In college I took a course in Southeast Asian History. I thought they were going to teach some really interesting stuff they wouldn't talk about in NUS. Nothing on Singapore, unfortunately. Maybe we didn't really matter? Or maybe they had too many Singaporeans on government scholarships going to that school that they decided not to poke the hornet's nest? There was a little on Malaysia but not much. Anyway the whole region is so big that you probably didn't have that much to say about Singapore.
Yes, you had Southeast Asia as a region being much more prosperous than Africa or South America. But there were problems too. The Vietnam war(s). Politics of Thailand. World war II. Indonesia (I'll come to that later). Philippines and people power. The Cambodian killing fields. Yes, you have zone of peace, freedom and neutrality, but I guess I wasn't fully aware of how much trouble there was in our region, and how much our region could really be called a region, given that a lot of these things hardly affected us.
Anyway I read news reports about people having fairly reverential attitudes towards a dying Suharto on his deathbed. When I hear that I think back upon how controversial a figure like Augustus Pinochet was. He was just like Suharto and Mobutu, Cold War era dictators who received support from the CIA because they were reliably anti-communist, and other than that, they could more or less do whatever they wanted.
In 1965, which is the year of our independence (the most accurate term is succession.) there was a coup. I can't remember all the details, but you can read about it in the history books. What followed was an orgy of violence, killings and counter killings. A lot of people who were supposedly "communist" were targeted. The CIA played a minor role in all this, or at least since a lot of Communists were being wiped out. Sukarno had been fairly friendly towards the Communists (at least he was a main part of the non aligned movement) and the US weren't sad to see him go, since Indonesia was one of the "dominos" they were afraid of. (One of the main arguments for fighting in Vietnam was the fear that they would spread Communism to Southeast Asia.)
So a lot (half a million) people die gruesome deaths. Burnt, hanged, balls chopped off. And this is the thing: nobody ever has a full account of what happened, and historians are in disagreement, although some of them contend that Suharto had a lot of responsibility.
Indonesia for the next few decades was run like a police state. Repression was very brutal, especially in places that had aspirations towards secession. In some villages in Aceh, you would sometimes have the soldiers going into the main square and firing a gun into the air, and this would be the symbol for everybody to assemble there. Anybody found missing at that time would be liable for jail, execution or dunno what rubbish.
Then there was East Timor. Now all of Indonesia is basically the old Dutch colonial empire, but the Portugese had a small colony and it was basically East Timor. Portugal was the first of the European colonial powers and also the last, and only decolonised in the 1970s when the Portugese decided that their dictator was ruining the economy by fighting useless wars in Angola. So around 1974, the Portugese empire (including Macau, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, and others) fell. Then Indonesia moved in to claim East Timor for themselves. What followed was around 25 years of bloodshed in one of the most brutal military occupations ever. (To give an idea how bad it was, some of the old people there were saying, "the Japanese were never this horrible to us".) Beatings, imprisonment, guerilla warfare, that sort of stuff. I think a fifth of the population was murdered over those 25 years.
Now a lot of the responsibility for this should go to the soldiers themselves, who thought that East Timor was going to be a piece of cake and didn't expect that occupation was going to be so difficult for that. But Suharto also was president over all that. Yes, there are things you have to be careful about when you are running an empire, because if you allow East Timor to go free, those people in Aceh and Irian Jaya are going to get some funny ideas. But East Timor was never a part of the old Indonesia, so they were very different.
At least one of the more useful things that BJ Habibie did was to allow East Timor to have a referendum in which case Independence won easily over the "Autonomy" option. And the Indonesian army didn't leave without stirring some trouble on their way out of course: the reason they were in there for so long was because it is very important for an army to be seen as having balls. But East Timor is independent now.
Then there was the corruption, where Suharto had a lot of business interests, and exchanged the granting of political favours to monopolies for business profits. Had a very wealthy family.
We wouldn't hear a lot of this, of course. Singapore's tack is that since Suharto is our good friend, an even better friend than Malaysia, we don't criticise him or learn anything about him. Never mind that Indonesia is a land where there is a small elite which is very rich, while most of them are very poor. (In this respect a lot of Southeast Asia is like Latin America.)
Well Suharto was pretty good for the Indonesia economy wasn't he? Maybe. I don't expect Indonesia to be considered a "tiger" the way they were in the early 90s. At least not anytime soon. And yes he did get brought to trial, although I don't really know what came of it. And yes at least Suharto wasn't an outright thief like Mobutu - the Indonesian Chinese would never have let him get away with it. But according to some reports, he is still the most corrupt politician in the world today, with $15 billion in stolen assets to his name (or his children's names). Fat lot of good $15 billion is going to do you when you're lying there with multiple organ failure.
There was this great big hoo hah about Augustus Pinochet. He is just like Suharto: came to power in a coup, ran a brutal military dictatorship but also put economic stability back into Chile. And still the British were very adamant about trying him for crimes against humanity. OK, he was directly responsible for "disappearing" people. Suharto? Who's going to make Suharto pay for his crimes?
When dictators die, people will sometimes shake their heads and lament that they made "mistakes". Chiang Kai Shek made a lot of "mistakes". Mao also made a lot of "mistakes" although he was good for China. (But who deserved more credit for unifying China, Chiang or Mao?) Franco also made "mistakes".
You wouldn't really need to put Suharto in jail now of course, but it's very important that people decide what his place in history is going to be. Well Lee Kuan Yew was fairly friendly towards Suharto when they met. Maybe he's worried about what people would say about himself when he goes. This is not to say that he won't be seen in a more positive light than Suharto. (But let's not forget that his job was much much easier than Suharto's.) Is he setting a precedent to be lenient with peoples' "mistakes"?
I think he wants to defend the stand that he has taken in being more cosy to Indonesia than Malaysia during his time in office. It's not nice if the person he's been coddling up to is seen as the mass murderer that he is. I'm not saying it's wrong to be friendly to Suharto - why would you want to piss off a giant country which surrounds you?
And when you are judging Indonesia's "economic progress", you got to ask yourself, is it economic progress when the rich get richer and the poor stay poor? It makes the government's job so much easier when all you have to do is to make sure that rich people grow rich fast enough so that they can disguise the fact that not everybody's getting the money. Indonesia has 200m people although if you were to only see the visitors here you'd think that everybody there is rich, and there was even this chump who wrote to the press, claiming he had seen "real" Indonesians telling him what a great guy Suharto is. I mean those people who got rich during the Suharto years would naturally say that. What about those guys in the big city slums, the starving villagers, the massacred separationists? They wouldn't be staying at his fancy hotel where a room for 1 night would cost 6 months' salary right? What a moron.
Yes, you had Southeast Asia as a region being much more prosperous than Africa or South America. But there were problems too. The Vietnam war(s). Politics of Thailand. World war II. Indonesia (I'll come to that later). Philippines and people power. The Cambodian killing fields. Yes, you have zone of peace, freedom and neutrality, but I guess I wasn't fully aware of how much trouble there was in our region, and how much our region could really be called a region, given that a lot of these things hardly affected us.
Anyway I read news reports about people having fairly reverential attitudes towards a dying Suharto on his deathbed. When I hear that I think back upon how controversial a figure like Augustus Pinochet was. He was just like Suharto and Mobutu, Cold War era dictators who received support from the CIA because they were reliably anti-communist, and other than that, they could more or less do whatever they wanted.
In 1965, which is the year of our independence (the most accurate term is succession.) there was a coup. I can't remember all the details, but you can read about it in the history books. What followed was an orgy of violence, killings and counter killings. A lot of people who were supposedly "communist" were targeted. The CIA played a minor role in all this, or at least since a lot of Communists were being wiped out. Sukarno had been fairly friendly towards the Communists (at least he was a main part of the non aligned movement) and the US weren't sad to see him go, since Indonesia was one of the "dominos" they were afraid of. (One of the main arguments for fighting in Vietnam was the fear that they would spread Communism to Southeast Asia.)
So a lot (half a million) people die gruesome deaths. Burnt, hanged, balls chopped off. And this is the thing: nobody ever has a full account of what happened, and historians are in disagreement, although some of them contend that Suharto had a lot of responsibility.
Indonesia for the next few decades was run like a police state. Repression was very brutal, especially in places that had aspirations towards secession. In some villages in Aceh, you would sometimes have the soldiers going into the main square and firing a gun into the air, and this would be the symbol for everybody to assemble there. Anybody found missing at that time would be liable for jail, execution or dunno what rubbish.
Then there was East Timor. Now all of Indonesia is basically the old Dutch colonial empire, but the Portugese had a small colony and it was basically East Timor. Portugal was the first of the European colonial powers and also the last, and only decolonised in the 1970s when the Portugese decided that their dictator was ruining the economy by fighting useless wars in Angola. So around 1974, the Portugese empire (including Macau, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, and others) fell. Then Indonesia moved in to claim East Timor for themselves. What followed was around 25 years of bloodshed in one of the most brutal military occupations ever. (To give an idea how bad it was, some of the old people there were saying, "the Japanese were never this horrible to us".) Beatings, imprisonment, guerilla warfare, that sort of stuff. I think a fifth of the population was murdered over those 25 years.
Now a lot of the responsibility for this should go to the soldiers themselves, who thought that East Timor was going to be a piece of cake and didn't expect that occupation was going to be so difficult for that. But Suharto also was president over all that. Yes, there are things you have to be careful about when you are running an empire, because if you allow East Timor to go free, those people in Aceh and Irian Jaya are going to get some funny ideas. But East Timor was never a part of the old Indonesia, so they were very different.
At least one of the more useful things that BJ Habibie did was to allow East Timor to have a referendum in which case Independence won easily over the "Autonomy" option. And the Indonesian army didn't leave without stirring some trouble on their way out of course: the reason they were in there for so long was because it is very important for an army to be seen as having balls. But East Timor is independent now.
Then there was the corruption, where Suharto had a lot of business interests, and exchanged the granting of political favours to monopolies for business profits. Had a very wealthy family.
We wouldn't hear a lot of this, of course. Singapore's tack is that since Suharto is our good friend, an even better friend than Malaysia, we don't criticise him or learn anything about him. Never mind that Indonesia is a land where there is a small elite which is very rich, while most of them are very poor. (In this respect a lot of Southeast Asia is like Latin America.)
Well Suharto was pretty good for the Indonesia economy wasn't he? Maybe. I don't expect Indonesia to be considered a "tiger" the way they were in the early 90s. At least not anytime soon. And yes he did get brought to trial, although I don't really know what came of it. And yes at least Suharto wasn't an outright thief like Mobutu - the Indonesian Chinese would never have let him get away with it. But according to some reports, he is still the most corrupt politician in the world today, with $15 billion in stolen assets to his name (or his children's names). Fat lot of good $15 billion is going to do you when you're lying there with multiple organ failure.
There was this great big hoo hah about Augustus Pinochet. He is just like Suharto: came to power in a coup, ran a brutal military dictatorship but also put economic stability back into Chile. And still the British were very adamant about trying him for crimes against humanity. OK, he was directly responsible for "disappearing" people. Suharto? Who's going to make Suharto pay for his crimes?
When dictators die, people will sometimes shake their heads and lament that they made "mistakes". Chiang Kai Shek made a lot of "mistakes". Mao also made a lot of "mistakes" although he was good for China. (But who deserved more credit for unifying China, Chiang or Mao?) Franco also made "mistakes".
You wouldn't really need to put Suharto in jail now of course, but it's very important that people decide what his place in history is going to be. Well Lee Kuan Yew was fairly friendly towards Suharto when they met. Maybe he's worried about what people would say about himself when he goes. This is not to say that he won't be seen in a more positive light than Suharto. (But let's not forget that his job was much much easier than Suharto's.) Is he setting a precedent to be lenient with peoples' "mistakes"?
I think he wants to defend the stand that he has taken in being more cosy to Indonesia than Malaysia during his time in office. It's not nice if the person he's been coddling up to is seen as the mass murderer that he is. I'm not saying it's wrong to be friendly to Suharto - why would you want to piss off a giant country which surrounds you?
And when you are judging Indonesia's "economic progress", you got to ask yourself, is it economic progress when the rich get richer and the poor stay poor? It makes the government's job so much easier when all you have to do is to make sure that rich people grow rich fast enough so that they can disguise the fact that not everybody's getting the money. Indonesia has 200m people although if you were to only see the visitors here you'd think that everybody there is rich, and there was even this chump who wrote to the press, claiming he had seen "real" Indonesians telling him what a great guy Suharto is. I mean those people who got rich during the Suharto years would naturally say that. What about those guys in the big city slums, the starving villagers, the massacred separationists? They wouldn't be staying at his fancy hotel where a room for 1 night would cost 6 months' salary right? What a moron.
So that's the other thing that Suharto stands for: the idea that when you take care of your rich, the rest of the world will take care of itself. LKY's endorsement of Suharto by no means refutes this idea, and it is a big indication of where Singapore too is heading.
And we won't know what Singapore will be like when he goes, which might not be that long time away.
And we won't know what Singapore will be like when he goes, which might not be that long time away.
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