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  Some of the army officer corps were being tinged as a “green” (or Islamic) faction, while others inclined to an early leadership succession. Suharto felt it wise to keep key positions in family hands. He made a brother-in-law, General Wismoyo Arismunandar, the army chief, while his son-in-law Prabowo Subianto (a son of the former trade minister Sumitro Djojohadikusumo) gained rapid promotion to head Kopassus and then Kostrad. His former palace aides-de-camp, Generals Try Sutrisno, Hartono, and Wiranto, also moved into the top commands (and later, in Try’s case, the vice presidency). In 1993 Suharto’s longtime information minister, Harmoko, was made head of Golkar, with the president’s daughter, Tutut, as one of his deputies and son Bambang as treasurer.

  Indonesia entered a period of excess. Tommy Suharto, after winning a stunningly destructive new monopoly over domestic and foreign clove supplies, was granted approval to start a new “national car” project, which turned out to be nothing more than the low-duty import of fully assembled Kia cars from South Korea. Habibie’s newest high-tech enterprise was to develop a naval shipbuilding capability by buying up the entire navy of the defunct East German state and bringing it back for refurbishment in Surabaya. Despite the reluctance of the Indonesian navy to have its funding spent on unsuitable ships, Suharto gave the venture tax-exempt status. The new banking and stock market freedom, in the absence of sound credit controls, set off a borrowing spree in foreign currencies for speculative property investments in shopping malls and apartments and for company takeovers.

  From this febrile political setting, two figures emerged as poles of independent political influence. Both inherited the mantles of famous fathers who’d held important places in Indonesia’s short history and their deep-rooted constituencies.

  Abdurrahman Wahid, known widely as “Gus Dur,” was the son of the republic’s first minister for religious affairs, Wahid Hasyim, and grandson of the NU’s founder. After returning from studying in Cairo and Baghdad during the 1960s, Wahid had moved—by natural succession, it seemed—into the NU leadership (hence the first part of his nickname, a diminution of the Javanese title for a prince). From his wide reading and education under the liberal remnants of Ottoman religious scholarship, Wahid displayed a pluralistic outlook to religious affairs and a highly flexible approach to politics, and was alternately inside and outside the Suharto tent.

  In 1984 Wahid led the NU out of the umbrella Muslim party, saying it was returning to its roots as a social and religious organization. The PPP’s share of the vote would consequently plummet—from 28 percent in 1982 to just 16 percent in 1987. Later in 1984, when the government announced that all parties would have to take the Pancasila as their ideological foundation, Wahid rode with the new rule, declaring that Pancasila was a “noble compromise” for Muslims.

  When the government set up the Muslim intellectuals’ group ICMI in 1990, Wahid responded by calling together a Democracy Forum, which included several leading secular figures and a number of well-known Christian thinkers. He became a firm critic of the ICMI, consistently arguing that it overemphasized the alleged backwardness of the Muslim community and advantages of other religious groups, and thus tended to promote an intolerant version of Islam that would ultimately lead to calls for an Islamic state. In March 1992, ahead of that year’s parliamentary elections, Wahid mounted a mass rally of NU members in Jakarta itself. It was attended by hundreds of thousands, even though army roadblocks prevented many from reaching the capital.

  Later, Wahid was bluntly warned by Prabowo Subianto, the president’s son-in-law and then commander of one of the four Kopassus combat groups, to endorse a new term for Suharto. Wahid demurred and later let it be known he might resign the NU leadership instead—a prospect that threatened turmoil across Java. The government backed off but in 1994 promoted an opposition group within the NU that got a rival board elected. Yet Wahid remained the authentic voice of the organization in most eyes.

  The PDI, meanwhile, was proving more difficult to control. Its government-approved leader, Suryadi, ran a more inspired campaign in 1992, calling for a constitutional limit on the number of presidential terms and portraying his party as the inheritor of Sukarno’s concern for the common man, epitomized in the founding president’s epiphany upon meeting a Sundanese peasant named Marhaen.

  Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri had been brought into the party’s parliamentary ranks in 1987, along with her husband, Taufik Kiemas, and they proved a great crowd puller. In 1992 they were joined as candidates by her younger brother, Guruh Sukarnoputra, by then a well-known choreographer and leader of the rock band Swara Mahardhika (Voice of Freedom). That Suharto had generously provided for the Megawati-Taufik household by allocating them a chain of Pertamina petrol stations did not abate their criticism of the president’s nepotistic practices.

  At that year’s parliamentary elections, the PDI vote jumped from 10.9 percent to 14.9 percent, at the expense of Golkar, and Megawati joined a group of PDI members of parliament who were calling on the party to nominate a presidential candidate to challenge Suharto. Suryadi rejected this provocative move, but his electoral success worried the government. Preman directed by the home minister, General Yogie Memet, literally crashed a party convention in Medan the next year, driving a Jeep-type vehicle through the front door and taking over proceedings. Suryadi’s position was ruled invalid by Yogie, and an extraordinary PDI congress ordered for later in the year.

  At this meeting in Surabaya, an overwhelming majority of PDI branches backed Megawati over the home minister’s preferred candidate. Yogie’s acting board members tried to stave off a vote by disappearing from the podium until the permitted time for the meeting had expired. Megawati declared herself elected, and her position was reinforced when army commanders allowed a “national consultation” of PDI opinion, held later in Jakarta, to endorse her position.

  Megawati had used her characteristic placidity to great effect. Her silences implied restrained anguish at what was going on. Ahead of the Surabaya meeting, the launch of a quickly compiled booklet of her thoughts drew an audience of old nationalist notables, human rights advocates, and family of the dumped military figure Benny Murdani. The booklet’s most evocative image, as the political scientist Angus McIntyre has noted, was that of peasants displaced from their land to make way for golf courses and luxury housing estates.

  In the tradition of other political daughters—Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, India’s Indira Gandhi, Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina Rahman, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi—Megawati symbolized a pure distillation of the father’s legend, at least before attaining political power. Against a background of constant harassment of her party branches by Yogie and the armed forces commander Feisal Tanjung, which included frequent allegations of communist infiltration, she spoke out against a climate of “fear” and made clear she was planning to stand for president in 1997–8.

  Under Suharto’s orders, his generals began trying to stir a party revolt in favor of a new party congress. In June 1996 a staged congress in Medan voted out Megawati, bringing Suryadi back. She ignored this and continued to speak defiantly from the party headquarters in Jakarta. In July mobs of preman attacked the building, as the Jakarta garrison forces stood by. Among them were members of the army-supported Pemuda Pancasila, by then led nationally by Yapto Soerjosoemarno, the son of an army general friendly to the Suhartos. Between five and twenty people died in the attack and the subsequent protests, while dozens of arrested activists vanished, presumed killed in custody.

  Megawati’s strategy thereafter was to embarrass the government with a string of lawsuits against government and army figures, unlikely as they were to succeed. The same strategy had been pursued by the publisher and writer Goenawan Mohamad, after the respected weekly Tempo was shut down in 1994 for criticizing Habibie’s purchase of the East German navy. In counterpoint, a section of the Pemuda Pancasila sued the new PDI chief, Suryadi, for underpayment of their agree
d fee for storming the party office.

  Meanwhile, the government had cracked the whip over its Muslim “intellectuals.” The PPP parliamentarian Sri Bintang Pamungkas called Suharto a “dictator” while in Germany. He was expelled from the ICMI and the parliament and jailed under a surviving Dutch-era lese-majesty law and a Sukarno-era subversion law. Amien Rais, the head of the modernist Muhammadiyah movement, criticized the foreign ownership levels of Freeport and other mining ventures. He was also expelled from the ICMI.

  Wahid decided that the survival of the NU was at stake and announced that the organization would support Suharto’s reelection. Early in 1997, Wahid took Tutut on a tour of pesantren in Java, giving his backing to Golkar. With Megawati announcing a boycott of the election, the Suryadi-led PDI’s vote dropped to a humiliating 3 percent. Golkar won a record vote of nearly 75 percent. It was soon meaningless.

  Signs of the government losing control were appearing across the archipelago, with attacks on Christian churches in many towns and a headhunting sweep by Dayaks in Kalimantan against transmigrant settlers from Madura. Within two months, the bursting of financial bubbles across Asia, starting in Thailand, led to an accelerating fall in the Indonesian rupiah. An infusion of International Monetary Fund (IMF) funding in October added to the financial panic, especially when it was clear that Suharto was exempting family-connected banks and projects from austerity measures. His new budget, in January 1998, was based on transparently unrealistic assumptions about the rupiah’s value and inflation. After sitting at 2,500 to the US dollar in May 1997, the currency dropped to 14,800 at the end of January 1998. Indonesian companies and state enterprises had no hope of servicing the estimated $40 billion in short-term loans set in dollars and yen. Share prices on the Jakarta stock exchange dropped to a fraction of their previous levels. Business shutdowns put millions in the formal sector of the economy out of work.

  Suharto continued blithely to prepare for a seventh uncontested term as president. Trusted army figures were moved up: Wiranto to commander of the armed forces, and Prabowo to Kostrad chief. In March the MPR met and unanimously voted Suharto into a new term, with Habibie as vice president. Suharto then announced a new cabinet stacked with loyalists, including Tutut as social welfare minister and his busy crony Bob Hasan as trade and industry minister.

  Protests intensified in mid-May 1998, as the government applied an IMF-mandated cut in fuel subsidies. Army snipers killed four students at Trisakti University in Jakarta, setting off a wave of demonstrations that was beyond control.

  Suharto loyalists had already stirred up anti-Chinese sentiment. Tutut had blamed them for the failure of her “I Love the Rupiah” drive. Feisal Tanjung had called the Sino-Indonesian conglomerates “unpatriotic” for moving capital out of Indonesia. Another general had warned: “It’s time to eradicate these rats.” Now mobs attacked Chinese businesses in the Kota district, burning shops and homes, and gang-raping many women. The office of Salim’s Bank Central Asia and the tycoon’s home were gutted. Foreigners and ethnic Chinese were soon packing flights to Singapore.

  Delegations of leading figures went to Suharto’s residence to persuade him to step down. He tried to offer political reforms and fresh elections, suggesting that Habibie was not up to the job, should he resign. His former loyal information lieutenant Harmoko, now the parliament’s speaker, joined the resignation calls and then threatened impeachment if Suharto did not. Another loyalist, the economic minister Ginanjar Kartasasmita, and thirteen other ministers said they would refuse to join a new cabinet. Having received assurances from General Wiranto that he and his family would be protected, Suharto made a national broadcast on May 21, 1998, announcing his immediate resignation.

  The disastrous end to Suharto’s thirty-two years in power overshadows all that was achieved in Indonesia during that period. He is widely portrayed now as an unalloyed kleptocrat, ruling entirely by armed force. But this is unbalanced. The record certainly shows nepotistic patrimonialism, which was starting to sprout in a third Suharto generation by the time of his fall. But for their ethnicity, the business empires of the former cukong would be seen as assets to any emerging economy. It has been argued that the Suharto children’s ventures were the kind of indigenous business groups that arise in the hothouse of government favor anywhere in developing Asia. They at least broke through government monopolies in such areas as telecommunications, broadcasting, and civil aviation for others to follow.

  From the time the PKI was eradicated in 1968 until the early 1990s, it could be argued that force was a last resort in political control—after persuasion, cooption, and bribery had failed. Suharto showed skill in attuning his development message and religious appeal to his changing society. Had he stepped down in, say, 1992, with the same sort of military protection afforded him in 1998, he could have claimed to have fulfilled his mission of basic development and stability. The economy had grown an average 7 percent per year since 1965, and continued at this rate until the sudden collapse in 1997. Self-sufficiency in rice production was attained in 1985, and the nation’s nutritional intake had risen dramatically. The adult literacy rate was about 85 percent in 1997; the primary school attendance rate was 92 percent, with 60 to 70 percent of students going on to secondary school.

  Others would have been left to steer Indonesia through an international environment that Suharto and his generals were now unable to handle. Anticommunist generals were no longer needed anyway. The end of the Cold War had diminished the strategic importance of Indonesia for the United States. Capital transfers were happening at the tap of a keyboard. The new economy and its institutional demands were beyond the command politics of the army. By the 1990s, a new cohort of Indonesians with higher education were ready to run it. Suharto had closed ranks at the very moment when his own success should have told him to open up and get out.

  4

  Reformasi

  By the end of the morning of May 21, 1998, Habibie felt like the most isolated man in the world. Two months after being appointed as the latest in a long line of ceremonial vice presidents—a clear signal that Suharto had no intention of stepping down or anointing an heir apparent—Habibie found himself in charge. After Suharto announced his resignation on national television, he left for his private residence. Habibie was at the palace as head of state and head of government.

  The state was in chaos. Despite the IMF rescue package (or because of it, in some eyes), the economy was in a state of collapse. Inflation was to reach 65 percent for the year, and gross domestic product was to shrink by 16.5 percent in a year. The rice harvest had been hit by drought the previous year, and millions in formal sector enterprises had been laid off. More than half the population was below the poverty line. The heart of Indonesia’s commerce, the Kota district of Jakarta, was a smoldering ruin after the military-inspired anti-Chinese riots. Students and other activists were swarming over the parliament building in triumph at Suharto’s removal and were demanding an immediate session in which root-and-branch reform could be initiated.

  Habibie was an accidental president. Suharto had openly doubted his qualifications to take over during the days preceding his resignation, saying, “There is a question of whether he is capable.” A few hours before resigning, Suharto had given the armed forces commander, General Wiranto, a letter authorizing him to restore order and political stability. It closely resembled the letter of March 11, 1966, the famous Supersemar that three of Suharto’s generals had forced Sukarno to sign. Wiranto was thus the designated successor.

  But a simple constitutional barrier stood in the way. As Habibie had conferred with Suharto on May 20 about the formation of a new cabinet, the president had informed him he would resign as soon as it was sworn in. Habibie later recalled that he then asked, “What is my position as vice president?” Suharto replied, “What happens, happens.”

  Although Suharto at no time spelled it out, it became clear later what was me
ant to happen: Habibie should have resigned too, clearing the way for the MPR to make a provisional appointment of a third figure to the presidency, just as it had done in 1967. The newspaper editor Endy Bayuni described the moment thus:

  In response to Soeharto’s statement ‘I am going to step down tomorrow’, Habibie could have answered either A: ‘So, I’m going to be the next president?’ or B: ‘I had better step down with you, Pak [Sir]’. He picked A. Had the German-trained aerospace engineer answered B, then he would have paved the way for a military takeover with Wiranto in charge, but with Soeharto no doubt continuing to pull the strings. Post-Soeharto Indonesia would have taken a greatly different historical path. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one stands, Habibie was not well-versed in Javanese tradition, where courtesans are expected to know, or at least guess, the correct response to a king’s questions from his body language.*

  Was it because, as a half-Makassarese who had spent much time out of Indonesia in Germany, Habibie had simply missed the message, in what commentator Wimar Witoelar has called a moment of “unbelievable naivety”? Was it because, as a research engineer, he was used to working logically from theory?† Or was it because his instincts were those of a “German liberal,” as suggested by his longtime colleague in the ICMI and former minister, Adi Sasono? Was he irked by Suharto’s disparagement? Whatever the mixture of reasons, Habibie chose to follow his constitutional duty, and his decision was a pivotal one for Indonesia. Fifteen years later, Indonesians were watching Egypt’s failed transition to democracy and thinking: That could have been us.