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

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.