B. J. Habibie

Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie was born on June 25, 1936, in Parepare, a port town on the west coast of South Sulawesi in what was then the Dutch East Indies ^[1]. His father, Alwi Abdul Jalil Habibie, was an agriculturalist of Gorontalese descent who worked for the colonial administration, and his mother, Raden Ajeng Tuti Marini Puspowardojo, came from a Javanese aristocratic family. The mix of Sulawesi and Javanese roots gave the household both provincial grounding and connections to the educated elite of the archipelago ^[2].

Habibie was still a boy when his father died of a heart attack in 1950. His mother moved the family to Bandung in West Java, determined that her children would be educated. In Bandung the teenage Habibie proved a gifted student with an appetite for mathematics and physics, and after secondary school he enrolled at the Bandung Institute of Technology, the country's leading engineering school ^[1].

He did not stay long. In 1955 he left for West Germany to study aeronautical engineering at the Rhenish Westphalian Technical University in Aachen, known as RWTH Aachen. Unlike many Indonesian students abroad at the time, he was not on a full government scholarship, and his mother helped fund his studies. He earned his engineering diploma in 1960 and completed a doctorate in aeronautical engineering, awarded with the highest distinction, in 1965 ^[2].

Anyone asking who was B. J. Habibie before politics finds the answer in German aviation. After his doctorate he joined the aircraft manufacturer that became Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, one of Europe's major aerospace firms, based in Hamburg. He specialized in the behavior of cracks in aircraft structures, working out how fractures propagate through airframes under stress. His methods for predicting crack growth earned him the nickname Mr. Crack among colleagues, and the calculations associated with his work became known in the field as the Habibie factor ^[3].

He rose quickly. By the 1970s Habibie held a senior post at the company, eventually serving as a vice president responsible for technology application, a rare position for an engineer from a developing country in a flagship European firm ^[2]. He became a respected figure in international aerospace circles while remaining, by his own account, committed to returning home when his country called.

That call came in 1974. President Suharto, who had known the Habibie family in Sulawesi during his army days, summoned him back to Indonesia to help drive industrialization. Habibie began as an adviser on high technology, and in 1978 Suharto appointed him State Minister of Research and Technology, a post he would hold for twenty years ^[1]. He also took charge of a cluster of strategic state industries covering aircraft, shipbuilding, steel, and arms production.

Any account of B. J. Habibie achievements has to begin with his campaign to make Indonesia an aircraft producing nation. He founded and led the state aircraft company IPTN (Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara) in Bandung, which assembled helicopters and transport planes under license before attempting original designs. The centerpiece was the N-250 Gatotkaca, a twin turboprop commuter aircraft designed in Indonesia, which made its first flight in August 1995 to national celebration ^[3]. Critics attacked the program's enormous cost, and the 1997 financial crisis eventually grounded it, but the project trained a generation of Indonesian engineers and remains a point of national pride.

Habibie's philosophy, sometimes summarized as starting at the end and ending at the beginning, argued that developing countries should leap directly into advanced industries rather than climb slowly through basic manufacturing. The approach put him at odds with orthodox economists in Suharto's cabinet, who favored comparative advantage in agriculture and light industry, and the debate between the technologists and the economists ran through Indonesian policy for two decades ^[4].

His influence extended beyond engineering. In 1990 he became the first chairman of the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals, known as ICMI, an organization that gave educated, devout Muslims a channel into the state after decades of political marginalization. The role made Habibie a significant political figure in his own right and signaled Suharto's late turn toward Islamic constituencies ^[4]. In March 1998, at the peak of the Asian financial crisis, Suharto chose him as the seventh Vice President of Indonesia. Barely two months later, on May 21, 1998, Suharto resigned in the face of mass protests and riots, and Habibie was sworn in as the third President of Indonesia ^[1].

His presidency lasted only seventeen months, yet it dismantled much of the authoritarian architecture built over the preceding thirty years. Habibie lifted controls on the press, legalized new political parties, released prominent political prisoners including labor and East Timorese detainees, freed labor unions, and set term limits for the presidency ^[5]. In June 1999 Indonesia held its first free parliamentary elections since 1955, with dozens of parties competing. He also devolved significant power and revenue to the regions, a decentralization that transformed how the sprawling country is governed ^[4].

The most consequential decision of Habibie's presidency concerned East Timor, the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia had invaded in 1975 and occupied at heavy human cost. In January 1999, to widespread surprise, Habibie announced that the East Timorese could choose between broad autonomy within Indonesia and outright independence. In the United Nations supervised ballot held on August 30, 1999, nearly four out of five voters chose independence ^[5].

The aftermath was grim. Pro-Indonesian militias, backed by elements of the armed forces, unleashed violence and destruction across the territory, and an Australian led international force was deployed to restore order. Habibie accepted the result and the international intervention, and East Timor moved to full independence in 2002. In Indonesia the loss of the territory was widely blamed on him, while abroad the referendum came to be seen as an act of considerable political courage ^[6].

The East Timor crisis, together with a banking scandal involving Bank Bali funds, drained his remaining support. In October 1999 the People's Consultative Assembly rejected his accountability speech, effectively a vote of no confidence. Habibie withdrew his candidacy for a full term, and the assembly elected Abdurrahman Wahid as president. He handed over power peacefully, the first Indonesian leader to do so through a competitive vote ^[5].

In 1962, during a visit home from Germany, Habibie married Hasri Ainun Besari, a physician he had known since their school days in Bandung. She gave up medical practice to join him in Germany, and the couple raised two sons, Ilham Akbar and Thareq Kemal, both of whom pursued technical and business careers ^[2].

The marriage lasted 48 years and became one of the most celebrated love stories in modern Indonesia. After Ainun died of ovarian cancer in Munich in May 2010, the grieving Habibie wrote a memoir titled Habibie and Ainun, which he described as a form of therapy. The book became a bestseller, and its 2012 film adaptation broke Indonesian box office records, introducing the former president to a generation born after his time in office ^[6].

Those who worked with Habibie described a man of restless energy, rapid speech, and unguarded enthusiasm, a contrast to the studied calm of Javanese political culture. He was a practicing Muslim, a lover of classical music, and famously devoted to his late wife, visiting her grave regularly in his final years ^[6].

After leaving the presidency, Habibie divided his time between Germany and Indonesia, gradually resettling in Jakarta. In 1999 he established the Habibie Center, a think tank in Jakarta devoted to democratization and human rights, and he remained a public commentator on technology and politics. In 2006 he published a memoir on the 1998 transition, Detik-Detik yang Menentukan (Decisive Moments), which stirred debate with its account of Suharto's fall ^[4].

Habibie died on September 11, 2019, at Gatot Soebroto Army Hospital in Jakarta, at the age of 83, after treatment for heart problems. The government declared national mourning, and he was buried with military honors at Kalibata Heroes Cemetery beside Ainun. President Joko Widodo led the funeral, and tributes came from across the political spectrum and from East Timor's leaders ^[1].

Assessments of any B. J. Habibie biography turn on a paradox. He spent twenty years as the favored technologist of an authoritarian regime, pouring public money into projects that economists derided, yet in less than a year and a half as an unelected president he opened the political system further than anyone expected. Scholars credit his government with laying the legal foundations of Indonesian democracy: free elections, a liberated press, decentralization, and the precedent of peaceful transfer of power ^[5]. Among the enduring B. J. Habibie facts is this: the accidental president, dismissed at first as a Suharto loyalist without a political base, became one of the principal architects of the world's third largest democracy. Engineers remember Mr. Crack; Indonesians remember the man who let them vote ^[6].