Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Kafe Wien

    Yesterday I had a very busy day, three interviews.  It’s really amazing how much it takes out of you when you have to talk about politics for an hour and a half or so in a foreign languages, and it’s even more amazing how tired you can get after you’ve done that three times in one day.  Suffice it to say that I really slept well last night.

    My last interview was with a journalist who has great connections with the Indonesian business elite.  He also has a great Indonesian business and politics blog.  We had a very nice time discussing all sorts of things related to corruption and cronyism during Soeharto’s time and these days now, and discussing the types of reforms that have been successful and the types that have not.  A wonderful conversation, very useful for my research, full of insights.  The guy has contacts everywhere, and we discussed some of the more interesting shenanigans of Soeharto and his cronies both during the crisis and after Soeharto’s resignation.  Helps to explain why Soeharto is still a free man, and why Soeharto’s son Tommy was only sent to jail after he arranged for a judge to be murdered.  (Tommy, by the way, got out of jail a couple days ago because his tummy hurts.)

    Our meeting was at Plaza Senayan, a very very upscale mall.  Malls in Indonesia, as we’ve discussed before, are really the center of all glamorous living.  It seems weird, but it’s true.  Tommy Hilfiger, the Body Shop, Ermenegildo Zegna, all were there.  We met at the fanciest restaurant at Plaza Senayan, Kafe Wien, a mock-Viennese cafe.  Seeing all of the waitresses in their dirndls was certainly the high point of my day, although it caused some weird cross-cultural mental interference remembering the time I spent in Austria while I was in high school.  The coffee was delicious, the clientele was very wealthy, and they even had a string quartet playing Mozart.  But like good Indonesians, the reporter and I ordered sop buntut instead of wienerschnitzel, and it was great.

    As an added surprise, I was walking through the Freedom Institute today and ran into an old friend, a PhD student in history at the University of Wisconsin but originally from Sumba and currently living in Jakarta.  Great to see him, and he’ll me and James around to see good stuff this weekend.

  • Unnamed Economist

    I met this morning with a truly fascinating character.  He is an economist and a long-time advisor of Soeharto, a 1961 graduate of UC-Berkeley in economics who was personally responsible with four other members of the "Berkeley Mafia" for showing Soeharto how to bring the country out of disaster after he replaced Sukarno as President in 1966.  I’ve decided not to just post his name up here.  If you’re curious, you’ll just have to read my dissertation.  Indonesianists could probably guess anyway; one of the five is dead, two don’t give interviews, and I’ve already spoken to the other remaining one.  Anyway, I was speaking face to face with one of the five people really responsible for putting Indonesia on a high-growth, export-oriented economy that led to the country’s rapid development and drastic reductions in poverty.

    (NB: Part of what Soeharto did, of course, was to kill between 500,000 and 1,500,000 "communists" to rid the country of the main organized political group aside from the military, but that’s not what we discussed.)

    It was so interesting to hear this guy talk about what went wrong and what went right with Indonesia’s development.  The introduction of market principles into most aspects of the economy was absolutely responsible for growth.  For example, in 1964, inflation was running at something like 650% per year, and by the early 1970s this was all under control due to what the economist liked to tell Soeharto was "debureaucratization" of the economy.  Of course, the areas of the greatest slippage and the ultimate undoing of the country’s economy was in the places where market principles ran amok–simply put, all financial systems require close supervision, and this supervision was lacking.

    The economist had some great insights.  Why was Soeharto so adamant about letting his children go crazy with corruption?  Because he felt like a bad father for always being away invading West Papua and leading the country.  Why didn’t Soeharto resign in March 1998, when he was elected to serve a seventh five-year term?  Because he was a general, and generals do not surrender when facing a crisis like Indonesia was facing.  How did you get Soeharto to listen to you?  Soeharto was a good Javanese, so the solution is to be gentle with him, to suggest ideas very softly and make him think that he came up with them himself.  All of these little tidbits really help me to give texture to the subject that I’m studying.  And thankfully, on the big important international political economy points that lie at the heart of my dissertation, his other comments on capital movement, interest rates, and exchange rate management support my own work.  That’s always nice.

    Anyway, it was a great chance to meet with a fascinating guy.  His house is also beautiful, and his servant served some great tea.