Suharto's legacy.

• Author: Morgan, Patrick
• Pages: 67(3)

The recently deceased President Suharto of Indonesia is routinely referred to by Australian journalists as a brutal dictator--they can't find a good word to say about him. Yet no-one did more to improve Indonesia as a nation, and to provide long-term stability for Australia and the region.

The later years of his predecessor, President Soekarno, were a shambles and worse. Soekarno's inability to govern properly threatened his own country and others near it. Externally he embarked on a dangerous and disastrous course of confrontasi with his Malaysian neighbours. Internally his rule disintegrated, and he increasingly had to rely for support on the powerful Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, led by D.N. Aidit.

By the mid 1960s all the signs were present that the PKI was moving to make a bid for power. The expected putsch came on 30 September 1965, when the PKI attempted to round up and murder the leading figures of the military. This they did, but fortunately a few senior generals, including Nasution, scrambled over a back fence, escaped and were able to put down the Communist insurrection. I remember feeling an immense relief at learning of this, as the momentum of events at the time was running strongly in the opposite direction and against our interests.

It can be plausibly argued that the defeat of the Communist coup was the most important event in our region over the last half century. It ranks with the repulsion of the Japanese push southwards in the 1940s at a time when Australia's safety was momentarily imperilled. At the time the region could have gone either way. Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes were organising a southward thrust of Communist takeovers in the Malayan peninsula, Indo-China, Indonesia and the Philippines. The dominoes were beginning to fall, but it was the failed Indonesian Communist coup of 1965...