Mar 26, 2026
If I was Spike Milligan I would entitle this "Suharto, my part in his downfall", but I'm not Spike Milligan and while Spike Milligan was known to direct actual artillery fire in the general direction of Hitler's soldiers, my own role in Suharto's demise was purely that of observer, from a relatively safe distance.
To discuss his fall, let's first outline just what it was he fell from. Suharto had a very ordinary upbringing in Central Java. He joined the KNIL Dutch colonial army in 1940, then after the Japanese invasion joined the PETA (Pembelah Tanah Air) militia that the Japanese raised from the local population and became a company commander. After Japan surrendered, his PETA unit disbanded and he became an officer in the new Indonesian Republic army. He married into Javanese nobility and remained in the army after independence. By the time 1965, the so-called Year of Living Dangerously, came around, he was the seventh most senior army officer in the country.
Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, was not a man encumbered by modesty. He was certain that his own personal rule was essential to the success of the nation. What started out as something resembling actual democracy was transformed into "Guided Democracy", with Sukarno being the one doing the guiding. A key part of his strategy for holding on to power relied on the identification of three political constituencies. The Nationalists wanted a strong secular democratic republic. The Islamists wanted an Islamic state, or failing that at least one where Islam was dominant. The Communists (PKI - Partai Komunis Indonesia) wanted a Communist state. All three were powerful political forces, and Sukarno was adept at keeping them all on a roughly equal footing. They were the legs of his three-legged stool, and of course the one sitting on the stool was himself. Any time one of the three gained some political advantage, the other two, with Sukarno's encouragement, would unite to take them down a peg. To say that Sukarno was communist, or favored communism, is a crude over-simplification. He tolerated communism as a means to keeping the other two factions in check, but he had no interest in actually letting them run the country. For the communist-phobic western powers, however, this wasn't good enough. Nothing short of a complete repudiation of communism would do for them.
Both the CIA and MI6 had operations running in Southeast Asia to curb the spread of Communism. The experience of Vietnam, North Korea and the Malay Emergency was unsettling and they were keen to avoid anything of the sort happening elsewhere. Their objective was to bring down Sukarno and replace him with someone more compliant. Thanks to the declassification of UK government documents a few years ago we know that MI6 had an operation based out of Singapore in the early-mid 1960s, and they considered an effective way to bring about the demise of communism in Indonesia was to have a premature communist coup - by being premature it would be doomed to failure, but would provoke enough of a backlash to ensure communism was crushed.
We've known about CIA involvement for longer - a CIA transport plane carrying weapons to support an attempted coup in Sulawesi and Sumatra was shot down in 1958, revealing the extent of the plan. The attempted uprising happened, but was defeated. They had ongoing operations after that but whether they had anything like the MI6 operation is not clear, as far as I know.
In 1965 the outcome desired by the MI6 agents came to pass, sort of. Whether they did indeed succeed in fomenting the communist revolt, or something of the sort happened anyway, is unclear. In particular, it's not clear the Gestapu attempted coup really was a communist uprising, or was something else. Certainly the communists were blamed for it, and they did seem to be somewhat involved, although it seems it was more of a split in the military, in particular the air force. Theories abound - some say the Air Force officers got wind of a planned army coup and acted to pre-empt it. There was also a theory that Suharto knew about the coup, or even had a hand in it. It's nigh impossible to verify any of these theories because Suharto himself worked hard to suppress any real information on the subject. There was only his version of the story, which is that a communist uprising happened, and violent female communist cadres known as Gerwani committed atrocities. The six most senior army generals were kidnapped - which sounds convenient for the seventh most senior, see above. Of the six, one, General Nasution, escaped, because the kidnappers mistook his adjutant for the general. The kidnapped victims were all found dead in a place called Lubang Buaya (the Crocodile Hole) in east Jakarta. The story that became the official line was that they had been tortured to death by the Gerwani and their bodies mutilated. A while ago I read a document that purported to be the official autopsy report that said they died from relatively clean wounds and it seemed they were just executed, no torture or mutilation involved. How reliable that is I don't know.
Of course Sukarno was accused of being involved in the plot - and again it's not clear whether he was or not. It does seem like officers involved thought they were protecting him, but beyond that who knows. In the aftermath the now most senior army officer took command of the situation to restore order. General Nasution of course was more senior on paper, but he was successfully sidelined. Suharto prevailed upon President Sukarno to authorize him to act to restore order in a legendary letter known as the Letter of Instruction of the 11th of March (Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret, or Supersemar for short, nicely evoking the wayang figure, Semar). While this letter was the basis for Suharto's assumption of power the existence of the letter or what it really said is very hard to substantiate. The original no longer exists, if it ever did, and the surviving documents that purport to be authentic copies are different from each other. There is no end to what one might suspect, but it's all difficult to prove.
After taking the reins Suharto immediately banned the PKI (Communist Party) and started on his purge of communists. Sukarno disagreed, but was soon persuaded to resign as president in favor of Suharto. Sukarno spent the rest of his life under house arrest, a situation he was familiar with from the time of Dutch rule. The purge of communists was ruthless and indiscriminate - something like a million people were killed, many of them with no connection to communism but denounced by neighbours for other grievances. This is well documented in numerous places - the most accessible may be the film The Act of Killing, which interviewed former death squad members who tell their stories with a chilling lack of remorse or any other emotion. There are credible reports that the CIA actively encouraged the killings, providing lists of suspected communists.
Having destroyed the PKI, Suharto revised Sukarno's political formula, and built his own three-legged stool. The former nationalists were rebranded as the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI, Partai Demokratis Indonesia), the Islamists became PPP (P3, Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, United Development Party) and he constructed a new third leg called Golkar (Golongan Karya, which means "functional groups", a name that doesn't enlighten much about its purpose). Golkar was in effect just him - it stood for nothing other than the continuation of Suharto's rule. It was by far the strongest of the three political forces, so the stool became quite unbalanced, but Golkar and Suharto were strong enough not to have to worry.
Suharto permitted elections to be held, with the three parties putting up candidates. PDI and PPP were only allowed to campaign in big cities - the countryside was exclusively for the Golkar yellow, to the extent that it had its own terminology, kuningisasi (yellowing). If you went for a drive out of the cities during election campaign time you would see a wall of yellow banners everywhere. Public servants were required to vote for Golkar - the official line was they had to "jalurkan aspirasi" (channel their aspirations) via Golkar. A friend who worked at a state-owned business complained to me that he and his university-educated colleagues had been compelled to attend a political rally in support of a local Golkar candidate, who announced no policy aspirations but insisted they all had to cheer loudly. He thought himself over-qualified for that role.
The election was always a bit theatrical. It would be referred to, apparently unironically, as a "pesta demokrasi" (festival of democracy). There would be public calls by all manner of officials, "mari kita sukseskan pemilu" (let's ensure the success of the election). The criterion for success was never stated, but implied. Unsurprisingly, Golkar always won. After the election a joint sitting of the two chambers of parliament would convene to consider the matter of who should be president. They always went through the motions of pretending to consider the matter seriously - they would compile a list of desirable attributes a candidate president should have, and pretend to look for someone who matched the criteria, and then to no-one's surprise they would always conclude that Suharto is the man for the job.
Suharto built much of his legitimacy on a strong economy. Sukarno hadn't been all that interested in economics, and under his rule the economy hadn't grown much and poverty remained an unsolved serious problem. Suharto appointed a group of economists called the Berkeley Mafia (because several of them were UC Berkeley graduates) to run the economy, and to start with he didn't interfere much with their work. They did the usual things economists like to do, keep the budget reasonably disciplined, encourage exports, ensure the predictability of regulations. The economy started growing at a healthy pace, and millions of people were lifted out of poverty.
Investment in primary school education led to a rise in literacy rates, which was good in all sorts of ways but in particular meant a workforce well-enough educated to work in manufacturing jobs, a major driver of economic growth. There was also investment in basic health facilities - every village acquired its own puskesmas (Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat, people's health clinic) and a major campaign vaccinated the population against polio. There was also a campaign to constrain population growth, "dua anak cukup" (two children are enough), which one might compare with the Chinese One Child Policy, except that it was not enforced by law, just by a persistent public education campaign, and of course two instead of one. China is in the throes of a demographic crisis as a result of this policy, whereas Indonesia is not.
Suharto built a record of performance legitimacy that had him held in high regard by much of the population. In later years he liked to refer to himself as "Bapak Pembangunan Indonesia" ("the Father of Indonesian Development", although you could also translate it as "Mr Indonesian Development").
Indonesia has had a Chinese minority population since early in Dutch times, and Suharto learned to exploit this to his benefit. Chinese people, being ethnically distinct from the "pribumi" native-born population ("native" is of course quite selectively defined, since many Indonesian Chinese have multiple generations of ancestors born in Indonesia), and mostly following religions other than Islam, have no natural political consistency they could use to assert power. Being denied access to public offices they were forced to concentrate on running businesses, and many of them became extremely proficient in doing so. Having common languages and in some cases family connections with Chinese people in other countries, they were well able to facilitate trade. Suharto learned in his army days that cooperating with a Chinese businessman could be an effective way to get his troops supplied while also earning himself a few percent, and in government followed the same plan. A small number of Chinese businessmen became fantastically wealthy helping Suharto build both the national economy and his personal wealth, in exchange for accepting exclusion from the political and cultural life of the country. Their political weakness meant Suharto never had to fear them. They profited from state monopolies in various fields, but were forbidden to celebrate the Lunar New Year or publish written works in any Chinese language. Even the importation of Chinese literature was banned - I recall having to fill in customs declarations stating I was not importing any such thing.
This system was certainly corrupt, but worked well enough for quite a long time as the corruption was within defined boundaries and the national economy really did develop. Where it started to come unstuck is with the next generation - both among the oligarchs, and Suharto's own family. The Chinese oligarchs, for all their faults, were genuinely competent at running businesses. Their children less so, and Suharto's children much less so. Suharto's wife, Ibu Tien, became known as Ibu Tien Persen for her habit of ensuring that someone in her family would always get some share of anything that is happening. Suharto's children began to demand a share in the monopoly system - most infamously, Tommy Suharto established a monopoly on clove trading, with the stated aim of ensuring reliable income for clove farmers but with the actual result of a collapsed clove market and destitution for the farmers. He would later prevail upon his father to grant him a monopoly on car sales - sedans up until then had a ferociously high sales tax, due to them being considered luxury vehicles, and his rebadged Kia "Timor" cars were exempt from the tax, making them much cheaper than any other sedans available. Later his brother Bambang managed to get a similar concession for his Bimantara car company in cooperation with Hyundai. Daughter Tutut Rukmana grabbed a monopoly on toll road construction. The Suharto family steadily took hold of a larger and larger share of the national economy - they became known as the Cendana family, for the street in the Jakarta suburb of Menteng where they lived, and getting any business done without a Cendana connection of some form became progressively more difficult.
The Chinese, meanwhile, became victims of their own success. Having grown their businesses to such enormous heights, they outstripped their original markets and expanded into other markets, building huge conglomerates of businesses related only by their ownership, not by any commonality of business model. The owners of course could no longer be expert in all the activities of the businesses their conglomerates owned, so overall effectiveness declined, but profitability could still be propped up by Cendana connections. These conglomerates inevitably owned their own banks. When the next generation, who lacked their fathers' experience of having built up a business from nothing, started to have a larger role in running the businesses they were more willing to take their success for granted and adopt looser fiscal discipline within their conglomerates. The house banks would lend within the group at favourable rates and without sufficient scrutiny of the business case for the loan, with the result that these conglomerates carried high levels of debt and uncertain prospects for paying it back. The banks would also lend to Cendana-backed businesses, as it was unwise not to.
The PDI elected Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri as their party leader. Suharto didn't like this - it sounded too much like someone who might have a real political constituency that could challenge him, so informed PDI that their choice was unacceptable. When Megawati stood firm, he organised a new PDI convention to choose a new leader, inviting only PDI members he knew he could rely on. The Suharto-approved PDI of course elected someone else, and the party in effect split, with Megawati's party taking the name PDI Perjuangan (PDI Struggle, or PDI-P). To make the position clear Suharto's son-in-law and army officer Prabowo Subianto organised a mob to attack the PDI-P party headquarters, with some casualties. We will hear the name Prabowo again.
The government appeared to worry about unrest during the election. In Balikpapan, as peaceful a big city as you could imagine, there were armoured personnel carriers and barbed-wire-encrusted machine gun emplacements at major street intersections. Driving past was a bit unnerving. I'm not sure what it was like in other cities - I can only imagine they were even more cautious elsewhere. The clear message was that no disruption would be tolerated.
PDI-P were of course not permitted to stand candidates. The Suharto-approved rump PDI had very little public support and was almost wiped out in the election, which was of course a victory for Golkar, again. The speaker of the house, Harmoko, was also Suharto's Information Minister (ie his duties were to ensure only approved information is available), and was known for beginning every sentence with "menurut Bapak Presiden" (according to the President). After the usual farcical selection process, Harmoko, on behalf of the joint sitting of parliament, declared that the people had demanded with one voice the re-election of Haji Mohamad Suharto as president. The "Haji Mohamad" was a recent affectation, as Suharto felt some need to improve his standing among Islamists.
This is the point in the story where we can start to see a fall happening. The Thai government ran out of foreign currency, leading to a collapse in the value of the baht, leading to capital flight, leading to investors and creditors in all the other Asian countries worrying about how secure their own positions were. Worry became panic, which spread, and suddenly all these bad loans by Indonesian banks were having a bright light shone on them. Creditors started calling their loans, money left the country, the rupiah collapsed, dollar-denominated loans became unpayable, and banks started to become insolvent. This was what Indonesians call Krismon (Krisis Moneter). I was working in Balikpapan at the time, for an Australian company, with half my salary being paid into my Australian bank account and half in rupiah into my Bank Bali account. It was amazing to see the increase in the number of rupiah my Australian dollar salary bought me. Some other expats benefitted in strangely random ways - camera stores in Balikpapan which had imported their stock before the currency crash still priced their wares according to the pre-crash pricing, so people who exchanged foreign currency more recently could buy a camera for about a tenth the normal price.
The IMF stepped in to help. Their idea of help was to insist on a free float of the rupiah to let it drop to its natural level, immediate austerity measures to reduce public spending, and tight controls of banks to prop up those that could be saved and liquidate those that couldn't. At the time it seemed reasonably sensible - however by contrast Malaysia steadfastly rejected any intervention from the IMF, halted trade in their currency (it was literally illegal to buy or sell ringgit), and came out of the crisis in much better shape than Indonesia. The head of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, came to Jakarta and in a public ceremony stood arms folded watching Suharto sign the agreement. I wonder if he understood what an image of abject humiliation he was creating, and I'm surprised Suharto went along with it.
Banks became so short of capital that they were offering insane rates on term deposits in rupiah. I was making about 50% interest at one point, having walked from one bank to another literally carrying a suitcase full of cash and feeling a bit vulnerable. There was an attempt at a public campaign, Cinta Rupiah (Love the Rupiah), to persuade people to buy their own currency.
Many businesses collapsed, and those that survived had to scale back their activities, leading to mass unemployment. For a while there was a trend where "artis" (ie tv and pop stars) would open cafes from tents at the side of the street in Jakarta, because no-one was paying them to make tv shows any more - you might be able to think of more deserving targets of sympathy, but they attracted a lot of attention at the time. The word "sembako" (sembilan bahan pokok - the nine staple requirements - ie the necessities of life, though I never found anyone who could precisely enumerate all nine) became part of the lexicon as local governments struggled to provide emergency assistance to their populations. Politicians had themselves filmed wandering around poorer parts of their cities handing out packets of instant noodles. The staff at Telkom, where my project was based, planned how they could help people in the poorer fringes of Balikpapan by raising funds to buy them food and other necessities. The Indonesian people were quite quickly in a world of pain.
Among the economic casualties was the project that had brought me to Balikpapan. This was not one of the more important consequences of krismon by any means, but it certainly mattered to me at the time. The government wanted to deregulate the telecommunications market, but, in typical Suharto fashion, didn't want to relax control over it, so their approach was to divide the country up into regions and invite foreign telcos to bid for the right to partner with Telkom, the state-owned telco, in each region. It might have looked at first glance like competition being introduced, but wasn't. In Kalimantan the British company Cable and Wireless were the incumbent foreign telco, and had contracted my employer to help them with mapping and software. I had been there for about a year, and had just got married, when the project was cancelled and my job disappeared. Cable and Wireless could clearly see they had no hope of recouping their investments - local people couldn't afford luxuries like new phone lines any more, while costs of everything had gone up. There had been a steady procession of their expat staff being sent home one by one over the several months before, and we had hoped they could perhaps weather the storm, but in the end they called it all off. I stayed in Balikpapan for another six months or so.
The legitimacy Suharto had built up with a growing economy evaporated, and people started to remember the other aspects of Suharto's rule that they were less impressed by. Demonstrations called for an end to corruption, and for real democracy. Another word entered the daily vocabulary: KKN, short for Kolusi, Korupsi, Nepotisme (collusion, corruption, nepotism). Some of the leaders of the protests were kidnapped, reportedly by soldiers reporting to Prabowo Subianto (yes, him again). Amazingly, some of these kidnapped democracy activists later escaped their captivity and told all about their experiences, while others were never seen again. In one particularly infamous incident a protest at Trisakti University in Jakarta was interrupted by soldiers shooting the protesters from an overpass over the highway next to the campus, with several deaths.
At about this time Suharto embarked on an overseas tour, first visiting South Africa where he met with the Javanese community there, descendants of workers transported there during Dutch rule of both places, and then to Egypt. While in Egypt, in response to a journalist's question about unrest at home, he blandly stated that if the people want him to step down as president then of course he would do so. This caused a huge reaction in Jakarta - even Harmoko, the chief sycophant, was moved to say that Suharto's decision to step down was evidence of what a great statesman he was, and cemented his legacy as a national hero. Suharto wasn't pleased - the "if" in his statement was intended to be a very big if indeed, and he had no intention of surrendering his position. He curtly and publicly reminded Harmoko of his statement that the people had cried out with one voice for his re-election as president.
Unrest, criticism of the government, and continuing economic crisis, eventually boiled over in May of 1998. Like so much that happens in Indonesia the chain of causality is a bit murky, but we can identify a few of the threads. The Chinese, being identifiably separate, mostly not following Islam, and on average more economically successful than other Indonesians, were always a target for resentment. Most Chinese of course didn't have the benefit of the favored status accorded Suharto's preferred oligarchs, but suffered from the resentment the oligarchs provoked. At the best of times, but even more so in a time of economic crisis, there are always plenty of people available to do almost anything in exchance for even a modest payment. Some among the police and military, it is claimed, thought a little bit of street violence would have people running back to them and asking for a strong response to restore order. There is credible evidence that Prabowo was among those inciting the violence.
Rioting started in cities all over the country - at first in the smaller cities like Solo, but then moving to Jakarta. Chinese-owned businesses were the first targets, and entire shopping centres were burned. Glodok, the Chinese-dominated business district of Jakarta, resembled a battleground and looting was prevalent everywhere. A few months later I was in Glodok, and broken glass was still strewn about the streets. The violence spread from businesses to the homes of Chinese residents. Murder and rape occurred on a large scale. Local communities armed themselves and posted guards to keep the rioters out, but that didn't help everywhere. If you meet a Chinese Indonesian living outside Indonesia and they tell you they emigrated in 1998, you already know the reason they left. They might have a harrowing story to tell you, if they are willing.
Balikpapan was largely immune to the violence. The sharp socio-economic divide that exists in much of Indonesia is much blunter in Balikpapan, as the oil, gas and other resource industries provide plentiful employment for professional and skilled workers. It's much harder to incite a mob into doing anything there. Ethnic tensions are also less of an issue, with so many people having moved to Balikpapan for work, from all over the country, so there is huge local diversity. While the remaining Cable and Wireless expats in Balikpapan were evacuating to Singapore, I stayed, and never felt unsafe. The Australian ambassador visited Balikpapan and invited all Australians there to a meeting. Many of those attending seemed terrified, and demanded the Australian government do something to help them, but the ambassador did his best to hose them down, and said that while the Indonesian people were in for a terrible ordeal, we privileged foreigners had much less to worry about.
The police and army did not intervene in any consistent way to contain the violence. Reportedly, low-ranking officers who wanted to try to intervene were explicitly ordered not to, which lends credence to the notion that their senior leaders wanted this to happen. There was sporadic intervention in some places, but never enough to quell the riots. The people did not yearn for a strong military response - instead almost all the institutions of state found themselves thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the public.
After the violence had persisted for some time Suharto began to lose the loyalty of even his senior Golkar leaders. Chief sycophant Harmoko himself this time definitely called for Suharto's resignation. Islamist organisations, previously loyal, or at least acquiescent, to Suharto's rule, also started to call for him to step down. A schism in the military became wider - presidential son-in-law Prabowo wanted the military to do whatever it took to keep Suharto in power, whereas army chief Wiranto saw which way the wind was blowing and concluded that Suharto's time was over. Suharto reshuffled his cabinet, in the hope of staving off demands for bigger changes, but some of the new cabinet ministers decided not to serve.
Reportedly it was Wiranto who finally persuaded Suharto it was time to go. On May 21 he resigned with a slightly bitter letter that blamed others for not cooperating with his desire to reform the government.
Deputy President Habibie was sworn in as President, and of course Prabowo enters the story again. Armed, he confronted Habibie, demanding he be made head of the military. It's not clear whether he actually threatened Habibie with his service pistol, but Habibie refused the demand, escaped the confrontation, and Wiranto immediately fired Prabowo from his position as head of Kostrad.
Prabowo fled the country, fearing, realistically, that he could be prosecuted for any of the many nefarious acts he was associated with. After many years living in Jordan he eventually returned and has not been troubled by the criminal or military justice system. Elite impunity is still the rule, even in post-Suharto Indonesia. On his third attempt he was elected as president. Among his many controversial acts in office, he had his father-in-law installed in the official list of national heroes, alongside such luminaries as Kartini and Diponegoro. Not everyone agrees this was merited.