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When the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, told a press conference in Jakarta in mid-January that one of the conditions of the $43 billion IMF rescue of Indonesia was the ending of government subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN) there was a ripple of applause among the journalists. For the Indonesian establishment - the family, cronies and courtiers of President Suharto IPTN is a gleaming symbol of the Republic's prestige. For the intellectuals and hard-nosed economists, who want to restore the economy of the potentially rich nation, IPTN is a symbol of all that went wrong.
For day after critical day in December and January, it appeared as though IPTN would escape what inevitably means the axe. Research and Technology Minister Jusuf Habibie, who is also IPTN's chairman (his son, Ilham Akbar Habibie, is chief project officer) is more than one of the cronies; he is sometimes seen as a potential successor to President Suharto and is close and trusted, probably more so than anyone outside the Suharto family. Habibie, educated and trained in Germany, returned from a design engineering position at MBB (as it was then) to bring the technological...