The Dynamics of Nation-Building

“You can imagine this moment for a man who more than sixty years ago was only a small boy, playing in the fields among the farmers of the village of Kemusuk, when he walked up the dais and spoke to a hall filled of experts and world dignitaries, as the leader of a nation that had just solved this enormous problem that concerned the fate of more 160 million souls’. This is how President Soeharto expressed his feelings at the time he gave his speech to the general assembly of the Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, on 14 November 1985, in Rome. It was a proud moment, indeed. The FAO ceremoniously recognized the success of Indonesia in solving its almost endless problems of feeding millions of its population. In July 1986 the Director General of FAO, Eduardo Saona, officially presented President Soeharto with a gold FAO medal. “On the one side of the medal,” as Soeharto describes it, there is “my picture and a written texts, ‘President Soeharto-Indonesia’. And on the other side there is picture of a farmer planting rice and inscription ‘From Rice Importer to self-sufficiency’.” The medal was to be printed in gold, silver, and bronze and to be sold all over world. He could not boast the way Sukarno did when the first president was at his prime. Soeharto, however, could be proud of his real accomplishment as the Head of State. “The Director General of FAO, Eduardo Saona called me ‘a symbol of international agricultural development’.”

President Soeharto had every reason to be proud of this international recognition. Who would have dared to think in the 1960s that the once politically underrated general, despite his seniority, was to emerge a more successful Chief Executive than the “father of the nation”? By the beginning of the 1990s, President Soeharto had already had several successes in social development he could be proud of. Since the success in economic growth was also accompanied with the decrease in population growth, Soeharto's New Order government could also be proud of the success of his government in improving the people's living standards. Unlike President Sukarno who had the tendency to make fun of the importance of family planning, he, after some hesitation, took the programme seriously.