JAKARTA --There is a familiarity to the chaos outside the Seokarno-Hatta airport. Touts, taxis and tour operators swarm around visitors just like they do at Tribhuban. Tourism is booming in Indonesia and there are rich pickings.
The drive to the city of Jakarta offers a dramatic view of stunning contrast of office towers soaring over a sea of shantytowns. In Kathmandu, we now only have brick shantytowns.
Indonesia is the fifth most populous country in the world, and 3,000 of the archipelago's 14,000 islands are thickly inhabited. It takes four hours to fly from Irian Jaya bordering Papua New Guinea in the east to Aceh in the west where some of the islands are only 30 km from India's Andamans. This huge country is blessed with enormous natural resources, but has been cursed with a history of dictatorship and the plunder of a nation by outside powers through their native agents.
Indonesia gained formal independence in 1949 and showed the potential of emerging as a quasi-socialist nation under Soekarno. But his anti-communism didn't satisfy Washington during the Cold War. He was sidelined by a more pliant highly ambitious Suharto through a bloody coup in 1965-1966. Suharto ruled the country for three decades with an iron hand. Present president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is Suharto's prot?g?.
With the help of what were known as the 'Berkley Mafia' of US-educated advisers Suharto rescued the economy from the brink of collapse, but over three decades built an elaborate system of crony capitalism. The pathologies of Indonesian politics can all be traced to a na?ve belief in the doctrine that mixing political passivity and technocratic excellence will foster economic growth. It may have done so for a brief period and it may work in a test-tube experiment like Singapore, but in Indonesia the resulting prosperity failed to lift all boats.