President Suharto's decisive and sometimes ruthless exercise of power over the Indonesian archipelago has earned him a reputation as a shrewd dictator. A simple man who does not burden himself with complicated studies and reports, Suharto is said to make decisions both large and small on the basis of strong political instincts. He also consults Javanese seers and psychics for guidance and inspiration. Ministers complain about having to take policy cues from vague hints and offhand comments.
Whatever the formula or method of rule, the iron grip of Asia's most durable dictator is slipping. That the unraveling of Suharto's New Order has been gaining momentum is evident from the events of this year, the worst the former general has endured since he seized control of the country three decades ago.
Although Indonesia is a sprawling and diverse country, Suharto managed to concentrate tremendous power for himself in the decade after he came to power in 1965. He accomplished this through a systematic attack on all competing centers of institutional, ideological, and personal power. One result of this concentration was that the president's rule became more simplified. On a broad range of issues it was enough for Suharto to make his wishes known, and he could be fairly certain that the necessary steps would be taken in both the public and private realms to accomplish them. In the eyes of the Javanese, the dominant group in Indonesia, the more effortless the rule, the more powerful the ruler. Conversely, the increasing need to exert power overtly signifies a leader's decline. In recent years, however, there has been mounting evidence that Suharto's rule is growing more difficult. The president's political maneuvers appear clumsy, and even when Suharto exerts himself he loses key battles.
After first collapsing several opposition parties into two ineffectual organizations, the Muslim-based United Development Party (PPP) and the largely Christian-nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), in 1973, Suharto spent the next 20 years manipulating their leadership and exploiting their internal conflicts. But by 1993 there were signs that the old game of divide and conquer would be played by new rules. The president had an unusually difficult time keeping Ismail Hasan Metareum, the pliant leader of the PPP, in office. And more significantly, Suharto bungled his handling of the PDI.
Although he successfully blocked the reelection of Soerjadi, a mild critic, to the top post of the PDI, Suharto lost control of the game. By pushing out a figure who was a minor irritant at the head of a minor party, the president paved the way for the PDI's election in December 1993 of Megawati Sukarnoputri, a figure of much greater political potential thanks to her lineage as daughter of Sukarno, the country's first and only other president. Despite a vigorous effort at the PDI congress to prevent Megawati's election, Suharto could not prevail. The embarrassment of this defeat has haunted the president, with dire repercussions in 1996. Even before this year's events, however, a number of incidents demonstrated that Suharto was losing not just on major issues, but on relatively minor matters as well.
The first of these occurred in January 1994 during internal elections held by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KADIN). Traditionally KADIN had elected the candidate Suharto wanted to lead the organization. For the 1994 vote, the president had signaled that he favored Abdul Rachman Ramly, the former head of Pertamina, the state oil company, and a former ambassador to the United States. But in a shocking upset, KADIN members chose a prominent businessman, Aburizal Bakrie, in balloting that was delayed into the night until Suharto himself finally conceded that his candidate would not prevail. That Bakrie was never afforded the presidential audience customarily given to the new head of KADIN provided still more evidence of Suharto's displeasure with the outcome.
Another indication that Suharto's grip on power was slipping could be seen in ministerial bickering and backstabbing that increasingly spilled over into the pages of the country's major newspapers and magazines. Deep splits were nothing new in Suharto's cabinets. But for the first time, the battles between different ministerial factions were being waged in the open. In June 1994, three of the country's most respected papers and magazines stepped into the cross fire and were finally ordered closed by Suharto for exposing ministerial infighting.
This spectacle sent a number of signals to Indonesian society. First, it showed that disagreements within the government were much deeper than most people had realized. To some this realization presented new political opportunities to undermine the New Order. Second, the public nature of the arguments suggested that Suharto was losing control over his ministers, who were apparently more concerned with positioning themselves for their future in a post-Suharto Indonesia than they were with any immediate punishment from the president for undermining the facade of state unity.
The next blow came in December 1995, when Suharto failed to block the reelection of pro-democracy advocate Abdurrachman Wahid as chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama. With 34 million followers, NU is the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, which itself has the largest Muslim population in the world (some 90 percent of its 200 million people profess Islam as their faith).
Suharto's inability to block Wahid's election was significant not because NU is a rival to the ruling Golkar party--NU has proclaimed itself to be apolitical--but because the PDI fiasco in 1993 had prompted Suharto to fight in an uncharacteristically strenuous fashion to ensure that Wahid would not prevail. Despite the bribes, intimidation, and outright threats that reduced some NU delegates to tears as they cast their votes, Suharto was handed a resounding defeat. Like Bakrie, Wahid was denied the customary audience with the president.
Every prominent opposition figure in the land--including Megawati Sukarnoputri, former general Ali Sadikin, Muslim poet Emha, and Indonesian rock star Iwan Fals--showed up at a huge ballroom in Jakarta to celebrate the democratic symbolism of Wahid's victory. Iwan Fals even sang a song that included the refrain, "hang Suharto," causing some of the guests to head for the door lest they have a more exciting evening than they had bargained for.
The Wahid-NU setback set the tone for the troubled year of 1996. This year's difficulties began in April when Tien Suharto, the president's famously corrupt wife and closest confidant, died suddenly from a heart attack. The most immediate political impact of her death was to remind Indonesians that the Suhartos were indeed mortal.
The more subtle impact of the first lady's death was widespread suspicion that Suharto, now 75, no longer possessed the will or the determination to hold on as president. Even if, as some suggest, her death matters little to Suharto, and even if he has as much fight as ever, her death is important politically because Indonesians can now contemplate and even plan for the once unimaginable: an Indonesia without Suharto and his family in charge.
The sudden announcement in July that Suharto was flying to a German heart clinic for a "checkup" fueled speculation that the president was in poor health.Despite reassuring photos of a smiling Suharto strolling though the clinic gardens, Indonesian financial markets reacted with a sharp downturn.
The trip to Germany interrupted Suharto's boldest move yet to harass Megawati and the PDI. Before departing, the president and his minions had sponsored an illegal PDI congress intended to restore the same Soerjadi faction Suharto had ousted in 1993. Not only would Soerjadi be indebted to Suharto for being allowed to retake the party leadership, but he could never hope to be a contender for national leadership in the way Megawati could.
Backers of Megawati, who represent a large majority of the PDI's rank and file, refused to accept the renegade congress and the Soerjadi leadership. The PDI headquarters in Jakarta became the symbolic line in the sand, and Megawati and her followers defied demands by the government, the police, and the army to surrender the building. Instead, they erected an outdoor platform and held daily "freedom forums" where Megawati and other opposition figures criticized the government's restrictions on political freedoms in general and the subversion of the Democratic Party in particular.
Back from Germany, Suharto refocused his attention on the PDI. On the morning of July 27, security forces stormed the organization's headquarters. The siege began just before sunrise and was over by midmorning. Supporters of Megawati were beaten severely, dragged bleeding from the building, loaded into military trucks, and taken away as bystanders looked on in horror. More than 70 people are still missing.
By early afternoon, tens of thousands of ordinary Indonesians had poured into the streets of Jakarta, destroying property and burning scores of buildings, most of which were government offices. By all accounts it was the worst unrest the country had seen since the mid-1960s. Significantly, this was the first time such unrest did not devolve into racist attacks on the country's wealthy, ethnic-Chinese minority.
Suharto claimed that a cell of communists had masterminded the riots. But in a country that does not even have a moderate left, virtually no one believed such nonsense. Instead, the effort to demonize dissent by using the communist bogey has backfired, convincing many Indonesians that the Suharto regime is desperate and hopelessly out of touch.
A more realistic interpretation combines the proximate cause provided on the morning of July 27 with deeper socioeconomic trends. Had the attack on the PDI been the sole reason for the riots that day, the number of participants would not have swelled to the tens of thousands and spread across Jakarta and to other parts of the archipelago. A more fundamental cause of the unrest lies in a strong undercurrent of resentment and frustration with Suharto's government, its rampant corruption, and a persistent pattern of economic and political exclusion. Perceiving correctly that Suharto's hold on the system is slipping, and triggered by the brutality of the day, the people took their cue.
Clearly shaken by the riots, the president stunned a delegation of Japanese journalists in September when he suggested that "there is a need to prepare the next leader." This was the first indication that Suharto may not seek a seventh five-year term starting in 1998 (general elections will be held in June 1997 for the assembly that chooses the president).
The political unrest this summer focused considerable world attention on Indonesia, Megawati, and human rights abuses. Thanks to Suharto's miscalculations, Megawati was transformed from an obscure housewife with no political experience into a figure compared with President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines or Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. Domestically, her support widened when people who were not necessarily interested in backing the PDI disapproved of the way Sukarno's daughter was being treated and sympathized with calls for more political openness.
Suharto's troubles continued into the fall, when two additional developments kept the country in the global spotlight. This time the United States found itself dragged into the unfavorable glare. In October the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Bishop Belo of East Timor and East Timorese foreign minister-in-exile JosŽ Ramos Horta. And in the closing weeks of President Clinton's reelection campaign, stories surfaced of shady contributions made by Indonesian investors to the Democratic Party. Partly because of timing, the two stories were linked as reporters asked whether large donations from Indonesians close to Suharto might have softened United States policy toward a regime that was violating not only the human rights of its own citizens, but also those of its neighbors in East Timor.
For purely economic and geostrategic reasons, the United States has backed Suharto's New Order through more than three decades of human rights abuses. Most recently, in June 1994, when Suharto clamped down on the domestic press, the United States issued garden-variety condemnations and said Indonesia should strive for more openness. This spring, when unarmed students demonstrating in the city of Ujung Pandang were killed by army troops (one was dangled by his feet from a balcony and then dropped), the United States government offered more words but took no meaningful action. And despite reports that scores of people may have been killed by the army during the unrest in Jakarta in July, despite orders given after the riots to shoot dissenters on sight, and despite a wave of arrests of pro-democracy activists on charges of subversion (which carries the death penalty in Indonesia), United States officials have gone out of their way to signal their continuing support for the Suharto regime. Pressure from a powerful minority in Congress, led by Senator Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.), won only a postponement in the sale of nine F-16 jet fighters to Indonesia following the summer crackdown.
The announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize prompted reporters around the world to dig into the mostly forgotten story of American cooperation with Suharto over Indonesia's 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor, and Suharto's government had to endure weeks of embarrassing exposure.
The story begins with what has been called the "big wink"--the visit of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Jakarta in December 1975, which gave the signal President Suharto had been waiting for to launch his invasion. Suharto knew that Ford and Kissinger were aware that an attack was imminent, and that provocative incursions by Indonesian forces had already been made into the former Portuguese colony. What Suharto did not know was how the United States government would react to the Indonesians' making offensive use of American weapons that had been supplied for strictly defensive purposes.
When Ford and Kissinger departed Jakarta without even mentioning East Timor--much less warning explicitly against using United States weapons for the invasion--Suharto correctly concluded that the United States would look the other way as the slaughter commenced. What the American officials had perhaps not bargained for was that the invasion would begin the very next day. Twenty years and more than 200,000 dead Timorese later (a third of the country's population), the United States still refuses to press the Indonesian government to seriously discuss peace and self-determination for East Timor.
One plan to achieve these goals has been proposed by Nobel winner Horta. His three-phase peace plan begins with the withdrawal of Indonesian troops, calls for the election of a local assembly that will not challenge Indonesian sovereignty, and culminates 10 years later with a free vote by the Timorese on independence. Instead of welcoming this eminently reasonable plan, the United States has blocked pressures on Indonesia to reach a diplomatic solution.
But this is part of a recurrent pattern. After a shocking videotape showing the massacre by Indonesian troops of 250 unarmed mourners at an East Timorese cemetery in 1991 was smuggled out of Indonesia, the United States government came under pressure to cut off officer training for the Indonesian military. Some of the most notorious Indonesian commanders in East Timor had received military training in the United States, including Major General Prabowo, Suharto's son-in-law. American officials responded that expanding training for the Indonesian army was the best way to improve discipline and ensure human rights were observed. As Horta remarked pointedly at the time, "now the Americans propose to run summer camps to reform military thugs."
Despite the end of the cold war, which removed the main justification offered for blindly supporting the New Order, there are no signs that challenges to Suharto's position will come from a shift in policy by major allies. Any real challenge will have to come from within Indonesia. It is important to recognize that the loosening of Suharto's grip on power has resulted less from an organized opposition movement than from the regime's deterioration from within. Disjointed challenges from a society that is more complex and less patient than before are being met by outdated government responses and tactics that are no longer effective. This was especially clear in the months after the July riots when the effort to blame communist agitators, always effective in the past, was widely ridiculed.
Suharto's domestic critics are a diverse group. Some are discontent because they are "out," when they feel they deserve to be "in." Others are mostly satisfied with the system, but would like to see less corruption. A relatively small group of dissidents objects on ideological grounds to military domination and the generally antidemocratic character of the government. All opponents of the regime are fragmented, unorganized, and largely ineffective, and seem to take turns being bought off by Suharto and the patronage system he has built.
The case of Megawati and the PDI is instructive. Until Suharto cornered the party and its leadership early in the summer of 1996, virtually nothing the party did could justify calling it an "opposition." Under Megawati's leadership the PDI has not developed a serious plan to achieve electoral victory, nor has it articulated a coherent alternative vision that could serve as the basis for amassing a broader following. At every turn the party has reacted rather than acted.
The same can be said for all the other opposition forces in Indonesia. In November 1996, Wahid stunned the country by announcing that he supports the nomination of Suharto for a seventh term. Even as Suharto's regime fragments under its own weight, key segments of society--the military, the business community, the ngos, or the outlawed independent unions--alternate between a game of waiting and cat and mouse. Such a vacant constellation of forces produces no clear movements and no apparent leaders. It is this pattern of decline combined with the absence of viable or even identifiable alternatives that have cast a deep uncertainty over Indonesia.
Jeffrey A. Winters is an associate professor of politics at Northwestern University and author of Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).