In 1966, Major General Suharto sent a wreath to the funeral of Arif Rachman Hakim, a student who had been killed in clashes with the palace guards of the then President Sukarno. The killing whipped up popular support for the protesting students and allowed Mr Suharto, whose public stance earned him the nickname of “the smiling general”, to overthrow and replace Sukarno.
Mr Suharto has yet to send a wreath to the parents of the six students who were shot in a mysterious incident on Tuesday, just as peaceful student protesters prepared to return to their campus. Nor has any ambitious rival general. But the student killing has proved an eerie rerun of 1966. Except it is worse.
Mr Suharto returned home to a burning capital yesterday. Many of the glass towers that bear testimony to his success in boosting the Indonesian economy stood shattered by stones. Shopping plazas that had reflected the growing prosperity of his citizens had been looted, or turned to blackened ruins, or both; more than 100 people had been burned to death inside one of them, bringing the total number killed in four days of rioting to more than 160.
It is worth remembering, at a time when images of protest and death haunt the world’s screens, that Mr Suharto’s rule has elicited praise in the past. In his 32 years of rule, he has managed to hold together a country of 17,000 islands, with a population of 200m (the world’s fourth largest). He was instrumental in developing the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), which is now a key regional body, and he opened up Indonesia to foreign investment and high economic growth.
Before the past year’s economic collapse, growth in income per head had averaged 4.6% since 1965, increasing per capita income from $270 to $1,080 (in 1996 dollars). What is more, though a small number of families close to the president have enriched themselves mightly, a good deal of the growth has trickled down to the farmers of the most populous islands of Java and Sumatra.
Most of the symbols of Mr Suharto’s economic success, the hospitals and schools, the roads and power stations, are still standing. Even in the midst of economic crisis most Indonesians are clearly better off now than they were when he swept to power. But few in Jakarta still use the honorary title bestowed on him by government propaganda, Father of Development.
Instead, the rioters and student protesters called him “King of Thieves”. They set fire to cars (the Timor and the Bimantara) produced by his sons. They attacked the offices of his daughter, who is both a minister in the cabinet and a prominent businesswoman. They ravaged branches of the country’s largest bank, BCA, jointly owned by two of Mr Suharto’s children and his friend and lifelong business partner, Liem Sioe Liong, one of the several prominent Chinese tycoons who have been closely linked to the president throughout his time in office.
So where did it all start to go wrong? In the west, people point to failed economic policies over many years, leading to overborrowing by Indonesian companies and massive corruption (not least by Mr Suharto’s own family). For Indonesians themselves, however, Mr Suharto appeared to lose his aura of good fortune after the death of his wife in 1996. Her blue blood compensated for his peasant background. And it was she who held the family together. Without her, Mr Suharto has appeared unable to control the business activities of his children, five of whom, plus a half brother, cousin and hundreds more have piggybacked on family ties to build a sprawling business empire that has become Mr Suharto’s biggest liability.
Korrupsie has become the term Indonesians use most often to describe his government. The president has appeared unable to keep it within politically acceptable limits or, it seems, to understand how much it is resented.
That may help explain why foot soldiers, even crack troops, could be seen chatting away with looters. Even if the top brass, mostly hand-picked generals who used to serve as his adjutants, appeared to remain loyal, their hold on the lower ranks seems tenuous. Numerous former aides have joined the opposition and yesterday a faction of Golkar, the obedient political party he set up to dominate parliament, abandoned ship as well.
Mr Suharto still managed a wan smile when news of the riots reached him in Egypt. He is a proud military man and, if he keeps control of the army, he might just succeed in re-imposing order. But it looks unlikely.
The military is only one of Mr Suharto’s sources of support. Even his worst enemies praise his skills in the ancient Javanese art of political patronage and manoeuvering, which have enabled him to take on the air of a pandithu ratu, a wise traditional ruler. “He is much more of a court-based king than a constitutional ruler,” says Heather Sutherland of the University of Amsterdam. “He regards himself as the saviour of the nation.”
Rather like Boris Yeltsin, Mr Suharto is a master in the art of keeping friends and foes guessing. Few Indonesian or foreign observers knew with certainty why he appointed the whimsical B.J. Habibie as his vice-president, and his daughter and other cronies to his new cabinet, or why he wavered between co-operating with and cheating on the International Monetary Fund in eight months of negotiations over the economic crisis.
Even Indonesians were wrong-footed when Mr Suharto toyed with resigning earlier this week. “I could lead from behind,” he said, “I could become a pandita [a sage].” To some, that suggested he was ready to step aside and take on the role of senior statesman, much like Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore and now its senior minister.
But the words may have been disingenuous. “There is a tradition among Javanese leaders to ask their followers, ‘How would you feel if I stepped down?’” says Ong Hok Ham, a prominent historian. “But anyone who would dare tell him to step down will lose his head. So nobody does.”
If Mr Suharto is indeed playing Javanese games in the midst of riots, it would be an extremely risky ploy. “Such remarks should weaken support for him in his inner circle,” one diplomat says. “If the old man is not serious about his job, who is?”
“[Suharto] is very cunning,” concludes Mrs Sutherland. “But not clever enough to realise things have gone too far.”
