Epilogue
As epilogue, it may be claimed that Suharto had been unduly harsh in Aceh and East Timor (today known as Timor-Leste). In December 1975, the Portuguese colonial rulers pulled out of East Timor, and the Indonesian army moved in. In the ensuing guerrilla warfare, at least 170,000 died over the next fifteen years (Reynolds, 429). Again, the contrast with democratic India is instructive: India invaded the princely states one by one, and Goa in 1961, with Nehru assuring the people that Mahatma Gandhi would have thoroughly approved the last move (J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 To The Present (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 497). Indeed, Indian nationalism proved virulent for minorities: The Economist observed that the Indian Army had killed 200,000 Nagas alone till 2003 (January 18, 2003). This comparison in no way exonerates the Suharto regime, but it does put the matter in some perspective, which has been sorely lacking, with Suharto being seen as the ''dictator who ruled with an iron fist'', as opposed to some ideal of benign democratic government. Indeed, where murder and mayhem are concerned, it may be argued that the world's largest and the world's oldest democracies have a lot in common.
In conclusion, the fact that Suharto's long period of stability was indispensable for economic growth and development cannot be disputed. Here, it is worth recalling the words of the development economist, Adrian Leftwich (Adrian Leftwich, 'On the Primacy of Politics in Development', Democracy and Development, ed. Adrian Leftwich, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 18)": "....development cannot simply be managed into motion by some idealised system of good governance, evacuated from the world of politics. For neither democracy nor good governance are independent variables which have somehow gone missing in the developing world: they are dependent ones. And whatever their relationship with economic growth and development may be, both are the products of particular kinds of politics and can be found only in states which promote and protect them. Indeed, they are a form of politics themselves and not a set of institutions and rules. ...Indeed, to insist on democratic institutions and practices in societies whose politics will not support them and whose state traditions (or lack of them) will not sustain them may be to do far greater damage than not insisting on them. Moreover, the kind of political turbulence which such insistence may unleash is bound to have explosive and decidedly anti-developmental consequences (italics original)."
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