Death of a Dictator

After a couple of weeks of anticipation, it happened: Soeharto died yesterday around noon and was brought back to the family house on the famous Cendana street in Jakarta. It’s been a very interesting couple of days here, although I'm mostly just watching, a bit confused and doubtful I'm really capable of understanding what's going on in people's minds.

Soeharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years, the better part of most people’s lives, and his death is all anyone talked about in the last 24 hours. I'm in Yogyakarta at the moment (getting permission to recruit students for my research), and everyone here is glued to TV sets with round-the-clock coverage of the funeral of “Pak Harto” (Mister/Father Harto) in Solo, the nearby traditional rival of Yogyakarta. Flags on official buildings are at half mast, of course, as in this Islamic school near my "homestay":

Soeharto was actually born near here to a poor peasant family and rose the ranks of the military (first the Dutch military, then the Japanese-sanctioned militia, then Independent Indonesian army). He was a classic military authoritarian and the fanfare today is both odd and fascinating to me. After such a long, often ruthless and ever-cleptocratic rule, Soeharto receives a lavish state funeral. All of officialdom was in Solo today and even dignitaries from nearby countries were invited (the president of East Timor included! Soeharto was the president who ordered the bloody invasion of East Timor. Perhaps not coincidently, he didn’t make it in time.)

Indonesians’ feelings seem decidedly mixed too. Most people I spoke to had very ambivalent responses. He did a lot of good for the country, some said, stabilizing it and orchestrating rapid growth that brought millions out of poverty and misery (and besides, things were just cheaper then.) But then they mention the large toll roads around Jakarta (a business venture his daughter, Tutut, is reportedly invested in) or other similar issues. “Maybe he was ok, but his family wasn’t” is one sentence I’ve heard more than once.

A local blog offered this epitaph (two weeks prematurely):

Here lies Soeharto’s mortal remains.
His loss is our eternal gain.
For while he exercised his powers,
Whatever he gained, the loss was ours.

Of course, for those who paid the personal price of “stability” – hundreds of thousands murdered and many others imprisoned - growth was no consolation to begin with.

But today everyone seems, mostly, fascinated. They’ve never experienced this before. The first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was buried without any pomp or public mourning of any kind in his rather remote hometown in East Java (in accordance with his successor’s orders.) This is really the first presidential funeral Indonesia has known.

It's been an interesting couple of days.

Here's Inside Indonesia’s take on things

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Unrelated, but fascinating