Suharto and Indonesia’s Heroic History

When Indonesia’s former president Suharto died aged 86 in 2008, the nation began a week of mourning and conflicted reflection. It was, wrote the Jakarta Post, the end of a ‘remarkable life’; it was also, it hoped, the end of autocratic presidencies. Foreign obituaries were less measured: ‘Dictator brought order and bloodshed’, said the New York Times.

The contours of Indonesia’s independent history might broadly be told as a tale of a revolution, two presidencies, and a reformation. Suharto, who ruled between 1967 and 1998, was the second president. A military man, he governed in contrast to his predecessor, Indonesia’s anti-imperialist flagship hero Sukarno, and in a manner that far better suited the Cold War tastes of Western governments. Known as ‘the smiling general’ for his taciturn public persona, and ‘father of development’ for straightening Indonesia’s economy and encouraging growth (in both concrete and rupiah), his rule was latterly associated with the initialism KKN – collusion, corruption, nepotism – and violence. Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime – the name signalling the break with the Sukarno era – was also characterised by military authoritarianism and abductions, rape, and murder.

The news in early November 2025 that Suharto was to join Indonesia’s pantheon of national heroes – the country’s highest honour – was, therefore, controversial. In Indonesia heroes are state approved and have been since the 1950s, a decade in which the young republic, having concluded its independence war in 1949, had myriad dead to remember. In 1957, 10 November became heroes day, the date chosen to commemorate the Battle of Surabaya, a defiant defeat to British forces in 1945. In 1958 Sukarno assumed the right to grant individual hero status by presidential decree. By 1965 there were almost 50, and the numbers grew under Suharto’s New Order, including the addition of his wife, Ibu Tien, in 1996. He has now joined her as part of a ten-strong cohort which, incredibly, also includes Marsinah, a 24-year-old trade unionist killed by his military in 1993. The dictator and the activist: the juxtaposition could hardly be more extreme.

Heroic requirements include being Indonesian, being dead, an outstanding contribution to the nation, and, significantly in Suharto’s case, the absence of any legacy-tainting actions. Anger, mostly of the online variety that Suharto never had to find a way of suppressing, was loud. ‘President Prabowo has created a new sub-category of National Hero’, announced the Jakarta Post: ‘This new category is for false heroes.’ Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s incumbent eighth president, was also a New Order general. His election in 2024 was seen by concerned onlookers as evidence of a backwards slide towards authoritarian rule. (He is also the ex-husband of one of Suharto’s daughters.) Prabowo was at the Jakarta ceremony on 10 November where Suharto was described as ‘a hero in the independence struggle’, who ‘stood out since the independence era’.

Out with the old

The last part is certainly true, though Suharto did not stand out by force of personality. Born in central Java in 1921, his military career tells its own story of Indonesia’s 20th century: he served in the Royal Netherlands army from 1940, in a Japan-backed militia during the wartime occupation, fought the Allies in the revolution, and climbed the ranks of the Indonesian army thereafter.

The next enemy was communism. Suharto came to power in 1965, replacing Sukarno who was ousted while still engaged in a slow-burn attritional war with Britain (the ‘Confrontation’) over the 1963 creation of Malaysia. Sukarno saw Malaysia – the union of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah – as an attempt to preserve British influence in postcolonial Southeast Asia (not unreasonably so). Still imploring Indonesians to ‘crush Malaysia’ in late 1965, Sukarno was, in the far from impartial view of Britain’s Southeast Asian commissioner general Earl Selkirk, a man with ‘the instability and lust for power of Hitler’. As the historian David Easter has written, Britain had adopted a ‘Micawber policy’ towards ending its financially ruinous war with Sukarno, so-called after the Dickens character who perenially hopes ‘something will turn up’. On 30 September 1965, something did: an attempted coup d’état in which six Indonesian generals were killed. The ‘coup’ was defeated and blamed on Indonesia’s communist party (PKI), the world’s third largest. Among the spared generals was Suharto, who assumed emergency control. The new regime accepted Britain’s olive branch offer of £1 million aid and the Confrontation ended, to the huge relief of Harold Wilson’s government. The PKI, to which Sukarno had in Western opinion grown dangerously close, was eradicated in a nationwide massacre. Leftist politics never recovered in Indonesia.

In the museum beneath the National Monument in Jakarta, a series of 51 dioramas surveys Indonesian history. In one display a bedbound Sukarno entrusts the nation’s future to Suharto, who sits at his bedside in military fatigues. It depicts the granting of full executive powers to Suharto on 11 March 1966. The dioramas are one legacy of the New Order. Industrialisation is another. Sukarno built, but liked prestige projects, such as the Hotel Indonesia and nearby Sarinah mall (the nation’s first, with its first escalator, still signposted). In the 1970s and 1980s the New Order built factories and infrastructure, welcoming foreign capital. A middle class was born. Western culture was allowed; Jakarta got its first disco. This was all accompanied by world-beating corruption; by one count, the Suharto family amassed a $30 billion fortune. And violence: Indonesian forces were accused of genocide in East Timor between 1975 and 1999. Prabowo was among them, and was banned from the US for human rights abuses. The rape of Chinese Indonesian women by the military during the Jakarta protests which preceded Suharto’s resignation in May 1998 were dismissed as ‘rumours’ in 2025 by Fadli Zon, the minister who recommended Suharto’s heroic elevation.

‘Suharto nostalgia’

After Suharto’s death in 2008, Benedict Anderson – still the most prominent Western scholar of Indonesia if university reading lists are anything to go by – published his ‘Obituary for a Mediocre Tyrant’. He covered the main charges and added another – that the New Order deliberately cultivated historical amnesia: ‘General ignorance of the past is probably greater than at any time in the last century.’ But there was cause for optimism. Invoking Churchill’s aphorism ‘while there is death there is hope’, Anderson looked forward to Suharto’s consignment to history’s dustbin: ‘Every year, the number of young people who only remember dimly or not at all what Suharto’s Neues Ordnung was like grows apace.’

That was true, but optimism misplaced. Anderson did not live to see the South China Morning Post’s headline in February 2024: ‘Prabowo’s victory: Indonesian youths pine for Suharto era.’ Nor to read a story published by VICE in 2017: ‘Indonesia’s New Order Nostalgia Isn’t Going Anywhere.’ Nor to see Suharto made a national hero with, according to state news agency Antara, 80 per cent approval.

As with authoritarian nostalgia globally, ‘Suharto nostalgia’ has murky origins. It has been at least cursorily recognised since his funeral, when one poll found that 58 per cent of Indonesians preferred life under the New Order. But media attention to the phenomenon has accelerated since 2014, the year in which Prabowo first ran for office, and in which t-shirts and stickers depicting the ‘smiling general’ began appearing with the Javanese phrase ‘Penak jamanku, to?’ (‘It was better in my time, right?’). In 2018 a papped lookalike triggered a flare-up: ‘Image of man on train sparks Soeharto nostalgia’, reported the Jakarta Post.

Nostalgia is difficult to measure, but the 2024 victory of Prabowo (in an election where more than half the electorate was under 40) has been taken as a high yard stick. In one analysis, his rehabilitation rides in tandem with Suharto’s, though this overlooks Prabowo’s deliberate evocation of Sukarno. (The historian John Roosa described Prabowo as a ‘mutant creature, transplanting the wild, romantic heart of Sukarno into the stiff, rotting corpse of Suhartoism’.) Perhaps it is unsurprising that Indonesia’s middle class should feel nostalgic for the regime that created it. The explanation for young nostalgists is often inheritance or historical illiteracy. In 2018 VICE quizzed Indonesians born after 1998 on the New Order. Confusion was evident in one 17-year-old’s response to ‘Do you like Suharto?’: ‘Yes. But not really.’ The Prabowo government’s new ten-volume set of ‘official history’ textbooks, delivered with a ‘positive’ tone, is not expected to encourage critical reassessment of the New Order.

No country for old heroes

Those looking for nostalgia in action might see ‘Jejak Soeharto’ (‘Suharto’s Footsteps’), a community page for ‘Soeharto Fans’ with 803,000 Instagram followers, posting New Order imagery with reflective prompts. But such accounts suggest more about Indonesia than the simple existence of nostalgic impulses. Expressions of ‘Suharto nostalgia’ are one characteristic of the latest chapter in the country’s modern history, the Reformasi, which has brought political democracy and a democratisation of Indonesian history, too. Under the New Order, history was held in what the scholar Max Lane describes as a ‘straitjacket’: a blunt tool hammering home the regime’s triumph over the PKI. After 1998, history entered the public domain, facilitated, of course, by the internet. Highly accomplished private archival projects have emerged: Irama Nusantara collects and digitises popular music recorded around the archipelago since the 1920s; Grafis Nusantara does the same for visual culture, producing an archive of 20th-century advertisements, food labels, and religious iconography; Artefak Kita collects and contextualises political propaganda from the colonial era onwards. But another characteristic of the Reformasi is the apparent triumph of personal memory which, as Mary Zurbuchen argues, has emerged as the ‘touchstone for new histories’.

Nostalgia might look like history, but it draws legitimacy from consensus not facts. In the debate about Suharto’s hero status, consensus appears to side with approval. But the loud opposition heard across, and outside, Indonesia shows that while heroes are the preserve of the state, the last word on national history is not.

Rhys Griffiths is co-editor of History Today.