Indonesian dictator Suharto is one of those people who I'd vaguely assumed was already dead until I read a story about his demise. I'm not sure I have much to say about Suharto beyond the obvious -- bad man, killed lots of people, etc. -- but John Quiggin has an interesting post making the case that since his departure from power "Indonesia has been remarkably successful in dealing with what was, in many respects, a poisonous legacy from the Suharto era."
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Suharto Dead
29 Jan 2008 08:15 am
Comments (10)
Matt,
He also presided over large and sustained growth from when he took over till the crisis in '97-'98. Of course, he did many bad things, but to his great credit he held an enormous and diverse nation together and brought it into modernity. A "nice" leader would not have been able to do any of those things.
I'll copy in response what I wrote over at Crooked Timber:
Almost all of the economic gains went to 1) Suharto’s family or 2) the small, wealthy Chinese minority. The average Indonesian didn’t really see themselves become richer during his reign. That is a big reason why during the anti-Chinese pogroms following his fall that led to massive Chinese flight out of the country (often to Singapore, etc.), the resulting capital flight halved per capita GDP in Indonesia: only a small handful of people were holding a lot of the wealth. According to Transparency International, he was the most corrupt leader since 1980, stealing more than anybody else, which is almost hard to do in a world with the likes of Mugabe. You can possibly make a similar case for, say, Pinochet or Fujimori, but it just doesn't hold water with Suharto.
In addition, he wasn't just brutal. His invasion of East Timor, by some studies, was one of the most intensely violent acts since WII. IIRC Around 100,000 people out of a population that was probably under 500,000 died. It ranks pretty near the Khmer Rouge as one of the great horrors of the postwar world.
Meanwhile, one of our Great Whores in the News Media-- the Washington Post -- just put up a truly disgusting puff piece praising Suharto for solving Indonesia's overpopulation problem. (Doesn't address the minor detail re the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people )
I'm not kidding --see "How Suharto Got It Right"
at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/needtoknow/2008/01/how_suharto_got_it_right.html
He also presided over large and sustained growth from when he took over till the crisis in '97-'98. Of course, he did many bad things, but to his great credit he held an enormous and diverse nation together and brought it into modernity. A "nice" leader would not have been able to do any of those things.
Oh, Jesus.
I spent about half of my childhood in Indonesia. My father was a professor and his field was East Asian theater and dance, with a concentration in Balinese shadow puppetry. So we were in country often, for sabbaticals and summer breaks.
Suharto was a miserable despot, a terrible and brutal dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands, silenced dissent wherever and whenever it occurred, and stole ludicrous amounts of the country's wealth. In the year of living dangerously, 1965, he and the army killed-- by a conservative estimate-- one million impoverished peasants. (To the hard-core red-baiters who would complain that they deserved to die because they were members of the Communist party, let me assure you that the Indonesian communists of 1965 had about as much in common with Lenin as you or I. The Communist party was popular because it offered the only real opposition to Sukarno and the military.) The unmarked graves are all around the country; you can find men in most villages who will show you were nearby ones are. His assault on East Timor, again speaking conservatively, killed a third of the island's population.
Then there were all the more mundane, everyday activities of a dictator, the murder of opposition leaders, the squelching of dissent. You say "A 'nice' leader" may not have presided over such sustained economic growth. Indonesia is one of the most resource rich countries in the world. Had any leader failed to produce enormous economic gains through modernization, I'd be shocked. Who knows how much more growth there would have been had so much money not been reserved for Suharto and his cronies. No, I'll take a "nice" leader, thanks, and so would the generations of Indonesians who came of age under his dictatorship.
Freddie,
I am not saying he was a good guy. But when you say:
"Indonesia is one of the most resource rich countries in the world. Had any leader failed to produce enormous economic gains through modernization, I'd be shocked."
you're being silly. Have you ever heard of a continent called Africa? It's got about 30-40 countries south of the Sahara - most of whom are resource rich, all of whom are poor as dirt.
One angle which I haven't ssen anyone cover is how American anti communism policy inadvertantly paved the way for resurgant islamism, by whiping the political space clean of non-islamist political choices. The point being that the PKI could have gone Mao or it could have gone British Labor Party, but the point is it would have been a secularising force in Indonesioan society and when its 500 000 supporter were murdered by conservative muslim death squads, indonesia was lost for modernity and potentially gained by the wahhabis, as an islamist stronghold. (the struggle is palying out but to my mind the islamists hold all the winning hands in indonesia)
The same process happened in Afghanistan. Looking back we can now say that it was tragic that the United States opposed the Russian invasion of Afghanistan so vigorously. That in destoying the Afghan communist party the US paved the way for the Taliban and the spread of 'successful" wahhabism, ie al quaeda.
History is full of these little ironies.
Putting aside whether Suharto was a "good" dictator, Indonesia's transition to democracy is a model for Asian post-dictatorship countries as well as Muslim countries (to the extent that category exists). Pakistan and especially Bangladesh could look to it, as well as Mynamar.
Really, Ikram, and who will be the Javanese in Pakistan? We know who are in Burma - they're called Burmese and they're despised by the Shan, Karen, etc.
The national myth of "Indonesia" revolves around the Javanese keeping their collective boot on the neck of the other islands - while sending out their surplus population to Sumatra and Borneo and a hundred islands that had never even seen a Javan before independence.
We, and especially the Aussies, got them to take the boot off half of one of the mid sized islands, and the only reason we pulled that off was due to them being Christian.
Greg's comment is unfortunately pretty typical of a substantial stream of Australian leftist opinion which takes for granted the beneficence of ethnic separatism, and views every aspect of Indonesia through the lens of East Timor.
Forced migration was one of Suharto's bad policies, but it was, I think, more than counterbalanced by the flow of migrants to the big cities in Java, from other islands as well as the rurla hinterland.
Indonesians in Aceh and elsewhere are moving beyond this kind of thing, and Australians should do likewise.
Comments closed February 12, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Yeah, this happened the same day Obama won SC. Two for two on the day! Woohoo!
Posted by Reality Man | January 29, 2008 8:38 AM