World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [80]
Suharto and the Indonesian Chinese had a nice thing going while it lasted. Just 3 percent of the population, the Chinese—like the Lebanese in Sierra Leone—were a classic vulnerable minority, the recurrent targets of popular anti-Chinese violence. In good autocratic fashion, Suharto protected the Chinese politically. He suppressed anti-Chinese labor movements, like the one in North Sumatra in 1994 that turned into a bloody riot against Chinese Indonesians. He extinguished all forms of anti-Chinese dissent and press, even jailing a prominent Jakarta journalist who published an anti-Chinese article. And he quashed, usually through armed force, political opposition of all types, including Islamic militants, Communists, and anti-Chinese political organizations. At the same time, Suharto granted the entrepreneurial Chinese the “freedom to make money,” affirmatively directing lucrative business opportunities to a select few of them.
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In exchange, the Indonesian Chinese, with their business expertise and international connections, returned these favors, both by serving as “miracle workers” for the country’s economic growth and by multiplying exponentially the personal fortune of the Suharto family. In the late 1990s the Suharto family was worth $16 billion according to Forbes, and twice that much according to an estimate attributed to the CIA. Despite their massive business holdings, Suharto and his children had poor entrepreneurial skills, and their lavish lifestyles were heavily dependent on Chinese billionaire cronies like Bob Hasan and Liem Sioe Liong. Through much of the eighties and nineties, no one outside of his family—not even high-ranking cabinet ministers—was closer to Suharto than these two men, who spent hours every week, golfing with the president, planning their joint investments. Most of these investments were channeled through so-called yayasans: supposedly charitable organizations that, because of their “non-profit” nature, were conveniently exempted from both taxes and auditing.
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Throughout his autocratic rule, Suharto called on his Chinese cronies to finance his pet projects, public as well as personal. Thus, at the president’s request, Indonesian Chinese businessmen reportedly covered over $400 million in foreign exchange losses of the Bank Duta, which was indirectly owned by Suharto. As another favor to Suharto, they bailed out Indonesia’s petrochemical industry after it collapsed. Suharto’s Chinese cronies also financed a glowing biography of the president, bankrolled the Taman Mini theme park monorail on behalf of Suharto’s wife, and accepted Suharto’s children as “business partners.”
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Using capital initially accumulated through Chinese cronies, Suharto’s family grew increasingly rapacious through the 1990s. While the vast majority of Indonesians remained in chronic poverty, and with 14 million at one point unemployed, Suharto’s children swept up business interests in television, radio, newspapers, airlines, banks, power plants, satellite communications, and toll roads. They brazenly set up monopolies while liberalizing the economy in ways that devastated the nation’s poorest. Their shady web of businesses extended to dozens of countries, including Uzbekistan, Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau. Many of the Suharto family’s projects—like the one conceived by Tommy Suharto, the general’s wealthiest, flashiest son, to manufacture an Indonesia national car called Timor—were vanity-driven, colossal economic failures.
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As in Sierra Leone, this state of affairs led to tremendous, long-suppressed hostility among Indonesia’s impoverished, largely Muslim pribumi majority. Suharto was aware of this hostility. Toward the end of his rule he began to distance himself from the Chinese, publicly castigating them for their “greed” and warning them of the dangers of ethnic unrest. At the same time, Suharto, in something of an about-face, began wooing influential Muslim intellectuals and religious leaders in an attempt to bolster popular support for himself. But he was too