Fall of Suharto and the Reformasi
The 1997-98 Asian financial crisis devastated Indonesia: the rupiah lost some 80 percent of its value, GDP contracted by around 13 percent, and roughly twenty million people were pushed below the poverty line. The economic collapse shattered the legitimacy of President Suharto's New Order, the centralised authoritarian regime that had ruled since 1966 on the basis of developmental performance and pervasive coercion. Through early 1998, university students mounted escalating protests demanding 'Reformasi' — political reform and Suharto's resignation. The shooting of four students at Trisakti University in Jakarta on 12 May triggered days of rioting in which hundreds died, accompanied by organised anti-Chinese violence that targeted the commercial minority and revealed how precarious its position remained. With his cabinet disintegrating, his own party deserting him, and students occupying the parliament building, Suharto resigned on 21 May 1998, handing power to his vice-president B. J. Habibie. The fall of Suharto was a mass-plus-elite overthrow of an entrenched regime — a revolution in structural terms — that opened the Reformasi era of democratisation, decentralisation, and the partial withdrawal of the military (TNI) from politics. It also unleashed long-suppressed tensions the New Order had contained rather than resolved: separatist insurgencies in Aceh and Papua, the East Timor independence referendum of 1999, communal and religious conflict, and the challenge of building democratic institutions where none had been permitted to develop.
- Year: 1998 CE
- Category: Political
