Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The primary Indonesian beneficiary of this effort was evidently intended to be forty-seven-year-old Lieutenant General Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law and business partner. Prabowo’s wife, who is Suharto’s second daughter, owned a sizable piece of Merrill Lynch, Indonesia. Prabowo, a graduate of elite military training courses at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, spent ten years fighting guerrillas in East Timor, where he earned a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness. In 1995, donning the red beret of Kopassus, he managed to enlarge the special forces corps from 3,500 to 6,000 troops. He worked closely with his American supporters; of the forty-one JCET training exercises conducted since Congress ordered all training stopped, at least twenty-four were with Kopassus. According to the Nation magazine’s Indonesian correspondent Allan Nairn, one Kopassus unit received twenty-six days of American instruction in “military operations in urban terrain” after the economic crisis began.

When Secretary of Defense Cohen visited Jakarta in January 1998, he stated, “I am not going to give him [Suharto] guidance in terms of what he should or should not do in terms of maintaining control of his own country.” However, Cohen also made a point of publicizing his visit to Kopassus headquarters, where he spent three hours with General Prabowo reviewing Kopassus units as they executed maneuvers. Indonesian officials said to Allan Nairn that they took the Cohen visit as a “green light” to use force to maintain the political status quo in the face of protests against the International Monetary Fund’s hyperausterity measures.

There were good reasons why the United States would want to keep General Suharto in power. In the early years of his rule, Suharto contributed greatly to regional stability, while bringing at least a modicum of prosperity and optimism to the Indonesian people. The greatest single success of the green revolution occurred under Suharto’s rule: in 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production. During Suharto’s rule Indonesia’s per capita income rose from around $75 in 1966 to almost $1,200 in 1996; former president Sukarno’s belligerence toward Malaysia was ended; and Indonesian diplomats played an instrumental role in the creation in 1967 of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), which has proved to be by far the most important regional organization in East Asia.

Like the government of another American-supported autocrat, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto’s government developed over time into a kleptocracy—firms still controlled by members of his family are said to be worth many billions of dollars; but unlike Marcos his achievements were formidable. He not only brought a measure of political stability and economic growth to Indonesia’s diverse islands, he also restrained Islamic militancy, while allying himself with indigenous Chinese entrepreneurs. It can be argued that without his type of strong rule, Indonesia would have been rife with separatist movements (of the very sort now gaining strength) and the likelihood of conflicts with other ASEAN nations would have been far higher. The current decline of Indonesian economic and, possibly, political power certainly means that China is more likely to assert its political primacy in the region.

The U.S. government was aware of these dangers, and therefore when, in 1997, international financiers began to exploit the Indonesian currency and foreclose on their short-term loans, leading American officials loudly proclaimed their backing of Suharto, signaling their lack of desire to see him overthrown. This position was, however, undercut by a politically uncoordinated agent of American power, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which agreed to lend huge amounts of money to Indonesia to help meet its debts, but only if it imposed economics-textbook prescriptions for reordering its economy.

The IMF, it must be noted, is staffed primarily with holders of Ph.D.s in economics from American universities, who are both illiterate about and contemptuous of cultures that do not conform to what they call the “American way of life.” They offer only “one size (or, rather, one capitalism) fits all” remedies for ailing economic institutions. The IMF has applied these over the years to countries in Latin America, Russia, and East Asia without ever achieving a single notable success. Nonetheless, the IMF’s officialdom assumed a triumphalist posture toward Suharto’s government, denouncing its “crony capitalism” and using its failings to trumpet the benefits of Anglo- American neoclassical economics over an Asian model of economic development. They ignored the fact that Suharto, while enriching members of his own extended family and firms that cultivated their good graces, also granted ordinary Indonesians food and fuel subsidies. On May 4, 1998, the IMF ordered these subsidies stopped. This alone made political instability inevitable.

On May 8, the United States ordered JCET activities suspended in Indonesia after the Nation’s Allan Nairn, at this potentially embarrassing moment, exposed the nature of the Pentagon’s covert assistance program for Kopassus. By mid-May 1998, U.S. officials had started to signal changes in their position and begun to leak to the press statements not for attribution indicating that the IMF’s reform program would not work unless Suharto were replaced. Senators like John Kerry of Massachusetts and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota echoed this demand on Capitol Hill. All of this was taken in Indonesia by powerful ABRI generals as a signal that they should act to secure the country and their positions in it. At the same time, students of Jakarta’s prestigious Trisakti University saw an opportunity to achieve a measure of democracy and took to the streets in orderly demonstrations, demanding an end to the privileges enjoyed by Suharto’s relatives. Amid growing turbulence in Jakarta, President Suharto left Indonesia for a state visit to Egypt, and the country’s top military officer, General Wiranto, left the capital on May 14 and flew to eastern Java for a divisional parade. In this context, Indonesia erupted.

Suharto was in Egypt when, on May 12, four students from Trisakti University were shot dead in the streets of Jakarta, even though the police were then armed only with blanks and rubber bullets. Eyewitnesses nonetheless saw snipers armed with rifles with telescopic sights and dressed in police uniforms fire on the students from a road overpass. The students were buried immediately without autopsies. As Business Week magazine reported, “On May 14, trucks loaded with muscular men raced to shopping centers and housing projects owned by ethnic Chinese. The men doused the shops and houses with gasoline and set off devastating fires. At least 182 women were raped or sexually tortured, some of them repeatedly, by men with crewcuts whom the victims believe to be soldiers.”¹⁶ At the Chinese-owned Lippo Karawaci Mall, security cameras tape- recorded six truckloads of men breaking into banks and cash dispensers, then inviting in thousands of looters. These actions were reported at more or less the same moment at forty different shopping malls across the city, resulting in 1,188 deaths, the looting and burning of 2,470 shops, and the destruction of 1,119 cars.

The Indonesian military high command and other top Indonesian officials would have liked the world to believe that this savagery was the result of visceral anti-Chinese feelings, “spontaneous outbursts of a crowd run amok,” in the words of Maj. Gen. Syafrie Samsuddin, then military commander of Jakarta. Far too many American pundits also found this explanation convenient. For example, in the New Republic, Jonathan Paris, an international lawyer connected with the Council on Foreign Relations, typically attributed the “riots” to “racial hatred and economic jealousy.”¹⁷

But there are obvious problems with this explanation. As George Hicks, an Australian economist who has written extensively on Indonesia, points out, it is unlikely that mobs could simultaneously attack forty different Chinese-owned shopping malls spread around more than twenty-five kilometers without planning and coordination, not to speak of “without a single culprit having to face any police or military units in a city of ten million normally crawling with heavily armed forces of law and order.”¹⁸ The Indonesian scholar Ariel Heryanto has observed that the events of May were not “racially motivated mass riots” but “racialized state terrorism.” The evidence, he believes, indicates that “racism among members of civil society was not responsible for the recent riots, nor for most other major anti-Chinese riots in past decades.”¹⁹ Instead, he argues that these, like the massive anti-Chinese pogroms that accompanied Suharto’s rise to power in 1965-66, were incited by the army. This time, as Asiaweek put it, General Prabowo believed “that he could take power in exactly the same way as his own father-in-law wrested power from Sukarno,” by appearing to restore order in