As inevitable as the infirmities of old age are the ghosts that haunt ageing rulers. The president's fear of them is surely the main explanation for the indictment on 10 May of Subadio Sastrosatomo on charges of insulting the president. Under articles 134 and 137 of the criminal code, the 78-year old is threatened with six and one years jail respectively. He is not yet in detention, but his secretary Rachmat RB Nasution, charged with the same offence, has been detained since mid-March.
Subadio is two years older than Suharto. Both belong firmly to the Generation of '45. He was among the medical and law students who admired Sutan Sjahrir, the intellectual socialist who became the republic's first prime minister in November 1945. In August 1945, the last days of World War II, Subadio was one of the youths who kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta to get them to proclaim independence on Indonesian and not Japanese terms. He led the parliamentary fraction of the Indonesian Socialist Party PSI even after Sjahrir had fallen from power - from 1950 to 1960.
In 1962, Sukarno, equally afflicted with a case of old-age ghosts, put him in jail together with Sutan Sjahrir, Anak Agung, and several leaders of Masyumi, on the vague suspicion of a conspiracy to overthrow the president. He was not released till Suharto had come to power.
In 1974 Subadio was detained (but again, never charged) for two years by the military under Ali Murtopo, along with several other intellectuals who had looked to Gen. Sumitro to protect them.
Though long banished from formal recognition, PSI figures remained influential as an intellectual leaven in the New Order, as they had been in the Old. The journalist Rosihan Anwar, the late academic Soedjatmoko, and economic guru Soemitro Djojohadikusumo prominent among them. (Soemitro's son Prabowo is married to Suharto's daughter).
At weekly meetings at his Jakarta home, Subadio has been expounding the greatness of Sjahrir to young activists since 1988. One theme of these meetings is that, like Sukarno's in 1945, Suharto's rise to power in 1965 was aided by global super-power politics. Today, another global event, the end of the Cold War, spells opportunity for a new regime. Another theme is that Suharto grasped power by a coup lacking popular legitimacy. And a third the mystical conviction that nature is now siding with the people in rising up in protest. In January 1997 Subadio put these sentiments into a pamphlet entitled 'Badio rejects New Order regime's manipulations', one of several publications, none widely noticed.
But in early April this year, Suharto startled a meeting of the country's provincial governors with a sudden angry outburst in which he accused PSI figures of making trouble. He named Soemitro Djojohadikusumo, and slammed Subadio's booklet down on the table as the proof.
At the same time he issued a fierce public denial that he had come to power by means of a coup against Sukarno. In a speech on 22 June 1966 known by the acronym Nawaksara, and especially in a supplement to it on 10 January 1967, Sukarno had implied the military were at least partly responsible for his downfall. But that final speech as head of state, Suharto now said, had been quite constitutionally rejected by the people.
Despite warnings from some in the ruling elite that it would be inflammatory to do so, Suharto loyalists followed through with his request to hold a 'seminar' on the Nawaksara question at the end of April. Chief speaker was retired Maj-Gen Abdulkadir Besar, probably Abri's most powerful New Order ideologue, though not one who has enjoyed much public exposure.
Subadio's connection with the younger dissident Sri Bintang Pamungkas, and with the PRD, marked him out as an ideological opponent of the president. So did his own grandiose insistence that 'my political mission is to save the Republic of Indonesia'. But he hardly had a major following. If Suharto had not been troubled by ghosts, he would have continued to look to the future, rather than risk waking more by dwelling on the details of how he came to power.
Gerry van Klinken, editor, 'Inside
Indonesia' magazine.
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