Vaudine England, Jakarta – Significant though the corruption charges filed yesterday against former president Suharto are, his forthcoming trial barely scratches the surface of the bundle of crimes most Indonesians believe he committed.
On the issue of money, and the ties with the bureaucracy and business which allegedly earned the Suharto family billions, this case is little more than one drop in a large bucket.
Conservative estimates of the Suharto wealth start at US$10 billion (HK$78 billion). Many bankers and even President Abdurrahman Wahid predict US$45 billion.
Starting from the mid-1980s, the Suharto siblings, with their father's backing, secured control of many of the country's core industries. Suharto allegedly ensured the family got a cut from almost every economic activity in town.
But no matter how much money was siphoned away from the 200 million mostly poor Indonesian people, human rights groups, students and observers say this is nothing compared with murderous behaviour by Suharto.
Scholars have long since concluded that his New Order government came into being on the deaths of up to half a million people, slaughtered in the aftermath of the 1965 coup attempt which brought him to power.
Suharto's regime depended on a pattern of major human rights violations to stay in power, they say. These range from the brutal suppression of riots and any form of free expression, to the killings of alleged criminals in 1984, a massacre in Tandjung Priok port in 1986, the torture and disappearance of student activists, and the organised, state-sponsored terror of military rule inflicted on Aceh and other parts of Indonesia.
A generation has grown up in a state where any sign of free thinking or unconventional behaviour was brutally suppressed, where the education system was neutered in the name of social control, where the legal system was destroyed, and where tens of thousands of people have either been forcibly moved off their land or seen their life's work taken from them by the military-business complex which underpinned Suharto's rule. Whether any charges will stick is unknown.
"I'm absolutely sure that Suharto will never be brought to court," said Arief Budiman, professor of Indonesian studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "The President will be too reluctant to do that."