Indonesia's Delicate Balance

When President Reagan landed in hot, humid Bali last week, those oft-mentioned "winds of freedom" were not blowing. Moments after Reagan's party touched down at Ngurah Rai Airport, Indonesian officials met the White House press plane and escorted two reporters from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. to the terminal, where they were forced to wait for the next outbound plane. The journalists were denied entry under a ban triggered by an article in a Sydney newspaper that charged members of Indonesian President Suharto's family and some of his associates with pocketing billions of dollars through shady business deals. The piece compared Suharto and his wife Madame Tien to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, dubbing Indonesia's First Lady "Madame Tien Per Cent." That same day New York Times Correspondent Barbara Crossette was expelled, possibly in response to a Times story by Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal classifying Suharto as a "tyrant."

As the expulsions illustrated, there is a delicate balance between freedom and authoritarianism in Indonesia. For two decades President Suharto, 64, has struggled to maintain stability in his strategically located republic. The archipelago's 13,677 islands sprawl 3,200 miles across some of the world's busiest East-West sea-lanes. With 173 million citizens, 87% of them Muslims, Indonesia is the world's fifth most populous nation. Though nonaligned, it has been friendly toward the U.S., and vice versa.

After more than three centuries of Dutch colonial rule, Indonesia declared its independence in 1945. For the next 20 years, the nation was governed by its first President, the mercurial, left-leaning Sukarno. After a bloody, abortive Communist coup in 1965, Sukarno's power waned, and he was eased out of office two years later by Suharto, an army general. The conservative, strongly anti-Communist Suharto earned a reputation as "the father of development," resurrecting a faltering economy with the aid of the 1970s oil boom. The son of a farmer, Suharto helped increase agricultural production, finally enabling the nation to become self-sufficient in rice.

After the attempted coup, 500,000 or more actual or suspected Communists, most of them of Chinese descent, were killed, and an additional 1.5 million Communist sympathizers were jailed or interned on remote islands. In the mid- 1970s, Suharto's regime invaded and ultimately annexed the former Portuguese colony of East Timor; the struggle led to the death of 100,000 Timorese.

Last year the parliament passed legislation requiring virtually all social and political organizations to adopt a secular state ideology known as Pancasila, a set of five principles calling for belief in one God, justice, national unity, democracy and humanitarianism. The law was designed to muffle nearly all dissent in the country and was of a piece with the regime's press censorship and powerful military. It sought to curb the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. After an antigovernment riot inspired by Muslim protesters in 1984 and a subsequent rash of political bombings, a number of prominent Suharto opponents, including a former Cabinet member, were imprisoned.

Suharto is currently trying to sustain economic progress in the face of collapsing oil prices. From 1971 to 1981, Indonesia enjoyed an annual 7.6% growth in gross domestic product. But GDP growth dropped to 2.2% in 1982 and is expected to be flat this year. The President has tried to make up for the shortfall with budget cuts, hikes in the price of fuel, and a push for nonoil exports. Suharto fears that the economic downturn could aggravate existing racial and religious tensions, and the U.S. shares that concern. Despite its reservations about human rights violations and corruption in Indonesia's government-run businesses, Washington remains supportive of Suharto. In 1984 the U.S. provided Indonesia with $164 million in economic and military aid.