Suharto’s impending demise and his legacy
It’s always good to find substantiation of one’s theories. A few years ago I produced an attempt to historicise the New Order, my ‘keeping up appearances’ article (in the book Indonesia Today: The Challenge of History). There I argued that the Suharto regime was not concerned with running Indonesia properly, merely giving the appearance of doing so (by maintaining the appearance of law, the appearance of economic growth, and the appearance of order, rather than actually doing anything substantial).
Now we have the situation where Suharto is all but dead, his vital organs seem to have packed up, but his doctors have announced triumphantly that the life-support machines have maintained the appearance of life. I don’t particularly like Suharto, but I feel sorry for him and think that he should be allowed to die with dignity, without the horrible press crushes around his comatose body.
Suharto’s impending demise raises the broader issue of reassessing his rule and his legacy. A number of his friends overseas have argued that we should overlook his faults (read mass murder, suppression of democracy, suppression of Islam etc) because he brought economic growth to Indonesia. This argument was already been put about during the Cold War as part of the US and Australian support for the anti-communism of Suharto, and found its strongest advocates in academics such as Heinz Arndt.
As I’ve already indicated, that assertion needs to be questioned. On the economic side, the rapid collapse of Indonesia in 1997 pointed to fundamental problems in the economy, the major one of which was the huge corruption which Suharto led (and this despite the fact that the ANU school thought at the time that the fundamentals of the Indonesian economy were sound!).
Another way of looking at this question of development is to ask what the alternatives were. I would argue that a better, less corrupt and more democratic, government could have produced better economic figures with a more lasting impact. Look at Thailand, sure they’ve had problems with democracy and corruption, but not to the extent of Indonesia, and so the standard of living in Thailand is higher than in Indonesia. Suharto failed to make any substantial investment in education, and doomed his country to being the cheap labour source of the region (Indonesia labour is still cheaper than China or India, unbelievable), with no development of skills and human resources. Look at India, where the education system has allowed Indians to take leading roles in IT.
Suharto also left the mechanisms of the state severely weakened. They had been under strain during the Sukarno period, but Suharto’s cultivation of corruption and the use of violence as a political tool have made the work of those trying to build a democratic and prosperous Indonesia very difficult. The efforts of those trying to improve the country are easily derailed by demagogues who use groups of preman to run local politics (and wasn’t it helpful of the VP to say recently that democracy might have to be restricted in the interests of prosperity?).
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