“Israel’s decision to allow Jewish immigrants to settle in
the occupied territories is an arrogant move that could have very serious
consequences.”
The words came out of Suharto’s mouth the way stones drop
into still water—flat, deliberate, carrying their own terrible gravity down
into the depths. He stood at the podium in Dakar, Senegal, on December 10,
1991, a small man in a dark suit before an assembly of nations, and if you’d
been watching closely—the way a careful person watches a dog that hasn’t quite
decided whether to bite—you might have noticed the faint tremor in his jaw. Not
fear, exactly. Exhaustion, maybe. Or the particular strain of a man who has
been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and can finally, finally,
see the place where he gets to set it down.
Twenty-two days. Lord God, twenty-two days.
He had left Jakarta feeling like a man at the top of the
world. He was returning as something considerably more complicated.
---
When Yasser Arafat wrapped his arms around him—this small,
keffiyeh-draped man with his sandpaper stubble and his ancient, knowing eyes—Suharto
felt the embrace the way you feel the end of a fever. A loosening. Something
that had been clenched tight inside his chest for three weeks releasing at
last, like a fist slowly opening in the dark.
It’s done, the hug seemed to say. You came. You
spoke. You survived.
But survival, as any careful reader of history understands—as
Suharto himself understood, in the deep animal part of him where real knowledge
lives—survival is never quite the clean, triumphant thing we hope it will be.
Sometimes you crawl out of the wreckage and look at your hands and find blood
there you can’t fully account for. Sometimes the thing chasing you followed you
all the way home.
The Garuda DC-10 was waiting.
---
It had started in Mexico, where President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari received him at Los Pinos Palace like royalty, invoking Christopher
Columbus with the kind of elegant, slightly theatrical diplomacy that Latin
Americans perform so effortlessly. “He landed on our shores, mistakenly
believing he had found yours.” The assembled officials had laughed
appreciatively, the way people laugh at things that are clever rather than
funny, and Suharto had smiled and nodded and filed it away—the smile that was
really a calculation, the nod that was really a measurement.
Mexico to Caracas.
Caracas is where the world cracked open.
---
A copy of the tape arrived from New York the way bad news
always arrives—quietly, without fanfare, delivered by ordinary hands. Someone
set up a television in a hotel room in Venezuela. It was a perfectly ordinary
hotel room; there was nothing remarkable about it. A bed with a beige coverlet.
A minibar that no one touched. Curtains drawn against the South American heat.
Suharto sat down.
Ali Alatas sat down. Moerdiono. Radius Prawiro. A handful of
journalists who understood, without being told, that what they were about to
witness was significant enough to bear witnessing.
The footage was shaky—grainy in the way of things filmed
with the desperate, handshaking urgency of someone who knows they might die for
holding the camera. A British journalist named Max Stahl had been there. Had been
there, in Santa Cruz Cemetery on November 12, 1991, when Indonesian
soldiers opened fire on a crowd of protesters—young people, mostly, kids
really, kids, chanting their impossible chants about freedom and
Fretilin and a man named Xanana—and the bullets had come down like a sudden,
terrible rain.
The tape was twenty minutes long, or maybe thirty. In that
hotel room in Caracas, it felt like it lasted for the rest of Suharto’s life.
When it ended, he sat quietly for a moment. Then he leaned
forward and pointed at the screen—the static, now, the snow—and made an
observation. Most of the protesters, he noted carefully, appeared to be between
twenty and twenty-five years old. Which meant they had been toddlers in 1976
when East Timor was integrated into the Republic. They had no real memory of
what came before. Their anger, he concluded, must be rooted in unemployment. In
economic stagnation. In the grinding poverty of young people with no horizon in
front of them.
This was the explanation he would carry with him for the
rest of the tour.
He would need to carry it a great distance.
---
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes not from
the body but from the soul—a weariness that sleep cannot touch, that no amount
of diplomatic rest stops in the Canary Islands can truly address. Suharto knew
this tiredness by the time the delegation reached Zimbabwe, where President
Robert Mugabe clasped his hand with the firm grip of a man who has his own
considerable secrets. He knew it in Tanzania, where Ali Hassan Mwinyi praised
him as a founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement and Indonesian
agricultural methods were discussed with the reverent seriousness that other
people reserve for scripture.
Every meeting. Every handshake. Every careful bilateral
conversation over lukewarm tea.
East Timor, the unspoken question hung in every room.
What happened? Explain it to us. We are listening.
And so he explained. Mexico’s Salinas. Venezuela’s Pérez.
Zimbabwe’s Mugabe. Tanzania’s Mwinyi. He walked them through the official
history the way a defense attorney walks a jury through evidence—methodically,
persuasively, with the calm of a man who has decided that calm is the only tool
still available to him. He had created an independent National Investigation
Commission, he told them. The rule of law would be upheld.
He said it enough times that it began to feel like truth.
This is how it always works, in the end. The story you tell
about yourself, told often enough, in enough rooms, with enough conviction—it
develops its own terrible weight. Its own gravity. It becomes the stone dropped
in still water, and the ripples spread out and out and out, long after the
stone itself has disappeared.
---
In Dakar, on the final night, State Secretary Minister
Moerdiono made his announcement: they were going home early. Three days ahead
of schedule. The State Budget required the president’s personal attention.
Long-distance cables were no longer sufficient.
The journalists wrote it down dutifully.
---
On the night of December 10, Captain F. Sumolang eased the
Garuda DC-10 up through the Senegalese dark, banked eastward, and began the
long flight home. Brief transit in Abu Dhabi—the desert below them, the oil
fields flaring like orange candles in the black—and then east again, over the
subcontinent, over the sea, down toward Jakarta and the ordinary machinery of
government that was waiting like a patient creditor.
An hour before descent, Suharto made his way through the
cabin. He and Ibu Tien moved slowly down the aisle together, and he shook the
hand of every member of the delegation, one by one. His grip was still firm.
His eyes were still steady. Twenty-two days of handshaking, of smiling, of
explaining, of defending, of enduring—and his hand had not trembled
once.
Maybe that was the real achievement. The bilateral
agreements would mature or collapse on their own schedules. The OIC speech
would be quoted and forgotten and quoted again. East Timor would remain East
Timor, a wound that all the diplomatic bandaging in the world could not quite
close. History would make its own judgments, in its own time, with its own
terrible patience.
But the hand had not trembled.
---
The aircraft touched down at Halim Perdanakusuma in the
soft, wet heat of a Jakarta night. And in the cabin, as the engines wound down
and the tension of three weeks slowly bled away into exhausted relief, a few of
the journalists—grown men, seasoned veterans of a hundred diplomatic tours—began
to crow.
Cluck. Cluuuck. Cluuuuuck.
The old sound. The rooster call that means: we’re home,
we made it, the ground is under us again and the sky did not swallow us whole.
Suharto heard it. He may even have smiled.
The things that were still unresolved—the massacre, the
footage, the questions that would not stop being questions—those were still
there. They would always be there. The dead have a way of persisting
that the living find inconvenient.
But the rooster was crowing, and the plane had landed, and
somewhere in Jakarta the State Budget was waiting to be signed.
The world kept turning.
It always does.
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