66 that took an estimated half a million to more than a million lives, with hundreds of thousands more imprisoned for years without trial. Out of that violence he displaced President Sukarno and, by 1967–68, made himself president. The killings were the foundation of the order he would call "New."

For three decades that order delivered real and rapid development. Foreign investment, oil revenue, and technocratic management produced growth of around seven percent a year for much of his rule, and poverty fell sharply. The cost was authoritarian: opposition was tightly controlled, the press constrained, the dominant Golkar machine engineered repeated landslides, and the military was woven through politics. Abroad, Suharto's army invaded East Timor in 1975 and occupied it for twenty-four years, a campaign whose famine, fighting, and repression killed an estimated 100,000 or more Timorese.

The New Order's bargain — prosperity in exchange for political quiescence — broke when the prosperity did. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 sent the rupiah into freefall, banks and companies failed, and the corruption that had enriched Suharto's family and cronies for decades suddenly looked intolerable. Re-elected to a seventh term in March 1998, he faced a wave of protest that the army's killing of four students in May converted into a national crisis. As Jakarta burned and his own ministers refused to serve, the man who had ruled through fear for thirty-two years found he could no longer command it, and stepped down.

Timeline

The order built on 1965

Suharto rose through an army forged in Indonesia's revolution against Dutch rule, an unflashy officer better known for organization than ideology. His moment came in the small hours of 1 October 1965, when a group of left-leaning officers calling themselves the 30 September Movement abducted and killed six senior generals in what they presented as a pre-emptive strike against a rightist plot. The exact authorship of that night remains disputed by historians. What is not disputed is what Suharto did with it. As one of the few senior commanders untouched, he swiftly mobilized the strategic reserve, took control of Jakarta, crushed the movement within a day, and laid the killings squarely at the door of the Indonesian Communist Party, then one of the largest in the world.

There followed one of the century's great unpunished mass killings. From late 1965 into 1966, the army, working with civilian militias and religious organizations, carried out the systematic massacre of people identified as communists, leftists, ethnic Chinese, and personal enemies, especially in Java, Bali, and Sumatra. Estimates of the dead range from around 500,000 to well over a million; as many as a million more were detained, many held for a decade or longer without charge on the prison island of Buru. The bloodletting broke the left as a political force and broke President Sukarno's base. Over the next eighteen months, through the gradual transfer of authority that began with the March 1966 Supersemar order, Suharto eased the founding president aside and, in 1967–68, took the presidency himself.

The regime he built he called the "New Order," defining itself against the chaos of Sukarno's "Old Order." Its promise was stability and development, and for a long time it delivered. Suharto's technocrats — the so-called Berkeley Mafia — opened Indonesia to Western investment and aid, expanded oil production, and presided over roughly seven percent annual growth for much of three decades. Rural poverty fell dramatically, rice self-sufficiency was achieved, and literacy and life expectancy rose. By the 1990s Indonesia was counted among Asia's success stories, and Suharto was hailed at home as the "Father of Development."

The price of that order was political life itself. Opposition was suppressed, dissidents jailed, and the press kept on a short leash. Elections were held, but the state party Golkar won them by engineered landslides while the two tolerated opposition parties were managed and divided. The armed forces, under the doctrine of dwifungsi — a "dual function" entitling them to a permanent role in politics and administration — were embedded throughout the state. And in 1975 the New Order turned outward, invading the former Portuguese colony of East Timor and annexing it the following year; the occupation that followed, marked by fighting, famine, and repression, killed an estimated 100,000 or more Timorese over twenty-four years.

When the bargain broke

The New Order's deep flaw was the nature of its bargain. It offered prosperity and stability in return for political silence, which meant its legitimacy was tied directly to economic performance and was hostage to it. Beneath the growth, the regime had become a vast machine of patronage. Suharto's six children and a circle of cronies controlled monopolies, banks, toll roads, and import licenses; the family fortune was later estimated by Transparency International at between 15 and 35 billion dollars, ranking him among the most self-enriching leaders of the era. So long as the economy expanded, this corruption — known in Indonesia by the shorthand KKN, for collusion, corruption, and nepotism — was tolerated as the cost of doing business. When the economy stopped expanding, it became the central grievance.

The shock arrived in 1997. As the Asian financial crisis spread from Thailand, capital fled Indonesia and the rupiah, allowed to float in August, went into freefall — from around 2,600 to the dollar to more than 14,800 by January 1998. Banks and conglomerates collapsed; prices of food and fuel soared; millions were thrown back into poverty in months. An International Monetary Fund rescue package came with demands to dismantle the very subsidies and monopolies that sustained the family, and Suharto, by then in his seventies, signed agreements he was visibly reluctant to honour. The technocratic competence that had been the regime's claim to rule had failed, and the corruption that the growth had concealed stood exposed.

Politically, Suharto misread the moment. In March 1998 the assembly dutifully re-elected him to a seventh term and approved a cabinet stocked with cronies and a daughter, a display of dynastic confidence amid national hardship. It inflamed rather than calmed the country. University campuses, long the seedbed of protest, erupted in demonstrations demanding reform and his resignation. The decisive break came on 12 May 1998, when security forces opened fire on protesters at Trisakti University in Jakarta, killing four students. Their deaths triggered three days of catastrophic rioting in the capital and other cities, in which more than a thousand people died, much of the violence directed at the ethnic Chinese minority in arson, looting, and mass sexual assaults — an eruption that exposed how thin the regime's order had become.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Suharto's resignation opened the era Indonesians call Reformasi — reform. His successor Habibie lifted press controls, freed political prisoners, and permitted the free elections and constitutional changes that, within a few years, turned the world's largest Muslim-majority nation into a functioning democracy. The military's formal political role was rolled back, decentralization devolved power to the regions, and in 1999 a UN-supervised referendum allowed East Timor, after a final spasm of militia violence, to vote for the independence it achieved in 2002. The transition was turbulent and incomplete, but it endured.

Suharto himself faced little personal reckoning. Shielded by ill health, he was never tried; corruption cases against him were repeatedly suspended on medical grounds, and the billions amassed by his family were never meaningfully recovered. He lived in quiet retirement in Jakarta until his death on 27 January 2008, at the age of 86. The mass killings of 1965–66 that had brought him to power went officially unexamined for decades, and remain among the gravest unaddressed crimes of the twentieth century.

His legacy is genuinely divided, and the division is instructive. To some Indonesians he is the leader who delivered three decades of growth and stability and pulled millions out of poverty; to others he is the general atop a regime founded on massacre, sustained by repression and graft, and responsible for the occupation of East Timor. The truth holds both: the New Order built a modern economy and a brutal, corrupt, and bloody political order at the same time, and it fell when the first could no longer excuse the second.

Lessons

References

• Suharto | Indonesian Dictator, New Order & Resignation BRITANNICA
• Suharto WIKIPEDIA
• Fall of Suharto WIKIPEDIA
• Corruption charges against Suharto WIKIPEDIA
• Indonesia's ex-dictator Suharto dies at 86 NBC NEWS