New Order (Indonesia)

Based on Wikipedia: New Order (Indonesia)

In the span of a single year, Indonesia went from having the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and China to conducting one of the twentieth century's most devastating political purges. Somewhere between half a million and a million people were killed. From the chaos emerged a military general named Suharto, who would rule the world's fourth most populous nation for the next thirty-two years under a system he called the "New Order."

That name was deliberately chosen to contrast with what came before. Suharto retroactively labeled his predecessor's government the "Old Order"—a rhetorical move that positioned him not just as a new leader, but as the embodiment of a fresh start for a nation that had been teetering on the edge of collapse.

The Chaos That Made Suharto Possible

To understand how Indonesia arrived at this moment, you have to understand its founding president, Sukarno. He's one of those rare figures who genuinely deserves the title "founding father." Sukarno had been fighting for Indonesian independence since the 1920s, endured Dutch colonial prisons, survived Japanese occupation, and declared independence the moment World War Two ended. For two decades, he was Indonesia.

But by the mid-1960s, his government was in shambles.

Annual inflation had reached one thousand percent. Factories sat idle. Infrastructure was crumbling. The government had to abandon public subsidies because there simply wasn't any money left. Rather than focusing on these problems, Sukarno was engaged in what he called "Konfrontasi"—a military confrontation with the newly formed nation of Malaysia—and had pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations entirely. He spent much of his energy on anti-Western revolutionary rhetoric while his people couldn't afford rice.

Sukarno governed through what he called "Guided Democracy," which was essentially his attempt to balance three powerful forces: the Indonesian military, Islamic organizations, and the Indonesian Communist Party, known by its Indonesian acronym PKI. He had a name for this balancing act: Nasakom, a portmanteau of Nationalism, Religion, and Communism. The idea was that he alone, like a dalang—the master puppeteer in traditional Javanese shadow theater—could keep these competing forces in harmony.

The problem was that the balance kept shifting toward the communists.

The PKI's Rise and the Military's Fear

By 1965, at the height of the Cold War, the PKI had penetrated every level of government. With roughly three million members and millions more in affiliated organizations, it was the largest communist party in the non-communist world. Muslim landowners watched nervously as the party pushed rural land confiscation programs. The military grew alarmed when Sukarno backed the PKI's proposal to create a "fifth force"—an armed militia of peasants and workers that would exist outside the military's control.

Meanwhile, Western intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, were actively working to create divisions within the Indonesian military, backing right-wing factions against those they perceived as sympathetic to the left. Indonesia had become a crucial domino in the Cold War's theory of containment. If it fell to communism, the thinking went, all of Southeast Asia might follow.

The country was a powder keg. On September 30, 1965, it exploded.

The Night Everything Changed

That night, a group calling themselves the September 30th Movement kidnapped and killed six Indonesian army generals. The plotters claimed they were preventing a right-wing coup against Sukarno. Within hours, General Suharto—who had not been targeted—moved to suppress what he labeled an attempted communist takeover.

What happened next remains one of the twentieth century's most horrific and least-discussed episodes of mass violence. The army, working alongside civilian militias and Islamic youth groups, launched a systematic purge of anyone suspected of communist sympathies. Teachers, union members, ethnic Chinese, artists, intellectuals—the categories of the condemned expanded rapidly. In some villages, neighbors killed neighbors. Bodies choked rivers. The killing lasted for months.

Estimates of the death toll range from five hundred thousand to one million people.

The West largely looked away. Some actively assisted. The United States provided the Indonesian military with lists of PKI members. Western media portrayed the killings as a regrettable but perhaps necessary bulwark against communist expansion. Time magazine described the slaughter as "the West's best news for years in Asia."

From General to President

In March 1966, while Indonesia was still reeling, Suharto secured a presidential decree from Sukarno known as the Supersemar. This document—whose full contents and circumstances remain controversial—gave Suharto authority to take any measures necessary to maintain security. He used it immediately to ban the PKI and begin purging Sukarno loyalists from the military, government, and parliament.

Over the following year, Suharto methodically dismantled Sukarno's remaining power. He ended the confrontation with Malaysia. He brought Indonesia back into the United Nations. Parliament, now stacked with Suharto supporters, stripped Sukarno of his title of "President for Life" and eventually impeached him entirely, citing his tolerance of the September 30th Movement, economic negligence, and—remarkably—"moral degradation" due to his personal relationships with women.

In March 1967, the parliament stripped Sukarno of all remaining authority and named Suharto acting president. The old leader was placed under house arrest in a palace in Bogor, south of Jakarta. He died there in June 1970, largely forgotten. By then, Suharto had already been formally appointed to his first five-year presidential term.

The Architecture of Authoritarian Stability

The New Order promised three things: political order, economic development, and the removal of mass participation from politics. That last item wasn't framed as a bug—it was presented as the entire point. After the chaos of the Sukarno years, Suharto argued that ordinary Indonesians needed to be shielded from the dangerous passions of ideology. They should focus on development. Leave the governing to the professionals.

This philosophy was implemented through an interlocking set of institutions designed to maintain control while preserving the appearance of democratic participation.

The military was given formal political power through a doctrine called Dwifungsi, meaning "Dual Function." This wasn't just rhetoric—one hundred of the four hundred sixty seats in the lower house of parliament were directly appointed military officers. The military ran businesses, administered local governments, and embedded itself in every significant institution. Military officers didn't just have political influence; they had formal political roles.

For the elected seats, Suharto created an ingenious system of controlled opposition. He took control of an obscure federation called Golkar—short for Golongan Karya, meaning "Functional Groups"—and transformed it into his electoral vehicle. Golkar wasn't technically a political party. It was a coalition of professional associations, civil service organizations, and other functional groups. This distinction mattered because Suharto could criticize political parties as divisive and ideological while presenting Golkar as something different: a practical organization focused on national development.

The actual political parties weren't banned, but they were neutered. In 1973, the government forced all four Islamic parties to merge into a single entity called the PPP, or United Development Party. The five remaining non-Islamic parties were fused into the PDI, or Indonesian Democratic Party. Neither was allowed to develop real opposition capacity. The government controlled their leadership, and any legislator who became too outspoken could be removed through a "recall" system.

This arrangement was called "Pancasila Democracy," and under it, Golkar won every single election from 1971 to 1997 with massive margins. The elected parliament then unanimously reappointed Suharto as president in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1998.

Pancasila: The National Philosophy That Explained Everything and Nothing

At the center of New Order ideology was Pancasila, a set of five principles that Sukarno had articulated in 1945 as the philosophical foundation of the Indonesian state. The five principles are: belief in one God, a just and civilized humanity, national unity, democracy guided by wisdom through deliberation, and social justice for all Indonesians.

These principles are deliberately vague—so vague that they can mean almost anything. Sukarno had designed them that way, hoping to create a framework broad enough to unite Indonesia's incredible diversity of religions, ethnicities, and political views. But under Suharto, this vagueness became a tool of control.

In 1978, Suharto secured a parliamentary resolution requiring all organizations in Indonesia to adopt Pancasila as their basic principle. In 1983, he went further, prohibiting organizations from adhering to any principles except Pancasila. This was the doctrine of "asas tunggal Pancasila"—Pancasila as the sole foundation.

Every Indonesian, from primary school students to office workers, was required to undergo Pancasila indoctrination programs. The philosophy was presented not as Sukarno's mid-twentieth-century political compromise, but as the ancient wisdom of the Indonesian people, something that had existed even before Hinduism or Islam arrived on the archipelago.

In practice, this meant that any criticism of the government could be labeled "anti-Pancasila." The vagueness that was supposed to unite Indonesians became a cudgel to silence them.

Creating a "Floating Mass"

Suharto's vision for Indonesian society was what he called the "floating mass"—a depoliticized population focused on development rather than ideology. To achieve this, the government created or co-opted civil society organizations for every sector of society.

All civil servants were required to join KORPRI, the Employees' Corps of the Republic of Indonesia. Workers who weren't civil servants had to join the government-controlled labor federation. Islamic clerics were organized under the MUI, the Indonesian Ulema Council. Women's groups, youth organizations, professional associations—all were brought under government supervision or replaced with regime-loyal alternatives.

The ethnic Chinese population, economically influential but politically vulnerable, faced particularly harsh treatment. Under a policy euphemistically called the "Basic Policy for the Solution of the Chinese Problem," all Chinese-language publications except one army-controlled newspaper were banned. Chinese schools were closed. Chinese cultural and religious expressions, including the display of Chinese characters, were prohibited in public spaces. Ethnic Chinese were pressured to adopt Indonesian-sounding names.

Sidelining Rivals, Rewarding Loyalists

Suharto understood that his power depended on more than just formal institutions. He had risen as first among equals in a military hierarchy full of ambitious generals who saw themselves as his peers. He spent years systematically neutralizing potential rivals.

General Nasution, who as parliament chairman in 1968 tried to pass a bill limiting presidential authority, was removed from his position in 1969 and forced into early retirement from the military by 1972. Three generals who opposed Suharto's approach to political parties—calling themselves the "New Order Radicals"—were dispatched to distant posts: one as an ambassador, the others as regional commanders in North Sumatra and South Sulawesi, far from the centers of power in Java.

The student movement that had helped bring down Sukarno was initially courted, but as the 1970s progressed, it became a source of opposition. Students protested the legitimacy of the 1971 elections, criticized the construction of an expensive theme park called "Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature," challenged the dominance of foreign capital in the Indonesian economy, and questioned why there were no term limits on Suharto's presidency.

The government's response was blunt. In 1978, army units occupied the campus of the Bandung Institute of Technology and student activists were imprisoned. Suharto issued a decree on the "Normalization of Campus Life" that prohibited any political activities on campus unrelated to academic pursuits. Universities, once hotbeds of political engagement, were forced to become purely educational institutions.

In 1980, fifty prominent figures including General Nasution signed what became known as the Petition of Fifty, criticizing Suharto's use of Pancasila to silence critics. Suharto refused to meet with them. Some were imprisoned. Others had restrictions placed on their movements and travel.

The Bargain

The New Order offered Indonesians an implicit bargain: sacrifice political freedom in exchange for economic development and stability. For many years, the bargain seemed to work.

After the hyperinflation and economic collapse of the Sukarno era, Suharto brought in Western-trained economists—nicknamed the "Berkeley Mafia" because several had studied at the University of California—who stabilized the currency, controlled inflation, and opened Indonesia to foreign investment. Oil revenues funded massive infrastructure projects. Poverty rates fell. Literacy increased. A middle class began to emerge.

But the development came with costs that would eventually prove unsustainable: endemic corruption, environmental destruction, and the enrichment of a small elite centered on Suharto's own family. By the 1990s, the president's children controlled vast business empires that touched nearly every sector of the Indonesian economy. The regime's corruption became so institutionalized that it earned its own acronym: KKN, standing for korupsi, kolusi, and nepotisme—corruption, collusion, and nepotism.

The Fall

In 1997, the Asian financial crisis swept across the region, and Indonesia was hit harder than almost any other country. The rupiah collapsed, losing over eighty percent of its value. The International Monetary Fund provided an emergency bailout that came with conditions requiring economic reforms that threatened the business interests of Suharto's family and cronies.

In May 1998, security forces killed four student protesters at Trisakti University in Jakarta. The killings sparked massive riots. Shops were burned, particularly those owned by ethnic Chinese. Over a thousand people died in the violence. As protests spread, Suharto's support evaporated. His own ministers abandoned him. On May 21, 1998, after thirty-two years in power, Suharto resigned.

The Afterlife of the New Order

Today, among Indonesians who fought for democracy and those who came of age after the reform era, "New Order" has become a term of condemnation. To call someone or something "Orde Baru" is to accuse them of the sins of the Suharto years: authoritarianism, corruption, the suppression of dissent.

Yet the legacy is complicated. Many of the institutions Suharto built remain. The military, though formally removed from politics, retains enormous influence. Golkar continues to exist as a political party. Former New Order officials, or their children, occupy positions of power throughout Indonesian society. The 1965-1966 killings have never been officially acknowledged or investigated, and the victims and their descendants still face discrimination.

Indonesia today is a democracy—the world's third largest by population—but it remains haunted by three decades in which a single man, invoking development and stability, built a system designed to keep power exactly where he wanted it: in his own hands.