Former Indonesian President Suharto died Sunday, January 27, at 1310 local time after several weeks in and out of consciousness in a Jakarta hospital.
Rumours have been flying since he was hospitalized January 4 about the various medical and spiritual interventions being made: the kids will keep him alive at all costs; he's lucid and talking to visitors; he's a drooling brain-dead; he’s critical and about to die; he's already dead (multiple times) but it's being kept hush-hush because it's bad Mojo to die on this day in the Javanese calendar; his brain has been removed and placed in stasis for possible transplant into a host organism (actually I made that last one up).
It’s kinda hard to read the street mood right now because few will speak ill of the dead until it’s clear they're not going to come back and ruin the crops, infest the house with geckos or hypnotize your wife into handing over all her Bank ATM- and VISA cards and PINs to a stranger.
What I can see is that everyone who is supposed to be in my office today is here; the traffic along Jakarta’s main drag Jalan Sudirman is as nasty as ever and, once you sweep away the kilometer-long convoys of official cars speeding for the airport with their Harley-Davidson-driving police outriders, it appears to be business as usual. No wholesale tears or gnashing of teeth here.
The foreign correspondents have dutifully dusted off the obits they’ve had ready for years. I've got some early, amateurish version squirreled away somewhere since his first serious medical crisis back in 2000. There's an inevitable and dull predictability to the tone and content of the writing I've seen thus far. Breaks down like this: Suharto did a lot of good for the country over 32 years, it’s too bad about all those folks butchered on his watch, and the legacy of corruption and waste that bedevils Indonesia to this day.
The obits are quite correct though I would add a slightly less tangible but ultimately more dangerous product of Suharto’s rule: the fostering of a distinctively Javanese brand of Imperial Cynicism which, at its most refined produces the almost pathological lack of public and personal accountability (or shame) that today permeates every sector and strata of Indonesian society regardless of the volume and sophistication of the accompanying ethnic baggage.
Suharto’s legacy, like that of all 'great' leaders is hard to reconcile. It's impossible to lift a country of this size and complexity from the malarial bowels of the Third World (it didn’t qualify as the less colonial adjective ‘developing’ in ’65) to relative global competitiveness in three decades by observing all the niceties, singing Kumbaya around the campfire.
In the real world somebody's flowerbed is going to get trampled; someone's Dad is gonna vanish forever on the walk home from work; someone's family business is going to be stolen away from them and handed to shadowy interests. The question folks here need to consider – and won’t for a several doctoral thesis’ worth of reasons - is whether it was truly necessary and acceptable to butcher 800,000 - 2 million people (including some hard line, virulent Communists who would have certainly putsched back if the shoe was on the other foot) in nine months after the 'coup' in '65 to make it happen? Or see another quarter million, one-in-four, murdered and starved to death in East Timor, and countless tens of thousands mowed down by helicopter gunships and Scorpion tanks in Papua and Aceh.
Does the blood ledger ever balance out? Villages wiped off the map vs national electrical infrastructure built; ethnic Chinese raped and systematically marginalized vs national school and health curriculums created; mass graves filled with the macheted bodies of agricultural coop members in East Java and Bali vs regional stability and generally good relations with the neighbors; a paranoid and corrupt security apparatus that excels only in killing its own citizens vs relative ethnic and religious peace and stability.
Not surprisingly for most Indonesians it’s a matter of one’s personal proximity to the events and access to information about what has gone before that shapes a world view.
As a consequence, the overwhelming numbers of people are prepared to forgive Suharto (and to a lesser extent his security apparatus) their excesses. They’ve begun erecting about him an edifice of artifice and mythology centered around several basic tenets: that development was worth the human costs and that some (Acehnese, Papuans, Timorese, Labor activists, Chinese etc) kinda deserved their fates; that the armed forces from which Suharto (and the current president) emerged remains a central, unifying and stabilizing force which lamentably contains ‘rogue’ elements responsible for decades of excesses; and that ultimately it is understandable (indeed laudable) that the Old Man would dote on his kids (by providing them monopolies on key goods and services for example) but how could he possibly have known (kasihan!) that the little pack of veloci-raptors would be so conscienceless and rapacious?
But the story is by no means done. My gut tells me that part of the deal the country has cut with its conscience is the following: Now that the old man is dead, his shadowy and powerful patronage no longer stretching from the relatively modest Central Jakarta residence where he’s lived since resigning in May 1998 to the National Palace, surely the hounds will be released on his venal children and their playmates? Is it possible that a measure of the justice Suharto eluded might come crashing down on those closest to him? Could it be that the weakened, prevaricating current President will finally hit stride, securing himself a second term in 2009 on the back of a widely popular crackdown on Suharto-era cronies and corruptors?
And what if after an appropriate period of mourning the government fails to act against those that remain? Will the public tolerate it or are we on the cusp of another painful and inevitably bloody period of national upheaval?
