What “The Smiling General” Means For Me

Some of you might have heard about the death of the former president of my country, Mr.Soeharto, on Sunday afternoon 27 January. He is known for 32 years of being an Indonesian number one leader, and also for his dictatorship. His mysterious, unspoken smile made everybody called him as “The Smiling General”.

I was born on 1981, the era where Indonesia was stepping ahead to the progress of development. My parents were living a good economic life, as what almost everybody else was. I remembered my mother saying that, “it was the time where jobs were easy to find, the social situation was smooth, everybody could go to school, and everything was going on very well.”

But it suddenly changed in the middle of 1990’s. I got a one year partial scholarship for an exchange program to the UK, however it was cancelled. Both of my parents could not afford the rest of the cost as the Indonesian currency got weaker compared to the American dollar, even 200% than the normal rate. At that time, the economical situation of my country was at its lowest point. I blamed Soeharto and his family for this, as they were one of the causes of the recession. The corruption they had gained from people’s tax, from their foundation, everything. But the worst was that for the first time, I saw people on the street were lining up even just for buying a handful of rice. I had only watched this before on TV and it happened in another faraway country, or in the middle of 1960’s before the communist movement in Indonesia kidnapped the generals.

Now, Soeharto has passed away. It is somewhat an awesome, strange view but real, that everybody still respects him to his final path. Ten years ago he was mocked and summoned for a justice, but now he seems to us like a hero. When I was a little girl and watched Ferdinand Marcos died on TV, I barely remembered that his funeral was almost a quite and private one. I thought it would be the same to our “Smiling General”, as he is no longer an important person in my country. But apparently, he is nonetheless still the important one, as what he had given to us in the earliest era of his leadership. No matter how he reached it by far.