“Women in Islamic dress had staged pro-IMF demonstrations; they had been out there with placards reading, IMPLEMENT THE IMF PACKAGE! In the weeks after the Suharto's fall, the IMF mission chief would sometimes go to a coffee shop in the shopping centre adjoining his hotel. There'd be a hush as people recognized him, and then strangers would approach shyly and shower him with thanks.”
- The World’s Banker, Sebastian Mallaby, p.201 .
I’m not qualified to answer that question. Someone who used to work at a Think Tank in Indonesia during the Asian Crisis told me that it was the Indonesian technocrats working with IMF and other international counterparts who collaborated to force reform on the dictator. Let’s get a response from an Indonesian economist blogger.
Related;
The World Bank report you don't want to miss...
1 comment:
I second your friend's argument: The IMF was as much the puppet as it was puppet-master.
But of course, this didn't answer your question. So, did the IMF bring down Suharto?
Well, that depends on what you mean by the question. Did the IMF and the technocrats conspire to bring down Suharto?
My sense of the period was, no they didn't. At the time, the interest of the technocrats was really to improve the efficiency of the economy. Meanwhile, the IMF knew very little about structural adjustments and was just playing along. After all, managing structural adjustments isn't its comparative advantage.
In this sense, neither the technocrats nor IMF officials, at the onset of the crisis, intended to bring Suharto down.
Now, did the IMF policies bring Suharto down? Well, in a sense that a liver failure contributes in killing a person who with a multiple-organ failure.
Here is a way to think about this: Had the IMF not come, would the instability that ended in the fall of Suharto happen? Given the reserve condition and the severity of the speculative attacks, I'd say the instability would have occurred sooner had the IMF refused to bail out Indonesia.
Post a Comment