Nevertheless, it is at least debatable whether a thirty-year period can be dismissed as a total and forgettable misadventure. In the Introduction to his important new biography of Suharto, Professor Elson raises this point when he says that Indonesians now seem to want to forget the Suharto period. It’s their choice, but should they allow themselves to forget it? Or should they debate it, to purge the myths that grew up during that period, and to clarify the political system they want, as against the systems they don’t want? Elson argues that, in order to understand modern Indonesia, it is essential to achieve a better understanding of the man who did so much to shape it. He presents a picture of a strong-willed man of limited vision who seized every opportunity. The result of intense research, his book adopts a sequential pattern in describing Suharto’s steadily advancing career, with a useful ‘conclusion’ at the end of each chapter (other biographers please note).

Suharto was one of those men who rise to the unexpected occasion. In the Indonesian Revolution he first established a minor reputation as a competent field commander; then, after the Revolution, as a regional military commander who looked after his troops through a variety of business activities, setting the scene for the army’s subsequent and much wider fund-raising activities; and then as commander of the West Irian effort. In all these appointments, even the latter, Suharto was surprisingly self-effacing and inconspicuous. His best-known involvement in the Revolution was the so-called general offensive (‘Serangan Umum’) in March 1949, when Indonesian fighters attacked and reoccupied Jogjakarta for several hours, showing that, although the Dutch had captured the Republican capital (and most of the nationalist leaders), its armed forces were still capable of counter-attacking. Suharto’s role is now rather controversial because of claims, in later accounts of the attack, that he and his followers greatly inflated his contribution.

Elson dispels some minor myths about Suharto’s obscure period as military commander in Semarang in Central Java. It appears that his relationship with the well-known Chinese trader Liem Siu Liong was not nearly as close as legend had it. He outlines the known facts about Suharto’s removal (or transfer) from the Central Java command, which involved a ripe mixture of corruption allegations, ideological tension and political manoeuvrings in Jakarta; but the full story is murky.

The move from Central Java may have been a process of being kicked upstairs, but the stairs led somewhere. Suharto trained in Bandung, then acquired the important West Irian command. Elson notes that he was probably very fortunate that his planned assault on Biak in West Irian was aborted at the last moment because American diplomatic pressure had at last forced the Dutch to yield. Given Dutch military strength and Indonesian weakness and lack of familiarity with the terrain, the most likely result of the operation (which Suharto acknowledged was highly dangerous) was a disaster from which no general’s reputation could have recovered.

Elson describes Suharto’s appointment to the Army Strategic Reserve as arising from his image as ‘a professional soldier above all, politically unambitious, tractable and unthreatening’. Apart from the word ‘tractable’, this is close to Suharto’s reputation in the mid-1960s; he was regarded as a man who had just done his best work. But it was a fateful decision, because it placed him as the one man in Jakarta in direct command of loyal troops when the crisis came.

Elson outlines the main competing theories about the dark drama of 30 September 1965, concluding that ‘the most plausible scenario … is a coordinated effort by some PKI leaders and junior officers closely connected with the Diponegoro division and the Air Force to seize those generals whom they strongly suspected were about to launch a pre-emptive move against the President, the PKI or both’. This is unlikely to be the last word on this contentious issue, but Elson’s clear presentation of the known facts and attendant theories, and his command of the variety of sources, are difficult to fault.

Elson concludes that Suharto must bear the ultimate responsibility for the single most repellent aspect of the New Order’s inception, namely the massacre of scores of thousands of PKI supporters: ‘while the scale of brutality was neither intended nor expected by Suharto, he appears to have had no remorse.’

As the new régime gradually got on top of the huge problems it faced, especially economic ones, Suharto’s integralistic ideology became more apparent. As Elson shows, it was both simplistic and arrogant: the corporatisation of the Indonesian state over the heads of the Indonesian people, who could not be trusted with politics. Elson is wary of explanations based on Suharto’s ‘Javaneseness’, but there is surely something of the Javanese feudal ruler in Suharto’s ideological standpoint.

The key word was ‘development’; everything was subordinate to that. Elson points out that Suharto was running two economies simultaneously: one an ordered, modern market economy dominated by technocrats and featuring up-to-date industrial plants, office blocks and hotels; the other, an anti-market affair of ‘off-budget’ subventions, secret patrimony, back-door sponsorships, economic nationalism, rent-seeking and political wheeler-dealing. Suharto never fully trusted the market, as shown in different ways by his sponsorship of can-do interventionist favourites such as Ibnu Sutowo and Habibie. But the system worked for a long time and with spectacular economic results.

Not surprisingly for such a private man, little emerges about Suharto’s private life. But the private life started to intrude on the public life, in the form of the Suharto family. Elson describes Suharto’s wife, Ibu Tien, as a useful networker and strategist, but, in business, she was always an embarrassment, as she quickly earned the soubriquet of ‘Madame Tien [Dutch for “ten”] per cent’, because of her demands on businesses. By the 1980s, it was increasingly clear that this was just the beginning; the children did not share Ibu Tien’s restraint. It became impossible to establish a successful business in Indonesia without some Suharto family interest. Foreign and local investors could cope with this while the economy kept making progress, but, in the form of the newly coined word ‘nepotisme’, it became one of the main strikes against Suharto when his power vanished. Elson attributes Suharto’s indulgence of his children ultimately to ‘his blindness to the distinction between public and private benefit’.

Economists may cavil at Elson’s relatively scant treatment of Indonesia’s economic development under Suharto. This is a political biography, but bearing in mind the centrality of Suharto’s economic achievements to his entire career, it is surprising not to find a macroeconomic summary and full set of statistics about the Indonesian economy during Suharto’s tenure.

That qualification aside, the reader can hardly go past Elson’s final chapter, a masterly summing-up of Suharto’s career, its achievements and failures, the central achievement being startling and sustained levels of economic development. Anyone who left Indonesia in 1960 and returned in 1998 could hardly avoid being amazed at the changes. Elson notes Suharto’s subtle and patient political manoeuvring, his ability to study and master administrative and economic detail (often to the astonishment of his advisers), and his ruthlessness and intolerance of dissent.

Elson points out that the rigid stability of the New Order that had contributed to its early successes made it unable to cope with the diverse demands of a modern globalised economy and, even more crucially, that Suharto failed completely to build strong independent institutions. (Another factor was his failure to prepare the succession. Indeed, he seemed deliberately to undermine the chance of any orderly transfer of power.)

Ultimately, the New Order was a personalised system that could not survive its founder - ‘a paternalistic political framework that could not accommodate change’. But I suspect that the more positive aspects of Suharto’s rule will eventually be better remembered by history than they are now.

Other biographers of Suharto will no doubt emerge, but Robert Elson has set a high standard for them. No specialist on Indonesia or interested amateur can afford to miss this book.