Indonesian Destinies

• Author: Vasuki Shastry
• Position: Senior Information Officer IMF External Relations Department
• Pages: 53

Page 53

Still Living Dangerously?

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation and its most populous Muslim nation. It is the world's largest archipelago and straddles important shipping lanes. But despite its size and strategic importance, the country's economic and political history has not received the attention it deserves from scholars.

A handful of international academics, mainly Australian, have studied the country in depth, but some of them have shown a tendency to portray the country in an overly sympathetic light.

In a welcome departure, Theodore Friend, a renowned American scholar of Southeast Asian countries, has written a balanced, fascinating, and richly illustrated book about Indonesia. He records the views of presidents and generals, but he also dwells "on several individual Indonesians of no special prominence because they illustrate ordinary lives with grace under pressure, and because I like them." The result of this combination of personal anecdote and scholarly expertise is a kaleidoscopic view of the successes and failures of Indonesia: "sometimes rarified aromas; too often, bloody reek."

The book concentrates on the period following the Dutch departure from the country in 1949 and carries the narrative to the present. Friend says he gives the events of 1997 to 2002 "relatively strong weight" because they brought to a head "numerous crises that were suppressed in the long Suharto era." Friend first visited Indonesia in August 1967, in the early days of President Suharto's rule and in the aftermath of the mass killings of suspected communist sympathizers, a period described in the 1982 movie The Year of Living Dangerously. President Sukarno's rule had taken its toll on the economy. There was hyper-inflation, food shortages were rampant, and a large segment of the population lived in abject poverty.

Incredibly enough, Suharto, an unschooled general who had maneuvered himself into power, would, for three decades, provide a steadying hand to guide the country out of its complex socioeconomic and political problems. Friend writes that Suharto's practical values after assuming power were simple and focused: "Suharto had a peasant's commonsense understanding that you must eat to live, that education helps you earn more money, and that those with more money eat better and live longer. He showed great appetite for the burdens of state, demonstrated early aptitude, hired good...