Sumitro Djojohadikusumo

Sumitro Djojohadikusumo was Indonesia's most influential economist, served as a minister under both Sukarno and Suharto, and spent five years in between as a rebel in exile with a price on his head. He was educated in the Netherlands, took a doctorate in Rotterdam, and represented the republic at the United Nations during the independence struggle. As trade and then finance minister in the early 1950s he ran a programme to build an indigenous business class by directing import licences to Indonesian rather than Chinese or Dutch firms, which produced a generation of rentiers and is generally judged a failure on its own terms. He broke with Sukarno over guided democracy and the drift towards the communists, joined the PRRI rebellion in Sumatra in 1958 - which was supported covertly by the United States - and lived abroad until 1967. Suharto brought him back as trade minister and then minister of research, where he was one of the technocrats who stabilised the economy and opened it to foreign investment. He was also a persistent public critic of the corruption around the presidency, and estimated in a famous remark that around thirty per cent of the development budget leaked. His son Prabowo Subianto married Suharto's daughter, commanded the special forces, was discharged after the abductions of activists in 1998, and was elected president of Indonesia in 2024. His other son Hashim is among the country's wealthiest businessmen. The family is a reasonable summary of how Indonesian power has held together across three regimes. He taught at the University of Indonesia and trained most of the economists who ran the country after 1966. He wrote and lectured into his eighties. He died in 2001, three years after Suharto fell.

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