Donald, may I suggest that if you ever find yourself in conversation with someone whom you truly suspect of not thinking it’s wrong to murder a million people, you should save your breath. Meanwhile, try not to take that tone with someone whom you are anything less than quite certain is indifferent to mass murder.

But Mark, I accepted everything Doug said on factual matters. It’s his moral compass and perhaps yours that needs fixing. Some of us think it’s wrong to murder 1 million people, even if you also manage to do a lot of good. There were commies, after all, who reasoned much as Doug did with respect to their heroes.

Doug, it’s as clearcut as any issue can be. The man was guilty of genocide. So, the economic wellbeing of his people was a 2nd order or 3d order priority of Suharto’s, as opposed to no priority for someone like Mobutu, but that’s it as far as redeeming qualities. And in any case, nothing could redeem genocide. Suharto was one of the worst political criminals of the 20th century.

Wow, we’re really scraping the barrel now, aren’t we?

Donald, the issue is not the flavor it leaves in your mouth, but whether or not the case Doug makes is true. It seems to me that you don’t have much of a clue one way or another, other than to the extent that it would better suit your prejudices if it were not. If that’s the case, maybe you should leave off throwing insults like “apologist” around unless and until you have a better understanding of the facts.

Seems to me that once someone has made the decision to be brutal, whether out of callousness or of a belief that they’re heading off worse deaths from a Communist take over, that how many people die is a function of the size of the country as much as anything else. A bog-standard takeover will kill 100x as many people in a country with 100x the population; does that mean the dictator is 100x more evil? Conversely, killing 1 million out of 4 million seems different than killing 1 million out of 100 million. Not that the latter becomes good, but making a comparison of the two megadeaths without taking base population into account seems like it’s missing something important.

And even more so for corruption. Suharto was “most corrupt”—why, because he had the biggest bank account? Is someone who takes $35 billion and 1% of an economy more corrupt than someone who takes $300 million and 10% out of a much smaller and poorer country? Indonesia has a big population—and being able to siphon a lot of money out might be a sign of his overseeing economic growth, such that there was money to siphon.

But if you look at the history, you can’t help but notice that growth stagnated until 1965 and then took off rapidly thereafter. Three things changed in 1965: the Communist Party was liquidated, foreign aid came back, and Suharto replaced Sukarno. I’ve already said why I don’t think foreign aid was decisive. (I would also note that, in an Indonesian context, Sukarno’s regime got large amounts of foreign aid up until the early 1960s. Didn’t help.)

That leaves the liquidation of the Party, amidst much bloodshed, and the change at the top.”

Note the rhetorical ploy here—Doug M doesn’t believe in the great man theory and admits there are multiple causes for Indonesia’s economic growth—he then dismisses one possible cause and leaves us with the million man massacre and Suharto.

I started out thinking that Doug M was just doing what Sen and others have done with Mao—pointing out that a mass murderer can also double life expectancies. But this tendency to say that anything bad that happened was inevitable, while anything good that happened was to Suharto’s credit leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. This doesn’t sound like someone simply trying to deepen our understanding of the complexities of recent Indonesian history—this is an apologist.

I knew someone from China who said Mao was a great man who’d made some mistakes, so this “I’ve been to Indonesia and this is how Indonesians look at it” argument isn’t quite as compelling as it might otherwise have been. Possibly the families of those who were murdered might look at it differently from people who didn’t lose a friend or loved one to the violence. And I assume Indonesians are probably about as callous as Americans when it comes to the harm they inflict on outsiders, so what happened to East Timor may not matter as much. Not too many Americans care what we did with respect to Timor.

The numbers I’m looking at say it bottomed out in 1967, and what with the killing spree and imprisonment that would make more sense.

How you can pass judgment so flippantly on Sukarno while being so meticulous about Suharto is beyond me. Sukarno was fighting off outside pressures that deeply undermined the government. That this thread got to 100 posts without any mention of the CIA-run civil war in the late 50s is, to put it one way, dumb as a box of hairs.

“[I]f Sukarno had outmaneuvered Suharto and stayed in power” then Johnson or Nixon would have found some other way to off him. The guy was marked. It’s impossible to say what would have happened had the CIA, for instance, kept its operations restricted to covertly funding opposition parties rather that starting secessionist insurrections and assisting military coups.

117: Foreign aid played an important role in Indonesia’s development, especially during the 1970s. But that begs the question of why aid worked in Indonesia, when in (say) the Philippines, it was water poured on a stone. Per capita aid to Indonesia has always been less than to the Philippines, yet one economy has stagnated while the other has surged ahead. And if we go further afield, there are numerous examples around the world—Mobutu’s Zaire comes to mind at once—where developing countries received vast amounts of foreign aid without the lot of the average citizen being improved in the slightest.

“Given that japanese aid in the 70s (when the first bailout occurred) would have been focussed around the same anti-communist principles as the US had at that time… Certainly clearly left-wing governments – even the non-dictatorial ones – didn’t get this kind of treatment from the capitalist powers.”

I’m sorry, but with regard to Japan that’s simply not correct. Japan has been a major source of aid to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. (Japanese rice saved the lives of tens of thousands of Cambodians in 1979-80, after Pol Pot was overthrown.)

Also, as mentioned upthread, even a left-wing or outright Communist Indonesia would still have received large amounts of aid from the Dutch and the WTO. So, while aid was significant, it wasn’t decisive, and much of it would have come anyway.

“I think you’re exaggerating the role of suharto in single-handedly bringing about economic improvements, and playing down other forces.”

I don’t subscribe to the Great Man theory of history, and there were multiple causes for Indonesia’s economic growth.

But if you look at the history, you can’t help but notice that growth stagnated until 1965 and then took off rapidly thereafter. Three things changed in 1965: the Communist Party was liquidated, foreign aid came back, and Suharto replaced Sukarno. I’ve already said why I don’t think foreign aid was decisive. (I would also note that, in an Indonesian context, Sukarno’s regime got large amounts of foreign aid up until the early 1960s. Didn’t help.)

That leaves the liquidation of the Party, amidst much bloodshed, and the change at the top.

I don’t subscribe to the Great Man theory… but I do think leadership makes a difference. Sukarno was a fool, a stubborn, charming egotist with hardly a brain in his handsome head. Suharto was something else again.

I’ve seen commenters express a distaste for counterfactuals, but I think they have their place. And if Sukarno had outmaneuvered Suharto and stayed in power, Indonesia would have been much worse off. Having a leader who is stubborn, self-centered, and dumb as a box of hair is not likely to lead to good things in the long run, and by 1965 Sukarno had already run Indonesia’s economy onto the rocks, and its politics into a state of deep crisis that made some sort of violent outcome almost inevitable.

Finally, I have to note that the several commenters who have actually been to Indonesia and/or dealt with Indonesians are the ones saying that things are not so clear-cut. The most dyspeptic eruptions of moral outrage seem to be coming from commenters who have never been within a thousand miles of the place.

I don’t say that you need to have visited a country in order to comment thoughtfully on it. I do say that if you believe X, and all the people who’ve been to the country are telling you Y, then perhaps it you should dig a little deeper than 500-word articles in the Guardian.

(It’s a pity that no Indonesians have turned up on this thread. Indonesia has a lively blogosphere, but I guess it doesn’t overlap much with CT.)

Okay, that’s probably it for me. See you next thread.

cheers,

Doug M.

Near the top you said—
“To be clear, I’m not saying that Suharto’s brutality and corruption was necessary for economic growth. I am saying that, although he was brutal and corrupt, he /also/ presided over a period of very rapid growth, which led to a vastly better life for tens of millions of people.

I truly don’t know what sort of moral calculus should be applied in this case. Suharto was a mass murderer and a thief on an immense scale. But he also brought prospetity, human development, health and schools, electricity and medicine and clean water. I do think that calling him “one of the worst political criminals of [the 20th century]” is simplifying a complicated story. He wasn’t a cartoon villain.”

What is the difficulty here? Life expectancy nearly doubled under Mao, from what I’ve read. In no way whatsoever does that remove Mao from the list of the great mass murderers of history. One could acknowledge the achievements that occurred under Suharto and still say, as you do, that most of them could have occurred without killing a million people. Probably most villains aren’t cartoon villains—that’s why cartoon villains are mostly found in cartoons.

I’m wondering if part of what is going on here is a whitewash of westerners who supported Suharto. First establish Suharto as a complex guy, hard to judge, and then what’s the big deal about supporting him when he was killing a million people?

Because the economic growth that lifted nearly a hundred million people out of absolute poverty took place only in Jakarta. Got it.

Doug M.

As noted upthread, Suharto’s Indonesia was more free than Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, or Burma. By SE Asian standards, it was in the middle, not the bottom.

It certainly is more free now, but this is in part because of trends that began under Suharto. With the exception of religious organizations, modern Indonesian civil society is entirely a product of the Suharto era.

Doug M.

Well, John, that’s kind of like saying that if your perspective is formed by the treatment of Japanese-Americans during world war 2, the USA had a comparable level of freedom to the Soviet Union at the time. Surely the experiences of the other 97% of the population count for something!

Also, I’m not sure that much has changed in West Papua since Soeharto. Aceh there’s been a settlement to end the fighting, but that’s a very recent development, and arguably is better characterized as post-tsumani, rather than post-Soeharto.