Nasution Instead Of Suharto

"Missed opportunity

"Although Suharto had been the man of the hour on 1 October, many of the other Army officers still turned to Nasution for leadership and had expected him to take more decisive control of the situation. However, Nasution seemed indecisive and slowly but surely the support began to swing away from him. Perhaps this reason was because he was still grieving over his daughter, Ade Irma, who died on 6 October.

"In the first few weeks after G30S, Nasution was the one who constantly lobbied Sukarno to have Suharto appointed Army Commander. Sukarno, who after 1 October wanted to keep Pranoto, had originally only made Suharto the Commander of Kopkamtib, but with Nasution's constant lobbying, Sukarno was finally persuaded and on 14 October 1965, appointed Suharto as the army commander.

"A golden opportunity came to Nasution in December 1965 when there was talk of his being appointed as vice-president to assist Sukarno in the times of uncertainty.[28] Nasution did not capitalise on this and chose to do nothing. Suharto, whose political momentum was growing, took the initiative in early 1966 by issuing a statement saying that there was no need to fill the vacant vice presidency..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Haris_Nasution

"What was perhaps the pivotal moment of General Nasution's life came on the night of Sept. 30, 1965, when six generals were slain as renegade troops tried to overthrow President Sukarno. With bullets flying around him, General Nasution fled his Jakarta house in his pajamas, leaping over a wall into the Iraqi ambassador's residence next door. His 6-year-old daughter and an aide were shot to death, however.

"That night started a blood-letting that went on for months as hundreds of thousands of Communists, suspected Communists and trade unionists were killed in reprisals.

"General Nasution might have been able to seize power then by playing on sympathy, his fierce anti-Communism and the prestige he enjoyed for having been a guerrilla leader against the Dutch after World War II, Ed Masters, a former United States ambassador to Indonesia, said today.

"'But he didn't,' Mr. Masters said.

"Instead, General Suharto moved to take over, accusing President Sukarno of leftist sympathies. General Suharto imposed an iron rule that lasted three decades. He brought economic development and political stability to Indonesia, making the world's fourth most populous country more self-sufficient and increasing literacy.

"The price was suppression of personal freedom and dissent and, many critics charged, corruption that enriched the leader and his relatives while millions of people were still trapped in poverty.

"'Indonesian history could have been different if General Nasution had become president,' said Mr. Masters, the No. 3 person in the American Embassy in Indonesia from 1964 to 1968 and ambassador from 1978 to 1982.

"Perhaps, Mr. Masters said, authoritarian rule was necessary for a while longer in a country that had known only that for more than 300 years under the Dutch and Japanese. But Mr. Masters, now president of the United States Indonesia Society, said he believed that General Nasution would have relaxed the government's hold far sooner than General Suharto..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/07/n...1-politician-and-indonesian-general-dies.html

So, what if Nasution rather than Suharto had gained power following the events of September 30-October 1, 1965? See
https://web.archive.org/web/2010041...ed/adt-VSWT20060227.095349/public/02whole.pdf for an interesting thesis which maintains that while Nasution did have an early falling out with the New Order regime, nevertheless its policies were to some extent an extension of his own socially conservative "organicist" ideas, such as his belief in the 1950's that "foreign" ideologies like communism and individualist liberalism were having a dangerous influence under the parliamentary democracy of the time. The thesis concludes that "he became a victim of the army whose ethos he did so much to form and nurture and which did so much to suppress the PKI, and he became concerned that his interventionist approaches of the 1950s had been misused by the New Order regime." Yet however ironic Nasution's position, his critique of Suharto's authoritarianism does seem to have been sincere, which suggests Indonesia could have taken a different path if he had gained control in 1965.

At the very least, it is hard to see the same degree of corruption as in OTL: "General Nasution may have been a military hawk, but he was also an officer cast from a different mold than Suharto. He was a devout Muslim, had long maintained warm relations with modernist Islamic politicians, and disapproved of extensive corrupt activities by military officers. His personal enmity with Suharto dated back at least to 1959 when as army chief he had transferred the then Colonel Suharto from his post as central Java military commander, apparently for his involvement in a smuggling racket...." Edward Aspinall, *Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia*, p. 63. https://books.google.com/books?id=n_DqinpeaLMC&pg=PA63 "

(I have not yet read C. L. M. Penders and Ulf Sundhaussen, *Abdul Haris Nasution: A Political Biography* (University of Queensland Press 1985), reviewed at http://www.jstor.org/pss/2056735 The review notes "President Suharto may not have warm feelings for the man who in 1959 dismissed him from the central Java command for corruption, but his present [1987] position of unchallenged power would have been impossible to achieve without Nasution's earlier labors.")
 
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