General Suharto, Indonesia's leader for almost 30 years, is the most successful dictator of modern times. As a soldier, he uses violence without apology; as a businessman, his family fortune exceeds that of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos; as a politician, he has eliminated all potential rivals. Presiding every five years over a ceremonial election, he has won six terms of office since 1968. Despite the country's economic crisis, Suharto, 76, plans to renew his term when it expires in March.
He is often likened to a king of ancient Java. The death of his queen, Siti Hartinah, known as Tien, is believed to have affected him profoundly-much more than the unpopularity of his six children. The Suharto family is probably the wealthiest in southeast Asia. People say that it is to secure the fortunes of his children that Suharto remains in power.
The Indonesian crescent, with its population of 200m, is the world's fourth most populous country after China, India and the US. It spreads across most of the south Pacific-from Singapore south almost to Australia, north to the Philippines and east to Papua New Guinea. During the second world war, the allies and Japan fought fiercely over it. Since then Britain, the Netherlands, China, the US and the Indonesian army have all sought to control it. Washington interfered in Indonesia from the beginning, pushing the Dutch to leave their colony in 1949, supporting separatist movements in the 1950s and creating common cause with the Indonesian army when it took power in 1965. That was the year the Indonesians, with the encouragement of the CIA, slaughtered between 500,000 and 1m of their countrymen. The purge made Indonesia communist-free.
Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali-all have romantic associations in the west. Conrad sailed their seas. In Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, languid natives joyously sang "Bali Hai" to American sailors. Peter Weir's film, The Year of Living Dangerously, featured Mel Gibson as a journalist who witnessed Suharto's coup in 1965. The 14,000 isles, with their beaches and palms, their oil and copper, their bamboo, teak, volcanoes, rain forests, rice paddies and ancient Hindu-Buddhist stone ruins, witnessed countless murders: first by the Dutch; then by the Indonesians themselves, during the communist purge. Later, Suharto's army began the massacre of a further 200,000 people in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.
Saddam of southeast Asia?
Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country. Although not part of the Arab world, it bears similarities to an Arab state: Iraq. Suharto comes from a hamlet, Kemusu, in the Muslim heartland of Java; Saddam comes from the village of Tikrit, the Arab Sunni Muslim centre of Iraq. Both dictators are products of troubled childhoods. Saddam's father disappeared shortly after his birth; he has often been called a bastard. Suharto's mother abandoned him in infancy. Saddam was raised by an uncle, Suharto by a great aunt. Both men went to village schools and never shared the foreign educations enjoyed by their countries' elites. Saddam dropped out of school to become a Ba'ath party member. Suharto sought the security of army life, enlisting in the Dutch colonial forces when he was 19. Both men took power at the same time. Both place friends and relatives in positions of influence. Both men's dress alternates between the sober business suit of the modern secularist and the pilgrim's white cloak of Islam. Both pose as champion of the downtrodden third world. Both have confessed to political murder. Referring to the estimated 10,000 Indonesians who died in the 1980s, Suharto wrote in his autobiography that "the corpses were left lying around as a form of shock therapy."
(These murders do not disturb the multinational corporations doing business with Suharto, including Mobil Oil, which publishes a full page advertisement in the New York Times every autumn to welcome him to the UN. Nor do they affect British Aerospace sales to Indonesia. Likewise, Saddam's crimes never bothered the international arms sellers.)
Saddam often wears a general's uniform, although he never served in an army. Suharto, a soldier all his adult life, is entitled to dress as a general, but he does not. Perhaps this is where the comparison ends. Saddam is a fraud; Suharto is the real thing.
Like a deity, Suharto is almost invisible: there are no statues, no posters, no magnificent oil portraits. In Jakarta, the only ubiquitous face belongs to the Marlboro man. While most Iraqis hate Saddam, many Indonesians are fond of Suharto. Suharto is more subtle and agile than Saddam. He has, in the words of Margaret Scott in the New York Times, "...refined repression to a point where few people need to disappear and torture need only be applied selectively." In place of freedom, Suharto held out the promise of prosperity. But as the tiger economies falter, wealth is vanishing: the value of Indonesia's currency has fallen by 80 per cent against the dollar in six months-making it virtually impossible for Indonesian companies to service their huge debts-and rice is now rationed.
Suharto's face is hidden, but his hand and the hands of his children are everywhere, collecting money. The airline, Sempati, belongs to Suharto's son, Hutomo Mandala Putra, known as Tommy. The toll road into Jakarta from the airport is the property of his daughter, Siti Hardijanti Hastuti, known as Tutut. The luxurious Grand Hyatt Hotel is the property of another son, Bambang. Two of the five Indonesian television channels are owned by Suharto's children.
Saddam has not amassed a personal fortune. Suharto is the senior partner in a family business called Indonesia. Saddam punished officials who were corrupt. Suharto rewarded friends and courtiers with monopolies and jobs. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and declared it Iraq's 19th province, he mistook US equivocation for approval. The night before Suharto invaded East Timor and made it Indonesia's 27th province, in December 1975, he met US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to make sure that they would support him. Suharto is a peasant become rich, a father who stands behind his billionaire children, smiling as they prosper. He is prudent, he is dull and he always wins. Saddam is reckless, bombastic and, though a survivor, a loser.
Nation and army
Indonesian history is the story of its army. The country was born under Japanese occupation in 1942; it struggled against the Dutch who returned, after Japan's surrender in 1945, to reclaim the colonies they had ruled for four centuries. Suharto's army coup of 1965 promised to eliminate the corruption of the first 15 years of "misguided" civilian democracy under Sukarno.
In Java, where 60 per cent of the population live, the story of the army is told in hand-made images at the National Military Museum. The first station on the Indonesian via dolorosa is a scene as familiar to Indonesians as the signing of the Declaration of Independence is to Americans: "The house at 56 Pegangsaan Timur Street" captures the moment when Sukarno, an engineer from East Java who had spent years in a Dutch prison, proclaimed Indonesian freedom in 1945.
(Sukarno, the towering figure of Indonesian independence, has not been airbrushed from history in the way Trotsky was. This has made it easier for Sukarno's daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, to lead an opposition party without disappearing like democrats from humbler backgrounds.)
There is no sign of Suharto in the museum until scene 23: "The Six Hours at Yogya," in March 1949. Suharto, thanks to his Dutch and Japanese military training, had risen from battalion commander to lieutenant-colonel. The Dutch were occupying the inland provisional capital of Yogyakarta and had arrested Sukarno. Suharto infiltrated men into the city and an early morning attack caught the Dutch garrison sleeping. Suharto's troops occupied the city until a Dutch armoured column rolled in at noon. But the Dutch were forced to release Sukarno and negotiate. They agreed to independence eight months later.
Suharto nurtured the legend born during the Six Hours at Yogyakarta. There were stories that he had disguised himself as a peasant to do his own reconnaissance; that he had met the Sultan of Yogyakarta who gave Suharto's wife refuge in the royal palace, where she gave birth to their first child, Tutut.
It takes 20 years more-and countless scenes in the museum-before Suharto reappears. He is in the grounds of a military compound, on the night of 1st October 1965. Soldiers in battle dress await his command. The legend reads: "General Suharto thwarts the Communists. While the state was in great danger, Major General Suharto as the commander of the Army Strategic Command came forward to save the state." After that Suharto appears in almost every scene.
The smell of cloves
Despite annual economic growth of 7 per cent in recent years, Indonesia was still a poor country, even before the economic crash. The average annual wage was $500. The Rockefeller Foundation estimates that 25 per cent of the nation's children are malnourished. On the streets of the capital, Jakarta, male and female prostitutes sit talking all night with the men who grill and sell satay, strips of flavoured meat. Fat dripping on coals sends up a pungent smoke, and the meat smells mingle with the perfume of the city's canals, restaurants and cars. But the strongest scent is the bitter aroma of burning cloves. If Suharto's children are arrested after his death, the cause will not be poverty, nor corruption, nor the universal fear of the army. It will be the smell of cloves.
In Indonesia, everyone smokes. The rich smoke Marlboro or Dunhill, but the smoke of the poor is the kretek, clove rolled in dark leaf. The cloves are grown in Indonesia and wrapped by Indonesian workers in Indonesian factories. Clove cigarettes are a multi-million dollar business which functioned smoothly until 1991. That was when President Suharto granted his youngest son, Tommy, a monopoly to market cloves.
Through his Clove Support and Trading Board (BPPC), Tommy would buy the cloves from farmers and sell them to the cigarette makers. Overnight Tommy became the middleman in an industry which had no need of one. Tommy paid the farmers less than they used to receive from the cigarette companies, and he charged the companies more than they used to pay. At first cigarette makers refused to buy the cloves. Tommy's company began to go broke, so the government directed the state banks to lend him $300m.
A few months ago, under pressure from the IMF, Suharto was forced to announce an end to Tommy's monopoly. The IMF is making some progress in using its current leverage to prise open the opaque world of Indonesian capitalism. But IMF officials say that it is the family businesses which are being defended most ferociously. Meanwhile, the opposition is speaking out more boldly, aware that the implicit contract-political passivity in exchange for rising standards of living-has been broken. But the opposition hotchpotch of ethnic separatists (there are said to be more than 300 different ethnic groups), Muslim fundamentalists and democrats has appeared rudderless in recent weeks-not helped by the fact that Abdurrahman Wahid, leader of the biggest Muslim organisation, has suffered a stroke.
Many who admire Suharto believe that his children have betrayed the old man's legacy. I asked a woman who had spent her childhood with Suharto in the jungle, whether the people loved the old man. "I would not say 'love' is the word. I used to 'like' him, but not any more. The clove monopoly was just too much." Nepotism had been blatant before, but never as damaging. Contracts for state monopolies awarded to Suharto's children would have normally gone to cukong, Indonesian Chinese, whom most Indonesians resent, or to a few rich pribumi, native Indonesians. But the cloves touched nearly everyone-farmers, factory workers, small retailers. No one dared complain publicly out of fear of being branded a communist. In Indonesia, this meant death in 1965; in 1986 it meant the loss of jobs for 1,500 state oil workers suspected of having had an "association" with communists 20 years before. It can mean imprisonment even now.
Suharto's children have created huge commercial empires in conditions of colossal corruption. The government requires licences for almost every business activity, from importing cars to running factories. The Suhartos and their friends provide the fastest slash through Jakarta's red tape. They claim their reward for assisting foreign and local businessmen to obtain quick contracts, quick loans and large profits. Government employees, including the police, are underpaid; and they too have circumvented the law for profit. When the government introduced a draconian traffic law which imposed huge fines for minor infractions, it meant a new source of income for the police: people preferred paying small bribes to large fines.
"Indonesia is the most corrupt country I've ever worked in," an American businessman told me. "One day, the police came and closed down our office in Jakarta. They arrested the entire expatriate staff. I had to fly out from London to talk to them. What did they want? Money. I paid a few hundred thousand dollars, but it saved me millions in assets and business." He has done business with Tommy Suharto and swore that Tommy was worth at least $7 billion. (Sometimes called the Mark Thatcher of Indonesia, Tommy was a multimillionaire by the age of 25.)
Part of Tommy's fortune is built on exclusive contracts with the state oil company, Pertamina, to export liquid natural gas to Taiwan. His photograph is often in the Indonesian press. He races cars and owns the national car factory. Despite being the youngest son, he is the richest of the six children.
His older brother, Bambang, born in 1953, heads the Bimantara Group of companies, whose annual receipts The Economist estimated at $1.1 billion. After his father banned advertising on state television-ostensibly to placate conservative Muslim opinion-the government awarded Bambang a licence to run a private station, Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia. Bambang held a monopoly on television advertising until his sister Tutut started another channel.
Tutut, the oldest child, owns the Citra Lamtoro Gung Group. She is more private than her brother Tommy. Dressed as a pious Muslim who helps the poor, she insists that her profit-making ventures support her charities. Yet Tutut excelled her brothers in one respect: she employed slave labour. As head of the Yayasan Tiara foundation, Tutut went to occupied East Timor in 1991 to persuade young Timorese to come to Jakarta for vocational training, promising jobs on an industrial estate in Batam Island, where her brother Bambang has a share in the free trade zone. With no opportunities to work since the Indonesian invasion of 1975, 600 Timorese volunteered for the $150 a month salaries (nearly four times the national average).
When the Timorese reached Jakarta they found no vocational school. They were forced to work cleaning chicken cages or carrying freight to trucks for private companies, nine hours a day, for $5.25 a month. Yayasan Tiara provided a bonus of $16.50 a month, from which employers deducted the youths' food, housing and transport costs.
While Tutut's slave labour project was extreme even by the Suhartos' standards, the children have merely continued the practices of the parents. The family fortune has been growing since independence. Suharto took advantage of the army's "Territorial Management" doctrine. The dual function theory, endorsed by US advisors in the 1960s, put the army to civilian use. Military officers supervised civil servants in all provinces. The officers augmented their salaries by sending soldiers to work. Civilians lost business, while soldiers built roads and houses.
Opportunity flourished in 1957, when Sukarno nationalised Dutch property. The army took most of the spoils. Suharto used friends, particularly among the Chinese who had been traders in Indonesia for centuries, to represent him on the boards of companies he owned. The "Suharto Mafia" included Chinese businessman Mohammed Bob Hasan, whose Wood Panel Association later controlled 70 per cent of the world plywood market, and Liem Sioe Long, who became one of Fortune's 30 richest men. Suharto's court of family and retainers all grew wealthy, leaving him free to disclaim any direct involvement in commerce. When Suharto bid for power in 1965, he portrayed himself as a mystic, a war hero, the father of his country.
Later, popular hostility fell on Suharto's wife, Tien. Those who accused "Mrs Tien Per Cent" of buying expensive jewellery and gowns from Paris forgave the president for indulging the woman he loved. After Tien's death, criticism focused on the children and their Chinese friends.
Sukarno's legacy
It remains to be seen how effective an opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri can become. But the ghost of her father, Sukarno, remains as powerful in Indonesia as Nasser's ghost in Egypt: a champion of the poor, his speeches mesmerised the masses. Sukarno had the charisma and charm (he was a notorious womaniser) that Suharto lacks. Suharto's coup spared Sukarno, who remained under house arrest until his death in 1970. Suharto so feared his predecessor's legacy that when Sukarno posters appeared on walls all over the country in parliamentary elections, Suharto banned photographs of all politicians-including himself. Suharto has, however, permitted a tomb to be erected over Sukarno's grave in the remote East Javanese village where he was born. He also permitted the new international airport in Jakarta to be named after Sukarno.
Suharto's grab for power came soon after most of the army high command was murdered at Lubang Buaya on 1st October 1965. The culprits were fellow officers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung. But the army later said they were also members of the Communist Party of Indonesia, the PKI. CIA documents later acknowledged that it was a conflict within the army, but at the time the agency propagated the story that the PKI was behind the generals' murders. This gave the army the opportunity to crush the PKI, whose 3m members made it the largest communist party outside China. US embassy documents show that the CIA saw the PKI as a greater threat to American interests in Asia than the Vietcong.
Suharto took command of the army and crushed the rebellion. Untung was tried and executed. In the months that followed, the army and religious fanatics among the Muslims, Christians and Hindus staged pogroms of suspected communists. Former CIA officers admitted that they supplied lists of suspected communists to Suharto. The murders went on for a year, and people in Jakarta told me 30 years later they would never forget the smell of blood in the river. As one man recalled: "No one would eat fish for months."
The Indonesian press call Suharto "Bepak"-father. It fosters an image of him as a paternal, benign and modest man who has presided over two generations of development and stability. It has little choice. The western press has given Suharto equally favourable treatment or-next best thing-no coverage at all. In 1966 the New York Times, acknowledging the murder of 300,000 Indonesians after his coup, called him a "moderate." Ten years later, The Economist, after he killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese, said he was "benign at heart."
Suharto's own ministers conceded that Sukarno would have won 80 per cent of a free vote in 1966. Instead, he was under arrest. Suharto opened the country to western investment. Mobil acquired the largest liquid natural gas field in the world. Other US, British and European firms returned to Indonesia. Ten thousand Americans now live there, a few as missionaries among the animists of West Irian, others working in oil and trade, eating at Tex-Mex restaurants where Indonesian bands play Willie Nelson songs. In April 1967, Suharto signed the first foreign mining agreement with Freeport McMo-Ran of Freeport, Louisiana, to produce copper in West Irian. Production began in 1973; by 1975 the US company had earned more than $60m after taxes. Soon after, Henry Kissinger joined the board of Freeport McMo-Ran and helped the company in 1991 to renew its mining permit for another 30 years.
The East Timor debacle
During my last stay in Dili, the capital of East Timor, I was followed by a government spy so bored that we eventually had lunch together. A man I interviewed said that any Timorese seen talking to a foreigner was taken for interrogation. "It is bad here," he said, "but it is worse in Aceh." Aceh is in north Sumatra, part of Indonesia since the beginning; long the site of Islamic discontent.
In Dili, most of the businesses are owned by Indonesian settlers. A travel agent told me that his companies went bankrupt in Kalimantan and South Sulawesi; East Timor was his last chance. Books for sale are in Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian national language. There is nothing in Tetum, Timor's native language, or in Portuguese, its lingua franca. Indonesians own all the coffee, the island's main cash crop. Soldiers are everywhere. The government has confined most villagers to resettlement centres. A struggle is taking place between the conqueror and the conquered: 200m people against East Timor's surviving 700,000.
One night, a man risked asking me to his house. He had been interrogated many times and asked me to leave by the back door. "Tell people to come," he said. "We need the tourists here. If foreigners are watching, the army has to be careful. Tell your government what is happening here. America is everything to Indonesia. Indonesia has to listen to it. America cares about human rights everywhere. Why not here? Aren't we people?"
East Timor is the worst propaganda disaster in Indonesian history. Portugal cut diplomatic relations with Jakarta and will not permit the EU to extend aid to Suharto. The US, Britain and the World Bank, however, remain generous. Indonesia's reasons for stealing the territory became clearer when it opened East Timorese waters to oil and gas exploration by US and Australian oil companies. The US Congress did nothing to condemn the occupation of East Timor until eye-witness accounts of the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre forced it to cut military aid to Indonesia in 1992. Civilian aid and trade continued. Indonesian money helped to fund Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign.
An Indonesian catastrophe?
Indonesia has the largest GNP in southeast Asia; it is the only country in the region to sell more to Japan than it buys. Its population and (until recently) its economy are growing so rapidly that its people migrate to outer islands. One day they may settle in Australia, gradually absorbing it, as their ancestors absorbed Sumatra, Java and Bali. But if its political order collapses, Indonesia could descend into the most catastrophic civil war of modern times. War in Indonesia would bring epic mass murders; the end of oil for the US and Japan; the loss of billions in foreign investments; default on Indonesia's debts of more than $108 billion to international banks; and the arrival of millions of refugees on the shores of Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and California.
So urgent is the present economic and political crisis that Suharto has received visits from the US secretary of defence and a deputy treasury secretary, as well as from the grey men of the IMF. All of them advise him to put in order a house they allowed him to put into disorder for 30 years. The army is preparing itself for riots, as factories close and a growing number of people can no longer buy food. Ten million workers are without jobs, 2m more than a few months ago. The Islamic movement is growing, and the army will not hand over power easily. The US would probably prefer Suharto to stand down but will support him in the absence of a credible replacement from the army or the opposition. Meanwhile, there have been attacks on Christians and, particularly, on Chinese businesses. The Chinese make up only 3 per cent of the population but because they dominate business, they are usually the first scapegoats (as they were, for example, in 1959, 1965 and 1966), accused of hoarding food and raising prices. In earlier anti-Chinese pogroms, China itself has protested but not intervened. That might change. All this has the feel of ante bellum Lebanon, another ally the US could not hold together.
Until recently, Suharto's political liabilities were his children and East Timor. To these must now be added a crumbling economy. His survival and his children's are mutually dependent. An Indonesian friend said the corruption was not Suharto's fault. "If an angel came to govern Indonesia, he would end up the same way." But, wherever the blame lies, Suharto may not last out another term of office. As the Shah of Iran, Mobutu of Zaire and the Marcoses discovered: dictators who become liabilities to the US are expendable.
