Bradley Simpson - Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968

On the morning of October 1, 1965, Lyndon Johnsons White House received a terse situation report from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): A power move which may have far reaching implications is underway in Jakarta.

Forty years later, millions of Indonesians still carry the scars of the night that changed their countrys historical trajectory. But they are mostly suppressed scars, prevented from healing by a regime that between 1966 and 1998 used the September 30th Movement and anti-Communism as a master narrative to justify the dominant role of the Indonesian armed forces (TNI) in the nations life, the circumscription of political parties, Islam, and civil society, and the ruthless suppression of dissent.

Since Suhartos downfall in 1998, Indonesia has experienced myriad problems, including economic instability, environmental degradation, state violence, corruption, religious conflict, and a recrudescent Islamic radicalism, which is locally rooted but has strong transnational links. Although not spawned by the New Order, each of these dynamics was exacerbated, in some cases exponentially, by the political and economic edifice that the Suharto regime created to sustain and legitimize its grip on power. The persistence of these problems in Indonesias wobbly democratic transition has forced a long overdue reassessment of virtually all aspects of the New Order period by both Indonesians and foreign observers. The unified coherence of Suhartos New Order, one scholar recently observed, has been thoroughly discredited, as economic stagnation and growing discord undermined its core themes of stability and state-managed development. Such a reassessment has been a long time coming. Between 1966 and 1998, as the Indonesian government pursued a deeply flawed authoritarian development model, the United States and other powerful governments, social scientists, and international institutions cheered Indonesias purported success while muting criticism of the Suharto regimes appalling corruption and abysmal human rights record as the regrettable price of stability and growth. As in Brazil, South Korea, Iran, and many other countries during the Cold War, Indonesia during the Suharto period pursued a strategy of what might be termed military modernization, in which the armed forces asserted for themselves a dominant political role legitimized by their commitment to economic and political development.

Such commitments did not spring out of the political ether, nor were they the product of purely local or national historical conflicts. Rather, a complex constellation of national and international political and economic forces lay the foundations for and encouraged the emergence in the mid-1960s of a military-led regime in Indonesia committed to modernization. These forces included the U.S. and other Western governments, which provided military and economic assistance; philanthropic foundations, which trained economists and military officers in management and administration; international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which promoted early variants of what would later be called structural adjustment; and social scientists, who deployed theory to account for and legitimize the growing political and economic role of the military in the development process, not just in Indonesia but throughout the so-called third world.