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  The New Order’s political strategists moved to tidy up further. One of Suharto’s more thoughtful loyalist generals, Widodo, came up with the concept that the population should be a “floating mass” between elections, going about the hard work of development without distraction from parties. A law in 1975 put this into effect, banning parties from organizing below regency level. Another fiat in 1973 had already railroaded the non-Golkar parties into two new “factions.” The PNI was amalgamated with several smaller nationalist and Christian parties into the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI, Indonesian Democratic Party), and the Muslim parties, including the NU, into the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, Development Unity Party).

  A pattern of manipulated electoral democracy was established for the remainder of the New Order, with the Golkar majority varying, mostly upward, from the level set in 1971. Candidates were screened by government panels for “subversive” tendencies. The military’s internal security command, known as Kopkamtib, wielded unchecked powers of arrest and detention. The parliament became an echo chamber, in a system that one Golkar founder likened to the Vatican: the pope chooses the cardinals, and the cardinals choose the pope.

  Communism in Indonesia had vanished. The army had quickly detected attempts by PKI remnants to regroup and wage “people’s war” from remote rural areas of East Java. All were quelled by 1968. In West Kalimantan, party elements merged into the substantial population of Chinese gold miners, timber and rubber traders, and other settlers. The army stirred up a racial vendetta among the indigenous Dayaks, who slaughtered hundreds of Chinese and drove 50,000 into the towns, thus removing the population in which guerrillas had operated. Until 1979, the army kept some 30,000 former sympathizers of the PKI, including intellectuals like the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in prison settlements on Buru, an island in the Moluccas, and on Nusakambangan, an island close to the south coast of Java. They and hundreds of thousands of others remained noncitizens, barred from political activity and voting.

  By the early 1970s, many of the former students of 1965–66 and many older proponents of open democracy and free speech were parting company with the government. Protests and newspaper articles criticized the patrimonial style of Suharto’s rule, his links to ethnic Chinese businessmen dubbed cukong (from a Fujian word for “boss”), his reliance on foreign investors, and the enrichment of his family circle through government favors. In 1971 he responded by saying that the campaign was aimed at kicking the military back to the barracks. His response would be the same as in 1965: to “smash” any opposition.

  In late 1973 the chief of Kopkamtib, General Sumitro, undertook a dialogue with the critics, which seemed to Suharto loyalists to be the start of a campaign to undermine the president. As Ali Murtopo and another presidential adviser, the financier-cum-mystic Sujono Humardhani, were also being criticized (the latter for his links with Japanese investors), this dialogue became intensely personal for Murtopo’s people. A visit by the Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka in January 1974 brought matters to a head. Protests erupted into rioting across Jakarta, with the Toyota dealership and other Japanese symbols set ablaze.

  The Malari affair, as it became known (from Malapetaka Januari, or “January Calamity”), was the moment when Suharto showed his authoritarian colors for good. Sumitro was replaced as Kopkamtib chief by the longtime naval aide Sudomo, now holding admiral’s rank. Several liberal newspapers were closed, and their editors barred from practicing journalism under the licensing system run by the Information Ministry. Among the hundreds arrested were the lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution and the editor Mochtar Lubis.

  This political crisis was followed within a year by a new economic one, when it was discovered that the state oil corporation, Pertamina, had run up $10 billion in debt, much of it in short-term loans, and also had contingent liabilities in oil tanker charters, commissioning of petrochemical works, and a new industrial base at Batam Island. That was equivalent to a third of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) at the time. Pertamina’s entrepreneurial chief, Lieut-General Ibnu Sutowo, was sacked in 1976, and Suharto squeezed Caltex and other oil companies for a higher split of production.

  That year Suharto also faced an unexpected challenge from a quarter he had long regarded as his own resource, the stream of Javanese mysticism known as Kepercayaan (belief) or Kebatinan (inwardness). The son-in-law of a retired police general running the official organization for Kebatinan followers, and by then a middle-aged official in the Ministry of Agriculture, Sawito Kartowibowo had been touring the places in Java where mystical forces are said to be concentrated. After a night’s meditation on a sacred mountain, he claimed to have found a stone engraved with his image, convincing him that the wahyu was descending to make him a new ratu adil.

  In 1976 Sawito made a series of calls on eminent figures, including the former vice president Hatta, the Catholic cardinal for Indonesia, a well-known general heading the council of the Protestant church, and a police general, Hugeng, who was widely known as having been sacked in 1971 for busting a well-connected smuggling operation at Tanjung Priok, Jakarta’s port (as well as enormously popular for his ukulele band, the Hawaiian Seniors). Sawito got many of these figures to sign a petition, titled “Toward Salvation,” criticizing the moral decay of the government. To this, Sawito attached his own call for Suharto to hand power to Hatta.

  The episode gave Jakarta journalists and the scholar Onghokham an opening to explore Javanese mysticism and Suharto’s use and abuse of it. On the government side, it was all taken very seriously, and Sawito was given eight years in jail. “From the rational point of view the Sawito case is just a comedy,” Ali Murtopo observed. “However, from the irrational point of view . . .”

  The 1965 alliance of army and rural Muslims against the PKI was long over. Mosques and pesantren remained the only local centers of power the government could not fully control, though they were kept under constant watch and their activists frequently arrested and beaten. Ahead of the 1977 elections, Opsus undertook a spoiling action, following an agent-provocateur strategy inspired by the 1965 events and by the agency’s successful fomenting of civil war in Portuguese Timor in 1975.

  One of its top operatives, Colonel Pitut Suharto, had long cultivated the remnants of the Darul Islam movement in West Java. He may have helped kindle the flames of the Malari fires, as truckloads of young Muslim hotheads from West Java were seen joining the riots. In late 1976 and early 1977, there were explosions at a Baptist hospital in West Sumatra and at nightclubs in Medan. Threats and attacks were made against the PPP. The arrest of a Jakarta student for allegedly preparing an incendiary device for use against officially tolerated dens of sin was the forerunner of a wave of arrests in the weeks before the elections. Those arrested were said to be members of a new organization, Komando Jihad (Holy War Command), which was set on reviving the Darul Islam campaign for an Islamic state. The hands of Pitut Suharto and Opsus could be seen.

  The 1977 election was a repeat of the Golkar victory, with its vote down slightly to 62.1 percent. The PDI won just 8.9 percent, and the PPP a sizeable 29.3 percent, thanks to the inclusion of the NU. In 1978 Suharto was duly sworn in for a third five-year term, amid student protests that were quelled with ease.

  Many of the president’s former allies had now distanced themselves. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX declined a second term as vice president. Liberal-democratic figures and Western-minded generals had been bought off with ambassadorships or other posts, or simply frozen out. Suharto didn’t care. He had survived the Malari challenge, kept the Islamists in a box, handled the Pertamina crisis, and brought Portuguese Timor into the nation. He’d also come through a prostate operation in the United States. High oil prices were sustaining Indonesia’s economic growth at close to 8 percent a year. When unusually bold foreign visitors asked about succession plans or the regime’s evolution, Suharto appeared baffled by how anyone could think of such things.

/>   The continuing high oil prices allowed a reassertion of domestic business empire building. In the state sector, it came from the Ministry of Industries, usually headed by an army general rather than an economist, and from a new figure in the Suharto entourage, technology minister Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie.

  As a young teenager, the half-Makassarese, half-Javanese Habibie had become a protégé of Suharto while the general was on assignment in South Sulawesi. He had gone on to study aeronautical engineering in Germany and had risen high in the aircraft manufacturer Messcherschmidt-Bölkow-Blohm’s (MBB) ranks. In the mid-1970s Suharto and Pertamina’s Ibnu Sutowo enticed him home with the promise of whatever resources he needed for new ventures. Habibie started with an aircraft factory, building a twin-engine turboprop transport of Spanish design and an MBB-designed helicopter. The aircraft were flyable but much more expensive than direct imports from the original makers, as the local civil and military customers grumbled. They had little choice, however, as did the Ministry of Finance, which was pumping money into Habibie’s venture. “First we have to pay him to build the aircraft,” the economic minister, Radius Prawiro, was wont to comment. “Then we have to pay the full price for it.” Habibie would also take over the money-hemorrhaging state steel enterprise, Krakatau, built by a German industrial group under corruption-shrouded contracts.

  Suharto’s circle of relatives, the army, and business allies from Semarang had flourished from the start of the New Order. The army’s holding company, Tri Usaha Bhakti, was given control of forests in Kalimantan, where it granted logging leases in return for 35 percent equity as a sleeping partner. Other companies and foundations belonging to the various armed services and their divisions became partners in hotels, construction, and automobile assembly. Government contracts were inflated to allow generous kickbacks to figures in the regime.

  Liem Sioe Liong, who had migrated from Fujian in southern China in 1938 to become a trader in Semarang, was the most notorious of the cukong around Suharto, try as he might to dispel hostility by taking an Indonesian name, Sudono Salim. His two banks in the Chinese-dominated commercial sector of Jakarta, known as Kota (notably Bank Central Asia), became the core of a rapidly expanding conglomerate.

  Smuggling across Dutch and civil-war lines in the 1940s and 1950s had given Salim a keen appreciation of Indonesians’ addiction to the clove-flavored cigarettes known as kretek, the most popular brands of which were manufactured in towns near Semarang. With domestic production in a shambles, in 1968 the government gave control of clove imports from Zanzibar and Madagascar to a firm owned by Salim and to another owned by Suharto’s younger half-brother Probosutedjo. The domestic selling price to kretek factories was set at about twice the buying price in the Indian Ocean islands. In 1970 Salim’s company, Bogasari, gained exclusive rights to flour milling and wholesaling in Java, Sumatra, and the southeastern islands, and he later pioneered a global instant-noodle market through the brand Indomie. A cousin of Suharto, Sudwikatmono, gained a small shareholding in Bogosari.

  Salim now expanded into other sectors, like cement and property, in partnership with other canny migrants from Fujian. In return for import protection and domestic monopolies, he was expected to put his money into various state projects favored by Suharto, including a steel-rolling mill attached to Krakatau, and expansion of sugar and rice production. When his businesses ran into short-term difficulties from time to time, state banks were ready with capital injections. The symbiotic relationship of Suharto and Salim—business acumen provided by one partner, political clearances and protection by the other—became the model for similar relationships between military commanders and local ethnic Chinese businessmen down the line.

  The genteel enterprises of Suharto’s wife (which gained her the widespread and probably unfair nickname “Madame Ten Percent”), the placement of Mangkunegaran-connected figures in various high offices, and the cuts given to Suharto’s brother and cousin were overtaken by the business activities of the six Suharto children. An early starter was the eldest son, Sigit Haryoyudanto, who emerged as partner in a cargo airline, Bayu Air, financed by a 5 percent levy on all air cargo shipments in and out of Indonesia. In 1982 the second son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, set up his Bimantara group with lucrative contracts from Pertamina. The two brothers gained an import monopoly on the import of plastics in 1984.

  The oldest of the sisters, Siti Hardijanti Rukmana, or Tutut, set up the Citra Lamtoro Gung group with her husband and two younger sisters in 1983, later gaining a share of the cash flow from Java’s burgeoning toll-road network and its first private television license. The brash youngest son, Hutomo Mandala Putra, or Tommy, set up his Humpuss group at age twenty-two in 1984, with the help of exclusive trading rights for certain key petrochemical products. With another ethnic Chinese businessman from Semarang, the timber and plywood tycoon Mohamad “Bob” Hasan, Tommy later gained the first private airline license, among many other ventures.

  The collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s strengthened the hand of the technocrats in rolling back some of the more egregious monopolies and price-fixing, which was sending a cascade of cost increases through the economy. Indonesia had to diversify its exports quickly, especially into manufacturing and agribusiness. In 1988 the government announced sweeping reforms to open up banking and the stock market, liberalized steel imports and interisland shipping, and most dramatically removed the plastics import monopoly enjoyed by a firm controlled by Suharto’s cousin Sudwikatmono and sons Sigit and Bambang. This had been raising the cost of inputs to local manufacturers by 15 to 20 percent, without any clear reason beyond enriching the family members. The reforms quickly galvanized investment in manufacturing, making Indonesia an important base for global supply chains in items such as shoes, clothing, and luggage.

  The New Order political system continued its five-year election ritual, with Suharto standing again and again for the presidency. But while the official Muslim party was even more dispirited after being forced to abandon its potent symbol of the Ka’abah, the black granite focus of worship at the center of Mecca, the broader ummat was stirring across Indonesia.

  The post-1965 political suppression had turned religious activists to dakwah, the spreading and deepening of faith and Islamic study. Many thousands of new mosques and religious schools appeared. People were turning to religion for moral guidance in their rapidly changing lives, taking on the outward symbols of faith, like prayer caps and headscarves, and peppering their speech with Koranic phrases. A similar thing was happening in the Christian churches, in some cases involving people who might earlier have had nationalist or communist involvement. Suharto himself quietly abandoned his identification with Kebatinan and became more Islamic in style, making the minor pilgrimage to Mecca in 1977.

  Muslim thinkers and proselytizers were now becoming more assertive. In 1984 an alleged intrusion by soldiers wearing their boots into a mosque at Tanjung Priok started a protest, which was fired on by army troops, killing dozens of people and sparking riots. In 1989 the army viewed a group that was protesting land grabs in Lampung, South Sumatra, as a secret fundamentalist camp and massacred one hundred men, women, and children in a raid.

  The president adopted a familiar strategy of cooption, though his master at the game, Ali Murtopo, had died in 1984. In 1990 Suharto commissioned Habibie to set up the Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim Indonesia (ICMI, Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals), which had free rein to canvass views on how to insert an Islamic perspective into state policies, with the help of a well-funded think tank and a new newspaper, Republika. Who was using whom was a moot question, as Muslim activists, like others, were becoming conscious of Suharto’s advancing years.

  The president showed no sign of bowing out, however, gaining reelection in 1993. Having made the full pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991, he now presented himself as Hajji Mohammed Suharto, and his daughters began appearing in headscarves. There was no modification of hi
s defense of the family businesses: they had as much right as anyone else to engage in commerce, not mentioning the unique favors they enjoyed.

  Benny Murdani, the former Special Forces hero, had been promoted to armed forces chief in 1983. Murdani warned Suharto in 1988 about the effect on public opinion of the children’s activities, counting on what he thought was an intimate, decades-old friendship. He was promptly sidelined to a powerless position, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the Jakarta think tank whose sponsorship he had inherited from Ali Murtopo, lost its former direct influence.

  In 1992 Suharto forced the Netherlands out of a foreign aid consortium, the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia, after its government reacted to the Santa Cruz massacre of protesters in East Timor the previous year by insisting on new human rights standards as a condition of aid. The other donors meekly acquiesced.

  In 1993 the president abruptly dropped Prawiro, Sumarlin, and Mooy, three of the top technocrats who had been with him since 1966, putting a Japanese-trained engineer and economic nationalist, Ginanjar Kartasasmita, at the head of the agency at the center of the technocrats’ policy making, Bappenas, the National Development Planning Agency. They departed without thanks. In a new ghostwritten autobiography, Suharto was similarly ungraceful to other former supporters. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX was written out of the story of the March 1, 1949, “general attack” in Yogyakarta. The late assistant Sujono Humardhani was dismissed as a source of spiritual counsel: Suharto had in fact been the guru in the relationship. Habibie praised Suharto’s mastery of Arabic and Islamic teaching: it was worth three doctorates, he said. Suharto’s style of rule was now widely described as “sultanistic.”

  The armed forces came under the leadership of a younger breed of commanders, many of whom, including General Feisal Tanjung, were from the Special Forces. They were known for applying harsh, aggressive methods during counterinsurgencies in Aceh, Papua, and Timor. In 1983–85, the Kopassus (Special Forces) carried out summary executions of street thugs who, Suharto felt, had been getting out of hand. The commandos killed about 5,000 of these preman (a word derived from the Dutch for “free man,” referring to masterless people allowed to stay in Batavia) and left the bodies for the public to view. At the time, these were officially petrus (from the Indonesian for “mysterious killings”); years later, Suharto admitted they were “treatment” for rampant crime that he had approved.