THE FALL OF SUHARTO

By Akhmad Kusaeni

It was the story of the end of an era: The fall of Suharto. Students in Indonesia were not chanting reformasi! any longer. Reformasi, meaning reform, by the mid of May 1998, seems an obsolete term. They began to use the more heroic and eerie term. They then shouted Revolusi sampai mati! --- revolution until death. The new chant resembles a similar one from 53 years ago, when Indonesian struggled for their independence from the Dutch: Merdeka atau mati! --- independence or die.

The economic disease had spread too far. For the past three decades, Indonesia has been one of Asia’s most powerful economies. During this period, its economy grew at an average annual rate of seven percent. But when financial turmoil struck the region last July, Indonesia’s economic achievements quickly unraveled.

Since then, its currency, the rupiah, has lost nearly 80 percent of its value. Before crisis, the values of rupiah were relatively stable with Rp3.000 per $1 U.S. dollar. During the crisis, rupiah jumped to Rp15.000 per $1 U.S. dollar. Banks and major companies have collapsed overnight. Unemployment has increased dramatically and food prices have skyrocketed.

Riots have erupted across the country, most of which are directed at ethnic Chinese, who make-up three percent of the population, yet control approximately three-quarters of the nation’s wealth. If economic conditions didn’t improve, many experts warned that Indonesia might plunge into social and political chaos.
But his handling of the recent economic crisis has failed to restore confidence both at home and abroad. Many contend that his reluctance to adhere to the International Monetary Fund’s prescribed reforms has exacerbated the current crisis. And despite his repeated promises, President Suharto has failed to dismantle the monopolies and cartels that control the economy, many of which are run by his family and friends.

Furthermore, his plan to peg the rupiah against the U.S. dollar has provoked international criticism. Continued defiance of the IMF plan may prompt its board to suspend future payments of its $33 billion loan package, potentially causing even greater chaos in the region.

When economics crisis became worst, it was too late for Suharto to recover. The bottom line was that the people have lost all confidence in him. Among mainstream leaders, Amien Rais (now holding position as the National Assembly’s House Speaker) was one of the first to see the potential for a mass uprising against Suharto. He said: “We must not afraid of the term “people’s power”. That, after all, was how we gained independence and again how we toppled Sukarno in 1966”.

Therefor, the student protest then continued to gain strength, with students all over the country demanding immediate “total reform” (reformasi total). The level of violence increased as the demonstrations grew in the strength and size, and the confrontation started to claim fatalities. On May 8, 1998, a demonstrator was beaten to death be security personnel in Yogyakarta, and the day after a plain-clothes security officer died in student demonstration in Bogor. The two deaths contributed to exacerbating the tension and animosity between the students and the security forces. On May 12, the troops shot dead four students in a demonstration at the Trisakti University in Jakarta. The Trisakti shootings were widely covered by the media, and the four slain students were dubbed “heroes of reform” (pahlawan reformasi).[1]

The next day (May 13) a memorial ceremony was held at the Trisakti University, which was attended by thousands of students from different universities in Jakarta. Several of Suharto’s most prominent critics in the previous six months came to speak to students, such as Amien Rais and Megawati Sukarnoputri (now VP under President Abdurrahman Wahid’s government). Meanwhile, a large crowd assembled outside the campus gates to watch the students’ activities and famous speakers who took part in the ceremony. Around noon the crowd started to become uneasy, and some of them called the students to go out on the streets to march to parliament building and Presidential Palace.

When the students declined, the crowd continued to grow restive, and some street lamps were smashed. Shortly afterwards, a passing garbage truck was stopped and set on fire. From the area around the Trisakti University, the rioting spread to nearby area and then to all over Jakarta.

In Center Business District Grogol, several shops, almost exclusively Chinese-owned, were looted, with rioters carrying away refrigerators, computers, TV sets and other electronic goods. Some of the goods were also taken out on the streets and set on fire, together with numerous cars and some motorbikes parked on the streets. Many shops were smashed or set on fire after they had been looted. The rioting continued throughout the night, and the next day, May 14, it flared up all over Jakarta and in the neighboring towns of Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi.

According to Joint Fact-Finding Team (TGPF, Tim Gabungan Pencari Fakta) over 1.000 people died in the riots which were the worst seen by far in Jakarta. Hundreds of banks and offices were partly or completely destroyed and close to 2.000 motor vehicles were set on fire. Rioters also attacked numerous police stations, hotels, restaurants, and gas
stations. An official estimate put the value of damaged property at almost 400 million US dollars.

One of the most gruesome aspects of the riots was the rape and sexual assault of large number of women, most of them of Chinese descent. The TGPF verified 64 cases of rape, several of them involving killing or mutilation of the victims. In the conclusion, these protest and riots, spearheaded by students, finally led to downfall of Suharto on May 21, 1998.

How can one explain the fall of Suharto, a long-term 'strongman' in May 1998, who had not only ruled for thirty-two years but had also been unanimously elected seventy-two days earlier? Was he the victim of a power struggle among the political elite, including the military, or was his fall simply the result of a momentum that had built up over many years and which exploded with the onset of the financial crisis?

Four western’s scholar tried to make analyses on the downfall of Suharto in their interesting and important books. They were Stefan Eklof in Indonesian Politics in Crises: The Long Fall of Suharto, 1996-98 ; Michael R.J. Vatikiotis in Indonesian Politics under Suharto: The Rise and Fall the New Order ; Adam Schwarz in A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability ; and Damien Kingsbury in Politics of Indonesia.
Stefan Eklof, in his book, tried to explore the two-year political crisis in Indonesia, which led to the fall of Suharto. Eklof, of the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University, Denmark, carried out research in Indonesia on four separate occasions during 1997-1998. Based on his research, he admitted that Suharto’s fall was precipitated by the economic crisis and the dynamics of international market mechanisms. But, according to him, the Asian economic crisis was not the beginning of the story.

In preface of his book he stated:
“Economic collapse provided the impetus for the political crisis to evolve in full, but Indonesia was already in the midst of a political legitimacy crisis when the economic crisis struck in mid-1997”.

This political crisis, its background and development, was the theme for his book. But, Eklof, also gave the readers a brief history about Suharto (born in 1921) and his “military dictatorship”. Yes, few of the world’s major countries have been so completely dominated by one person as Indonesia was by Suharto from the mid-1960s to 1998. When he was forced to step down in May 1998 he had already by far surpassed his predecessor and Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, as the country’s longest serving head of state. As Suharto had led Indonesia for 32 years, few other world leaders had led their countries for longer than the Indonesian president.

Suharto and his New Order regime came to power in 1966 in the wake of an abortive coup attempt the year before in which six top army generals were murdered. The circumstances around the coup were still unclear, but the event provided a pretext for the military to move against its main political adversary, the Indonesian Communist Party, PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia). In a nation-wide purge from October 1965 to March 1966, an estimated 500.000 real and imagined Communist were killed as long-standing social and political tension exploded, fuelled by the army’s organized campaign against the PKI.[2]

During his 32 years in power, according to Eklof’s book, Suharto presided over tremendous changes in the social and economic spheres. Enormous progress was made in health, education, agriculture and poverty eradication to mention a few of the most important fields. This was at the heart of Suharto’s and the New Order’s legitimacy.

How was Suharto maintaining his power for such very long time? Suharto has been succeeding in making himself as president, general and king. The political structure of his New Order regime can be described as a steeply ascending pyramid in which the heights are thoroughly dominated by single office, the presidency. The President commands the military, which is primus interpares within bureaucracy, which in turn holds sway over the society.

David Jenkins, Australian journalist, describes the degree of control Suharto had achieved almost three decades after taking power:
Suharto stood at the apex of the pyramid; his appointees sat in each of the key executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government. His writ extended into every department and into every state-run corporation; it reached down, if he chose, to every village…In short, he had established himself as the paramount figure in a society in which deference to authority is deeply rooted[3].

Golkar is the government’s party, an electoral vehicle given its present form in 1969 in order to deny any parliamentary majority to the other parties. Its seats are filled with men and women who have or have had bureaucratic careers or are in other ways connected to bureaucracy. In Parliament and Assembly, the Golkar delegations have never taken autonomous initiatives, but served instead as the sponsors of policies arrived at elsewhere in the government. A large majority of the 1000-members Assembly is appointed or approved by the sitting executive. Every five years, all 1000 members “vote” by acclamation for Suharto’s re-election. Before his resignation, Suharto has just elected for the seventh terms of presidency.

Critics of the New Order had often been tended to characterize the regime as a military dictatorship. The relationship between ABRI (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia) and the civilian politicians was always uneasy. The military vigorously defended in prominence in politics, enshrined in the doctrine of the dual function (dwifungsi) of the military.

The doctrine stipulated that ABRI, because of its historical role in the struggle for national independence, had two roles, one in defense and security, and the other in social political management. ABRI also saw itself as the essential vanguard for national stability and unity. Most evidently, the dual function meant that ABRI was represented by an appointed faction in parliament, and that active and retired officers held the key post in the government and throughout the bureaucracy. Besides the presidency, ABRI clearly was Indonesia’s most politically influential institution under the New Order.

So, in the case of May riots, Eklof believed that the military were involved in instigating the riots. He stated:

“The involvement of personnel from the special forces, Kopassus, in all three cities, Jakarta, Medan and Solo, seems particularly incriminating, and strengthens suspicions that the group of senior officers around Lieutenant-General Prabowo (former Kopassus Commander) was responsible for instigating at least parts of the unrest”.

It was not completely clear what motive, or motives, Prabowo and the group around him would have had for instigating the riots. Adam Schwarz, in his book “A Nation in Waiting”, had quoted Indonesian’s scholar Dewi Fortuna Anwar:

“It’s very hard to believe the riots were spontaneous. It was all done with military precision”.

For Schwarz, an American journalist worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review and now lecturer on Asian politics at John Hopkins University, why the military would instigate riots was also not clear. One theory was that military elements loyal to Prabowo and close to his radical Muslim supporters saw an opportunity to strike at the ethnic-Chinese, in what sociologist Ariel Heryanto called an “act of the state-sponsored terrorism”. It’s aims “to spread greater fear among the large population against whom similar violence could happened at any time”.

Similar to Schwarz views, Stefan Eklof also sees the possibility that the riots were part of a concerted campaign against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population. It’s aims to drive parts of the ethnic Chinese business community out of the country and thus facilitating a redistribution of their business and other assets to non-Chinese Indonesians. The rapes and sexual violence against Chinese Indonesian women, primarily in Jakarta, might in this context have been part of the campaign.

Another theory that Adam Schwarz mentioned in his book is that Prabowo and the generals close to him helped foment the riots in a bid for power. According to this theory, Prabowo hoped the riots would discredit Armed Chief Commander General Wiranto and convince Suharto to appoint Prabowo as armed chief commander or chief of a new security agency.

Earlier in the month, Suharto had reportedly considered reconstituting the disbanded internal security agency, Kopkamtib, and putting Prabowo or Army Commander Subagyo in charge of it. He would have been able to do this thanks to the new powers given to him in March at the MPR (National Assembly) session. The Kopkamtib chief would have wide-ranging powers and be outside Wiranto’s chain command.

On the afternoon of May 14, several senior generals and influential civilians held a meeting at armed forces headquarters. The purpose of the meeting was disputed, but several members of government-appointed team that investigated the riots believed the meeting discussed the restoration of Kopkamtib and the granting of emergency powers to Prabowo.

In its formal report, the fact-finding team said there were links between the abduction of pro-democracy activists earlier in the year, the killings at the Trisakti University on May 12 and the riots that began next day.

The TGPF report said:
“The range of incidents climaxing on May 13 to May 15 gives the perception that the situation was engineered to create an emergency which required extra-constitutional force to control”. [4]

The two officers, General Wiranto and General Prabowo, were known to be averse each other. All the four books mention this competition among military elite, but only in Damien Kingsbury’s book, readers could understand these rivalries in very detail.

All the four books had a common ground on one thing that while Suharto out of the country (Suharto visited Egypt at that time), Prabowo might have staged the unrest to create impression that Wiranto was incapable of commanding the security forces and upholding order.

The chaotic situation would have been occasioned a direct intervention by Prabowo to restore order, thus making him stand out as a national savior. This scenario resembles the events of 1965-66, when Suharto used his position as Commander of Strategic Reserve Army (Kostrad) to wrest power from Sukarno. A senior military officer, quoted by Asiaweek, even suggested that it was Prabowo’s plan to take power from Suharto in the same manner.

It was very interesting to know the result of rivalries between General Wiranto and General Prabowo. As it mentioned in Kingsbury’s book “The Politics of Indonesia”, General Wiranto represented the Red and White Faction in ABRI and General Prabowo represented the Green Faction in Indonesia military. Red and White Faction were army officers who close to nationalists, Christians, and other minority group such as Chinese. Green Faction were army officers who close to the modernist Muslim community.

Kingsbury further mentioned that while Suharto’s resignation was greeted with enthusiasm and Vice President Habibie replaced him as the Head of State, real power appeared to be firmly in the hands of General Wiranto. The fact that several army officers closed to Wiranto became minister in Habibie’s “Reform Cabinet” indicated that ABRI was again in the ascendancy, and that the Red and White Faction had won the day.

After a brief and somewhat ill conceived show of power on May 22, in which he told Habibie to appoint him as ABRI Commander-in-chief, Prabowo was shuffled out of Kostrad to the staff and Command College at Bandung. He then applied for earlier retirement from the military and went to Jordan to seek a new life as a businessman. (Prabowo was a close friend of Prince Abdullah of Jordan. They were classmates in Army College in America).

Meanwhile, Prabowo’s military allies were similarly moved from influential positions in what was beginning to look like a purge, to be replaced by Red and White loyalists. In particular, Kopassus Commander Major General Muchdi (Prabowo’s allies) was replaced by Major General Sjahrir (Wiranto’s allies).

Kingsbury made conclusion that:
“The Red and White Faction had not only won in Cabinet; it had also won control of ABRI”.

Michael R.J. Vatikiotis, another U.S scholar who watched closely situation in Indonesia before and after the fall of Suharto, wrote in his book “Indonesian Politics under Suharto” that “there was clearly a virus in the military’s software”.
He mentioned that consistent with Suharto’s long-standing policy of divide and rule within the ranks, Suharto --at the end of the New Order era-- had appointed Wiranto as armed forces commander; another loyal adjutant, Subagyo as army commander, and his son-in-law Prabowo to the key Kostrad commands.

If Subagyo’s intense loyalty to Suharto acted as a check on Wiranto’s professional inclinations, Prabowo was the virus. As Kostrad commander, he had more active troops than Wiranto under his direct command. Prabowo also used his influence with Suharto to have several close fellow officers appointed to other key command in Jakarta.

Wiranto therefore had a tough time mobilizing troops to protect Jakarta once the rioting broke out. Reinforcements had to be brought in from as far as East Java – apparently because Kostrad troops were standing aside to let the looting continue. Later, before removing Prabowo and dispatching him to Staff College in Bandung, Wiranto told Suharto that Prabowo was a “troublemaker”. Suharto, by then out of power, readily agreed.

Habibie, Suharto’s successor, also agreed that Prabowo was a “troublemaker”. In Stefan Eklof’s book, it was mentioned that in the afternoon after Suharto resigned, news spread that the presidential palace was surrounded by troops, believed to have been ordered there by Prabowo. According to intelligence reports, the troops were from Kopassus. Coordinating Minister of Politics and Security Feisal Tanjung ordered troops reduction, but the order was not followed, and instead the number of troops in the city center increased.

In the evening of May 21, Prabowo, accompanied by the Kopassus Commander Major General Muchdi, showed up in full battle gear at the presidential palace and demanded to see Habibie. A scuffle occurred between Prabowo and the presidential guard, as the Kostrad commander initially refused to hand over his gun before entering the place. Eventually Prabowo conceded and was allowed to see Habibie unarmed.

According to one of Habibie’s close associates, Prabowo presented the president with a list people whom he wanted to sit on the cabinet. Wiranto would retain his position as defense minister, but Prabowo demanded that he be replaced as commander-in-chief by the army chief of staff, General Subagyo. Prabowo himself was to be promoted to a new post as deputy commander-in-chief.

Prabowo also reportedly told Habibie that he had already made arrangements to assemble a gathering of Muslims to retake the parliament building and restore order the following morning, and he demanded to be rewarded for this and other services. However, Prabowo eventually left the palace without having had his demands granted by the president. Meanwhile, Habibie, fearing his life, moved to the state guest house Wisma Negara where he remained overnight, but no further disturbances occurred. The obvious threat of a coup d’etat triggered an alert among the other military units in Jakarta, and military presence in Central Jakarta remained heavy for the following 24 hours. [5]

In the morning of May 22, Prabowo was officially relieved of his command over Kostrad at a closed ceremony. He was to be transferred to Bandung where he has assigned as chief of the Army’s Staff and Command School, Seskoad, a position out of the capital and with no combat troops under his command. His associate, Kopassus Commander Major General Muchdi, was also immediately removed from his position. The two replacements marked the beginning of process. Led by Wiranto, to consolidate ABRI and to remove Prabowo’s associates from strategic positions.

The four scholars --Eklof, Schwarz, Vatikiotis and Kingsbury-- agreed that Habibie’s own role in the succession process was unclear. Although there was no evidence that he actively conspired to depose Suharto, the latter possibly believed that Habibie had done so, and after the transfer to power the relationship between the two men became markedly cooler.

Another question mark regards Prabowo’s role. If relationship between Suharto and
Habibie became cooler, it seemed that Suharto after his resignation completely broke with his son-in-law. Eklof stated that:

“There are indications that Prabowo and his associates were involved in instigating parts of the riots in Medan, Jakarta, and Solo, and it has been suggested that the Kostrad commander worked with Habibie to encourage Suharto to resign. Prabowo seems to have counted on benefiting from Habibie’s ascendancy, but his plans backfired as Suharto, on the night before his resignation, reassured himself of Wiranto’s support for the hand-over of power to Habibie. In the new power constellation, there was no room for Prabowo”

It was interesting to find out what Wiranto and Suharto talked about on the night before president resignation. The Jakarta Post quoted informed sources as saying Wiranto went to Suharto’s house on Wednesday evening and, speaking on behalf of the military leadership, “asked the president to resign”. But, either Schwarz or Vatikiotis, they did agree with that speculation.

Vatikiotis wrote:
“At around 10.30 p.m. Wiranto came to see him. Tempting as it is to assume that Wiranto asked him to resign, almost every military source insists that this would have been unthinkable. Wiranto briefed Suharto on the security situation, and doubtless painted a bleak picture”

Schwarz, similar to Vatikiotis, wrote:
“Some believe the military’s version on events exaggerates its role after the fact in order to appear on the side of reform movement”.

Military analyst Salim Said claimed:
“Wiranto just reported to Suharto what was going on without encouraging Suharto to do one thing or another. Until the last minute, Suharto was in control of the army”.

Hasnan Habib, a retired general and former ambassador to the United States, took the same view:
“Wiranto was Suharto’s favourite aide-de-camp. There is no way a Javanese soldier like Wiranto told Suharto to resign. Lots of my colleagues think Wiranto was too passive”.

In the other hand, as it mentioned in Adam Schwarz’s book, General Prabowo considered himself “a king maker”, because he had contributed to the unrest in Jakarta and elsewhere, paving the way for Habibie to take over the presidency.[6]

According to Habibie’s aide Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Prabowo once showed Habibie evidence of his support, including pamphlets supporting Habibie and of the demonstrations he had covertly organized to counter pro-democracy activists. But, Habibie denied Prabowo’s support. Habibie was shrewd enough to prevent Prabowo from doing the same thing to him. If Prabowo could orchestrate the riots in order to topple Suharto, his father-in-law, he might do the same thing to Habibie.

There was a widespread feeling that the students had been exploited as pawns in the political manuevering among the elite. In its final stages, the four authors: Eklof, Schwarz, Vatikiotis, and Kingsbury, had made a conclusion, that “the fall of Suharto was more due to intra-elite manuevering than to ‘people power’”.

They also believed that economic collapse provided the impetus for the political crisis to evolve in full, but Indonesia was already in the midst of a political legitimacy crisis when the economic crisis struck in mid-1997. Therefore, Suharto was nothing less than the victim of a power struggles among the political elite, including the military. His fall simply was the result of a momentum that had built up over many years and which exploded with the onset of the financial crisis.

Clearly, there was no disagreement in terms of substance between the four authors, but rather it reflects their different personal styles of writing. For example, Schwarz was slightly more explanatory, while Vatikiotis is slightly more adversarial. Not surprisingly, the issue of Suharto’s succession haunted both Schwarz and Vatikiotis’s books. While this issue had been critical in contemporary Indonesian politics, it had been the dominant issue on the political agenda since the late 1970s.

Vatikiotis hinted that Suharto would be on his way out either in or soon after 1993 (the year when his first edition of the book published), while Schwarz hinted that Suharto would be looking to step down in 1998 which possible democratization to follow. In this case, Schwarz was absolutely right, while Vatikiotis was not completely wrong. Anyway, Suharto resigned in 1998 just ahead a few years of Vatikiotis prediction.


[1] Kompas Daily Newspaper, Jakarta: May 14, 1998.
[2] R. William Liddle, Leadership and Culture in Indonesian Politics, Sydney: Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1996.
[3] David Jenkins, Soeharto and his Generals: Indonesian Military Politics 1975-1983, Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1984.
[4] Far Eastern Economic Review, May 28, 1998.
[5] Michael Sheridan, “The Day Civil War Simmered in Indonesia”, Sunday Times, November 8, 1998.
[6] Keith Richburg, “Seven Days in May that Toppled a Titan: Back-Room Intrigue Led to Suharto’s Fall”, Washington Post, May 24, 1998.