By Marwaan Macan-MarkarBANGKOK, Jan 28 (IPS) - ‘’We pray to Allah to bless Pak Harto’s soul and to place him among the blessed,’’ Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahamad Badawi is reported to have told the local media after news broke of the death on Sunday of Indonesia’s former president Suharto.
Similar words of kindness and sympathy have been expressed by Badawi’s predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, towards the man known fondly to some in South-east Asia as ‘’Pak Harto,’’ or Father Harto.
Earlier in January, as the 86-year-old Grand General (Retired) Haji Mohammed Suharto lay dying in a hospital in Jakarta, Singapore’s founding father and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, flew into the Indonesian capital to be at the ageing leader’s bedside and to shower praise on his achievements.
Such positive tributes for Suharto -- who was admitted to the hospital on Jan. 4 with heart, lung and kidney problems, and who died of multiple organ failure -- is understandable from present and past leaders of Malaysia and Singapore. For these two countries, along with Thailand and the Philippines, owe a debt to the Indonesian dictator for helping to shape a regional identity in the form of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) and to place it on the world map.
‘’ASEAN would not have come into being if Indonesia under his charge had sought to be a regional hegemon,’’ noted ‘The Straits Times’, a mouthpiece of the Singaporean government, in an editorial last week, about the former leader of South-east Asia’s largest country. ‘’Because it chose to be the facilitator, not the dictator, of regional stability; because it focused on economic and social development; because it was stable for more than 30 years, the region as a whole was able to grow.’’
Others who wrote similar accounts to assess Suharto’s legacy after the former dictator was hospitalised said as much. ‘’Suharto was with ASEAN for 30 years and earned deep respect from present and former ASEAN leaders, as shown by their visits to him at his sickbed,’’ observed Bantarto Bandoro, chief editor of ‘The Indonesian Quarterly,’ a publication of a respected local think tank, in a commentary for ‘The Jakarta Post’. ‘’But he was restrained during his time from projecting himself as a ‘heavyweight’ of ASEAN, because he knew well that ASEAN members states would have to develop their countries in their own way.’’
ASEAN, which has expanded to 10 members today, with the inclusion of Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, has just embarked on its next phase as it celebrated its 40th anniversary. To further strengthen its regional ties and identity, the bloc has unveiled a charter to make it a rules-based legal body.
But such a prospect of regional amity appeared remote during the years of Suharto’s predecessor, Achmad Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president after the country gained independence from the Dutch colonialists in 1949. The mercurial Sukarno had greater designs for his country, unleashing in the process a campaign of ‘’konfrontasi,’’ or confrontation, against Malaysia, in 1964. He wanted the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, which belonged to Malaysia, to come under Indonesia’s ambit. To achieve that end, he even threatened to trigger an uprising by arming local leftists and farmers.
Since its creation in 1967, ASEAN’s five founding countries began a steady upward march towards economic development. By the early 1990, some of them were described as Asia’s ‘’Tiger economies’’ for their achievements through open, free-market policies. Foreign investment poured into resource-rich Indonesia, under Suharto, as it did to the other four members of this regional bloc from the United States and other Western countries.
By 1995, the per capita income in Indonesia was over 827 US dollars, according to some reports, up from 195 U.S. dollars in 1965, when Suharto, then a young army general, rose to power. During his 32 years in power, he had also seen the country go from being an importer of rice, the staple dish, to being self-sufficient in the grain. The once bankrupt country also saw progress in the health and education sectors and advances in infrastructure development.
Yet ,such regional stability and economic growth that Suharto helped to shape have not been able to mask the darker side of the region’s politics that has earned ASEAN notoriety. The Indonesian dictator stood out as the worst of the strongmen and autocrats who ruled South-east Asian countries with an iron fist, ranging from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Lee in Singapore to Mahathir in Malaysia.
Shortly after he emerged as Indonesia’s strongman, following an abortive coup, in 1965, Suharto led a brutal campaign to purge the county of its communist party, all left-leaning intellectuals and artists, sympathisers of the left, citizens of Chinese origin and others perceived to be enemies of the state, including ‘’atheists.’’ Over several months, between 500,000 people to, some say, a million were killed in one of the worst massacres in history.
Suharto’s brutal anti-communist purge was in keeping with a mood shared by other South-east Asian governments in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. This was, after all, during the height of the Cold War and the U.S. war in Vietnam. Washington and London backed such anti-communist repression, as they supported the creation of ASEAN as a bulwark against the spread of left-wing political movements in the region.
Suharto also came to symbolise another form of violence common across South-east Asia, of strong central governments crushing smaller, vulnerable ethnic communities. In 1975, Suharto ordered his troops to occupy East Timor, which had just won independence from Portuguese colonisation, in a brutal campaign. An estimated 200,000 people -- or a third of the half-island nation’s population -- were killed.
And by 1998, when Suharto’s 32 years in power came to an end following a pro-democracy uprising in Indonesia, the colossus of ASEAN had come to epitomise another excess prevalent among the region’s political leaders -- corruption. Studies done by the United Nations and the World Bank have identified Suharto as the worst among national leaders who robbed their country. He is estimated to have embezzled between 15 –35 billion US dollars. It is a list that also includes the former Filipino dictator Marcos.
Yet, by the time he died, nearly a decade after being forced out of power, Suharto evaded justice in a manner familiar with other strongmen who have dominated the political landscape across South-east Asia. His family and lawyers stalled the few attempts to book him by raising concerns about the former dictator’s failing health.
Even Singapore’s Lee, who led his country with an iron grip but won applause for combating corruption, came to Suharto’s rescue this month to help whitewash this sordid side of ASEAN’s history. ‘’What’s a few billion dollars lost in bad excesses?’’ he is reported to have told Singaporean journalists after seeing the former Indonesian dictator in his sickbed.
