The Decade in Politics
1998

1998 was a blur of cruise missiles, subpoenas, Lewinsky jokes and high moralizing about some rather low-brow White House antics. I talked with a friend of mine who was working for a Washington politics magazine at the height of the scandal, a few weeks before the release of the Starr Report. He was energized like I'd never seen him before — his hair was practically standing on end as he described the various ins and outs of the investigation, and the way media coverage had twisted and turned to stay apace of the burgeoning mass of evidence and rhetoric.

The Starr investigation was a tempest in a teapot, but it was sufficiently distracting that other developments got absolutely lost in the shuffle. Among them was the end of an era in a country very distant from America's capital: Indonesia.

As President Clinton fought like trophy muskie to avoid being removed from office, another iconic leader, Suharto, lost the battle and was forced from power. But unlike Clinton, Suharto was a vital, irreplacable keystone to his nation's stability.

With a force of will and grand national vision reminiscent of Yugoslavia's Josip Bros Tito, Suharto spent 32 years as the authoritarian ruler of an archipelago made up of 17,000 islands, inhabited by more than 300 ethnic groups, speaking at least 250 languages. His tenure saw a hard anti-Communist crackdown, the institution of a pro-Western foreign policy and an American-inspired fiscal discipline that reigned in rampant inflation. But cronyism and years of authoritarian rule eventually brought about the mass protests and discontent that forced the father of modern Indonesia from office.

In the wake of Suharto's departure, ethnic and nationalist conflicts have begun to tear Indonesia apart, with turmoil raging through disparate hotspots including Aceh, West Kalimantan, East Timor, the Molluccas, and Irian Jaya.

And while Indonesia has a creaky, semi-functional multiparty democracy and the seeds of a strong, independent press, neither seem to be sufficient to fight the centripetal force that seems to be spinning this massive island nation apart.

It's easy to dismiss the disintegration of Indonesia as irrelevant to American prosperity. But a destabilized Indonesia has a real economic impact on Japan, China, South Korea and Australia, a country that has already been swamped by refugees fleeting political unrest and desperate living conditions.

More importantly, perhaps, Indonesia is a giant working model of exactly the kind of religious, ethnic and nationalist tensions that are tearing at India, parts of China, all of Russia and the Balkans.

Every ounce of American attention to Indonesia, in the form of official observers, journalists, economic aid and public support would pay itself back a thousand times — solutions discovered in Indonesia could be invaluable for the sort of nation-building that seems to dominate post-Cold War international politics.

The United States ignored Indonesia at one of its darkest hours. If we continue to do so, it is at our own peril.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)