Suharto's heirs - US should sever ties with Indonesian military and support the democracy movement - Editorial

Progressive, The, July, 1998

The dictator is gone. The dictatorship lives. The eventful days of May that brought down Suharto, one of the world's most sanguinary autocrats, might go down in the books as a historic step toward freedom. But they also might be recorded as a tragic missed opportunity.

In an enormously courageous and inspiring act, Indonesian students did what would have been unimaginable a year ago. They organized peaceful, mass protests and forced Suharto out of office. This is cause for worldwide celebration. It proves that no matter how oppressed people may be, the wellspring of freedom will not dry up. And when people dare to challenge authority en masse, they don't need guns to overthrow their dictator. They need only themselves.

"You never know what spark is going to lead to a conflagration," Howard Zinn noted in The Progressive last July. "You do things again and again, and nothing happens. You have to do things, do things, do things. You have to light that match, light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it's going to sputter and go out and at what point it's going to take hold. Things take a long time. It requires patience, but not a passive patience--the patience of activism."

Indonesian students lit that match after more than three decades of active patience. Finally it caught fire. One reason it did, ironically, is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) spread around a lot of kindling. The IMF's insistence that the government lift the price of fuel by 70 percent sent not only the students but thousands of the middle class into the streets.

"The IMF officials miscalculated," says Allan Nairn, an investigative reporter who was expelled from Indonesia in March. "They were phasing in the increased fuel prices too quickly."

Suharto tried to play the populist card by appearing to stand up to the IMF, but no one bought it. Indonesians realized that he opposed the IMF's prescriptions not because they would cause mass suffering but because they would deprive Suharto's family of its usual perks, Nairn says.

By this time, Suharto had lost all remnants of popular support. With the economy crashing and no relief in sight, the generals began to worry that the people's rebellion would get out of hand and threaten their rule. That's why General Wiranto finally told Suharto to pack his bags and hand over titular power to his old crony, B.J. Habibie.

For the democracy movement in Indonesia, this interregnum presents a challenge. The students have achieved their first objective, the toppling of Suharto. What remains to be toppled is the police state.

The Indonesian army still exercises inordinate power. It arrests and detains political opponents. It tortures advocates of democracy. It exercises a "dual function" in every aspect of the country's political life. It will not give up this role willingly.

"Unless people continue protesting, there is no chance for real freedom and democracy in Indonesia," warns Nairn.

Up until the very end, Washington's role in this unfolding drama has been deplorable. The United States supported Suharto from day one and then for 12,000 days after that. Only in the last ten hours of his rule did Washington begin to distance itself from the dictator.

Let's remember: After pushing aside Indonesia's founding president Sukarno in 1965, Suharto and his military killed as many as one million people. The U.S. government gave Suharto a helping hand, even providing the generals with the names of 5,000 suspected communists. The United States also made sure that Suharto's men had enough weapons to do the job. "A steady flow of cable traffic between the U.S. embassy in Jakarta and Washington released under the Freedom of Information Act shows conclusively that the United States was well aware of the killings, approved of them, and even sent emergency supplies of small firearms to arm the killers," writes Carmel Budiardjo in Surviving Indonesia's Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story (Cassell).

In the ensuing years, the United States continued to arm Suharto and give economic aid. In December 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford visited Jakarta and gave Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, which he did within forty-eight hours. That invasion and occupation cost 200,000 lives.

Suharto was Washington's creature. And it took Washington the longest time to abandon him. Even on the last day of his rule, there was a split within the Administration over whether to call for him to step down or muffle criticism.

"The United States was the last one off the sinking ship of Suharto," Nairn says.

Washington is now reluctant to put too much stock in the corrupt Habibie, who has no political base. And it certainly hasn't backed the pro-democracy movement, despite some rhetoric to the contrary. Instead, it has cast its lot with General Wiranto, Suharto's defense minister and former aide de camp. No angel he.

On May 20, the day before Suharto stepped down, Wiranto had no compunction about warning protesters of another "Tiananmen." Back in March, the Indonesian military's intelligence unit, which was "under Wiranto's daily control, picked up nine labor activists who had called for an increase in the minimum wage," Nairn reports in the June 15/22 issue of The Nation. Some of these activists were tortured. A U.S. official told Nairn that this intelligence unit in East Timor "was using a new tactic: breaking the hips of prisoners."