Subject: Guardian: Indonesia's Temporary Tyrant Faces Tough Future

[Dennis L. Fiddle]

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Date: Sun, 24 May 1998 01:50:32 EDT
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Subject: Guardian: Indonesia's Temporary Tyrant Faces Tough Future

Temporary tyrant
Suharto's replacement in profile.

Habibie faces tough future

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

Sunday May 24, 1998

President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie's enthusiasm is infectious, but his head-
spinning monologues have the power to wear anyone down - as Margaret Thatcher
discovered while drumming up business in Indonesia.

Purposeful as ever when on a mid-1980s visit, she strode around the Bandung
aviation plant with Habibie trotting beside her, talking furiously. It was a
visibly flagging Thatcher who emerged an hour later with the impish Habibie
still in full flow.

The day may soon arrive when Habibie will look back on a sunny morning in 1995
as the most glorious climax of his career - not the dramatic moment last
Thursday when, with a Koran held over his head, he took the oath of office to
replace Asia's longest-serving ruler, Suharto, as President of Indonesia.

It was a hot August day in the pleasant hill town of Bandung when - with
Suharto and the top brass of Indonesian business and politics seated under
canvas awnings - the doors of an aircraft hangar drew back and a modest-
looking turboprop passenger aircraft rolled out on to the apron.

Indonesia had for weeks prepared for the inaugural flight of the N-250, a
50-seat commuter plane wholly designed by Habibie's aerospace organisation.
The launch was carefully timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of
independence. Billions of dollars were being spent, not only to build
Indonesian planes but to unleash an industrial revolution on the country.

The revolution that eventually occurred was not a technological one, but
popular revolt against the cronyism and excesses of a despotic regime.

And in the dying hours of the Suharto regime, with students occupying the
rubber-stamp parliament and mobs looting and destroying whatever they could
get their hands on, Habibie made an impassioned appeal to his old mentor to be
given the ultimate reward for his loyal service: the presidency. But as he
stepped forward to take over this country of 202 million people he may have
found the real power already in the hands of the military.

It was much easier being Suharto's "technology tsar" for more than 20 years
and boss of an aircraft manufacturing company, IPTN. This was just one of many
hi-tech ventures which "Professor, Doctor, Engineer Habibie", as state media
describes him, conjured up for his master. He launched a shipbuilding company
that would one day construct supertankers to carry the nation's oil. Undaunted
by the proximity of volcanoes and earthquake faults, he backed the idea of
building nuclear power stations. He even conceived a wacky "zig-zag theory" of
economics, extolling the benefits of wild fluctuations in interest rates.

Critics regard these as strange fixations for a land of rice paddies and
tropical forests, struggling to lift the world's fourth-largest population
from poverty. But with Suharto behind him, the extra noughts on Habibie's
bills just didn't seem to count.

So far as anyone can tell - the company books are not open to public scrutiny
- IPTN has never sold a passenger plane on the open market or turned a profit,
yet Suharto was willing to ransack an environmental fund to find extra
capital. And when an uppity Finance Minister wanted Habibie's shipbuilding
concern to pay some $80 million in back taxes, he could depend on Suharto to
send the miscreant packing.

Suharto had championed the maverick prodigy from his early teens, and Habibie
seems to have felt himself a man apart ever since. His authorised biography
tells how the child Habibie never went out to play like other children when he
finished his homework - he preferred his Meccano set.

Awed by the wartime exploits of the Luftwaffe's ME-109 fighter, he went to
Germany in the late 1940s to study engineering. Zealous study earned him a PhD
and a job at Messerschmitt until Suharto brought him back.

Since then Habibie has been the target equally of plaudits and brickbats. His
fizzing energy and restless imagination have won him admiration as a visionary
but also derision as the nation's most eccentric politician. His hi-tech
dreams gained political currency as a vehicle for Indonesia's Muslim
modernisers even as they became a target for economic technocrats.

He has a chip on his shoulder about his diminutive height, and would carefully
watch the reaction of visitors to the model aircraft crowding his desk top. If
they smirked, he never forgave or forgot.

As president, Habibie will face pressures of an altogether different
magnitude. His profligate ways make his dearest projects a target for the
International Monetary Fund, and international financial markets savaged
Indonesia's currency in January when Habibie emerged as Suharto's choice for
vice-president.

His domestic audience is even more severe. The students who beat down
Suharto's presidency have little time for an heir they see as a product of the
culture of corruption and nepotism they are bent on rooting out.

Even more worryingly for Habibie, neither do many of Indonesia's politically
powerful generals, including the army commander, General Wiranto. Trapped
between the two, with little grass-roots support, Habibie may go down as the
shortest president in Indonesian history - in more ways than one.

ďWith Indonesia's economy in free fall, credit from the International Monetary
Fund is urgently needed to start the process of restoring the country's
credibility with the markets, writes William Keegan.

The country faces a desperate shortage of capital, and of cash for essential
imports. It is estimated its total international reserves, given by the IMF as
$15.5 billion at the end of February, are now down to below half this level.
Indonesia's total exposure is $59bn, compared with $103bn for Korea and $70bn
for Thailand.

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Copyright Guardian Media Group plc 1998

--
dfi...@mn.uswest.net (Dennis L. Fiddle)
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