Suharto: Part Deux

While Suharto certainly deserved the bullet-pocked and blood-soaked legacy of his extraordinarily long stay in power, there are still a lot of mixed feelings among the public about what he has done over the past few decades. It's not that I've never been aware of this paradox; only that this dissonance was displayed with such simplicity by one of my students this morning. Despite of not being allowed neither possession of electronics nor access to TV, most of my students were well-informed of Suharto's death when I entered their class this morning. I used my usual 5-minute warm-up chat before lesson to ask their opinions about Suharto and what they think about him and his legacy. Quite a few said that they actually shed tears of joy when they heard the news. One student, on the contrary, mentioned that he was sad and sort of missed the good old pre-Reformasi days. When I asked him why, he replied, "because Mister, when Suharto was President, the price of a packet of IndoMie was Rp250, and now it's Rp1,000."

The gist of it is that life was perceivably much easier under Suharto, and the student's sentiment is shared by many other Indonesians. But was life really all bed of roses during the New Order era? And if it was, does Suharto deserve all the credit? Historical and economic factors played vital roles in contributing to Indonesia's fast-growing economy at this time. First, the huge influx of foreign investment (read: Western anti-communist countries) after Suharto took over. After the powerful Communist Party was decimated in 1965-66 and the erstwhile President Sukarno was forced out of power in 1967, Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into a strident anti-Communist country and re-oriented the country from Russia and China to the West. Hence the exponential increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign and military aid. Second, oil was found in abundance in mid-1970s, which further filled up the government's coffer to the brim. High oil prices during the 1980s recession certainly helped to cushion Indonesia through the crisis. A lot of moolah meant cheap subsidies for the public, and that was why prices were artificially low during this period. Anyway, see this BBC News article about Suharto's "opaque legacy."