David Jenkins’ biography of the late dictator of Indonesia, General Suharto, is truly extraordinary. The only other grand biographies of famous Indonesians—Rudolf Mrázek's on the country's first Prime Minister, Sutan Sjahrir, and Harry Poeze's on the legendary communist Tan Malaka— were written long after their heroes were dead, and depended mainly on archival sources.

Jenkins became very well known for his book Suharto and His Generals, published in 1984 when the dictator was at the peak of his power. This work relied substantially on the author's astonishing store of intimate interviews with senior and high-ranking generals of Suharto's generation. The biography still relies on Jenkins’ unique access to the military elite right up to the present, which one can only explain by his calm, tact, patience, and friendly sobriety. But it also relies on Jenkins’ searches in all kinds of newly-opened archives, not only in Indonesia, but in the UK, Japan, the Netherlands, the US and Australia.

Rather than spending a lot of time and paper denouncing the brutal and secretive dictator of 30+ years (in the manner of most academic work on Suharto), Jenkins does a great job of locating him within the turbulent framework of Indonesia's society and politics from the last years of firm Dutch colonial rule, the violent Japanese Occupation, the revolutionary war 1945–49 which ended with worldwide recognition of the country's independence, the creation and downfall of constitutional democracy, the deepening of the Cold War, the overthrow of Sukarno's populistauthoritarian Guided Democracy, the vast massacres of the left in 1965–66, and Suharto's own coming to power.

The most fascinating part of the book is what Jenkins discovered about Suharto's parents, his childhood and (minimal) education, his training in the colonial military, his experiences in the Japanese-formed Peta military, and his activities during the Revolution. He had to ease his way through a vast amount of lies, propaganda, secretiveness, and prejudices. As a much-respected long-time journalist, Jenkins’ prose is excellent, without any academic gobbledygook, his analysis is almost always astute and balanced, and his attitude is based on the big questions of how and why a man like Suharto could not only come to power but could also maintain it so long.

By virtue of his birth, the infant Soeharto was simultaneously the subject of two very different sovereigns. One was Queen Wilhelmina of Orange-Nassau, a forty-year-old Caucasian Christian, heir to an unbending Calvinist tradition, who lived half a world away, presiding over her flat and prosperous North Sea kingdom and its distant dominions, most notably the East Indies, where Dutch fortunes were thought by some to be at the high meridian of their glory. The other was Sultan Hamengku Buwono VIII, a forty-one-year-old Javanese Muslim who was not long back from the Netherlands, which, as we have seen, he had visited during his latter years as Crown Prince. The product of a distinctly non-Calvinist tradition, the Sultan was eventually to acquire not only a permaisuri (principal consort, or sultana) but seven minor wives, numerous concubines and those seventy-five children.

The Sultan lived behind the walls of the Kraton, a sprawling complex of buildings, at the centre of which stood the Golden Pavilion, where the rulers were enthroned. The Kraton was a world unto itself, somnolent and enclosed, the atmosphere languorous, the sound of gamelan music washing, gentle and percussive, over the great courtyards and walled tropical gardens. Although it had been all but powerless for ninety years, the Sultanate, and its attendant minor court, the Pakualaman, stood at the very centre of Java, both culturally and geographically. And Java was, in turn, the most populous and most important island in the Netherlands East Indies. Therein lay the seeds of so many of the problems that were to bedevil independent Indonesia. If we are to understand the world in which Soeharto came to power it is necessary to say something about the complex factors which shaped that world.

The motto of the nation that Soeharto was to rule for so long is “Unity in Diversity”. But forging a unified nation out of such extraordinary geographic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious and political diversity was never going to be easy. An archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia extends across more than one-eighth of the world's circumference at the equator, a distance of 3,400 miles from east to west and 1,200 miles from north to south.

In the days after the Dutch surrender, Soeharto stayed on in Cisarua, a soldier in a defeated army, waiting to see what would happen next. As a sergeant in the KNIL, he assumed, not unreasonably, that he would become a prisoner of war of the Japanese. For a time nothing happened. Soeharto whiled away the hours playing cards, making, or so he later claimed, a handsome profit in the process. “I had only a guilder in my pocket, but as I played—and won—it soon grew to fifty.” Deciding eventually that he had no wish to be incarcerated in a POW camp with his Dutch and Indonesian military comrades, Soeharto made his way to Cimahi, on the western outskirts of Bandung, accompanied by Amat Sudono, his closest friend in the KNIL. Here, they “bought some ordinary clothes” and discarded their distinctive green KNIL uniforms. Here, too, Soeharto encountered the Japanese army for the first time. “I was taking a break outside a civilian's house,” he recalled. “Japanese soldiers had driven out the Dutchmen who had controlled us for centuries. They looked full of confidence and their countenances were truly frightening.”

A person of pedantic or churlish disposition might be inclined to note that the Dutch had not, in fact, controlled most of the East Indies for centuries. They may have been in the Spice Islands since the 1600s and in Java for a very long time. But in 1942 they had only had full control over Bali, for example, for thirty-four years. That same critic might note that the Dutch had only been able to control Indonesians because they had always been able to find men like Soeharto—men who were willing to take the King or Queen's shilling to keep other Indonesians in their place. A more serious charge might be that Soeharto was now a deserter. Was that the case? The evidence strongly suggests that he was not a deserter. Nor, it would appear, could that be said of aspirant officers (cadetten) such as A.H. Nasution and T.B. Simatupang, who had recently attended the Royal Military Academy in Bandung and who would go on to play a central role in the post-war Indonesian National Army.

In 1930, Surakarta (Solo) was a small and neatly laid out court city where two very different worlds, one Javanese and ostensibly Islamic, the other Dutch and stoutly Christian, had coexisted for a century, since the end of the Java War, just as they had in Yogyakarta. At the heart of the town stood the Kraton of the seriously overweight Susuhunan (Sunan) Pakubuwono X, a monarch of intemperate habits and eccentric pursuits who had been on the throne for thirty-six years, in the course of which he acquired a consort, forty secondary wives, forty-five children and seventy grandchildren.* Pakubuwono X, who was sixty-three in 1930 and who is remembered today “as the last Surakarta king endowed with a truly regal aura”, was held in awe by many Javanese. It was said that his mystical eye could see events which occurred anywhere in his kingdom and he was known “to converse with all animals in their respective languages”. He was best known, however, for his capacity to harness the power of magic and for his exceptional skill at prophecy, gifts which he was said to have inherited from his forebears.

Like his nine predecessors and his distant relatives in Yogyakarta, Pakubuwono X had no political or military power, this being firmly in the hands of the Dutch governor, a man who towered over him when the two appeared together on high occasions of state, the former dressed in great finery, his blue velvet jacket bedecked with honorary medals the size of small plates and worn over a batik kain, his left hand clutching the elbow of the governor in the approved manner. But the Sunan was “tremendously popular and nettled the Dutch through a series of royal progresses in which he was lionised by his people as if he were in fact the island's true ruler.” On these journeys, His Royal Highness was in the habit of tossing coins as alms to his appreciative subjects from the window of his automobile, a monarchical prerogative which, as we have seen, Soeharto was to revive when he dedicated the refurbished gravesite of Mangkunegoro I and others from that court in 1971, only three years into his presidency.

Soeharto, now wearing the coveted collar patch of a KNIL corporal, left Central Java in July 1941 to join the 13th Battalion (Inf XIII), one of two infantry battalions garrisoned in the hill town of Malang in East Java. Built up over the previous fifty years to serve Dutch commercial interests, Malang stood on a saddle between two groups of mountains: the Kawi and Butak volcanoes were to the west; the impressive Tengger Caldera, which includes the Bromo and Semeru volcanoes, to the east and southeast. The majestic Arjuna volcano lay almost due north. More than 1,300 feet above sea level, Malang was pleasantly cool for most of the year, even cold at times. In 1941 it had a population of 200,000, including 11,000 Europeans. Malang owed its prosperity to the surrounding sugar, tobacco and rubber plantations. But it was also an important garrison town, home to the KNIL 6th Infantry Regiment (6 RI), which was responsible for East Java, with a force of three infantry battalions, two in Malang, the other in Surabaya. The 13th Battalion barracks were in the military quarter of Rampal, immediately east of the railway station in an area that looked more like a spacious colonial suburb than a military base, with the houses of senior officers and NCOs set down in large gardens, with shaded lawns and cascading bougainvillea.

Visitors arriving on foot made their way up Stationweg, a narrow road lined with tamarind trees, and turned right at the main gate. The barracks complex was built according to a standard KNIL formula, with a long, single-storey administrative block facing the road, a heavy enclosed wooden gate in the centre and a guardroom off to the right. Behind the gate and the office of the duty sergeant, with its typewriters, desks and rows of enormous keys (many of the original keys are still there today and still in use), lay the parade ground, which doubled as a soccer field. On each side and to the rear stood any number of neat, single-storey brick buildings, housing offices, classrooms, armouries, storehouses, kitchens, washing areas and row upon row of barracks. The buildings, which have not changed in nearly eight decades, are now home to Infantry Battalion 502, part of the Indonesian Army's Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), the unit Soeharto would command when he came to power in 1965.

In writing about this period Soeharto is at pains to stress his mounting anti-Japanese feeling. All his experience in the Peta, he wrote in his memoir, had convinced him “that in no way could we condone the brutal treatment meted out by some of the Japanese officers. I felt a growing desire to fight back.” In the aftermath of the Blitar incident, he adds, the Japanese decided to purge the Peta officer corps not just in Blitar but in various other places as well. “I had a feeling that I was one of those who would be ousted, but a number of Japanese officers who respected me saved me from expulsion.” Some years later, Soeharto gave this story a further polish. The Kenpeitai, he said, “began watching me closely because they knew I was beginning to feel critical about them.” Even if these fears were well founded, which seems unlikely, it is notable that Kenpeitai “suspicion” is not referred to until 1945.

Soeharto may have felt some concern about his position at that time. But the Japanese confined their wrath to those who had played a key role in the Blitar revolt, and it is difficult to avoid the impression that Soeharto is attempting here to embellish his nationalist credentials. If indeed he felt a growing desire to fight back, he had an odd way of showing it. Everything suggests that he was quite willing to go on cooperating with the Japanese. Nor, it seems, did the Japanese entertain any serious doubts about Soeharto's loyalty at the time of the Blitar uprising. On the contrary, he was the one man, out of 250 Peta company commanders on Java, to whom they turned in their hour of need. Immediately after the revolt, Soeharto was sent to Brebeg to train junior Peta members as squad leaders or NCOs (bundancho), to replace those arrested by the Japanese. Given the state of Japanese paranoia about the loyalty of the volunteer army, there could hardly have been a more sensitive assignment at that time or stronger evidence of the faith that Soeharto's superiors had in him.

Japanese officers who served in Java reject out of hand Soeharto's claim that he fell under suspicion at this time.

In later life, when he ruled so watchfully over Indonesia, President Soeharto was wont to make two observations about his early childhood. The first was that he was an authentic product of rural Java and that the nine years he spent in the impoverished hamlet of Kemusu, six miles west of the court city of Yogyakarta, had left him with an abiding interest in agriculture. The second was that his childhood had been a time of acute deprivation, both material and emotional, owing to the fact that his mother abandoned him when he was less than six weeks old and that he was shunted thereafter from one family to another, feeling for much of the time neglected and rejected. As a child, he wrote many years later, “I had to endure such suffering which perhaps others could not imagine.” As a soldier and national leader, Soeharto was frequently devious and duplicitous, given to falsehoods and mendacity, as leaders so often are. But there has never been any reason to doubt the veracity of the two claims he made about his early life in rural Java. Those years were to shape him in profound ways. They left an indelible imprint not just on the man but also on his presidency, which was to stretch over three remarkable decades.

Kemusu stood on a low plateau of land six feet above the surrounding rice fields, an island in a flat and watery realm, one of several thousand such islands scattered across the fertile plains of Central Java, a region of such abundance that it had sustained a succession of powerful kingdoms, first Hindu-Buddhist, then Islamic, before the Dutch gained full control of Java in the early nineteenth century. It was a world of simple houses and markets, redolent of humid, red-brown earth. The rice fields, which were divided into a patchwork of holdings, some no larger than a tennis court, were watered by an irrigation system of such complexity and ingenuity that the fertile soil brought forth two crops a year.

On Friday, 8 October 1943, on the advice of his Japanese superior, Superintendent Okamoto, Soeharto presented himself at a temporary army recruitment centre in Yogyakarta. Wearing a kain (sarong), white shirt and sandals, rather than his police uniform, he joined about four hundred other young men who gathered in the grounds of an elementary school in the heart of the city. The Sixteenth Army had decided to form a Java Volunteer Defence Force—which was to be known in Japanese as the Jawa Boei Giyugun, or Giyugun for short, and which the Indonesians would come to know as the Fatherland Volunteer Defence Force (Tentara Sukarela Pembela Tanah Air, or Peta)—to augment its own overstretched units. It was now looking for officer cadets. Soeharto may have been “advised” to be at the recruitment centre that day. But this, the evidence suggests, was an opportunity he welcomed. He had just the sort of capabilities the Japanese were looking for and recruitment into Peta would allow him to move on from police duties, which were presumably less to his liking than army life. Soeharto had set his heart on joining the volunteer defence force.

Some of the young, and not so young, Javanese men waiting to be interviewed that day had impressive credentials. They came from a middle-or upper-priyayi background and had attended Dutch high schools, some of them quite prestigious. These applicants were relatively healthy, well-fed and well-dressed. They included schoolteachers, policemen, public servants and high school students. Others who waited patiently in the sun were less well qualified for the positions on offer. Most were barefoot. Many were in poor health (the most common medical complaints were skin diseases and TB). Many had only the most rudimentary education. Inside the hall, where they were called in one at a time, a twenty-six-year-old Japanese intelligence officer, First Lieutenant Tsuchiya Kiso, the director (shibucho) of Beppan's Yogyakarta branch, sat at a table choosing officer cadets for the new force. Tsuchiya was responsible for recruiting battalion commanders, company commanders and platoon commanders.

In the weeks before this, Tsuchiya, continuing a process begun by Maruzaki, had asked several organizations in Yogyakarta to recommend suitable candidates.

During his time in Wuryantoro and Wonogiri, Soeharto was exposed more fully to a Javanese philosophy of life. Many of the principles of that philosophy have been distilled into a set of aphorisms; and in later life, Soeharto was to make much of these sayings, which, in his view, embodied eternal truths, although some of the less central points in the canon might be thought so nebulous and so generalized as to be all but meaningless.

One favourite Soeharto aphorism provides guidance on how a person should behave as a member of society. It can be summarized as the “three don’ts”, all of them close in meaning: don't be easily surprised or shocked by anything, but remain calm; don't be overwhelmed by anything or any person; don't act haphazardly (ojo kagetan, ojo gumunan, ojo gugupan). A fourth “don’t” that commended itself to him, and which is a moral command, not behavioural advice, is ojo dumeh, which means “be aware of yourself, who you are.” For example, “Don’t, just because you get promoted, start being arrogant” and “Don’t, just because you are handsome, exploit women.” As Soeharto saw it, these four points made it clear that if one wanted to be successful in society, it was necessary to develop self-awareness and self-confidence. By knowing oneself and being self-assured, one would not be thrown by unexpected developments, nor would one become overbearing and arrogant. These prescriptions, he wrote, “became the guiding principles of life which gave me strength to face problems which otherwise might have shaken me.” The value of this guidance lay, he believed, in its emphasis on instilling the attitudes of patience, fortitude and acceptance of fate, based on self-confidence.

As an army officer and as President, Soeharto seemed to personify a number of these attributes, achieving a state of measured calm and disciplined self-control. But as he got older, and more convinced that he was indispensable, he seemed less able and less willing to cloak a fundamentally arrogant and overbearing nature. In the late eighties, Soeharto invited a large group of people, including all his cabinet ministers and fourteen former student leaders, to the Merdeka Palace to see the film Jakarta ‘66, which focused on the tumultuous events surrounding his rise to power. Afterwards he addressed those present.

The Japanese had had much to celebrate in the days after the Sixteenth Army landed in Java in March 1942. The island at the heart of the Dutch East Indies had fallen into their hands after a land campaign lasting a little more than a week. Elsewhere, the forces of the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy were carrying all before them, from the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. But success in war is often fleeting, and by mid-1942 the war was starting to go badly for Japan. An almost unbroken string of Japanese military triumphs had come to an abrupt halt at the Battle of Midway in early June, almost six months to the day after the opening strike against Pearl Harbor and only three months after the Japanese landings in Java. At Midway, the Imperial Navy lost four of its largest aircraft carriers in one day; the US Navy lost only one. It was a blow from which the Japanese would never recover.

As 1942 wore on, the Japanese Southern Army, which had primary responsibility for Burma, Malaya, Sumatra, Java, British North Borneo and the Philippines, and which maintained garrison armies in French Indochina and Thailand, found itself increasingly cut off from the Japanese home islands as a result of US submarine attacks on Japanese merchant shipping. As a result, Java assumed even greater importance as a supply base, for food, raw materials and manpower. But as the Japanese were well aware, Java was itself vulnerable. During the six months he spent on Java, General Imamura was, as we have seen, “keenly expecting” an Allied attack on Java from bases in Australia. And as he knew only too well, his “ten battalions of aged soldiers” would be quite insufficient in the event of any such attack. Those concerns remained after Imamura was transferred to Rabaul.

One solution to the manpower problem was to create an indigenous army of some kind, using either conscripts or volunteers, as the Japanese had done when they founded the Indian National Army and the Burma Independence Army at the end of 1941. But the Japanese were not sure that Indonesians were physically or temperamentally suited to military service.

At around 7:15 a.m. on Friday, 1 October 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, a battalion commander in President Sukarno's Tjakrabirawa palace guard, issued a startling proclamation over Radio Republik Indonesia. A hitherto unknown “September 30th Movement”, he declared, had saved the head of state from a CIA-backed “Council of Generals” which was plotting to overthrow the government. What Untung did not disclose was that three or four hours earlier Tjakrabirawa troops had murdered the Army Commander, Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, and two other prominent generals in their homes and had kidnapped and murdered, or were about to murder, three more generals. The Defence Minister, General A.H. Nasution, had narrowly escaped assassination; his five-year-old daughter had been mortally wounded, a young lieutenant seized and murdered. By late that afternoon, Major General Soeharto, the commander of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), had marshalled a counter force, won over a battalion of September 30th troops guarding key locations in central Jakarta and put a second battalion to flight. A botched and brutal strike against army leaders known for their hostility to the large Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) had failed. And although there remained a dangerous standoff in Central Java, where many units had come out in favour of the September 30th Movement, the power balance in Jakarta had changed irrevocably.

On the following Monday, a day of strong emotion and high drama in Indonesia, the army recovered the bodies of the six generals and the lieutenant from a disused well known as the Crocodile Hole. The corpses were bloated and blackened, in most cases barely recognizable. Eleven days later, Soeharto gave a report on recent developments to leaders of the National Front, a left-leaning body Sukarno had established to mobilize political parties and other groups behind government policies. “We have found the bodies of the generals,” he said at one point, in what appears to have been an informal exchange with front members. “But I am also a general and many of you don't know me.” He then gestured towards K.P.H. Haryasudirja Sasraningrat, a thirty-nine-year-old Javanese aristocrat who was Minister for Water Resources in Sukarno's cabinet. “If you have any questions about me,” he continued, “well, Mr Haryasudirja can answer you.”