B. J. Habibie
B. J. Habibie was president of Indonesia for seventeen months, from 21 May 1998, when Suharto resigned and handed the office to the vice-president he had chosen two months before, to October 1999, when the assembly rejected his accountability speech and he withdrew from the election, and in those months the aeronautical engineer whom everyone had taken for Suharto's creature freed the press, released the political prisoners, allowed parties and unions, separated the police from the army, devolved money and power to the provinces, held the freest election in forty-four years in June 1999, and offered East Timor a referendum on independence that it took in August, after which the army's militias burned the territory. He also let the rupiah recover from seventeen thousand to the dollar to seven. He was born in Pare-Pare in Sulawesi in 1936, was sent to Germany to study aircraft engineering at Aachen, took a doctorate, and rose at Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm to be its vice-president for technology, with theorems on crack propagation in aircraft structures that bear his name. Suharto, who had known his family, brought him home in 1974 to be minister of research and technology, which he was for twenty years, building the state aircraft company at Bandung that made a turboprop airliner and the shipyards, steel and engineering industries of his high-technology vision, on money the economists said was wasted. He chaired the association of Muslim intellectuals Suharto used against the army in the 1990s, and was made vice-president in March 1998 as the crisis deepened. The presidency began with the country in flames and the IMF on the doorstep, and what he did with it surprised everyone. The political laws of January 1999 made forty-eight parties legal; the East Timor offer of 27 January 1999 was made without consulting the army, the election of 7 June was won by Megawati's party, and the referendum of 30 August in East Timor voted seventy-eight per cent to leave. The Bank Bali scandal, in which his party's people took a cut of a bank recapitalisation, and the militia violence in Timor cost him the assembly's confidence on 19 October, and Abdurrahman Wahid was elected the next day. He lived in Germany and Jakarta, wrote a memoir of his marriage that became a film, and died in Jakarta in September 2019.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Indonesian
- Roles: president, engineer, politician
