Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani Page A

first to his son Bambang, then, in quick succession, to his cousin Sudwikatmono and his daughter Tutut. Suharto allowed his family to import soap operas from Latin America, to sprinkle them liberally with advertisements, to drop any pretence that TV might have a social purpose. At first these stations only reached an urban elite. Over time, though, they found their way onto the satellite and into the homes of people living on tuppence ha’penny a day in places that none of the Suharto children would ever visit. People very much like Suharto himself, in his younger days.

    Suharto grew up as poor as the next villager, dropping out of junior high school and giving up a job in a bank because he fell off his bicycle and ripped his only set of presentable clothes. He joined the army, rose through the ranks, grabbed power. But he always cared deeply about improving life for the Javanese farmer, and once he was on the throne, he set about doing that with conviction. Though he put generals in charge of most aspects of Indonesian life, Suharto had the good sense to put the economy into the hands of a small clique of competent and cautious economists collectively known as the ‘Berkeley mafia’ because many of them had studied in California with sponsorship from the Ford Foundation. They first pushed through policies that got agriculture back on its feet. The country went from being the world’s biggest importer of rice to being a net exporter.
    Having watched South Korea and other countries grow rich by helping private companies make things other countries wanted to buy, the Berkeley mafia welcomed foreign investors and promoted manufacturing for export. The economy boomed. The proportion of kids in school doubled, access to basic health services rocketed. In his first two decades as President, Suharto kept the country on an even keel by delivering just enough to keep everyone on board, and to keep them obeying the captain’s orders. It was a giant balancing act. If Catholics in the military were growing too strong for comfort, Suharto would throw a little meat to Muslim intellectuals. He allowed the army to keep its fingers in most of the huge state companies that were the legacy of Dutch times; in return, soldiers were obliged to keep workers in the embryonic manufacturing sector in their place. The President invited foreign companies to invest in Indonesia, then made them team up with one of the businessmen who bankrolled his own various political ventures.
    This made for what World Bank economists called ‘high transaction costs’ and everyone else called corruption. And yet from the early 1980s foreigners did want to invest in Indonesia, precisely because of the stability that this web of compromise delivered. Many people saw the pay-offs to generals and cronies as a reasonable price for that stability. The investors turned a blind eye to the other price, the one paid by the communities whose objections to logging or mining were silenced with gunfire, by the workers who requested the minimum wage and wound up in hospital, by the journalists who were locked up for describing these things.
    For many years, most Indonesians turned a blind eye too, because the stability that Suharto delivered worked well for them. On my very first day as a correspondent for Reuters in Jakarta, Suharto’s autobiography was published in English. The reporter I was to take over from threw the volume across onto my empty desk. ‘Give us a couple of pars on that,’ he said. Seeing my panic, he added: ‘The story’s probably the extra-judicial killings.’ And indeed in his autobiography, the serving president mentioned almost casually that he had, a couple of years earlier, ordered his defence minister to kill over 2,000 common criminals without trial. ‘Shock therapy’, Suharto called it. I went to a nearby restaurant in search of some ‘vox pop’ – Indonesians who might, in English, tell me what they thought of the President’s