Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | January 28, 2008
INDONESIA'S Suharto was an authentic giant of Asia, a nation-builder, a dictator, a changer of history.
He was also, for Australia, the most important and beneficial Asian leader in the entire period after World War II. This was once a widely held view among senior Australian policy-makers.
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating frequently averred there was no country in the world more important to Australia than Indonesia.
He also, in interviews with me and many other forums, declared that Suharto's rise to power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s was the most fortunate strategic development for Australia since the end of World War II.
This was not only a Labor view. When Tim Fischer was deputy prime minister, he nominated Suharto as the man of the 20th century.
Keating and Fischer may have spoken with some characteristic overstatement, but the impulse behind their remarks was certainly right.
Suharto was a prime mover of history and his rule was of immeasurable benefit to Australia.
The messiness and tragedy of Suharto's last years in office make this an uncomfortable and unpopular judgment now. It is true, nonetheless.
It is hard to take the proper measure of Suharto.
The positives, too easily forgotten, are enormous. When Suharto took control of Indonesia in 1965, he defeated a botched pro-communist coup attempt.
Indonesia was then a broken backed country on the brink of famine and disintegration.
Inflation was running at 500 per cent. It had one of the largest communist parties in the world, at a time of dangerous communist expansion.
Its erratic leader, Sukarno, whom Suharto gradually deposed, had instructed Jakarta's malnourished residents to solve the city's vermin problem and their own hunger by eating the huge population of rats.
Indonesia was embroiled in a tense and dangerous military confrontation with Malaysia, in which Indonesian and Australian troops clashed in Borneo.
Suharto turned all this around, while consolidating his own power and the New Order regime he set up.
He turned over the running of the Indonesian economy to the so-called Berkley Mafia of Western-educated technocrat economists.
They did a brilliant job. The period 1965 to 1968 in Indonesia became a textbook case of how to bring hyper-inflation under control.
Suharto reoriented Indonesian foreign policy on to a stable and pro-Western path. He was crucial in the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 and the overall stability of Southeast Asia. Later he was critical to every positive achievement of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum.
Australia's successful APEC diplomacy, especially under Keating, would have been impossible without Suharto.
The broader regional stability Suharto brought about was of incomparable importance to Australia.
It is difficult to imagine what Australia might have been like had Indonesia become a communist nation in the mid-1960s.
Everything we know of Southeast Asian development and success would have been absent from history, and tyranny and social failure on a massive scale would have replaced it.
Australia's defence budget over three decades might have been three or four times as high as it was. We could have developed as a fearful, isolated and perhaps even militaristic society.
This is all speculation, but a communist Indonesia would have fundamentally changed Australian history.
After stabilising Indonesia's economy, Suharto's team set about developing it.
The great agencies of development, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, regarded Indonesia in the 1970s and 80s as a model of the effective uses of international aid.
Millions of people were freed from poverty; Indonesia became self-sufficient in rice; a sizeable manufacturing economy grew up.
Most important of all, a middle class came into being.
There was, especially from the late 1980s, an important liberalising streak in Indonesia and the emergence of a genuine civil society.
Although Indonesia was never a democracy under Suharto, there was a wide degree of permissible discussion, by Southeast Asian standards a fairly liberal press, and many of the procedures of social consultation that characterise a democracy.
These trends continued up until about 1993 and if Suharto had retired and gone into retirement at that year's presidential election, or if illness had claimed him around then, he would now be hailed as one of the most successful nation builders the world has seen.
But, like so many others, he stayed too long.
It was not the least of the ironies of Suharto's demise that he was brought down by the middle class his economic liberalisation had created, especially the university students, in many cases the sons and daughters of officials in his own government.
The positives in Suharto's rule are easily forgotten, but the negatives were huge and undeniable as well.
The most important negative was a consistently poor record on human rights.
In the mass anti-communist killings of 1965, it is still not clear exactly what role the army played nor indeed precisely how much control Suharto, still struggling with Sukarno, had.
The savage and mostly Muslim initiated anti-communist violence was a cover for many unrelated violent actions. The army certainly wanted to suppress the communists, whom it believed had orchestrated the 1965 coup attempt, but the army was not responsible for much of the killing.
The worst, but by no means the only, human rights excess under Suharto occurred in East Timor, during and after its incorporation into Indonesia in 1975.
Suharto's rule had many other flaws. He was a strong president but a weak father.
Although Suharto himself lived modestly, he allowed his greedy children many state monopolies, which meant they could extract vast monopoly rents from the Indonesian economy.
More than anything, it was the corruption of Suharto's family that turned Indonesian opinion against him.
He also failed dismally in planning a proper succession strategy.
He even appointed the eccentric BJ Habibie as vice-president partly because he thought no one would want him as president.
This was related to a broader failure of his regime to develop state institutions with a significant grip on the society.
As Suharto became older, his rule became more personalised so that while a civil society did develop, Indonesian institutions remained anaemic and feeble.
Worst of all, perhaps, from about 1993, certainly by 1994, Suharto himself had turned definitively away from the liberalisation he had gradually allowed in the several previous years.
In 1994, a pivotal year, he closed down the prestigious Tempo magazine, and some others, in a sure sign of regime insecurity and clumsiness.
But there was infinite irony, and much tragedy, in the crisis that finally brought Suharto down.
In 1965, he had brought the Indonesian economy back almost from death by following orthodox Western economic advice.
In the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis, it was Suharto's willingness to put Indonesia on an IMF reform path, which, more than anything, was the immediate cause of his regime's collapse, whereas Mahathir Mohamad, in neighbouring Malaysia, defied the counter-productive IMF advice and prospered.
It was not, as some analysts thought, an unwillingness on Suharto's part to embrace the pain of the IMF reforms that did him in, but the foolishness and unreality of the IMF's prescriptions for Indonesia and the consequences of Suharto's genuine efforts to implement them.
The greatest testament to Suharto, however, is modern Indonesia. That Indonesia moved from more than three decades of Suharto's rule to the relatively stable and economically growing democracy it is today is of course a tribute to the Indonesian people.
It is also a tribute to the Indonesia that Suharto created, a modern, complex, diverse society with capable leaders and an intelligent outlook on the world.
There was good and bad in Suharto, good and bad in what he did. Undoubtedly, in producing a stable Indonesia, and therefore a stable Southeast Asia, Suharto bequeathed an inestimable gift to Australia.
