Adi Abidin – In the pantheon of Southeast Asia's strongmen, Soeharto and Rodrigo Duterte occupy adjoining pedestals – both built on fear and polished by the rhetoric of 'order.' Each promised to rescue their nation from chaos, and each delivered that promise through killings.
Yet in 2025, their legacies are veering in opposite directions. Indonesia, under President Prabowo Subianto, has elevated Soeharto to the rank of national hero. The Philippines, under President Ferdinand 'Bong Bong' Marcos Jr., has allowed Duterte to face trial in The Hague. For an Indonesian watching these diverging paths, the contrast is not only striking – it is damning.
Soeharto's record as an authoritarian ruler is among the most notorious for scale and endurance. His New Order regime survived for more than three decades on twin foundations of coercion and technocratic discipline. The massacres of 1965-66 that paved the way for his ascent claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; surveillance, censorship, and military repression did the rest.
Nevertheless, on this year's Heroes Day, Prabowo presided over a ceremony that enshrined Soeharto alongside the republic's liberators. This was an act framed as national reconciliation, but its political meaning is unmistakably revisionist.
Among the ten honourees were Soeharto, former president Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), labour activist Marsinah (ironically, a tragic victim of New Order violence), and diplomat Mochtar Kusumaatmadja. Pairing Soeharto with Gus Dur – the authoritarian with the democrat, the enforcer with the pluralist – was presented as a balancing gesture. But symbolism, in this case, is substance. The very act of canonisation recasts Soeharto's rule not as predation but patriotism.
For Prabowo, Soeharto's rehabilitation is less about history than inheritance. The president, once Soeharto's son-in-law, is a proud product of the same military apparatus that carried out New Order repression. Now he has reclaimed that ideological lineage. By honouring Soeharto, Prabowo legitimises his ambitions to restore an Indonesia that is disciplined, centralised, and obedient.
What is framed as reconciliation is, in truth, consolidation – a rewriting of moral boundaries that benefits those in power today.
In fact, the moral weight of this move is profound. In his memoir "Soeharto: Pikiran, Ucapan, dan Tindakan Saya" (1989), the general did not deny authorising Petrus (penembakan misterius, mysterious shootings), the extrajudicial killings in the early 1980s of alleged 'gangsters'.
In the memoir, Soeharto argued that crime had created 'fear among the people' and that criminals had acted 'beyond the limits of humanity.' Faced with such threats, he said, the state needed to take tindakan tegas – firm action. If suspects resisted, they 'had to be shot.' Some bodies, he admitted, were deliberately left in public places to deliver 'shock therapy.'
Scholars later showed that Petrus was not the work of rogue actors but an organised state campaign of terror, just as Soeharto said. Komnas HAM (the national human rights commission) eventually classified it as a gross human rights violation.
By elevating Soeharto to national hero, Indonesia is not merely overlooking this grim and bloody history – it is recasting it as courage and patriotism.
Prabowo's supporters insist that the recognition is about unity, not absolution. But unity without truth becomes curated amnesia. For Millennials and Gen Z – who never lived under Soeharto but grew up in a digital ecosystem where history competes with memes – his canonisation tells them that the state's violence can be sanitised if it suits current powerholders, that order outweighs accountability, and that historical trauma is negotiable.
Across the sea, another strongman faces a different fate. In March 2025, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested under an International Criminal Court warrant after President Marcos Jr. reopened Manila's cooperation with The Hague. Duterte now awaits trial for crimes against humanity connected to his murderous 'war on drugs,' which left more than 20,000 dead.
Like Soeharto, Duterte cloaked brutality in the language of order and discipline. But unlike Soeharto, Duterte governed in the age of smartphones. His violence was not hidden – it was livestreamed. His tirades were broadcast online, publicised by the algorithm.
And yet Duterte's reckoning is not born of moral awakening. It is born of political rupture. The Marcos-Duterte presidential alliance (Marcos' son paired with Duterte's daughter as his deputy) that delivered victory in 2022 imploded. When it did, Duterte's shield collapsed with it. A Marcos – scion of another authoritarian dynasty – has now invoked the ICC to humble a rival. Justice, in this configuration, may be genuine but it is also instrumental.
Should Sara Duterte rise to the presidency – a plausible scenario given her family's enduring base – she could renounce further engagement with the ICC and orchestrate a sweeping domestic rehabilitation of her father. But she would not be able to spring him from The Hague; once a detainee is in ICC custody, no Philippine administration can reverse that process.
But the Philippines is not so much moving toward accountability as it is circling through a familiar cycle of elite rivalry, where the language of justice becomes another instrument in the contest for power.
Yet even this weaponised justice offers a stark contrast to Indonesia. For all its political cynicism, the Philippines has shown that a state can treat its strongmen as liabilities. Indonesia has demonstrated the opposite: that a strongman can be sanctified if it serves the needs of those in power.
This contrast has particular implications for young Indonesians. As textbooks soften the New Order's edges and public ceremonies dress Soeharto in patriotic honour, Prabowo's gesture risks validating the myth of benevolent authoritarianism. It teaches a generation that never lived through those decades that discipline and development justify fear – and that accountability is optional.
Southeast Asia has long been a region comfortable with its strongmen. From Soeharto and Marcos Sr. to Mahathir, Lee Kuan Yew, and Hun Sen, its modern history is built on the logic of centralised authority. But today, the region is splitting in its treatment of these legacies. The Philippines is performing a cautious, politically motivated exorcism; Indonesia is performing a deliberate canonisation.
In Jakarta, Soeharto's portrait now hangs in the Hall of Heroes. In The Hague, Duterte's mugshot sits in the ICC archive. Both images capture the same paradox: nations struggling to live with their dictators, yet unable to live without them.
But the choices of their governments diverge sharply. One state weaponises justice to reign in an old executioner; the other redeploys heroism to sanctify its own.
Source: https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/soeharto-vis-a-vis-duterte-two-opposite-tales