[DEBATE] : Suharto: made and broken by the West

[Russell Grinker]

James Heartfield 

Suharto: made and broken by the West

The bloody dictator was not overthrown by Indonesian ‘people power’, as the
obits claim; he was sacked by his Western backers when his face no longer
fitted.

General el-Haj Mohammed Suharto came to power in Indonesia in 1965 in a
US-backed coup against the popular nationalist leader Sukarno (1). Suharto’s
bloody dictatorship - though in fact he had no official title - lasted until
1998, when it was destabilised by a concerted Western effort. At the time,
they called it ‘People’s Power’. But the anti-government protests were
little more than a stage army; the real overthrow was organised at the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations. Today, Western
observers are surprised to see the crowds mourning Suharto. But Indonesians
never really owned the campaign against him, and for that reason they do not
share its judgement. 

In 1941 the Japanese army kicked the Dutch and English out of East Asia.
Indonesian nationalists found an early opportunity in the Japanese
administration. With his Dutch military training, Suharto served in the
Japanese Peta militia, before switching sides to the Indonesian partisans.
When the Japanese retreated, Suharto earned admiration for blocking a Dutch
reoccupation of Yogyakarta, the ‘war capital’ of Indonesia, in 1946. 
In the hiatus between Japan’s retreat and the United Nations’ preferred
option of a Dutch re-colonisation, the Indonesian leader Sukarno seized the
opportunity to set his country free. Sukarno’s bid for freedom was
undoubtedly popular, and a beacon to Third World nationalists, who founded
the Non-Aligned Movement at a conference that Sukarno hosted in Bandung in
1955. But challenged on the left by a mass Communist Party and on the right
by US-backed rebels, Sukarno came to rely on military rule at the expense of
political representation. 
It was a weakness that the US exploited when it backed a coup by Sukarno’s
military chief Major General Suharto in 1965. US president John F Kennedy
and British prime minister Harold Macmillan had ‘agreed to liquidate
President Sukarno’ in 1962, according to a CIA memorandum (2). Suharto’s
forces slaughtered half a million communists and Sukarno loyalists, using a
US Embassy-provided list to identify the communists. ‘I probably have a lot
of blood on my hands’, said the embassy official, who crossed names off the
list as the Indonesian forces reported the communists killed (3). 
There were plenty of financial motives for the West to back a coup. Of
Indonesia, Richard Nixon wrote: ‘With its 100million people and its 300-mile
arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources,
Indonesia is the greatest prize in South-East Asia.’ (4) In the end, though,
it was Sukarno’s affront to white prestige that gnawed at Western leaders.
Challenged by radical nationalists in China, Korea and Vietnam, Suharto’s
rise over Sukarno was a moral victory for the West, and his regime a welcome
ally. 
In 1975, the officers’ revolution in Portugal destabilised her overseas
Empire, leaving East Timor without a colonial ruler. The West backed an
Indonesian invasion, fronted by Adam Malik, who was rewarded with a seat on
Willy Brandt’s North-South Commission. According to the British Foreign
Office: ‘The arguments in favour of [East Timor’s] integration into
Indonesia are all the stronger. Developments in Lisbon now seem to argue in
favour of greater sympathy towards Indonesia
 Certainly it is in Britain’s
interests that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as
unobtrusively as possible.’ (5) Tens of thousands of East Timorese were
killed. 
Suharto’s long decades of service to the West, though, were no guarantee of
continuing support. Like many Cold War strongmen, Suharto was less use to
the West once the Cold War abated. The toppling of Stalinist leaders in the
East was the opportunity for the West to dump their own bloody-handed
dictators. US and European leaders set about destabilising these local hard
men, one by one. 

Despite rewriting the constitution to help Western investors rip off the
country with impunity, Suharto was still leant on by the IMF in the 1990s,
which effectively pulled the plug on his economy. The IMF used Indonesia’s
debts to demand price rises and the selling off of state assets. Suharto
took the blame for the price rises, but was privately condemned for dragging
his feet over the IMF restructuring demands (6). In 1998, US National
Security Council spokesman Larry Summers said Jakarta needed ‘a more open,
pluralistic and accountable political system’. He hinted that Washington was
already looking to an era in which Suharto was no longer the dominant
figure. 
The younger generation of leaders who took power in the West in the decade
after the Cold War ended wanted to install a new vision of humanitarianism
worldwide, and looked upon the West’s old allies with distaste. Robin Cook,
Labour’s foreign secretary when Tony Blair became PM in 1997, was
embarrassed to have to justify the preceding Tory government’s deal to
supply Indonesia with fighter jets. In October 1996, the Norwegian Nobel
Committee had decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize, in two equal parts, to
Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta ‘for their work towards a
just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor’. This was a signal
that the West was about to turn its back on Suharto, backing separatist
rebels against him. 
Rioting in Indonesia in early 1998 made it clear that the population
understood that he was no longer to be feared. Some optimistic radicals saw
a revolution in the rioting, but it would be closer to a medieval peasant
‘Jacquerie’ with mobs turning quickly to attack Chinese traders. In March
1998, Suharto was bundled out of office, in favour of his deputy, Habibie;
but that did not stop the West’s continuing campaign to dismember
Indonesia’s drifting regime. 

In July 1998, the European Union sent a delegation to East Timor. Robin
Christopher, the British ambassador to Indonesia, told independence
protesters there: ‘Your voice has been heard. We all have taken your
messages away with us. We congratulate this good and disciplined
demonstration ... We want the future of East Timor to be peaceful.’ But they
had to cut the trip short after Indonesian intelligence agents accompanying
the diplomats opened fire on a crowd of pro-independence supporters in Dili,
killing a man in his twenties and injuring five other men. 
After Suharto’s departure, Indonesia was not stabilised. With the support of
the West, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri came to power, but could
not quell the separatist movements that were gathering across the
archipelago state. 
The UN’s hasty declaration of East Timorese independence led to thousands
more deaths as the separatist movement was pushed prematurely to take power
in the face of a vicious rearguard defence by the Indonesian militia. Worse
still, her independence too quickly proved to be little more than a cover
for a UN-backed rule by the Australian military. Many are shocked by the way
that Australia grabbed East Timor’s offshore oil and gas fields. In March
2007, Australian troops opened fire on supporters of rebel leader Alfredo
Reinado, killing four people. 
Following his death, Indonesians are confused about Suharto’s record,
because they were never truly the architects of his downfall (nor, indeed,
his rise). A degree of nostalgia for the ‘stability’ he brought seems
perverse, until you understand that most Indonesians were made bystanders in
the struggle for their country’s future, and never had the opportunity to
form their own judgement on Suharto. 
James Heartfield is author of Green Capitalism: Engineering Scarcity in an
Age of Plenty, published next month. Visit his website here. 

[1] The el Haj Mohammed is a later addition, like many Javanese, Suharto was
born with just one name. 
[2] Quoted in Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, 1995, p. 217 
[3] Quoted in Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, 1995, p. 218 
[4] Spoils of a Massacre, John Pilger, Guardian, 14 July 2001 
[5] Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, p. 220 
[6] Geoff Forrester and R. J. May, The Fall of Soeharto, 1998, p. 25, 98;
and see Howard Dick et al, The Emergence of a National Economy, 2002, p 237 

***

The West betrays its Cold War allies

*February 1986: rigged elections in the Philippines fail to save President
Marcos from ‘People’s Power’ 
*February 1986: Jean Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier leaves Haiti 
December 1989: US troops invade Panama to depose General Noriega 
*August 1990: UN Security Council resolution condemns Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait 
*December 1990: General Ershad forced to resign in Bangladesh 
March 1992: whites-only referendum grants one person, one vote in South
Africa 
*February 1995: the Taliban, former anti-Soviet militia, attacks Kabul,
provoking Western condemnation 
*June 1996: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu takes power, provoking
open hostility with the US 
*November 1996: UN resolution authorises intervention in Zaire (Mobutu later
flees) 
*March 1998: General Pinochet persuaded to relinquish command of the Chilean
military, before being arrested in Britain for war crimes in 1999 
*1998: Suharto forced out of office, while the United Nations sponsors
separatist revolts in East Timor and Irian Jaya.