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Asia Buzz: Crystal Ball
The experts aren't always right. Look at Indonesia
By
TERRY McCARTHY
June
14, 2000
Web posted at 3:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 3:30 a.m. EDT
When I started my latest assignment in Asia for TIME at the beginning of 1998,
it was clear that the region was in flux. Thailand had crashed on the back of
the baht, and all the talk was of the economic crisis spreading. But while
attention focused on the survival of the reform process in China, the viability
of the Nikkei stock average and the future of foreign investment in the region,
few even then could have imagined the impact all this would have on Indonesia.
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- Monday,
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on Demand: World Class Cities
Your country needs you
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from Japan: History Lesson
Straight from the horse's mouth
- Friday,
June 2, 2000
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ASIAWEEK |
Intelligence
The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek
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For three decades Suharto had been firmly in control of power in this colorful
archipelago, and his family had profited enormously from their proximity to the
president. It had become standard operating practice for any foreign business
coming to Jakarta to enlist one of the Suharto clan as partners before setting
up shop--it was like having to get inoculated for going to a country with
endemic diseases. You had to get the jab.
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Naive newcomers were told by confident analysts in the embassies' political
sections and the investment banks that Suharto's rule was absolute and secure,
that Indonesia was different to the democracies of the West, that the
Indonesians liked to have an overall king, and so on. You just needed to be here
long enough to understand.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is fascinating to see just how wrong they
all were. In the last two years we have seen the dismissal and almost total
humiliation of one of Asia's most powerful men. Earlier this month, a court in
Jakarta dismissed the libel suit Suharto had brought against TIME for its cover
story on his family's illicit wealth. The idea of any judge ruling against
Suharto was, until recently, pure science fiction.
And that is only the beginning. Indonesia's "permanent" annexation of East Timor
has been reversed--that half-island is now a new, if struggling, state with its
own leaders and ideas about the future that do not include domination by a
Javanese colonial system. (Jakarta would never give up East Timor, said the
long-timers, because the military had too much control over the island).
Indonesia also has a free press--amazing to anyone who had spent any time here
under Suharto, when journalism was an extension of the government's sycophantic
knee-bending before the great Bapak. (Indonesians were not like Westerners, said
the supposed experts. They didn't need to have investigative reporting, truth
was always relative in the mystical Javanese mind).
And every day truth commissions and investigations are announced, delving into
the murky past of the Suharto era when countless victims were "removed" or
"disappeared" and a privileged few looted the national economy to become
spectacularly rich while the majority stayed poor. Even the slaughter of half-a-
million suspected communists in 1965-66 is now up for investigation.
(Indonesians were not interested in the bad events of the past, said the
analysts, they just adapted themselves to an ever-changing present. Amazing how
flexible and forgetful people in this country could be, they said).
I list all this to illustrate how wrong the experts--including members of my own
profession--can be. Faced with an apparently rigid status quo, the temptation is
to seek ways to explain its assumed permanence, rather than to look for the
small cracks appearing--the excessive and destabilizing speculation in the
economy, the rise of [Vice President] Megawati Sukarnoputri as the voice of the
dispossessed, the increasingly large gap between the political theater and the
people at large.
True, we could never have predicted it would all change so quickly. Nor will we
predict how Mahathir's days as Malaysia's long-term ruler will end, nor will we
be able to write the obituary for China's communist party in advance. But one
lesson we should take from the last two years of our coverage of Indonesia: in
politics, nobody endures, and absolutely nobody endures absolutely.
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