Fall of Suharto and the Reformasi
Suharto resigned on 21 May 1998 after thirty-two years, four days after students occupied the parliament building. The Asian financial crisis had begun in Thailand the previous July and reached Indonesia in the autumn. The rupiah lost about eighty-five per cent of its value, the banking system failed, prices of rice and cooking oil doubled, and the International Monetary Fund's conditions required the removal of fuel subsidies. That is the point at which an arrangement everyone had tolerated stopped being tolerable. The New Order had delivered thirty years of growth, and it had also concentrated the economy in the hands of the president's children and associates, killed several hundred thousand people in 1965 and 1966, and annexed East Timor. Protests began on the campuses in February and were confined there by agreement. Four students were shot dead at Trisakti University on 12 May, and Jakarta burned for three days: some 1,200 people died, much of the Chinese-Indonesian commercial quarter was destroyed, and organised mass rapes of Chinese women were documented by a subsequent government inquiry. The army stood back and the militias involved have never been identified. Suharto returned from a conference in Cairo, failed to form a new cabinet because nobody would join it, and resigned on television. Habibie freed the press, released political prisoners, permitted parties, and called the referendum that let East Timor go. What followed is the part usually left out. Indonesia has held free elections since 1999, decentralised power to the districts, ended the army's guaranteed parliamentary seats, and become the third largest democracy in the world, which almost nobody expected in May 1998.
- Year: 1998 CE
- Category: Political
