Indonesia: An Eyewitness Account
By Michael Maher
Viking, Penguin Books
274pp. $30
REVIEW BY PIP HINMAN
"Suharto had promised to build foundations that would secure Indonesia's future. Instead, he bequeathed his people a house of cards".
This is how Michael Maher, former ABC Jakarta-based correspondent, summed up the legacy of the corrupt and self-serving clique that reigned over some 200 million people for 32 years. His book, Indonesia: An Eyewitness Account, covers the five years before the downfall of Suharto, a time of massive political change in Indonesia.
Being posted to Jakarta was, in foreign correspondent circles, the equivalent to selecting the short straw. This was because of the difficulties associated with collecting and reporting information.
But Maher wasn't put off. Having grown up in India, Thailand and Burma, he was keen to find out more about Australia's biggest neighbour which, in the early 1990s, boasted about its economic dynamism. The miracle didn't last, however, and by the end of 1997, the Asian crisis had hit Thailand and Indonesia, sending the economy, and then Suharto, crashing down.
Maher says he didn't initially see the writing on the wall. However, his reports on key political issues, which have been woven together to construct the book, do give an accurate insight into just how untenable the regime's political and economic prescriptions had become.
With the economy on the rise and Suharto unwilling to rein in his offspring and cronies, the frustration among the less favoured political elite began to show. Some of them, like Amien Rais, even lent support to the more radical student sector which was preparing to take more decisive action against the regime.
In this context, the racist scapegoating of the ethnic Chinese community, students' struggles for democratic rights, and the struggles for self-determination in West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), Aceh and East Timor make up key chapters.
Maher also manages to throw into stark relief the uniformly conservative nature of Indonesia's political elite, including the all-things-to-all-people Amien Rais, nuclear reactor enthusiast and hapless third president Dr Jusuf Habibie, the regal-like Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, and the mercurial and scheming Abdurrahman Wahid. Aside from some engaging descriptions of these feudal relics, Maher also manages to weave into his book a sense of the archipelago's vibrant and ethnically diverse history and culture.
One of the most interesting chapters is devoted almost entirely to what Maher describes as the "crazy braves of Indonesian activism", the People's Democratic Party (PRD). Apart from in Green Left Weekly, the PRD receives very little coverage elsewhere in Australia. Maher was obviously moved by these activists' courage and commitment, something which caused him to reflect on just how many freedoms he took for granted.
Maher discovered the PRD after the regime scapegoated the small left-wing party for the military's attack on the Indonesian Democratic Party's offices in central Jakarta in July 1996. Determined to wipe out the PRD, which had only just launched itself, the regime hunted down its leaders, set up show trials and sent many to prison.
Budiman Sujatmiko's case was the more celebrated partly because of his PRD leadership position but also, I suspect, because he used the court room to deliver a stinging four-hour critique of the Suharto regime. Maher covered Budiman's trial for the ABC and the footage was extraordinary.
Not only did Budiman and his comrades use the court room to press their ideas for reforming the Indonesian political and economic system, they told the world they were prepared to die for the cause. Maher was impressed: the penalty for treason, or crimes against the state, was death. In the end, Budiman was sentenced to 13 years', but was unconditionally pardoned by the Wahid government in December 1999.
Maher's chapter on East Timor is a little weak, perhaps because so much has happened since the 1999 ballot and the political differentiation is only now resuming, after being put on hold to fight the Indonesian occupying force. However, he does make some important points about Australian governments' slavish accommodation to the Suharto regime.
Maher returned to Indonesia to cover the first "democratic" elections in October 1999 and his book ends with a rather hopeful prognosis of what the new political elite in government might deliver. This was the view being put uniformly by all establishment media. But the scale of the economic crisis and the fact that power remains concentrated in the hands of the political elite means that not enough has changed.
A year down the track, Wahid's "reform" credentials are being widely questioned. For ordinary Indonesians, life has become more difficult and looks set to get worse; an end to the economic crisis is nowhere in sight.
Could all this have been foreseen? Perhaps not, but in any case Maher successfully creates "an accessible book on Indonesia" which is compelling reading for non-specialists with a thirst to know more about this enigmatic country.