Most of the severest of Suharto'c critics, inside and outside of Indonesia, rightly concentrate of the gross violations of human rights during his 33 years of power. The worst of these were the mass murders of 1965 and the military occupation of East Timor.
We know from the public statements of generals such as Kemal Idris that he was given orders to "clean-up the PKI". We know from the research of historian Bonnie Tryanna, that Suharto's attorney General, Ali Said, sent a circular around the country clarifying that no action was to be taken against anybody killing those supposedly sympathetic with the 30th September Movement. We know the mass murders were state policy, under Suharto. And there are many other examples of these very, bloody violations.
But there was another victim of Suharto's rule: the Indonesian nation. Suharto was an anti-Indonesian. There are a number of aspects to this.
Perhaps the most discussed among political economists was his surrender of national sovereignty over the Indonesian economy. He surrendered the whole post-1965 restructuring of the Indonesian economy to an assembly of multinational corporation CEOs who met in Switzerland in 1967. As a result, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, has never industrialized. This is despite receiving tens of billions of dollars from the export of oil, gas and timber and tens of billions more in aid and loans from the West. Suharto was happy for Indonesia to be minor outsource center for garment, footwear and other light manufacturing assembly. No heavy industry, no engineering industry or other middle level industry was ever developed.
A report by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in 2000 listed Indonesia near the bottom of the list of countries with any kind of diversification or depth of industrialization. In a damning assessment of what amounted to an abandonment of any attempt to industrialise, UNIDO stated:
"The pattern of Indonesian industrialization differed from that of other countries... Between 1985 and 1997, the contribution of higher technology industries to manufacturing value-added did not increase,.. virtually all countries in the region and elsewhere have maintained the share of medium-technology industries in their manufacturing output."
This was before the Asian financial crisis. Only low technology manufacturing expanded – the "coolie" based industries. While Sukarno had fought against Indonesia becoming "a nation of coolies, and a coolie among nations", Suharto turned Indonesia precisely into a coolie nation. A massive two thirds of the workforce – 60 million plus – accounted for only 5-6% of total manufacturing value added!
Meanwhile billions of dollars have left and are leaving the country in the form of interest on debt repayments and profit repatriation. Now, every time an Indonesian worker bites into a piece of tempe or tahu, money leaves the country.
But Suharto's anti-Indonesianness goes beyond his sale of his country and people as coolies. Suharto also set in motion policies that have and are still destroying the base of Indonesian national culture.
Indonesia, like all great nations, was a creation of a great revolution that begun in the field of ideas with Kartini and spread into mobilisational politics of Tirto Adhisuryo, the Sarekat Islam, the Indonesian Communist Party and finally Soekarno and the Indonesian National Party. Mobilisation and activity on the streets and the workplaces and in the villages began the creation of a new national culture, an Indonesian culture. The new culture was the enemy of passivity, the key characteristic of Javanese feudal culture, and a force for productiveness and creativity. In Indonesia (the Netherlands Indies then) the biggest, modern mass organization in the world at the time had come into existence, Sarekat Islam.
An explosion of writing, fiction and non-fiction accompanied these mobilising organizations, with their protests, strikes and boycotts. Soekarno was at the forefront, but there were many others. Novels, short stories, poems and political writings mushroomed everywhere. "Wild schools" sprung up to help spread the new ideas and writings to the younger generation. The cultural explosion continued after Independence. All the political parties had cultural organizations taking their ides down to the villages. The left wing Peoples Cultural Institute (LEKRA) and National Cultural Institute (LKN) were the biggest.
This cultural explosion ended under Suharto. Worse than that, all the gains of Indonesian culture from the previous 60 years was abandoned. For thirty years and several generations now the novels, plays and poems of the revolution that created Indonesia have not been taught in Indonesian schools. Tens of millions of children have gone through their schooling with almost no exposure to the ideas upon which their country was based. The writings of Soekarno are not studied, nor even those of his more conservative rival Mohammed Hatta. The great writings of Chairil Anwar, Sitor Situmorang and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are not any list of compulsory reading. While every year, there is a holiday to celebrate the birth of Indonesia's first great, liberation thinker, Kartini, nobody reads her writings at school. They are not studied.
On top of this, the teaching of history in the schools was de facto put under the control of the Indonesian Armed Forces History Centre. The people's own history was no longer theirs; it became a history of military heroes. Not even in senior high school did students read any primary sources from their history. History text books which diverge from official history are banned and thrown onto public bonfires.
Culture and history were redefined. Culture was surrendered to the neo-colonial economy. The national film industry collapsed (while Soeharto's family monopolised cinemas). There is only one national book distribution company for a country of 250 million. The country's greatest living poet, Sitor Situmorang was under house arrest. The greatest dramatist, Rendra, was in and out of jail. The country's greatest novelist was in gaol and even when released after 14 years had his books banned.
Suharto surrendered the economy to become the economy of a coolie nation, no matter how many Indonesian millionaires now own apartments in Singapore. He suppressed the national history, and abandoned the nation's cultural achievements during its revolution and nation formation process up until 1965. When Sukarno stood before tens of thousands of workers and peasants and the US ambassador in 1962 and said "go to hell with your aid", he did so standing upon a cultural legacy of pride in the achievement of freedom through struggle, with a self-confidence summed up in a poem of the revolution by Indonesia's great poet of the 1940s, Chairil Anwar. In "Me", he wrote:
Though bullets should pierce my skin
I shall still strike and march forth
Wounds and poison shall I take aflee
Aflee 'Til the pain and pang should disappear
And I should care even less
I want to live for another thousand years
But Suharto started killing that spirit in 1965, 20 years after Anwar wrote it. Yes, the flags should fly at half-mast, but not for Suharto.