Indonesia’s Quiet Success Explained
Resurgent Indonesia: From Crisis to Confidence, by Vasuki shastry.
OFTEN Called the world’s largest “invisible” country, Indonesia has a magical hold on foreign correspondents who have reported out of the archipelago. as if to make up for that invisibility, many of the journalists, all privileged temporary residents with the ringside view of a correspondent, have written excellent accounts of their time in Indonesia, interpreting the complex country by demystifying it. With its wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) and dalangs (puppeteers), dwifungsi (the military’s dual function under former leader suharto), dukuns (spirit mediums) and gotong royong (tradition of mutual self-help), there is much that’s enchanting, magical and exotic in Indonesian society to be explained to the uninitiated.
My former colleagues at the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review — hamish Mcdonald, adam schwarz, Michael Vatikiotis, John Mcbeth and sadanand Dhume — as well as epidemiologist elizabeth Pisani, who was formerly a Reuters correspondent in Indonesia, have written knowledgeably and perceptively about the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. To that list, now add Vasuki shastry, a former correspondent for singapore’s Business Times and later an official at the International Monetary Fund, who is now a senior bank executive in london but has stayed engaged with Indonesian and asian economic affairs.
shastry’s account, Resurgent Indonesia, is actu- ally two books in one. he has seen Indonesia from two perspectives: first, as a reporter covering the most important story of Indonesia in the past quarter century — the 1997-98 financial crisis and suharto’s fall, which I too witnessed and covered for the Review; and later, as an IMF official when the fund was designing policies and programs to help Indonesia overcome the crisis. Three threads run through shastry’s writing: his affection for the Indonesian people; his thoughtful critique of what went wrong; and his reliance on economic evidence to advance his analysis and argument.
We see two distinct narratives in the book — the color and drama shastry saw as a reporter, and his work as a participant after he became an international bureaucrat. he does the former with a keen eye; he does the latter by quoting widely from analytical reports, academic papers and speeches. The reports he cites are not written as engagingly as he himself writes, which slows the pace of the text; it springs to life again once shastry writes in his own voice.
I vividly recall the day suharto resigned in Jakarta, 20 years ago in May 1998. I was with my colleague and friend, the Jakarta-based correspondent John Mcbeth on the terrace of Wisma antara, the building where the Review had its office, surveying the city sprawled around us. There were flames everywhere, from Glodok, West Jakarta’s Chinatown, to the shopping centers in the east, as protesters attacked businesses close to suharto, or the property of Indonesianchinese, who the demonstrators believed had disproportionately benefited during suharto’s rule.
shastry recalls that period with calm prose, not missing any of the drama while recounting the Indonesia’s very real economic crisis. Indeed, its political crisis was the consequence of an economic one, and shastry’s account vividly recreates the slow-motion disaster. he writes about the origins of the crisis (the mismatch between the banking system’s assets and liabilities, and the impossibility of maintaining a fixed exchange rate at a time of increasing private, short-term debt repayments), linking those to the political ramifications brought on by a crony-infested economy; all compounded by the el Niño weather effect that led to a fall in food production. Together, these forces destroyed the suharto presidency.
shastry is critical of the cynicism within suharto’s inner circle. some businesses and politicians