Alan Beattie and Tom McCawley – The International Monetary Fund does not usually end up being sued by the people it has negotiated with. But Kwik Kian Gie, Indonesia's national development planning minister, recently advised a group of local lawyers to go ahead and file a class action lawsuit against the IMF for its policies in the country.
Of all the countries affected by the Asian crisis, Indonesia had perhaps the most fraught interactions with the international community. And it has recovered far more slowly and painfully from the trauma of 1997-98 than most, intensifying the legacy of bitterness and recrimination.
For its critics, the IMF's Indonesian programme became a byword for malign and capricious interference in a distressed country's affairs. When the currency started weakening and banks came under pressure in late 1997, the IMF's attempt to stem the pressure with a limited bank closure failed.
Critics then charge that, in the second round of reforms, the IMF took the opportunity to impose a massive and painful restructuring on the economy – which precipitated the ousting of former president Suharto in May 1998 – far out of proportion to the cause of the crisis.
IMF officials say the problem with Indonesia was the intertwining of politics with economics. Suharto's dictatorial regime, with its extensive nepotism reaching into almost every corner of the economy, meant that any serious attempt at reform inevitably ended up threatening a relative and hence the president's power base.
One part of the long list of conditions set down in return for help – the dismantling of the government monopoly on marketing cloves – has been widely cited as a symbol of excessive micro-management.
When Horst Kvhler, the IMF's managing director, took up his post in 2000, he cited his personal experience of the IMF programme in Indonesia – having been sent as an emissary from the German government – as an example of why the fund had to slim down the conditions it placed on help.
"It was impossible to do it overnight," he said. "It was an agenda for a decade." Officials involved in the programme admit that some parts of it, such as the first round of ad hoc closures of banks without guaranteeing deposits, was in retrospect a mistake. It encouraged rather than prevented bank runs as depositors wondered which banks would be shut next.
In the chaos that followed, Indonesia's economy contracted 14 per cent in 1998, the most severe damage wrought on any Asian country by the regional crisis.
But the officials hold firm to the idea that Indonesia's essential problem was crony capitalism, and that a serious reform effort was necessary to demonstrate that this would end. The clove monopoly was owned by Suharto's son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, who amassed a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Not every policy was well-conceived and wise," says Hubert Neiss, then director of the IMF's Asia-Pacific department and now Deutsche Bank's chairman for Asia. "But that is inevitable in a crisis. The broad strategy was right: to use conditionality to impose better governance. Without that the international community would never have come to Indonesia's support."
IMF officials also point out that demands for extensive reform emanated from within the country itself. As a counterbalance to the demands of his family and cronies, Suharto had collected a so-called "Berkeley mafia" of US-educated economic advisers to whom he turned in times of crisis. Liberal, market-minded reformers of a sort eagerly seized on by the IMF, fund officials say they pressed it to include more and more conditions in its lending which would have the effect of undermining the Suharto dictatorship.
In reality, the IMF's problem was not that it came in with a preset notion of what needed to be done, but that it faced a country beset by corruption and dictatorship and, in effect, threw in its lot with a particular faction which had a view of how to reform it.
"Many of the domestic reformers were telling the IMF we needed to demand certain things as a symbol of Suharto's willingness to undertake reform," says an IMF official. "The clove monopoly was a symbol of this. In the abstract, we may not have insisted on its elimination." These debates have by no means gone away, as Mr Kwik's intervention shows.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indonesia's president, remains in favour of a continuing relationship with the IMF and the lending programme has recently been extended, but Mr Kwik finds significant minority support elsewhere.
Amien Rais, speaker of parliament, says Indonesia can achieve recovery without the IMF. He and other Islamist leaders, whose parties hold 15 per cent of parliamentary seats, hit at "western imperialism".
Economic nationalism of the type preached by Suharto is still widespread. Indonesia's government is reluctantly re-privatising the banks it took over during the crisis, but has still to make significant inroads in liberalisation elsewhere. A large debt burden drags back economic growth and restricts the ability of companies to borrow. Almost alone among the crisis-hit east Asian currencies, the rupiah remained vulnerable to bouts of severe weakness in the years after the crisis abated.
The experience of the IMF rescue hangs over the country. Late last month Tommy Suharto was jailed for his alleged part in an assassination attempt. The controversies over Indonesia's relationship with the international financial institutions, which in many other Asian countries have subsided, remain a part of its daily political life.