An all-consuming family man
Stefaans Brmmer
When Indonesians celebrated 40 years of freedom from Dutch colonial rule in 1985, the independence day parade was led by a float depicting President Suharto driving the tractor of his country’s economic progress. Thousands of school children sang a specially composed hymn to the “Father of Development”, an official title.
Twelve years on, 76-year-old Dad is still firmly in the driving seat of Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country; it’s well over 10 000 islands home to 200- million people from perhaps 300 ethnic communities.
Suharto has reversed the political and economic decay he inherited three decades ago when he effectively deposed his predecessor Sukarno. Ambitious development initiatives, backed by booming oil revenues, lifted Indonesia from grinding poverty to become an industrialising member of the world’s lower-middle-income countries.
But Suharto’s patriarchal rule has brought a system based on a near-unrivalled mix of patronage and bloody repression. “Mobutu Sese Seko” jumps to mind, but for that detail of an economy that actually works.
Suharto has often emphasised the need for politics to be practised in a “family-like” atmosphere. But some families are clearly more equal than others.
Four of Suharto’s kids help daddy control a sizeable chunk of the nation’s wealth. Said one diplomat: “[The children] have got their hands stuck to everything … You can’t do anything in this country without a brown envelope.”
The envelopes are often metaphorical. Foreign investors have to find local partners with access to the throne. Invariably, the local company is owned by the first family or a crony. Claimed one Indonesian opposition politician: “The local company doesn’t do anything. It just gets commission.”
The Suharto business empire encompasses hundreds of companies with stakes in everything from the lucrative oil and natural gas sector to the media, air transport, roads, automobiles and consumables. Some estimates say the family controls wealth of around R150-billion.
Some predict that the children will yet become Suharto’s and Indonesia’s biggest headache. Indonesia has not been spared the slump in East Asian markets, a crisis some analysts argue has its roots in exactly the kind of inefficiency encouraged by rampant patronage. And the succession battle, likely to have to be decided in the next five years, will be complicated by the desire of the younger Suhartos to protect what they have.
The stepchildren of Suharto’s Indonesia have been the people of occupied East Timor and various undesirables. Previously a Portuguese colony, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Suharto’s troops and later annexed. Indonesian spin doctors like to portray this as a re-unification, but little does this explain why a third of the territory’s inhabitants – an estimated 200 000 people – died from military activity and disruption to agriculture.
But even more bloody were the murky events that brought Suharto to power. By 1965 the Indonesian Communist Party had grown to be the largest outside the Soviet Union and China. A group of left-wing military officers murdered six generals they accused of planning a coup against Suharto’s charismatic predecessor Sukarno. Suharto, then a well-decorated major-general, and other right-wing officers went on a counter-offensive, accusing the left-wing officers of plotting their own coup.
Suharto led the offensive, presiding over wholesale chaos in which communists, their sympathisers and families were hounded down. As many as a million people died in four months. Suharto was in effective control and Sukarno had to make way. On his formal ascendancy to the presidency in 1967, Suharto’s official CV simply says: “Appointed Acting President by Decree No XXXIII/1967.”
There have been other outrages, but none on the same scale. In 1983, shot-up bodies began to litter the streets of Yogyakarta, Suharto’s home town. Soon it emerged they were recently released prisoners. Thousands died in these anti-crime pogroms. Suharto is reported to have denied at first that the state was involved, but to have later confirmed he had personally authorised it. “We needed to have our own treatment, firm measures.”
Indonesian diplomats have often insisted that human-rights practices are improving. But they also insist there are standards for human rights other than the Western. Indeed, democracy in Indonesia remains something that hardly resembles the Western model. Since 1973, only two opposition parties have been allowed by Suharto’s regime.
Recently, the military “deposed” Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno, as head of one of these, the Indonesian Democratic Party. There is only one approved trade union federation; freedom of speech and access to the media are limited; and political opponents still find themselves at the receiving end of harsh security and judicial procedures.
Yet, Suharto has remained on friendly terms with many Western leaders – a black sheep, yes, but not expelled from the flock. The countries of the West – and especially Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – have over the years lavished large endowments of aid and weaponry on his country. Suharto, slayer of communists and stabiliser of the world’s fourth-largest nation, played his Cold War cards well.
Vital Statistics
Born: June 8 1921 in Yogyakarta, the Dutch colonial capital
Ambition: What remains to a man who has ruled the world’s fourth-largest nation for three decades and heads one of the wealthiest families in the world?
Favourite car: Sooo hard to choose. There are the saloon cars manufactured by son Bambang; there is Indonesia’s “national car”, imported from South Korea by younger son Tommy; and then the trustworthy old Mercedes, whose local agency somehow ties in with the family business
Favourite people: The kids – and Nelson Mandela, of course. Why else write Mandela a rumoured $10-million cheque for the ANC’s election coffers?