When Indonesia’s former president Suharto died aged 86 in 2008, the nation started every week of mourning and conflicted reflection. It was, wrote the Jakarta Publish, the top of a ‘exceptional life’; it was additionally, it hoped, the top of autocratic presidencies. International obituaries have been much less measured: ‘Dictator introduced order and bloodshed’, mentioned the New York Occasions.
The contours of Indonesia’s impartial historical past may broadly be advised as a story of a revolution, two presidencies, and a reformation. Suharto, who dominated between 1967 and 1998, was the second president. A navy man, he ruled in distinction to his predecessor, Indonesia’s anti-imperialist flagship hero Sukarno, and in a way that much better suited the Chilly Battle tastes of Western governments. Often called ‘the smiling basic’ for his taciturn public persona, and ‘father of improvement’ for straightening Indonesia’s economic system and inspiring development (in each concrete and rupiah), his rule was latterly related to the initialism KKN – collusion, corruption, nepotism – and violence. Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime – the identify signalling the break with the Sukarno period – was additionally characterised by navy authoritarianism and abductions, rape, and homicide.
The information in early November 2025 that Suharto was to affix Indonesia’s pantheon of nationwide heroes – the nation’s highest honour – was, subsequently, controversial. In Indonesia heroes are state authorised and have been because the Nineteen Fifties, a decade by which the younger republic, having concluded its independence struggle in 1949, had myriad lifeless to recollect. In 1957, 10 November grew to become heroes day, the date chosen to commemorate the Battle of Surabaya, a defiant defeat to British forces in 1945. In 1958 Sukarno assumed the best to grant particular person hero standing by presidential decree. By 1965 there have been nearly 50, and the numbers grew underneath Suharto’s New Order, together with the addition of his spouse, Ibu Tien, in 1996. He has now joined her as a part of a ten-strong cohort which, extremely, additionally contains Marsinah, a 24-year-old commerce unionist killed by his navy in 1993. The dictator and the activist: the juxtaposition might hardly be extra excessive.
Heroic necessities embody being Indonesian, being lifeless, an excellent contribution to the nation, and, considerably in Suharto’s case, the absence of any legacy-tainting actions. Anger, principally of the web selection that Suharto by no means needed to discover a manner of suppressing, was loud. ‘President Prabowo has created a brand new sub-category of Nationwide Hero’, introduced the Jakarta Publish: ‘This new class is for false heroes.’ Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s incumbent eighth president, was additionally a New Order basic. His election in 2024 was seen by involved onlookers as proof of a backwards slide in direction of authoritarian rule. (He’s additionally the ex-husband of considered one of Suharto’s daughters.) Prabowo was on the Jakarta ceremony on 10 November the place Suharto was described as ‘a hero within the independence battle’, who ‘stood out because the independence period’.
Out with the previous
The final half is actually true, although Suharto didn’t stand out by pressure of persona. Born in central Java in 1921, his navy profession tells its personal story of Indonesia’s Twentieth century: he served within the Royal Netherlands military from 1940, in a Japan-backed militia through the wartime occupation, fought the Allies within the revolution, and climbed the ranks of the Indonesian military thereafter.
The following enemy was communism. Suharto got here to energy in 1965, changing Sukarno who was ousted whereas nonetheless engaged in a slow-burn attritional struggle with Britain (the ‘Confrontation’) over the 1963 creation of Malaysia. Sukarno noticed Malaysia – the union of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah – as an try to protect British affect in postcolonial Southeast Asia (not unreasonably so). Nonetheless imploring Indonesians to ‘crush Malaysia’ in late 1965, Sukarno was, within the removed from neutral view of Britain’s Southeast Asian commissioner basic Earl Selkirk, a person with ‘the instability and lust for energy of Hitler’. Because the historian David Easter has written, Britain had adopted a ‘Micawber coverage’ in direction of ending its financially ruinous struggle with Sukarno, so-called after the Dickens character who perenially hopes ‘one thing will flip up’. On 30 September 1965, one thing did: an tried coup d’état by which six Indonesian generals have been killed. The ‘coup’ was defeated and blamed on Indonesia’s communist celebration (PKI), the world’s third largest. Among the many spared generals was Suharto, who assumed emergency management. The brand new regime accepted Britain’s olive department supply of £1 million support and the Confrontation ended, to the large aid of Harold Wilson’s authorities. The PKI, to which Sukarno had in Western opinion grown dangerously shut, was eradicated in a nationwide bloodbath. Leftist politics by no means recovered in Indonesia.
Within the museum beneath the Nationwide Monument in Jakarta, a sequence of 51 dioramas surveys Indonesian historical past. In a single show a bedbound Sukarno entrusts the nation’s future to Suharto, who sits at his bedside in navy fatigues. It depicts the granting of full govt powers to Suharto on 11 March 1966. The dioramas are one legacy of the New Order. Industrialisation is one other. Sukarno constructed, however favored status tasks, such because the Lodge Indonesia and close by Sarinah mall (the nation’s first, with its first escalator, nonetheless signposted). Within the Seventies and Eighties the New Order constructed factories and infrastructure, welcoming international capital. A center class was born. Western tradition was allowed; Jakarta bought its first disco. This was all accompanied by world-beating corruption; by one rely, the Suharto household amassed a $30 billion fortune. And violence: Indonesian forces have been accused of genocide in East Timor between 1975 and 1999. Prabowo was amongst them, and was banned from the US for human rights abuses. The rape of Chinese language Indonesian girls by the navy through the Jakarta protests which preceded Suharto’s resignation in Could 1998 have been dismissed as ‘rumours’ in 2025 by Fadli Zon, the minister who beneficial Suharto’s heroic elevation.
‘Suharto nostalgia’
After Suharto’s dying in 2008, Benedict Anderson – nonetheless essentially the most distinguished Western scholar of Indonesia if college studying lists are something to go by – revealed his ‘Obituary for a Mediocre Tyrant’. He coated the principle prices and added one other – that the New Order intentionally cultivated historic amnesia: ‘Normal ignorance of the previous might be larger than at any time within the final century.’ However there was trigger for optimism. Invoking Churchill’s aphorism ‘whereas there may be dying there may be hope’, Anderson regarded ahead to Suharto’s consignment to historical past’s dustbin: ‘Yearly, the variety of younger individuals who solely bear in mind dimly or under no circumstances what Suharto’s Neues Ordnung was like grows apace.’
That was true, however optimism misplaced. Anderson didn’t dwell to see the South China Morning Publish’s headline in February 2024: ‘Prabowo’s victory: Indonesian youths pine for Suharto period.’ Nor to learn a narrative revealed by VICE in 2017: ‘Indonesia’s New Order Nostalgia Isn’t Going Wherever.’ Nor to see Suharto made a nationwide hero with, in response to state information company Antara, 80 per cent approval.
As with authoritarian nostalgia globally, ‘Suharto nostalgia’ has murky origins. It has been not less than cursorily recognised since his funeral, when one ballot discovered that 58 per cent of Indonesians most well-liked life underneath the New Order. However media consideration to the phenomenon has accelerated since 2014, the yr by which Prabowo first ran for workplace, and by which t-shirts and stickers depicting the ‘smiling basic’ started showing with the Javanese phrase ‘Penak jamanku, to?’ (‘It was higher in my time, proper?’). In 2018 a papped lookalike triggered a flare-up: ‘Picture of man on practice sparks Soeharto nostalgia’, reported the Jakarta Publish.
Nostalgia is tough to measure, however the 2024 victory of Prabowo (in an election the place greater than half the citizens was underneath 40) has been taken as a excessive yard stick. In a single evaluation, his rehabilitation rides in tandem with Suharto’s, although this overlooks Prabowo’s deliberate evocation of Sukarno. (The historian John Roosa described Prabowo as a ‘mutant creature, transplanting the wild, romantic coronary heart of Sukarno into the stiff, rotting corpse of Suhartoism’.) Maybe it’s unsurprising that Indonesia’s center class ought to really feel nostalgic for the regime that created it. The reason for younger nostalgists is commonly inheritance or historic illiteracy. In 2018 VICE quizzed Indonesians born after 1998 on the New Order. Confusion was evident in a single 17-year-old’s response to ‘Do you want Suharto?’: ‘Sure. However not likely.’ The Prabowo authorities’s new ten-volume set of ‘official historical past’ textbooks, delivered with a ‘optimistic’ tone, just isn’t anticipated to encourage crucial reassessment of the New Order.
No nation for previous heroes
These in search of nostalgia in motion may see ‘Jejak Soeharto’ (‘Suharto’s Footsteps’), a group web page for ‘Soeharto Followers’ with 803,000 Instagram followers, posting New Order imagery with reflective prompts. However such accounts recommend extra about Indonesia than the straightforward existence of nostalgic impulses. Expressions of ‘Suharto nostalgia’ are one attribute of the newest chapter within the nation’s fashionable historical past, the Reformasi, which has introduced political democracy and a democratisation of Indonesian historical past, too. Beneath the New Order, historical past was held in what the scholar Max Lane describes as a ‘straitjacket’: a blunt device hammering house the regime’s overcome the PKI. After 1998, historical past entered the general public area, facilitated, in fact, by the web. Extremely completed non-public archival tasks have emerged: Irama Nusantara collects and digitises fashionable music recorded across the archipelago because the Twenties; Grafis Nusantara does the identical for visible tradition, producing an archive of Twentieth-century ads, meals labels, and non secular iconography; Artefak Kita collects and contextualises political propaganda from the colonial period onwards. However one other attribute of the Reformasi is the obvious triumph of private reminiscence which, as Mary Zurbuchen argues, has emerged because the ‘touchstone for brand spanking new histories’.
Nostalgia may appear like historical past, nevertheless it attracts legitimacy from consensus not info. Within the debate about Suharto’s hero standing, consensus seems to facet with approval. However the loud opposition heard throughout, and out of doors, Indonesia exhibits that whereas heroes are the protect of the state, the final phrase on nationwide historical past just isn’t.
Rhys Griffiths is co-editor of Historical past Right this moment.
