Singapore: ISEAS, 2021. xliii, 502 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$55.90, paper. ISBN 978-981-4881-00-5.
Up until October 1, 1965, few Indonesians knew of Major General Soeharto, and those who did never imagined him becoming president. He had risen through the ranks without becoming a public figure. Soeharto was quiet, reserved, and utterly ordinary. By happenstance, he was the senior general left standing after a strange putsch killed off the commander, General Yani, and five fellow generals. Even once Soeharto began to take advantage of his fortuitously acquired position and gradually seized state power from President Sukarno in late 1965, no one expected that this unknown, uncharismatic upstart would remain president for 32 years. His improbable rise to power seems comical enough to remind Javanese of the wayang story of Petruk, the clownish servant who became king.
Soeharto’s three decades-plus presidency retrospectively endowed his unremarkable life before 1965 with great significance. While he eschewed a personality cult, he ensured that Indonesians knew of his rags-to-riches story. He frequently commented on his childhood of rural poverty when speaking with journalists. He authorized two biographies, one by the West German journalist, spy, and ex-SS officer, Rudolf O. G. Roeder in 1969, and another, quasi-autobiography, by the Indonesian writer Ramadhan K. H. in 1989. He presented himself as a simple peasant boy from an out-of-the-way village in Central Java who, by dint of superior intelligence and unrelenting hard work, became head of state.
David Jenkins’ book, the first installment in a planned three-volume biography, covers the years from Soeharto’s birth in 1921 to the ending of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in 1945. It critically examines just about every claim made in previous biographies and delves into a new level of detail concerning his parentage, upbringing, schooling, and employment. Jenkins came to know the man when working as an Australian journalist posted to Jakarta from 1969–1970 and again in 1976–1980. Amidst his other work, Jenkins has been interviewing people who knew Soeharto and been collecting documents (in Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian) about him ever since. He has consulted many of the leading historians specializing in twentieth-century Indonesia. With a gestation period of about five decades, this biography is extraordinarily well-researched. One cannot imagine it ever losing its status as the most comprehensive and reliable source on Soeharto’s life.
The 14 chapters of the book can be seen as falling into three sections: chapters one to six cover his childhood and youth; chapters seven and eight cover the 22 months he was part of the Dutch colonial state’s army in the Indies (1940–1942), and chapters 9 to 14 cover Indonesia’s period of Japanese occupation. The narrative moves chronologically with the author stopping to provide context for each stage of Soeharto’s life. The reader learns much about the schools in Java, the Dutch military in the Indies, and Japanese police methods.
It is a strength of this biography that the context sometimes overwhelms the story of Soeharto’s own life. The book’s description of the Japanese military occupation of Indonesia, for example, should be essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. Jenkins interviewed numerous Japanese military officers and drew upon a variety of primary sources to produce an original account of the institutions of the occupation. With such a wealth of information, he could have easily written a separate book just on that topic alone—a book in which Soeharto would have featured as little more than a footnote.
Much of this book about Soeharto’s early years involves foreshadowing, probing this period of his life to discover the determinants of his post-1965 style of governing. The book points to a great variety of determinants: his troubled childhood (his parents divorced soon after his birth and he was left to be raised by relatives), his experience with poverty, his education in village schools, his awareness of not belonging to the class of elite Indonesians attending Dutch-language schools, and his immersion in the moral adages and mystical beliefs of the Javanese religion, kejawen.
The book’s central question is how Soeharto, “a man of such modest social origins and limited education,” could rise to “the pinnacle of power” (xxxii). The answer largely lies in his success within a series of military institutions. “The Dutch had pushed him through their pre-war NCO training programmes as they prepared to face a Japanese onslaught. The Japanese had pushed him through their wartime officer training programmes as they prepared to face an Allied onslaught” (304). His five years of training from 1940 to 1945 provided him the foundation for becoming a high-ranking officer in the Indonesian army after independence. Even though the training involved no combat experience, it gave him an extensive familiarity with military matters, especially with the everyday functioning of the bureaucracy needed to provision and manage the troops. At 24 years of age in 1945, he was a military expert by comparison with most of his peers.
That expertise was his only distinguishing feature. Otherwise, the young Soeharto emerges in these pages as an ordinary Javanese man of his times. If events had turned out differently in 1965, this Petruk could have easily not become king and would have faded away into obscurity, never to establish a kleptocratic, nepotistic, and brutal dictatorship—and certainly not ever attracting the attention of such a tenacious and talented biographer.
John Roosa
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver