Aubrey Belfor – While Indonesia's Suharto is reviled overseas, critics say a mix of fear, self-interest and affection among the country's political elite means the ailing former dictator gets softer treatment at home.

Since Suharto was admitted to hospital Friday for lung, heart and kidney complaints, a steady stream of visitors, including current elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, have arrived to pay their respects. Politicians from his former political vehicle, Golkar – now the biggest party in parliament – even used the 86-year-old's illness to call for the government to drop a more than $1.4 billion civil corruption case against him.

The attorney general rejected Golkar's call on Monday, but a criminal corruption case against Suharto was dropped on health grounds in 2006. Domestic respect for Suharto is in sharp contrast to critics abroad who see his rule as a kleptocracy that bled billions of dollars from the economy and oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of political opponents.

At one extreme, many in politics want to protect Suharto because their own positions are dependent on the culture of corruption fostered under his rule, according to Luki Djani, a researcher from Indonesian Corruption Watch.

If you bring down Suharto then that means that you dismantle the (system of) impunity, and this could have a snowballing effect because, frankly speaking, politics in Indonesia is dependent on kickbacks," he told AFP. "The political elite want to protect Suharto to protect themselves."

Even among those more critical of Suharto here, Indonesian culture dictates respect for the former leader, especially among the large share of the elite that personally advanced under his New Order regimes, Djani said.

Yudhoyono – a general during the regime who was elected in 2004 on an anti-corruption platform – and others "think they owe Suharto, so it is not polite culturally to go against your former boss," he added.

Criticism of Suharto has also been muted by a deep-seated respect for authority among the dominant Javanese ethnic group, according to Damien Kingsbury, a lecturer at Australia's Deakin University. "There's a very traditional Javanese perception of authority that is not value-laden as we understand it i n the West," leading to a tolerance of authoritarian excesses, Kingsbury explained.

Despite his popular overthrow in 1998 after 32 years of rule, Suharto, who is still credited with leading the country to stellar economic development and crushing the threat of communism, has retained an aura of power, Kingsbury said.

The country's democratisation and its slow and steady corruption fight is a subtle rebuke of Suharto's legacy. But a full-scale assault on graft, starting with the former dictator himself, would "tear apart the fabric of Indonesian society, or at least the elite of Indonesian society," he said.

And while corruption is treated with kid gloves, the killings, arrests and disappearances of Suharto's regime receive even less acknowledgment, according to Haris Azhar, the vice coordinator of human rights group Kontras.

Politicians are still reluctant to raise human rights cases involving the once-dominant armed forces, even though the military has cut back its political role, he said. Perhaps the most egregious abuse of the Suharto regime, the mass slaughter of over half a million communists after a fai led 1965 coup attempt, still goes largely ignored, Azhar said.

The regime's use of the media and schools to blame the coup attempt on the Indonesian communist party has gone largely unchallenged, Azhar said, meaning most people were either unaware the killings happened or saw them as a good thing. Details surrounding the event are still hotly disputed. "We have been fooled by Suharto for years, for generations," Azhar added.

And while Suharto is now seen as a villain overseas, Kingsbury noted that he was a darling of the West during the worst periods of his regime bec ause of his economic policies and, earlier, his anti-communist credentials. "In the West... it's now convenient to demonise him," Kingsbury said.