Ceritalah | History has been kind to BJ Habibie, who transformed Indonesia in 17 months as president
- His time in power was a whirlwind and Habibie stunned his critics with an unprecedented political ‘big bang’ of reforms
- However, the so-called liberation of East Timor, although viewed positively by the West, was regarded domestically as his biggest failure
He was a quintessential product of Suharto’s “New Order” and, having served as a cabinet minister for two decades, was a much promoted, admired and protected protégé.
“Pak Habibie was not a politician. He was an engineer – a man of science,” said Dewi Fortuna Anwar, one of his key advisers.
“He designed and built things. He also built institutions. And as president at that time, he saw that it was his task was to get Indonesia out of what was a multidimensional crisis. To his mind, Indonesia, for too long, had depended on economics alone. Social and political developments had atrophied. This had to change.”
Born in 1936 on the eastern island of Sulawesi, Habibie would probably have lived a quiet and relatively obscure existence as a successful aeronautical engineer in his beloved Germany had Suharto – then a rising star in the military – not been sent to pacify Makassar (and the Andi Aziz Rebellion) in 1950.
The visiting general found a warm welcome in the Habibie homestead on Jalan Maricaya. The hospitality, combined with a shared Javanese connection, formed the basis of a deep, long-term family friendship. Later, whenever Suharto travelled through Germany in the 1970s, he often made a point of catching up with the young Habibie – by then an ambitious and talented engineering student.
