In the more than two decades since the overthrow of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966–98), Indonesian studies has seen the publication of dozens of books revisiting the personalities, politics, and violence of that formative period. Some readers might wonder, then, whether there is a need for yet another book on the era and its actors. But David Jenkins has written just a book, the first in a three-volume biographical opus intended to examine the New Order's paramount politician, President Muhammad Soeharto. The book draws on Jenkins's in-depth interviews over more than four decades with hundreds of Indonesian politicians, military commanders, and business leaders, as well as interviews with former imperial Japanese officers stationed in Indonesia during the Second World War. It also draws extensively on historical archives in Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, Britain, and the United States. The result is a book of rare richness, one that sheds light on Soeharto's early years (childhood through first military years), while simultaneously providing a far-ranging and incisive reflection on the making of modern Indonesia.
Jenkins is an Australian-born journalist, defense analyst, and historian. In addition to covering the American wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for the Melbourne Herald, Jenkins reported from Jakarta in the late 1960s and again from 1976 to 1980. Jenkins's Suharto and His Generals is still regarded as one of the finest studies ever published on the New Order military.Footnote 1 As Jenkins explains in the preface, this new book is the first volume in a three-volume series “that will chart the rise to power of one of Asia's most brutal, most durable, most avaricious and most successful dictators” (p. xxvii). Notwithstanding the justifiably critical tone of some of its judgments, not least with regard to Soeharto's role in the mass killings of Indonesian communists in 1965–66, Jenkins's biography succeeds in presenting Soeharto in all of his complexity, and it does so with great insight and occasional sympathy.
This first volume takes the story from Soeharto's birth in a small village in Central Java through to his service in the Royal Netherlands Indies Army, his role as a policeman during the Japanese occupation, and then again as a soldier in the Japanese-sponsored Java Volunteer Defense force known as PETA. Jenkins shows that unlike many who rose to leadership positions during the Indonesian Revolution, Soeharto came from a simple rural background. Notwithstanding his diligence and obvious intelligence, as a youth he did not experience the Dutch-language high school education enjoyed by many leaders of the young republic. Jenkins also explains that the details of Soeharto's early life are still today clouded in mystery. His father divorced his mother when Soeharto was just forty days old, apparently after the couple had quarreled and she had wandered off from their home in a dark cloud of depression. Some Indonesianists, as well as some of the dozens of Indonesians whom Jenkins interviewed about Soeharto's early childhood, have suggested that the reason for his parents’ marital discord was that Soeharto's biological father was actually “a senior member of the Yogyakarta court, perhaps even the Sultan himself” (p. 12). Although this rumor of noble pedigree is impossible to verify and was denied by Soeharto (p. 21), it was given credence in Yogyakarta court circles. More significant for Soeharto's political personality, the broader pattern of “parental abandonment . . . had the deepest impact” on Soeharto. The future president was “polite and well-mannered but silent, self-contained and ruminative, intensely conscious of the inequities of life and harbouring a deep resentment toward those who had treated him unkindly” (p. 76).
Having opened with Soeharto's early childhood, the book's middle and later chapters alternate engagingly between Soeharto's personal and professional life, and a no less detailed account of the Indonesia in which the quiet young man was coming of age. Chapter 2 surveys the geography and colonial history of Indonesia just prior to Soeharto's birth. Chapter 3 examines the rise of Muslim, nationalist, and communist movements in the Dutch colony, set against the backdrop of related trends in East Asia. Chapter 4 reflects on Soeharto's village upbringing and uses its account of Soeharto's primary school experiences to summarize the uneven and inegalitarian nature of Dutch-sponsored mass education in the late colonial period. One of the book's most nuanced and important chapters, chapter 5 explores Soeharto's lifelong interest in Javanese mysticism, as well as the motives behind his courtship of nondemocratic Muslims in the late 1990s. Chapters 6 explores Suharto's adolescence against the backdrop of broader changes in Yogyakarta and Central Java.
Chapters 7–14 pivot toward Soeharto's military service, including his employment as a police official under the Japanese. Here, as throughout the book, Jenkins zooms in on the details of Soeharto's personal career, only then to zoom out to the broader context of Java, the Indonesia archipelago, and the country's growing entanglement in regional affairs during and after the Second World War. Among these chapters’ many achievements, they provide an overview of the culture and organization of the Japanese military and its role in shaping independent Indonesia's military culture. No less fascinating—and astonishing in their detail—are the impressions of the Japanese military officials who trained Soeharto and came to know him as “a cautious man” who “never showed off his talent” and “never lost his temper” (p. 272).
Jenkins writes with an engaging and theoretically unpretentious prose. He manages to strike a deft narrative balance between the personal details of Soeharto life and the broad sweep of developments in Indonesian politics, society, and culture. This is, certainly, a long book. But it is a masterful study that deserves to be read by any and all readers with an interest in Soeharto and the bittersweet project of Indonesian nationhood.
