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  The conspiracy theories persisted even beyond Suharto’s eventual removal from power. Untung had been close to Suharto. Was he an agent provocateur, perhaps unwittingly? Was Sjam a double agent for the army, pretending to be Aidit’s spy? But why would the army chiefs put their own lives on the line? Suharto later emerged as a masterly political figure, but could he and his staff, at that time, really have conceived and executed a plot so diabolically clever?

  Unless some confession emerges unexpectedly from the Suharto group, John Roosa’s thesis and parallel work by Bradley A. Simpson, drawing on US and British archives, suggests that Suharto was versed in the army’s countercoup planning and promptly put it into action on October 1. Though not trained in America, Suharto would have been fully briefed on Yani’s plans. Before moving into senior commands, he had gone through the indoctrination on civic action and governmental roles under Colonel Suwarto at the staff college in Bandung. He stepped up and pushed Nasution aside.

  By March 1966 Suharto had finessed his political master, Sukarno. On October 2, 1965, he went to meet Sukarno and addressed the army leadership issue head-on. He offered to unwind all the measures he’d taken since the previous morning. Sukarno demurred. The other, less anticommunist general Sukarno had preferred, Pranoto, was given an administrative command (and was later jailed for twelve years by Suharto); Sukarno gave Suharto written orders to “restore order.” It became the mandate he was looking for.

  Backed by student protests organized by the army, Suharto faced down Sukarno and his cabinet at critical points. When ministers met to discuss nationalizing the oil industry in December 1965, Suharto arrived by helicopter, strode in, and warned them against making “precipitous” decisions. In January 1966, under the watchful eye of the Special Forces, the American-educated economists of the University of Indonesia held a seminar over several days outlining their plan to rescue the economy from its collapse. Sukarno responded by announcing his own new cabinet. Demonstrations and counterprotests swept the city, with foreign embassies under attack from different sides. It was orchestrated chaos.

  Sukarno retreated to his palace at Bogor. On March 11, 1966, three of Suharto’s senior generals arrived and handed him a draft letter of decision, transferring all executive powers to Suharto. The terms of the discussion have not been revealed—at least, not in any credible sense. It was what the political scientist Harold Crouch identified as a “disguised coup,” and others as the culmination of a “creeping” encirclement of Sukarno.

  After that, Suharto moved quickly. He banned the PKI formally on March 13 and followed up by arresting fifteen of Sukarno’s ministers, including the most senior, the foreign minister, Subandrio. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX and the wily anticommunist Adam Malik were drafted into an emergency cabinet.

  Through the year, Suharto wound back Sukarnoism. In August he sent word to Malaysia that Konfrontasi was over. A trial of the central bank governor gave him a platform from which to reveal the hidden costs to the state of the president’s amours. The cabinet was broadened to include the University of Indonesia economists, under their former dean, Widjojo Nitisastro. In early 1967 pressure was stepped up to force Sukarno out.

  In March, a thoroughly intimidated and controlled Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly), the repository of sovereign power in the Indonesian system, transferred authority to Suharto as acting president. A year later, the same body voted him into a full presidential term of five years.

  Sukarno was sent into a bitter and lonely retirement. The withdrawal of public attention and contact with crowds, not to mention the four-month separation from his family during a period of interrogation in about 1965—the kesepian, or isolation, that can be a cultural torment for the Javanese—saw his spirit wilt and his body succumb to illness three years later.

  After a terrible transition, which was quickly pushed to the back of their consciousness, the pragmatists, the realists, the exporters, and their Western backers had finally got the kind of leadership for Indonesia they had long wanted.

  3

  The New Order

  As the character of the new regime began to emerge following the imposition of control, the model of Javanese kingship was cast aside by analysts (at least during its early years), and a more recent one applied. As the scholar Ruth McVey has argued, this was the Beamtenstaat, the efficient bureaucratic machine of the later Dutch administration. Replace the titles, and Indonesia’s New Order looked quite like that system: an all-powerful governor-general, an ineffective appointed people’s council, a ruthless military and police, a bureaucracy given a share of the tax farm, a view of the villagers as a passive mass, and an economy geared to exploit extractive export industries in the outer islands.

  From the beginning, Suharto and his generals privately made it clear that there would be no early transfer of power back to civilians, whose messy politics were blamed for the diversion of the revolutionary spirit. But civilian expertise would be enlisted. Sukarno’s incantations were replaced by new, technocratic slogans: “stabilization,” “rehabilitation,” “dynamic stability,” and “twenty-five years of accelerated modernization.”

  Initially, the effort was to stop Indonesia from going into complete economic collapse. Hamengkubuwono IX, the economic expert on Suharto’s initial team, revealed in April 1966 that the nation’s foreign debt service obligations for the year exceeded its expected export earnings. He and Adam Malik toured world capitals to seek new credit and a moratorium on repayments, with some success: lenders either had few prospects of otherwise recovering their money or had strategic interests in helping the new government. The International Monetary Fund set up an office in the central bank, and in February 1967 it, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank began loan programs.

  Hamengkubuwono’s team of advisers included the University of Indonesia economists who had run the army-sponsored seminar in January 1966 and, earlier, been guest lecturers at Seskoad, the army’s staff college in Bandung. Their senior member, Widjojo Nitisastro, and two others, Ali Wardhana and Emil Salim, had all gained their doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley. Others, including J. B. Sumarlin, Subroto, Mohammad Sadli, Radius Prawiro, Frans Seda, and Rachmat Saleh, had done their higher studies elsewhere. But “the Berkeley Mafia” became one sobriquet for this group, who were also known as “the technocrats.” All were to move up into key economic and planning positions. In 1967 they were joined in the government by the former economics dean and PSI politician Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, who had pursued business interests in Singapore and Malaysia after retreating from the 1958 rebellion in Sumatra.

  Through careful control of government spending, credit growth, and the allocation of foreign exchange to industries strangled by a lack of replacement parts and inputs, the technocrats were able to re-expand the economy and rein in inflation. By 1969 real per capita income had gone past the best level previously attained, in the early 1950s. Inflation, which had hit 640 percent over 1966, fell to 10 percent in 1969.

  The regime change also sparked a stampede into Jakarta by foreign banks, oil companies, and miners, manufacturers, and traders. The new ministers were not going to delay things with due diligence or outside policy advice. The New Orleans–based Freeport Minerals virtually wrote its own contract for a copper-gold deposit on a mountaintop in New Guinea, which it had spotted in Dutch geological records. A dozen oil explorers signed production-sharing contracts with the emerging state oil giant Pertamina for the first wells in the Java Sea, and Japanese companies opened textile and car-assembly plants.

  In 1969 Suharto launched the first of successive five-year plans that put special emphasis on improving rice yields, through the introduction of high-yielding varieties and the provision of subsidized urea fertilizer. Another initiative was a family-planning scheme that employed middle-aged women to introduce young village women to contraceptive pills and intra
uterine devices. A moribund program of transmigrasi was revived, to ship landless villagers from Java to cleared jungle areas in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and New Guinea. Through these programs, Suharto began working on the problems neglected by the Ethical Policy of the Dutch. Along with anticommunism, “development” became the second mission and proclaimed base of legitimacy for the New Order.

  But it was not all economics: there was also some clever manipulation of the Javanese courtly tradition and oral literature. The March 11, 1966 letter extracted from Sukarno was given the abbreviated title of Supersemar (an acronym from the Indonesian for “Letter of Decision, 11 March”). This was also a reference to the peasant figure named Semar, introduced by the Javanese as comic counterpoint in their versions of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Along with his sons Gareng, Petruk, and Bagong, the clownish Semar is the repository of great wisdom and common sense, his interventions solving conflicts that baffle the more elevated characters.

  Suharto thus positioned himself as a Semar-like figure, an adviser who did not aspire to compete with Sukarno in charisma or worldliness. He seemed made for the role. Born in June 1921 in a small and impoverished village called Kemusuk, about 12 kilometers west of Yogyakarta, his credentials as a man of the masses were impeccable. His father was a village irrigation official, and his mother a village woman, though she may have descended from a royal concubine at the kraton in Yogyakarta.

  A difficult childhood turned Suharto into an exceptionally withdrawn and scheming character. Only forty days after his birth, his mother disappeared; she was found three days later carrying out a ritual fast in a rice storage shed, suggesting severe postnatal depression. The baby was given to a foster home in the village, and his parents separated and started new families. The boy Suharto went through a childhood in which he was grabbed alternately by his mother’s new household in Kemusuk and that of his father’s sister in a village south of Solo, a day’s journey away. As a teenager, he was placed in the household of a dukun, a practitioner and teacher of Javanese mystical arts and faith healing.

  Even in a Javanese society in which divorce, remarriage, adoption of children, and change of name was common, it was a remarkably disrupted childhood. It created a persona marked by intense self-control of emotion, to avoid shock and suppress pain. By the age of twelve, Suharto was later to assert, he had adopted the attitude of aja kagetan, aja gumunan, aja dumeh (don’t be startled, don’t feel overwhelmed by anything, don’t feel superior). He also became immersed in the mystical practices of Java, a mixture of animism and Hinduism, although his limited formal schooling—to middle grades—came from the modernist Islamic organization Muhammadiyah. Thus, he knew the legends of Java inside out.

  Behind a normally stern countenance, broken by a wide smile when trying to win support in small group settings, Suharto was intelligent and tough. After a spell as a bank employee, he signed up for the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army in June 1940, when it stepped up recruiting in the face of the Japanese, and rose to the rank of sergeant. After the Dutch collapse, he joined the Japanese auxiliary force, PETA, rising to become one of its trusted officers at the company-commander level by 1945.

  In Yogyakarta after the surrender, Suharto was made a battalion commander in the new Indonesian republican forces. His reputation as a fighting soldier grew after clashes with the British forces trying to extricate European civilian ex-internees. A marriage was arranged with Siti Hartinah, known as Tien, who came from the lower echelons of the priyayi class, thanks to descent from Solo’s junior royal house, the Mangkunegaran. In December 1948, when the Dutch army seized Yogyakarta in its second police action, Suharto withdrew his troops south of the city. He is said to have meditated in the caves frequented over a century earlier by the rebel prince Diponegoro, imbibing his spirit, and to have slipped into the city incognito to note the Dutch positions and to contact the sultan, Hamengkubuwono, the only republican leader not arrested by the Dutch.

  On March 1, 1949, Suharto led his troops in a surprise attack on the city at 6:00 a.m., holding central positions for six hours until pushed out by Dutch reinforcements. His “six hours in Yogya” would later become the stuff of hagiography, in writing and in film, its importance in the independence struggle inflated.

  In the postindependence army, Suharto had risen steadily to command the Central Java division, which had its headquarters in Semarang. After a short career interruption in 1959, when his commodity-smuggling activities in alliance with local Chinese merchants got him pulled out to the Bandung staff college during a crackdown by General Nasution, he rose steadily through higher commands. His roles in the military side of the New Guinea campaign and in running the army’s ambivalent involvement in Konfrontasi helped him build a body of loyal and pragmatic officers, who followed him into Kostrad and then into building the political-security side of the New Order. They included his intelligence chief, Yoga Sugama, and Ali Murtopo, the head of a political warfare unit called Opsus (from Operasi Khusus, or Special Operations), the young special forces officer Benny Murdani, the navy officer Sudomo, and a paymaster with mystical inclinations, Sujono Humardhani.

  Having cloaked all his maneuvers against Sukarno with “constitutionality,” Suharto was left with little choice but to keep the existing political institutions and move ahead with the long-delayed elections. The 1945 constitution provided an excellent setting for authoritarian rule, particularly as it was quite vague about the electoral process and composition of the legislatures. Through an election law passed in 1969, the numbers in the standing parliament, the DPR, were set at 360 elected members and one hundred appointees, and of the latter seventy-five from the military. These were included in the higher assembly, the MPR, which made the presidential appointment and which had more presidential appointees within its 460 members. Elections were now set for 1971.

  As well as pursuing a quiet détente with Malaysia, and later orchestrating the “Act of Free Choice” in New Guinea, Opsus, with its mixture of former Special Forces officers and civilian operatives, turned its attention to bringing the noncommunist parties into line.

  A manipulated congress of the PNI in April 1966 saw the old left-wing Sukarnoist leadership of former prime minister Ali Sastroamidjojo replaced by a highly conservative one that included an old Suharto ally and business partner from Semarang, the city’s former mayor Hadisubeno Sosrowerdojo. At a PNI convention three years later in Semarang, delegates were warned beforehand by their local military commanders to vote Hadisubeno into the chairmanship, with Ali Murtopo and his operatives directing the event from a nearby “command center.” Hadisubeno was duly elected.

  The modernist Muslims regrouped under a new party, Partai Muslimin Indonesia (Parmusi, Indonesian Muslim Party), but leading figures from the old Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia (Masyumi, Council of Indonesian Muslim Associations) remained banned from political life. In 1970 Parmusi also came in for Murtopo’s attention, getting his associate John Naro and a contentious Suharto minister, Mintaredja, installed as leaders. They promptly watered down the party’s policies, abandoning support for the Jakarta Charter requiring Muslims to follow Syari’ah law. A third intervention saw a government-supported ticket under the nationalist publisher B. M. Diah installed to head the Indonesian Journalists’ Association, pushing out a team of editors who advocated a more independent role for the press as a fourth estate of the polity.

  The New Order now required its own political vehicle to enter the contest. It found it in the idea of a golongan karya (functional group), first floated by Sukarno in 1957 in his search for something to augment or replace the squabbling parties. Instead of one class striving to dominate another through political parties, or the constant adversarial clashes of the “Western” political process, Indonesia was more suited to an “organic” system, in which each class and occupational group was respected and content in its position, and each contributed to the overall good.

 
The army, under Nasution, had responded enthusiastically to the idea, to the point that Sukarno himself backpedaled, but Nasution had persisted. In the plantations and factories it controlled, the army-sponsored Golongan Karya (Golkar, Functional Groups) movement promoted an alternative labor organization, using the term karyawan (staff) rather than buruh (worker) to suggest that managers and employees had a common interest. It moved into a niche between capitalism and the state, forming ties with the cooperative movement Kosgoro (Kesatuan Organisasi Serbaguna Gotong Royong, Federation of Miscellaneous Mutual-Aid Organizations).

  The idea of a movement based on dutiful participation, rather than activism, appealed to the “small-town Java” and military mind-set of Suharto’s inner group. It also drew in some of the former Catholic student activists who had joined the struggle to overthrow Sukarno and the PKI. The “corporatist” idea of the state as a family had been a strong element of political thinking in Rome since the late nineteenth century. In 1970 the government ruled that all state employees had to observe “monoloyalty” to Golkar. Effectively, this meant the entire bureaucratic apparatus was a contestant in elections, which it was supposed to run fairly.

  An additional buttress came from the military, even though it was meant to be apolitical and had its own appointees to the DPR and MPR. The military’s “territorial” structure had been extended under Suharto, all the way down to the posting of sergeants in villages. Over two-thirds of provincial governors and half of all bupati (heads of regencies or large rural districts) and city mayors were military officers.

  The relentless official support and lavish resources, plus some positive appeal as the vehicle of modernization and development, gained Golkar 62.8 percent of the vote in the 1971 elections. The PNI won just 6.9 percent, and Parmusi less than 5 percent. The unreconstructed NU, the league of traditional Javanese Muslims, was the rock of resistance, gaining 18.4 percent of the vote—almost the same as its result in the only previous election, in 1955.