Suharto is dead

Like some other dictators he managed some significant economic successes

It is a tortured kind of sentence.

Anyway, Quiggin’s post seems more directed at Australia’s attitude to post-Suharto Indonesia.

‘Indonesia has grown much faster than the world average over the last 40 years’.

Needless to say, this sentence would only have meaning if it could be demonstrated that the only way that Indonesia could have achieved these growth rates is by being ruled by a psychotic, corrupt, brutal, mass-murdering tyrant. The examples of other countries in the region suggest this is nonsense.

In any case, is anyone going to be brave enough to suggest that the East Timorese, equally, are ‘conflicted’ over Suharto’s ‘legacy’?

hidari: “Needless to say, this sentence would only have meaning if it could be demonstrated that the only way that Indonesia could have achieved these growth rates is by being ruled by a psychotic, corrupt, brutal, mass-murdering tyrant.”

Actually, no. It could have meaning that ‘there was some fine economic growth, and I don’t give a sh*t about the hundreds of thousands of ‘eggs’ broken for that nice omelet’. That would be a valid meaning, and probably be the mainstream belief among Very Serious People in the USA’s foreign policy establishment.

Almost all of the economic gains went to 1) Suharto’s family or 2) the small, wealthy Chinese minority. The average Indonesian didn’t really see themselves become richer during his reign. That is a big reason why during the anti-Chinese pogroms following his fall that led to massive Chinese flight out of the country (often to Singapore, etc.), the resulting capital flight halved per capita GDP in Indonesia: only a small handful of people were holding a lot of the wealth. According to Transparency International, he was the most corrupt leader since 1980, stealing more than anybody else, which is almost hard to do in a world with the likes of Mugabe.

reality man, that’s a very important post. It’s easy to set up a nasty resource-extraction economy with the help of foreign companies and governments, to suck wealth out of a country, with some retained by the elite, but the rest of the country suffering.

“1) Suharto’s family or 2) the small, wealthy Chinese minority.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just not true.

Doug M.

Mrs. Tilton: it wasn’t that he set up for economic growth later. It’s that he provided ~25 years of actual economic growth. Marcos hosed his country during /and/ after his time.

As for Indonesia being a nasty resource-extraction economy that enriches just an elite, no, that’s not quite right either. It’s not Norway, or even Mexico, but it’s not Nigeria either. A lot of the energy money has been spread around, and it’s jump started a lot of economic development.

And to return to the “enriched only his family” meme: it’s hard to find good Gini numbers for Indonesia before the late 1980s. However, it doesn’t appear that inequality increased dramatically over Suharto’s reign. Remember, 1965 Indonesia was already a very unequal society — a small elite owning everything that mattered, and a mass of immiserated peasants. So it moved from being a very unequal, desperately poor country to being a very unequal, but on average much less poor country.

While we don’t have good Gini numbers, we do have good human development statistics. And those make very clear that, yes, the average Indonesian was far better off in 1997 than in 1965: healthier, better educated, more likely to have access to clean water, you name it.

I mean, life expectancy increased by over 20 years under Suharto. Infant mortality dropped by over eighty percent. The number of households with both indoor plumbing and electricity went from less than five percent to more than fifty percent. Absolute poverty dropped from 60% to around 14%. Etcetera, etcetera.

If you don’t like numbers, there’s another thing to try: you could go to Indonesia and, you know, ask a freakin’ Indonesian.

I was in and out of the country for a decade, and my experience was consistent: even the ones who hated Suharto — and if you’re an English-speaking Westerner, you’ll encounter a disproportionate number of those — acknowledged that the country got much, much more prosperous during his time. And a large minority still respect and admire the man, for exactly that reason.

I dunno. I’m getting the vibe that I’m violating a consensus here. People seem to be getting pissed that I’m Defending Teh Evil. Raising millions out of poverty shouldn’t be considered in the final tally? Or only when it’s done by “good” leaders? What am I missing?

Doug M.

‘I dunno. I’m getting the vibe that I’m violating a consensus here. People seem to be getting pissed that I’m Defending Teh Evil. Raising millions out of poverty shouldn’t be considered in the final tally? Or only when it’s done by “good” leaders? What am I missing?’

You’re not missing anything. I’m just wondering if you realise that you sound exactly like those Stalinists in the ’50s and ’60s who mumbled about ‘mistakes’ made by Uncle Joe, but who went on to go on about rising literacy rates, huge rates of economic growth, ‘the electrification of the Soviet Union’, the ‘absence’ of unemployment, and so on.

Russians are also conflicted about Stalin – in fact he seems quite popular in opinion polls. And I’m guessing Russian/Soviet GDP was bigger in 1953 than 1917 or 1929 (if that’s when Stalin can be deemed to have taken over).

Good comparison! Because when faced with popular unrest, Uncle Joe resigned, stepped down peacefully, and handed power to a constitutional successor.

Why is that of overriding importance?

If you had to choose, would you rather be a median Nigerian or a median Indonesian?

Yes Suharto was a bastard. There are worse ones.

Doug, it might rather be that the ‘consensus’ is to be very, very skeptical of people praising some dictator.

I was in and out of the country for a decade, and my experience was consistent. (…) And a large minority still respect and admire the man, for exactly that reason.

You know, a large minority of Germans still respected and even admired Hitler (and yes, I don’t care about Godwin’s law) a decade or two after his demise. And then you had all the people saying “while I hold no brief for Hitler, you have to grant him that he built the Autobahn (not true actually), achieved a 100% employment rate and saw to it that you could walk the streets safely at night blahblahblah”.

Now had you gone to Germany in the early sixties, it would have certainly been your right to side with these people against those who condemned Hitler unequivocally – the position of the latter is now the consensus among 99% (or whatever the exact number) of Germans and it’s instant political suicide to suggest anything else. So if you want to be on the losing side of history keep making excuses for genocide.

I mean, life expectancy increased by over 20 years under Suharto. Infant mortality dropped by over eighty percent. The number of households with both indoor plumbing and electricity went from less than five percent to more than fifty percent. Absolute poverty dropped from 60% to around 14%.

A few minutes poking round on the Human Development Report website confirm the life expectancy and infant mortality claims here, and I assume Doug M. knows what he’s talking about on the others.

These strike me as important facts. They represent a transformation of life, for the better, for millions and millions of people. Perhaps we in the West sometimes overvalue political and civil freedoms as opposed to freedom from extreme poverty.

More generally, I think we should all try to cultivate our negative capability, and be able to see both that Suharto was a brutal, corrupt dictator and that his regime involved an enormous improvement in the lives of Indonesia’s poor, quite unlike that of most corrupt dictators. Neither fact cancels out the other, and it’s not necessary or, probably, even possible for us to weigh them into a single moral judgement.

And if you could say the same thing about Stalin, well then, you could say the same thing about Stalin. Not every country is fortunate enough to modernize as painlessly as the US or Australia.

a large minority of Germans still respected and even admired Hitler

And you don’t see any relevant difference between Germany and Indonesia here?

There’s gotta be more to the story than personality of the individual associated with a 20-30-year long socio-economic/geopolitical phenomenon. Once again, the cause and effect relationships are not quite obvious here – do certain events take pace because a certain individual is in control, or does the right individual get elevated because these events must take place according to the laws of nature?

I’m curious about the same question as abb1 and geo. Especially in light of the contrast with the Phillipines, where to a naive outside a lot of the same structural factors would seem to apply.

The bottom line to me is the following: invading east Timor and slaughtering communists were decisions Suharto himself took, he could have acted otherwise, he did not; presiding over an economy is something entirely different than presiding over a war, involving thousands of actions completely independant of Suharto’s mind and intentions.

Or in short, with no Suharto, no genocide in East Timor (the fact that there would have been no slaughter of communists is a little more debatable in my opinion). No Suharto, in all likelihood a comparable economic growth (or at least so I believe, and will until someone points to specific insights and decision of Suharto which had crucial effects on development).

So no, I don’t hold a brief for Suharto, even on second thoughts.

Agree with geo @34. The reaction of many people to Doug’s comment would be appropriate if he were offering an apologia for Suharto. I dont think I agree with him altogether, but I also don’t think he’s an apologist.

Perhaps the analogy is to a man who beats his wife and molests his children, but provides increasingly well for them materially, then dies and leaves them a lot of money. Nothing in that fact pattern mitigates his assholery. But there is an important additional way in which he didn’t f*ck them over. A member of his family could be grateful for that fact without being grateful for him.

And you don’t see any relevant difference between Germany and Indonesia here?

No, they’re totally the same: Hitler and Suharto, Nazis and Suharto supporters, Germany and Indonesia, they only look different and the food is better in Indonesia.

Give me a break, when that guy in the Commitments says: “The Irish are the blacks of Europe”, he doesn’t really mean that literally, you know, rather he is pointing out certain similarities among otherwise very dissimilar entities.

“Surely there’s a spectrum of leader quality, and I hope you’ll excuse me for not seeing Suharto in the same league as Pol Pot.”

It’s quite possible that Suharto was responsible for more deaths (directly) than Pol Pot, although no one will ever really know for sure. To quote the Wikipedia:

‘Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000*, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease‘. (emphasis added). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia_under_Pol_Pot)

So it’s possible that, by a conservative estimate, Pol Pot ‘only’ murdered about 750,000 people, with the other 750,000 being ‘excess deaths’ (of the kind we are familiar with from the Lancet Iraq studies).

Suharto murdered 500,000 in his initial putsch, and another couple of hundred thousand (probably) in East Timor, West Papua etc. So Suharto could easily have been directly responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot. (Pol Pot probably ‘made up the numbers’ in terms of ‘excess deaths’ on the other hand).

I hate to have to point out the obvious, but the reason that Hitler and Mao (and others) are considered ‘great monsters’ (despite their record on ‘economic growth’ and ‘poverty reduction’) is because they made the terrible mistake of not being on ‘our’ side: whereas Suharto was. That’s the only difference.

*Note: the 3 million estimate is from the Vietnamese immediately after they invaded Cambodia and is not credible.

like Cher, Suharto had only one name.

Cher LaPierre Bono Allman had only one name?

“I thought the consensus was that Pol Pot’s number get really impressive when you take into consideration the (small) total population of Cambodia and the (short) length of his rule.”

If we’re going by a per capita killed per year measure, then Suharto’s record in East Timor in the late 70’s is comparable to Pol Pot’s.

Nice economic growth, pity about the half million murdered.

The killings of 65-66 were not, as Doug M’s shameful apologias claim, mere civil conflict that can be blamed on someone else. They were a deliberate, months-long, organized campaign to murder noncombatant civilians, rank-and-file members of a variety of organizations. This was Suharto’s work. I don’t have time to do a proper job on this this morning, but this example is typical:

(from http://manerly.multiply.com/journal/item/4)
“My great uncle was killed in 1965 because they said he was listed as being a member of PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia/Communist Party of Indonesia). He actually joined an organization for farmers – PETANI/BTI (Pergerakan Petani/Barisan Tani Indonesia) -at that time, 9 million Indonesians had joined this organization that was associated with the PKI party. Others in his village (Including women & teenagers) that had joined GERWANI (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia/Indonesian Women’s Movement) and Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth), SOBSI (Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia/All Indonesian Central Labor Organization/Workers Union), and other organizations that were claimed (by Suharto & his cronies) to have communist influence in them at that time were also killed or sent to camps and prisons.”

Memory matters, and especially when the killers succeed and do their best to suppress the memory of those killed.

A few more links.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2247822,00.html
http://dannyreviews.com/h/The_Indonesian_Killings.html
http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/bibliog/indonesia.html
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-May-1998/byrne.html
http://www.asia-pacific-action.org/southeastasia/indonesia/publications/military/crimes.htm
http://www.namebase.org/scott.html

And it is bizarre not to hold Suharto responsible for events in 1969.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm

At another time we might ask what part of the economic growth was due to the looting of the natural resources of the outer islands.

Honestly I have a hard time totally atributing West Papua and East Timor to Suharto. Those invasions and the killings that followed were the result of indonesian muscular nationalism and I doubt Sukharno or anyone else would have acted differently.

At another time we might ask what part of the economic growth was due to the looting of the natural resources of the outer islands.

Indicator………~1975……..~2000
Infant Mortality…104……….28
Life Expectancy….49………..69
Human Dev. Index..0.47………0.69

It’s trends like these that are the issue, not economic growth per se.

Nobody here is defending Suharto’s brutality or his regime in general, but I really don’t see what’s gained by ignoring or denying the huge improvement in life for ordinary Indonesians that evidently took place during his rule. Especially since such improvement was definitely not the rule for poor people in most parts of the world.

This was Suharto’s work.

Yet if you look at the bigger picture it’s obvious that around that time pretty much the same kind of atrocities were going on all over the world – Greece, all over Central and South America, Congo, Iran and so on. Pin this on evil man Suharto – and you won’t understand anything at all.

Ouch! So sorry, I meant Suharto, not Sukarno.

1. I yield to none in my enthusiasm for economic growth. But it is repulsive to put that into some sort of balance with wholesale, organized, official murder of civilian noncombatants. Some things are not fungible.

2. I throw up my hands at the ethical blindness of other commenters. Another Indonesian tyrant might have done the same things. Yes, and then we would hold that person responsible. The bloody 20th century had other murderous tyrants. Yes, and we hold them responsible for what they did. Suharto had accomplices. Yes, and they should be held responsible too.

Economic growth absent Suharto: well, you can look at growth under his predecessor, Sukarno. There wasn’t much. Trend under Sukarno was ~3%, which barely covered population growth.

Relevant comparanda: I’d point to the Philippines, Burma, Papua New Guinea, and India, more or less in that order. All of them are multi-ethnic and post-colonial; Burma and PNG are also resource-rich. All did a lot worse during this period than Indonesia under Suharto. Burma and the Philippines were both richer than Indonesia in 1965. By 1997, both had fallen far behind.

I don’t think it’s a “shameful apologia” to note that Suharto doesn’t bear full responsibility for the deaths in 1965. Sukarno had maneuvered the country into a position where violence was inevitable. While Suharto was the most powerful figure in the military, at that point he was no more than _primus inter pares_, and his fellow generals were complicit in both the planning and execution — in fact, pretty much the whole officer corps, top to bottom, was champing at the bit. Later, much of the killing was done by local elites eager to settle scores. Suharto bears criminal responsibility, no question, but he doesn’t stand in the same relationship to the killings as, say, Stalin to the Great Famine.

N.B., “Not full responsibility” is not the same as “no responsibility”, and to say “it wasn’t him alone” is not the same as saying “he’s not culpable”. This is an educated and thoughtful readership, and one would think this would be a pretty obvious distinction. Bringing out some of the complexity of the history (and it was damnably complicated) should not trigger swift and heated accusations of being an apologist for genocide.

Finally, as to Suharto’s departure from office: his regime was authoritarian, but not so oppressive that people didn’t dare protest. And when unrest grew strong enough, he didn’t break out the machine guns; he stepped down, passed office to a constitutional successor, and retired to private life. That’s not typical behavior for a murderous dictator; they usually either cling to power to the last bullet, or flee the country. The fact that Suharto retired but stayed says something about his relationship to the country and to the rule of law.

One thing that people miss about Indonesia is that, for a country at its level of development, it has a very strong civil society. This is in large part due to developments under Suharto. By the eve of the crisis, Indonesia had already evolved, in rudimentary form, the organs of a modern liberal state. The press was free, as long as it didn’t attack the wrong people too vigorously. It was possible to win judgments against the government, and get them enforced, as long as nobody too powerful was implicated. Opposition parties were permitted, as long as they didn’t seriously threaten the ruling party’s hold on power. Anyone could travel freely anywhere in the country, except East Timor. There was complete freedom of religion, as long as you weren’t an Acehnese talking about replacing Jakarta’s corrupt rule with clean shari’a. NGOs — foreign and Indonesian — were ubiquitous. There was no formal censorship. Indonesians travelled freely abroad.

John’s original post called it “one of the tightest dictatorships in the region”. With all respect to John, that’s just not right. In Suharto’s last few years Indonesia was more free than contemporary China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or Burma, and not far behind the contemporary Philippines or Malaysia. It was firmly in the middle of the Asian league, neither particularly pleasant nor horribly bad.

Indonesia in 1998 wasn’t a “dictatorship”. It was an authoritarian state ruled by a corrupt but energetic and ambitious elite: far from free, but already more liberal than, say, Putin’s Russia today… and unlike modern Russia, it was slowly becoming more free rather than less.

None of this is to downplay Suharto’s many and various crimes. It’s just, you know, that’s not the end of the story.

I note that the Indonesians, who ought to be the best judge of him, gave Suharto a state funeral… accompanied by a vigorous public debate about his legacy.

Doug M.

58: Colin, I’m not saying it is fungible. The economic success doesn’t offset the murder and theft. But that doesn’t mean the economic success should be ignored.

59: Hidari, other leaders might have behaved differently — but they’d have faced some of the same constraints, like Indonesian nationalism, the need to keep the Army happy, paranoid anti-Communism among Indonesia’s military, commercial and religious elites, you name it. I don’t think it’s irrelevant that Indonesia’s other dictator — Sukarno — behaved in pretty much the exact same way as Suharto WRT human rights within the nation and military aggression outside it.

A democratically elected leader — very unlikely given Indonesia’s history to that point, but let’s handwave it in — might well have done much the same; being democratically elected does not inoculate you against wars of choice, nor make you immune to the temptations of xenophobic nationalism.

Noting that leaders were under constraints pushing them towards stupid and evil decisions doesn’t absolve them from responsibility for those decisions. But we know that people operate in social contexts that affect choice. This is as true for dictators as for the guy who knocks over a corner store and shoots the cashier. The robber may be a desperate kid from a broken home who never had a chance — or he may just be a vicious asshole who likes shooting people. You can take the position that it doesn’t matter, crime is crime and he’s guilty; or you can look closer and try to suss out some whys. YMMV.

Doug M.

Doug,

geo’s question @63 is a fair one. If I understand your argument correctly, your position is that Suharto (i) was a very vicious bastard indeed, yet (ii) for all that, achieved (or at least, presided over the achievement of) significant improvements in the material well-being of his subjects, or at least, those of them that he did not torture or kill (i.e., not only did he realise real economic gains, but these were not captured solely by an elite but rather redounded to the benefit of many or most of the populace). Fair enough. What, then, did he do (or suffer to be done) that made Indonesia, despite his tyranny, materially better off? IOW, what distinguishes him from Pinochet (a mass murderer who left his economically meh country meh better off) or Hitler (a mass murderer who left his rich country ruined)?

Chris @61,

that’s a deep and insightful comment, and adds a lot of value to this discussion.

no one here is defending Sukarno (geo #55)

I hold no brief for Suharto… no, wait. I guess I sort of do. (Doug M #1)

—hold a brief for: advocate, defend —usually used in negative constructions (Merriam Webster)

I would have thought the debate about what portion of the economic growth that Suharto’s economic policies were responsible for should depend a lot on aid flows. How much of Australian, US and Japanese aid at that time was going to Indonesia vs. comparable nations, and how much UN/WHO intervention was involved? Also was the change in life expectancy etc. between 1975 and now steady, or did it occur early, late? Did it correspond with economic growth? And how much of the reduced life expectancy in the early years was caused not by poverty but by the murder of a million people in their prime?

I have a suspicion that the improvement in life expectancy was due to intervention in childhood mortality, possibly due to large amounts of aid flows for those tasks; and the aid flows were a direct consequence of Suharto’s anti-communist brutality. There was a cold war on then, folks!

(And wouldn’t the best comparison be not with the Phillipines or PNG, but with Malaysia?)

Doug M is right. It’s easy to take the moral high ground and say that all murderers are as bad as one another, but it doesn’t make for very useful history. The details are important, as are the circumstances, and I’m not sure that there is too much knowledge about either on the part of some of Doug’s critics.

I think Doug’s description of Soeharto’s role in 1965 is pretty accurate. Yes, he was part of a leadership group that lit the fuse, and clearly he bears responsibility for what happened, but it is not like he personally ordered a million people to be rounded up and killed, as some appear to have it. It’s also a legitimate part of the story that of all the realistically possible scenarios for Indonesia in the early to mid 1960s, what actually occurred was by no means the worst.

There’s even another side of the story with East Timor and West Papua. West Papua, for example, should have been part of Indonesia in the first place, and almost certainly would have failed if it had become independent, rather than being returned to Indonesia in 1969. Before Indonesia invaded East Timor, it was in the midst of a fratricidal war, one side of which had declared it intention to foment communist and secessionist movements in other parts of Indonesia. Moreover, for long stretches, there were positive aspects to Indonesian rule. Many observers believe that if a referendum on integration into Indonesia had been held in the mid-1980s, a majority of East Timorese would have supported it.

This is not to whitewash or defend these actions. But there is context there that many critics of Soeharto don’t understand or want to acknowledge.

On the economy, most Western economists who have detailed knowledge of the period give Soeharto a great deal of credit for pursuing policies that – at least up to 1997 – achieved rates of development and poverty reduction that are comparable to the best in the post-war period, albeit with some features built in (such as corruption and limitations on the rule of law) that contributed significantly to the set-backs of 1997-1998. And this was despite some significant handicaps such as geography and multi-ethnicity that many other nations didn’t fact.

That said, I don’t think it’s fair of the commenters in 63 and 69 to expect Doug to provide an economic history of Indonesia in a blog post – there’s a wealth of material available on the internet or at you local library if you are finding yourself under-educated on the topic.

Finally, I think this is an excellent summary of the state of Indonesian civil society at the end of Soeharto’s rule:

By the eve of the crisis, Indonesia had already evolved, in rudimentary form, the organs of a modern liberal state. The press was free, as long as it didn’t attack the wrong people too vigorously. It was possible to win judgments against the government, and get them enforced, as long as nobody too powerful was implicated. Opposition parties were permitted, as long as they didn’t seriously threaten the ruling party’s hold on power. Anyone could travel freely anywhere in the country, except East Timor. There was complete freedom of religion, as long as you weren’t an Acehnese talking about replacing Jakarta’s corrupt rule with clean shari’a. NGOs—foreign and Indonesian—were ubiquitous. There was no formal censorship. Indonesians travelled freely abroad..

In that, it was a hell of a lot closer to, say, Singapore than it was to Soviet Russia, or even China today.

Okay, will try to take these in order.

63: Geo, several of your guesses are right on the money. Suharto’s economic development program went something like this:

— stabilize the currency (when Suharto came to power, the country was staggering under hyperinflation)

— build a government bureacracy that actually covers the whole country, with basic civil servants (postmaster, schoolteacher) in every village

— basic education everywhere — mandatory free elementary schools. Strong push for mass literacy.

— basic health care everywhere, even if it’s just a clinic with a “barefoot doctor” and basic medicines

— investment in public health programs — sewers, inoculation against childhood diseases, malaria eradication

— investment in basic agriculture — 1960s Indonesia was an almost entirely agrarian country, with ~80% of the population poor rice-growing peasants. Indonesia took better advantage of the Green Revolution than almost any other country.

— basic legal framework (contract law, company law, etc.) based on a mix of influences (Dutch law, Javanese legal traditions, shari’a), not too alien to be easily picked up

— in the cities, mass cheap public housing

— in the early years, crude attempts at import substitution. Later, a more sophisticated protectionist/export powerhouse model, with tax breaks and subsidies for major export industries. Also an import license system, which was a bad thing in the long run (artificial monopolies, massive corruption) but in the first decade helped keep the country’s balance of trade intact.

— starting in the 1970s, heavy investment in higher education. In law (for example), a dozen law schools were created in a few years around 1980. As a result, by the 1990s there was a large caste of lawyers accustomed to working from a fixed, written legal code; this group has since played a major part in the country’s progress towards a functioning democracy. Similarly, by the 1990s the country had a critical mass of technicians and engineers — enough to (for instance) run its oil industry with minimal foreign assistance.

— complex relationship with the large Chinese-Javanese (‘cukong’) minority, which can be summed up as “turn them loose to make money, as long as they don’t get too uppity”. The cukongs were discriminated against, and to some degree oppressed, but also protected — Suharto shared in the standard Javanese prejudices against them, but he was bright enough to realize that, in the near complete absence of an Indonesian business class, the Chinese would have to lead the way. Note that the violence against the cukongs came after Suharto had left the scene.

— starting in the late 1970s, massive investment in basic infrastructure, especially electrification.

Development in Indonesia was very much a top-down thing, especially in the first generation. Suharto used a series of five-year plans explicitly based on the old Soviet model. After about 1980 the five-year plans became less important, but in the first 15 years they were the main driver of development. N.B., Suharto was a pragmatist, and his economic policy was very much a buffet plate. Ideology played a huge role in politics — _pancasila_, the Five Principles, and all that — but not much in economy; over time, Indonesian planners borrowed from Stalin, Ataturk, the New Deal and the Chicago School with equal enthusiasm.

Suharto’s regime also made good use of both foreign aid (especially in the early years) and oil money. When he came to power, the country was massively in debt — Sukarno had borrowed billions, then wasted the money on prestige projects and a pointless military buildup. One of Suharto’s first moves was to sit down with the lenders and negotiate a debt repayment plan, which included donors assuming some of the debt. Much foreign aid was then channeled towards the basic stuff (education, health, agriculture) mentioned above.

The oil shortages of the 1970s gave the country much-needed hits of hard currency, but it’s worth noting that the first wave of economic growth (c. 1969-73) and the boom-boom years of hothouse growth (the 1980s) took place while oil prices were low. On the whole the oil sector was a distinctly mixed blessing, since it fed into massive corruption and tempted the country towards various bad ideas (like oil-burning electrical plants, or an inefficient and environmentally horrible chemical industry). That said, Indonesia has handled its oil better than most developing countries.

This is not to say that everything was hunky-dory. Far from it! Corruption was pretty much universal. A large chunk of the economy was in the hands of the military, either overtly or otherwise. A complex system of licenses gave state-sanctioned monopolies to a handful of wealthy families — with Suharto’s family in the lead, of course. Unions were allowed, but living and working conditions for the growing industrial worker class remained miserable for a long time, and activists who got too troublesome were harassed, tortured, or simply made to disappear. The banking system was backwards, corrupt, and poorly regulated — it would collapse in 1997-8, turning a bad situation into a disastrous one. The environment suffered horribly as tropical forests were turned into wood and furniture for export.

That said, the economic growth was real, sustained, and massive. Over 30 years, Indonesia went from being a miserably poor country to a middle-income one, and the quality of life for the average Indonesian was vastly improved.

And it didn’t “just happen”. Putting aside the interesting question of what government’s role in development /ought/ to be, there’s no question what the government’s role in Indonesia’s development /was/ — it was top-down and (especially in the first 15 years) largely driven by policy decisions made in Jakarta.

Must go to work now; will try to respond to others later.

Doug M.

“…leaving aside all the vast and undisputed evil they did, what did Indonesia’s rulers do right to get those quality-of-life improvements?”

You can’t leave the evils aside, because killing communists and simps was exactly what they had to do to join the winning side. But I suspect what they did especially right was leaving just enough doubt that, unless the population is more or less satisfied, communists might come back any time.

70: Mark, you’re right.

I’ve written a couple of thousand words now on the economics, history and politics of Indonesia. Everything I’ve written is easily checkable with a few moments on google.

I do think — no offense intended to anyone — that some of the commenters don’t know much about Indonesia, except that Suharto was friends with Henry Kissinger and a very wicked man. Indonesia’s economic miracle is just not that well known. But I think I’ve put forward the basic facts, and people who are really interested should be able to carry on from here.

73: “I don’t see a lot of difference between Suharto’s Indonesia and places like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”

John, I must firmly disagree. Remember, we’re talking about the period 1966-1997. For most of those years, the countries in question were either at war or under very oppressive regimes indeed.

I’ve spent time in Cambodia and Laos. Contemporary Laos is still an authoritarian Communist one-party state, albeit a relatively mellow one; there’s no opposition, the press is firmly under government control, and troublemakers are still not allowed. 1990s Laos was much worse — back then, it was still doctrinaire Brezhnevite, with no private property, internal passports, and all the choking nonsense of late-period Communism.

Contemporary Cambodia is so poor and so utterly corrupt that it’s hard to speak of things like freedom and human rights in any meaningful fashion. And again, in the 1980s and ’90s, it was worse.

I note in passing that Hun Sen, the Cambodian Vicar of Brae, resembles Suharto in some respects — longevity, corruption, military background, pragmatism. Suharto’s hands were bloodier, but OTOH he did more for his people; Hun Sen has never shown any ambition beyond staying rich and on top, and is interested in economic development only insofar as it serves those prime directives.

Anyway: at all times from 1975 to 1997, Indonesia beat all three of those countries on any measure of you’d care to pick. It’s not even close. You can say “in all those countries you’re safe enough if you don’t threaten the government’s hold on power”, but that covers a very broad spectrum, from “eh” to “pretty bad”. (And I’d note that, in Cambodia, you can get jailed or killed for annoying powerful businessmen whether you’re opposing the government or not.)

“I might try a post addressing the general issue of “successful” dictators some time.”

It’s a fascinating topic. I’d like to see that.

Doug M.

I am amazed at some of the apologetics here for Suharto. When he seized power, he organized the mass murder estimated between 1 and 3 million people. He passed anti-Chinese laws and forced assimilation.

A CIA report(and the CIA aided him in his crimes)described the killings as ““the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century”. The U.S. Embassy would cross of the names on a list it had given Suharto as they were killed.

Suharto later went on to murder about 200,000 people in East Timor.

As to economic success, by coincidence the U.S. started to give him aid after he overthrew Sukarno. There was a cost though, as he gave away Indonesian resources to American companies.

bernarda, i don’t think apologetics is the right word here. Most of the commenters appear to be fully aware of the numbers you mention, and some say there is another part of the story that can’t be neglected.

If your point is that Suharto was a vile mass murderer, I don’t think anyone here will disagree. But passing judgement on dead people has only a limited value. If we want to learn anything from history, we can’t stop at ‘he was evil’, even though he was.

In my opinion, Doug M is a bit fast in blaming the atrocities on circumstances while giving the credit for the development to Suharto personally, but that might well be more the result of the format of the discussion than his balanced opinion. His facts do appear to check out, and he does seem to know more sides of the story.

“Yes, but” is a classic form of apologetics and as far as the ethical evaluation of a leader is concerned, I don’t really care what is mentioned in the latter part of such sentences, if the former part contains a few hundred thousand dead people. As doug m. has made clear in his very first sentence, he does hold a brief for Suharto, and holding a brief does mean advocating and defending someone. We can discuss the development of Indonesian society all day long, fine, but it won’t change my mind about Suharto being a brutal mass murderer deserving unreserved condemnation by anyone with a solid position on human rights. If you can’t pass unequivocal judgment on dead mass murderers, you’re more likely to tolerate the living ones. Such tolerance seems to increase proportionally to the geographical, racial and cultural distance of the countries in question to our own.

If you can’t pass unequivocal judgment on dead mass murderers, you’re more likely to tolerate the living ones.

I guess you have a point there.

I recently worked on a law suit relating to a fraud done by some former members of the Indonesian state health-care system. The details of that are not important, but what was interesting was to learn how Indonesia has a quite interesting social health-care scheme, one that’s much less of a stupid design than whatever will be cooked up here in the US in the next few years. I don’t know how well it functions over all but as a plan it’s pretty interesting. (Basically, all employers must either pay into a state system that covers everyone or they can buy their way out of it by providing a higher level of coverage for their employees.) I don’t know when it started but it was certainly under Suharto since it was running for some time by the late 90’s the case I worked out had its origins.

Novakant, you sound like Chomsky now. Not that anything’s wrong with that, but will you be able to maintain consistency here? After all, just one bomb dropped on Hiroshima instantly killed almost a hundred thousand civilians. The Iraq sanctions in the 90s apparently killed a half-million children. And so on.

Doug: SEVEN days of national mourning… (sigh).

But anyway: There is a lot of things that other regimes could have done with a) an initial low level of economic development, b) a low technological base that could be developeded easily by c) extensive natural resources, in particular oil during the 1970s when prices were high, and d) lots of foreign aid from allies.

LONDON (AFP) – Indonesia’s former president Mohamed Suharto holds the dubious title of being the most corrupt world leader in recent history, heading a “Top 10” corruption list.

Plundering a family fortune estimated at anything between 15 billion and 35 billion US dollars (12.4 to 29 billion euros) during his 32-year reign from 1967, Suharto was a clear winner, according to British-based Transparency International.

The group gave a corruption “top 10” for global political leaders over the past 20 years, released to coincide with the release of its annual Global Corruption Report, a round-up of government graft worldwide. […]

“Political corruption undermines the hopes for prosperity and stability of developing countries, and damages the global economy,” said Transparency International chairman Peter Eigen.

“The abuse of political power for private gain deprives the most needy of vital public services, creating a level of despair that breeds conflict and violence.

“It also hits the pockets of taxpayers and shareholders worldwide. The problem must be tackled at the national and international level.”

#67, Engels, quoting the BBC:

Within the space of a few months at least half a million people were slaughtered in anti-communist pogroms that, at the very least, Suharto and the military tacitly encouraged.

At least half-a-million, perhaps closer to a million. And I’d lay these deaths at the feet of Suharto. After all, if a million people were killed by the armed forces in your country, wouldn’t you place the blame at the feet of the Commander-in-Chief?

Throw in the deaths in East Timor and you’ve a death toll comparable to that of Pol Pot. (Although Pol Pot’s armed forces caused, perhaps, less than 100,000 death directly; disastrous economic policies doing for the rest. No-one is accusing Suharto of disastrous economic policies.)

Nevertheless, we need to put the mass murder into context. Suharto’s armed forces killed fewer people than President Johnson’s. Yet there are plenty of revisionist historians who are eager to praise LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Great Society and so on. Doug M is only continuing in that illustrious tradition. And don’t get me started on Richard Nixon, whose forces killed as many as LBJ’s. Particularly don’t get me started of Harry Truman who’s armed forces killed even more (mostly in the Korean War) and who is now revered as one of the greatest US presidents of the 20th century.

The fact that people are so ready to criticise Suharto, and not Truman, seems exemplary of the anti-Third World prejudices we see so often on blogs.

For “scary question” read tired cliché.

The fact that people are so ready to criticise Suharto, and not Truman, seems exemplary of the anti-Third World prejudices we see so often on blogs.

Or it might possibly have something to do with the fact that this thread is about Suharto, not Truman…

One of the 20th century’s characteristic types was the modernizing tyrant — the ruler who claimed that progress justified brutality, and killed large swathes of their population in the name of development. Getting a grip on this means not treating the violence as a regrettable excess from which you can avert your eyes after a quick “of course…”, not having it as always the first part of a “yes but” construction (step back and ask yourself what’s the underlying pattern of thought that generates those constructions). The violence was integral to these regimes.
Indonesia is a particularly strong case here, because the mass killings of 65-66 essentially succeeded in their goals of eliminating a whole layer of peasant and other activism and frightening the survivors.

Also, Tracy, it’s remarkable that whenever the subject of Soviet Russia comes up you do a fine impression of Anne Applebaum. Now that the topic is Suharto, you are starting to sound like Stanley Fish. If nothing else, one has to admire your range…

94. “After all, if a million people were killed by the armed forces in your country, wouldn’t you place the blame at the feet of the Commander-in-Chief?”

In 1965 in Indonesia, that would be Sukarno.

100. “The violence was integral to these regimes.”

There’s some truth to that — Suharto came to power in a bloodbath, and used that fact to scare people for a long, long time afterwards.

But, again, this seems to be addressing an argument I’m not making.

Doug M.

Or that humans in general find it easier to criticise and condemn crimes when they are committed by people who are culturally distant.

Oh puh-leeze.

Engels – I don’t understand your criticism. I am not arguing that humans *always* criticise and condemn crimes when they are committed by people who are culturally-distant, I am arguing that in general people find it easier to condemn crimes when they are committed by people who are culturally distant. Henry Kissinger is one man, and cannot disprove my theory by himself. I will also quote from the second link you provided: “Indonesia was a major site of U.S. energy and raw materials investment, an important petroleum exporter, strategically located near vital shipping lanes”. Therefore, though Suharto may have been culturally distant from the US, the US could plausibly have benefited from Suharto’s actions. Does it really surprise you that under the circumstances some Americans would have been inclined to be supportive of Suharto?

If it will make things clearer for you, I will amend my statement to humans in general find it easier to criticise and condemn crimes when they are committed by people who are culturally distant and the crime doesn’t benefit themselves in any obvious way.

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by bringing up counterfactuals.

My argument re Hitler was that there were apologists in Germany, who tried to “balance” the view of Hitler by pointing to his economic and social achievements. I compared these unfavourably with Suharto apologists who follow a similar strategy. In both cases there is some basis for the claim that lives were improved (for those who weren’t killed, incarcerated, or forced into service) and society brought forward during the reign of these dictators (you cannot dispute that there was a major economic and social crisis during the final years of the Weimar Republic and that during Hitler’s reign until the war years there was more “stability”, infrastructure was modernized and the standard of living among farmers, laborers and the formerly unemployed rose – and this is what the Hitler apologists kept referring to).

However, as has been discussed above, how much of this was due to the reign of these dictators is in dispute and the question if a counterfactual democratic, humane government could not have achieved similar things cannot be answered conclusively.

This leaves the Suharto- (or Stalin-, Hitler-) apologist with two options: either he argues that the economic and social transformation was closely connected to the dictatorial style of government, in which case he needs to make the morally unacceptable “you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette” case. Or he has to argue that the two are wholly independent, but then he cannot refute the objection that the economic and social gains could have just as well been achieved by a counterfactual, democratic government and thus his praise for the dictator’s achievements falls flat.

In the face of a couple of hundreds of thousands of dead people both fallback positions are a tad weak.

Novakant, but what about my deterministic argument: structural causes, and the dictator is merely a symptom.

For example, suppose there is a used car dealer named Suharto and he happens to be a crook. We could condemn Suharto and go look for an honest used car dealer, or we could analyze the market in used cars and possibly come to a conclusion that dishonesty is the only way this kind of business can be run. And if that’s the conclusion, then personalities of the individual used car dealers are not important, it’s a characteristic of the trade.

Slightly amusing how this thread has now degenerated into a theological dispute over the true meaning of the Word of Doug.

Isn’t the interesting question not precisely what circle of hell Suharto should be assigned to, nor even whether Doug is as nobly indignant as the rest of us about Suharto’s human rights violations, but rather: are there any useful lessons for developing countries from Indonesia’s experience?

With the unspoken next step, “Can we do that without being a bloodly dictator?” Because, certainly, there have been plenty of spectacular failures of modernization…

Of course, if people are more interested in mounting moral hobby horses…

Engels, at #98 wrote:

Or it might possibly have something to do with the fact that this thread is about Suharto, not Truman…

This thread is about someone whose armed forces killed a six-, possibly seven-digit number of civilians during 1965/66 and in East Timor. Pol Pot had already been brought into the thread, so why not the even more bloody-handed Truman?

I recognise that there are differences between Suharto, Pol Pot and Truman if one is willing to look beyond the death toll; which I think is kinda Doug’s point. My gut-feel, however, is that looking beyond the death toll is a bit like asking, “Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play.”

“I stand by the view that Indonesia was less free than its neighbours under Suharto, but is now more free.”

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.

I’ve already said I’m not opposed to people pointing out the good things a mass murderer might have accomplished, but Doug M, you come across as someone who wants to give Suharto credit for all the good things that occurred under his rule while paying lip service to the fact that he was a killer.

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?

“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 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.

No mention of population size and per capita effects?

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.

Since people are ultimately virtually identical economic units, if a bunch of radicals(leftists, jihadists, whatever, etc.) are creating economically disruptive social and political tension and chaos, but then they all get functionally liquidated, or beaten into silence (or hammered into it by a natural disaster), and anybody sympathetic to them gets terrorized by example into silence, and consequently without that disruption the business of business is allowed to proceed relatively unimpeded, then removing those radicals etc. could well be said to have lead to happier times economically.
And since that measurement of happiness is in levels of prosperity for virtually identical economic units, the absence of radicals etc. could well be viewed as a good thing, for everyone except the radicals etc. themselves.
This view then seems to lead inevitably to sentiments like the one behind this at #28:
“Perhaps we in the West sometimes overvalue political and civil freedoms as opposed to freedom from extreme poverty.”
the blurry edge of rationalized cowardice. Death must be seen as a state of ultimate poverty in that light, and a thing to be avoided at all costs. The refusal to sacrifice liberty for comfort, the willingness to sacrifice economic well-being for altruistic ideals like freedom becomes merely a case of poor economic judgment, or a kind of mental illness, in that light.

As Indonesian, I don’t know what should I say. For me personally, He did a lot of bad things, but also he is a very powerful man.

“Donald, the issue is not the flavor it leaves in your mouth, but whether or not the case Doug makes is true.”

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.