confrontation with Malaysia. He denounced the
Malaysian Federation as a Western colonial
outpost. For a time in 1963 and 1964, with
Indonesia promoting armed incidents, there
seemed to be a real threat of war between the two
countries. Hastily assembled Commonwealth
troops, British, Australian, New Zealand and
Malaysian, set up an effective defence force that
deterred Sukarno from further provocation.
Suharto’s military coup of 1965 was nonetheless
greeted with relief by the West.
General Suharto and the military had viru-
lently opposed the communists long before they
massacred hundreds of thousands of them on
taking control of the country in October 1965.
Reflecting this opposition internationally, Suharto
dropped Sukarno’s friendships with China and
the Soviet Union and reorientated to the West.
With fears prompted by the Vietnam conflict of a
communist takeover of the whole of south-east
Asia, the US supplanted the Soviet Union as the
arms supplier and provider of foreign aid to
Indonesia. The country was opened to Western
enterprise, but, despite its plentiful resources and
even though in the 1970s it became the largest
oil producer in Asia, corruption and inefficiency
marred its economic development, so that it
remained a poor Third World country. State plan-
ning largely failed to remedy the gross disparity
between the wealth of a minority and the poverty
of the majority; loans were not properly applied;
and Indonesia’s foreign debt rose enormously,
swallowing up nearly a third of all export earn-
ings in 1991, despite considerable expansion of
oil and gas exports in the 1980s. In the late 1980s
the regime began a policy of liberalisation from
state control.
In external affairs, Indonesia’s relations with its
Malaysian neighbours and with Singapore were
generally easier than they had been during
Sukarno’s era. Indonesia is a member of the
Association of South-East Asian Nations, which,
although not a well-functioning organisation, has
done something to promote trade and peace. At
the end of the 1980s Indonesia also played a more
positive role internationally in helping to broker
the peace agreement finally reached in Cambodia.
But General Suharto did not abandon Indonesian
expansionism. Among the worst atrocities in
south-east Asian history was Indonesia’s invasion
of East Timor, which the Portuguese had left in
December 1975. The invaders crushed the move-
ment for an independent East Timor with such
brutality that a fifth of the population of some
700,000 were either killed or disappeared.
Nonetheless, independence as an ideal was not
abandoned by the politically active in East Timor.
Attention was once more focused on Indonesia’s
military when a peaceful demonstration on 28
October 1991 led to the killing of many demon-
strators, amid worldwide condemnation. Within
Indonesia, insurgencies on some of the islands
were no less brutally suppressed, with the tacit
support of the majority, who preferred military
rule to continual strife and bloodshed provoked
by the minority insurgents.
Suharto’s military rule allowed no opposition
or constitutional development, nor did his mod-
ification of Sukarno’s ‘guided democracy’ liber-
alise the authoritarian government of the country.
All effective power was concentrated in his hands,
and even the discarding of his uniform could not
disguise the truth that his rule was based on mil-
itary force. Periodically ‘re-elected’ as president
by a carefully controlled and largely ceremonial
parliament, he brought a certain stability after the
hectic Sukarno years. But the increasing wealth of
a small middle class and the rising discontent of
students occasioned a questioning of authoritar-
ian rule. Here, as in the rest of Asia, the wind of
change was blowing, albeit very gently.
Stability and national unity were the watch-
words of the junta, repression the means of achiev-
ing them, whether combating communism,
(non-Indonesian) nationalism or the demands of
fundamental Muslim groups. That strategy left lit-
tle scope for the development of civilian demo-
cratic rule. The stability provided by an authori-
tarian military regime also encouraged the devel-
oped world to invest in Indonesia. In the early
1990s President Suharto and the army attempted
to present a more liberal image to the outside
world by allowing some political activity and try-
ing to appease more moderate Muslims after
years of preventing Islam from playing any role
in state politics. These were but small beginnings.
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