REVISIONISM
Political nostalgia
Sylvie Tanaga
Iwas only eleven when Suharto, Indonesia’s second president, who ruled as a dictator for thirtytwo years, gave his resignation speech in 1998. I remember watching my parents staring agape at the television, confusion and relief on their faces. This memory later sparked my curiosity to find out the significance of what had happened.
It took me several years to fully appreciate how Suharto’s New Order had discriminated against Chinese Indonesians. It took me even longer to learn about the unspeakable violence of the brutal massacres in 1965– 1966. I asked my parents why they hadn’t told me about all this cruelty and why I hadn’t read about any of it in my history textbooks at school.
“Look,” my mother said, “we are Chinese Indonesian. We can’t just talk about politics openly.”
She died eight years later, but her words left a deep mark on me. I involved myself in social activities and sociopolitical discussions. I read widely and studied politics. When Suharto died in 2008, I thought we had seen the end of the New Order.
That changed in the early 2010s. After I graduated from college, I saw a photo of Suharto on the back of a truck. He was smiling gently, a hand held up in a wave. Accompanying this image were the words “Penak Jamanku To?”—“It was better in my time, right?” Images like this have become increasingly common in public. In the run-up to the 2024 election, there were more conversations about Suharto. Many of the people I spoke to in Bandung said they’d vote for Prabowo Subianto— Suharto’s former son-in-law and a controversial former army general—solely on the basis of his association with the “glory” of the New Order era.
At times, this sort of nostalgia would turn into talk of “the good times of Suharto”. I heard this even among Chinese Indonesians. Some—particularly upper class entrepreneurs who had enjoyed privileges under the New Order regime—longed for the political and economic stability associated with the Suharto era, conveniently ignoring that much of this stability was born of oppression and a very different global economic context. Prabowo made this work to his benefit: as a former member of the New Order regime and a presidential candidate who chose President Joko Widodo’s son to be his running mate, he managed to appeal to both selective nostalgia and hopes for a smooth political transition. Accusations of human rights violations he’d committed against Chinese Indonesians fell to the wayside.
This nostalgic narrative also seems to have been embraced by Indonesians who never experienced the Suharto era. I’ve seen young Indonesians commenting on social media that their parents preferred life under Suharto because basic necessities were more affordable then. Stories they’d heard from their parents had sparked their curiosity about the Suharto era. But there’s no guarantee that what they’re learning from social media is accurate or presented with the necessary context.
Gen Z—defined by Indonesia’s election commission as those born between 1997–2009—is a significant political force in Indonesia: this year, the number of registered voters from this demographic reached almost 23 per cent of the electorate. Prabowo made sure to appeal to them, portraying himself as a “gemoy”—a cuddly grandpa. His roles in the 1998 kidnapping of activists or the human rights violations in Timor Leste have never been fully exposed. It doesn’t help that a number of former activists who had been highly critical of the New Order regime—and had even been victims of kidnappings led by Prabowo—now endorse him as a politician, helping him whitewash a disturbing track record. The cute grandfather gambit and the historical revisionism appears to have paid off: an exit poll published in February suggested that 71 per cent of Gen Z voted for Prabowo. He won the election with about 58.5 per cent of the vote.
One might be puzzled by the appeal of a former Suharto-era hardliner to Indonesian youth. Ben Laksana, a doctoral candidate at the Victoria University of Wellington, has a theory. “This shows that in fact, the New Order never really died in Indonesia’s society,” he said. “Suharto and his family were only the face of the New Order, but its ideas—such as militarism—are still very much alive. The New Order itself was a complex network, a giant octopus whose people still exist in power today.”
Andreas Harsono, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, believes nostalgia for Suharto arises mainly because Indonesians have never had the opportunity to learn about his human rights violations—especially since Suharto himself had never been brought to a fair trial for his crimes. “Because there is no court to find the truth, it is also difficult for history books to be written comprehensively and proportionally. Young people who are now in their twenties and thirties have no idea what Suharto did, including human rights violations such as 1965–1966, Aceh, Papua, Timor Leste and corruption.”
In January 2023, President Widodo officially acknowledged twelve major human rights abuses that had occurred in Indonesia. Among them were the mass killings carried out in 1965–1966 and the May 1998 riots, in which Chinese Indonesians were targeted. Despite this, as Asvi Warman Adam, a research professor in social and political history, has pointed out, there appears to be a reluctance to include these violations in prominent history books like Indonesia Dalam Arus Sejarah (Indonesia in the Flow of History), widely circulated in public.
“Young people never learn from history and become very easily influenced by New Order ‘marketing’ that always seeks to glorify Suharto,” Soe Tjen Marching, a senior lecturer in Indonesian at the SOAS University of London, told me. “Revising history lessons is difficult because Suharto’s cronies are still entrenched in power.”
Is it really true that Gen Z Indonesians don’t know about Suharto’s dark side? Is there no desire among this generation to explore Indonesian history beyond the official narrative?
To find answers, I spoke to Maya, twenty-five, and Bunga and Viko, both twenty-one. All three were born after the Suharto era and admitted that they don’t know much about him or his New Order regime. Their primary source of information had been school lessons that’d been limited to providing a chronology of major events. There’d been little explanation of the context behind historical events, let alone any encouragement to reflect on history’s relevance to their current and future lives.
Viko, who spent his junior and senior years in a private school in Bandung, said he’d been taught about both Suharto’s weaknesses and strengths. He’d left school with the impression the New Order era had both good and bad sides: Suharto’s development programmes had brought economic progress, but there had also been corruption, collusion, nepotism and a lack of freedom of expression.
Maya and Bunga went to public schools 4,800 kilometres apart from each other—one in Southeast Maluku and the other in Sukabumi in West Java. But both recalled history lessons on the New Order era as short and superficial. “I actually understand more about the New Order from my current lecturer, who experienced the Suharto era,” said Bunga. “Her personal stories made me aware of the horrors of the New Order.”
Maya, Bunga and Viko all believe a knowledge of history is important, but also admit the majority of their peers aren’t very interested. Even if apathy wasn’t the problem, there’d still be obstacles to learning.
“I’m from Southeast Maluku, very far from Java,” Maya said over a voice note from Papua. “It’s a challenge to meet basic needs, much less to get high-quality books and a strong internet connection. Right now, I work as a teacher in Papua, where there are significant cultural and geographic differences. It’s not easy to study history well if there are difficulties with access to knowledge.”
Bunga is studying to be a pharmacist. All her time is taken up by lectures or lab activities; although she recognises history’s importance, she has little energy to study history on top of all her coursework. Even so, she’s aware that her future as a medical worker will be influenced by state policy, and tries her best to set aside time to understand more about Indonesia’s past. Since our conversation for this piece, Bunga has often peppered me with questions over WhatsApp about Suharto and the New Order era.
Activism in Indonesia is often seen as the domain of the young. They’re expected to be the drivers of political transformation, even if young Indonesians might lack knowledge and experience. But Ben Laksana, whose doctoral dissertation focuses on how Indonesian youth learn about and engage in activism, argues that historical awareness and changemaking shouldn’t be placed solely on the shoulders of the young.
“Young people are one of the most vulnerable age groups in Indonesia and I feel sad that we often demand change from young people,” he said. “Many of them don’t even have an income and their future is uncertain because of the threat of economic precarities, war, epidemics, the climate crisis and so on.” As with societies in other parts of the world, the generation of Indonesians now coming of age are facing a highly unequal and uncertain future. The pressures of the modern world—coupled with revisionist accounts of the supposed “good old days”—could prime people to long for a return to a past that never truly existed.
“Whether it is feudalism, systemic corruption, militarism or technocratic development coupled with an authoritarian iron fist, Indonesian society has never really been encouraged to systematically question these practices that were upheld or derived from the New Order,” Laksana said. “Ultimately, it may be that society itself could have contributed to the reproduction of the New Order. If we don’t begin to educate, understand and fight it together—regardless of age—it is possible that in the future not only Prabowo, but also other figures will try to emulate the New Order through novel ways that attract the young generation.” ☐ Sylvie Tanaga, now living in Bandung, writes about various social, political and cultural issues
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