[Indonesia in the Soeharto Years. John H. McGlynn, Jeffrey Hadler, Bambang Bujono, Margaret Glade Agusta, Gedsiri Suhartono, et al. The Lontar Foundation. 507 pp.]

Hartoyo Pratiknyo, Jakarta – In this age of the instant book, seven years seems like a long time for somebody to come up with the idea of publishing a volume on what it was like to live and work in Indonesia through 32 years of what might be called the country's era of enlightened despotism.

Certainly, there is no lack of material on Indonesia's second president. After all, he was, up to the moment of his forced resignation on March 21, 1998, not only one of the longest ruling and most influential leaders in this region, but he was also one of the most fascinating figures in the history of modern Indonesia – his leadership style, the scope of both his failures and accomplishments, the shrewd rationality that complemented his traditional Javanese weltanschauung, the continuing mystique surrounding the man and his background.

But if sheer bulk and number of contributors – including some of the country's most respected scholars, activists, academicians, government officials, intellectuals and photojournalists – are a measure of value, Indonesia in the Soeharto Years certainly does make up for this lapse in civic memory.

The book measures a good 22 by 30 centimeters and runs 483 pages from frontispiece to index, with sections structured in chronological order preceded by brief commentaries and a foreword by former United States president Jimmy Carter.

As the poet, writer and journalist Goenawan Mohamad notes in his preface, the book makes no attempt to give a comprehensive account of the era. Rather, its aim is to present the Indonesian public with "an album of Indonesia from 1965 to 1998,... an aide-memoire put together with enthusiasm and with a sense of inadequacy."

Perhaps this, and the abundance of material it attempts to cover, is why it takes some effort for readers to find details and hard information about certain subjects. The general index at the end is of little help. Some of the hundreds of pictures, many of which are previously unpublished, did not come out too well in print, while others lack impact.

But any discourse on Soeharto – or on life under his all-pervading leadership – must of necessity be inadequate. Soeharto came to power on the wave of one of the most crucial watershed episodes in Indonesia's modern history. A peasant boy by birth, unfamiliar with the particulars of modern Western thought but steeped in the wisdoms passed from generation to generation through traditional Javanese texts, he astounded the nation and the world by the swiftness and the thoroughness with which he quashed the October 1965 communist "uprising" – and thereby saved the nation from its gradual slip into Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.

And while ruthlessness was not uncommon among rulers in ancient Java, the way in which Soeharto tacitly condoned the hunting down and killing of hundreds of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and communist sympathizers was entirely true to the dictum stated by Machiavelli in his famous little book, The Prince: "...it must be noted that men must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance." Nor did he seem averse to using trickery and deceit to attain what, according to his beliefs, were morally justifiable ends.

For example, it has been asserted that, as commander of the Army Strategic Reserves Command (KOSTRAD) at the time, Soeharto had deliberately overstepped the limits of authority given to him by Sukarno's March 11 order (Supersemar) to take whatever measures deemed necessary to restore order and safeguard the president. Instead, Soeharto used the opportunity to take the de facto national leadership into his own hands.

In spite of his authoritarianism, however, many observers believe that it would be a mistake to assume that Soeharto had nothing but his own personal interests at heart. Rather, many contend, it was his belief in the traditional Javanese concept of manunggaling kawulo gusti – the "oneness" of the ruler and the ruled, of man and divinity – that led him to foster, in practice, what he saw as a benevolent and necessary form of authoritarianism for the sake of the common good.

This concept of "benign" dictatorship gradually came to pervade every aspect of societal life. All forms of dissent were nipped in the bud and political stability became the key phrase in New Order Indonesia.

Political parties were realigned and the media put under strict government control. All institutions of state, including the judiciary and the national and regional legislative bodies, were subordinated to the executive branch through a resourcefully conceived system of "Pancasila Democracy" that preserved the outward appearance of participatory rule, but in fact, left all decision making in the president's hands.

In this climate of sustained stability, the economy flourished and grew at an average of almost 6 percent to more than 7 percent between 1989 and 1994. As GDP and per capita incomes grew, the number of people living below the poverty line decreased from roughly 60 percent in 1966 to less than 14 percent at the end of that period. International praise was heaped on the country and the regime.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point out the mistakes and the misconceptions in Soeharto's grand design. A new generation of Indonesians had begun to emerge, imbued with the ideals of personal freedom and human dignity. Soeharto's greatest mistake, it appears in retrospect, was that he failed to take into account these growing aspirations and so failed to anticipate the force of the combined onslaught of multiple crises and discontents that, in the end, collaborated to bring him down.

In this sense, this "aide-memoire" can serve as a reminder of how easy it is to digress from the true spirit of the manunggal doctrine once power is firmly in hand, and of the perils that are inherent in authoritarian rule, however "benevolent".