Thomas Omestad, Jakarta – "The old man at No. 8 Cendana Street sits by his satellite TV, watching local sitcoms and nature shows on the Discovery, National Geographic, and Animal Planet channels. After three strokes, he is on a low-fat, low-stress regimen, and his doctors think it best that he avoid newspapers and magazines. Occasionally, he grabs a golf club and practices his swing in his bedroom. But because he is under house arrest, golf is no longer an option. At 79 and feeling his mortality, the old man is often found deep in prayer, alone or with neighbors on Fridays, the Muslim sabbath. His six kids, who keep houses nearby, drop by regularly.

All seems quiet inside the modest two-story, red-tiled house in a leafy neighborhood of the Indonesian capital. There is little sense that the man who lives there is at the center of a political and legal storm roiling this young democracy. Or that for 32 years he was the man who ruled Indonesia with an iron hand, smothering dissent and allowing his associates and his children to plunder the nation. Only his parrot harks back to that past, dutifully squawking a daily greeting: "Good morning, Father President."

Inside No. 8 Cendana, the man known simply as Suharto is still revered. Outside, things are very different. Violent student protests erupt on short notice. Graffiti throughout Jakarta scream: "Try Suharto!" and "Hang Suharto!" Late last week, prosecutors charged him with siphoning off some $570 million in state funds and vowed to take Suharto to court this month.

Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, in an interview with US News, insisted that Suharto must face trial – "but that he will be pardoned if he cooperates in returning the family's ill-gotten gains.

Disciplining dictators

Demands for justice are driving Indonesia to take stock of its corrupt and bloody past. But Indonesians are divided over what to do with their former dictator, who resigned two years ago amid a frenzy of rioting, rape, and arson that took more than 1,000 lives. Other countries have dealt with deposed dictators in varying ways. Chile guaranteed junta Gen. Augusto Pinochet freedom from prosecution to buy some peace, though courts are now reassessing his immunity. Ferdinand Marcos managed to flee the Philippines with much of his loot. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were shot dead. But here the only leader whom most Indonesians had ever known simply quit.

Almost surreally, he planned to live quietly among them. But he left behind an embedded system of corruption, cronyism, and nepotism, as well as countless supporters throughout government and business. Suharto dominated the world's fourth most populous nation, and many Indonesians saw his reign in semimystical terms. "Twenty to 25 percent of the 'little people' believed that he was a modern Javanese king who was given courtly power [by God] to rule," says Amien Rais, the leading opposition politician. "Suharto's had a lot of power over every single sector of national life."

Officials believe that influence, at least from Suharto's followers, persists. Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono charged in an interview that former Suharto cabinet members are fomenting Muslim-Christian violence in the Molucca Islands to destabilize Wahid's government. He emphatically told US News that authorities are investigating Suharto backers – "as well as "one or two" of his children – "suspected of financing attacks by Muslim extremists. Documents providing evidence of payments to Laskar Jihad, or Holy War Troops, were recovered from a truck that exploded in east Java in June. But bribes have apparently hampered the probe. "The residual power of the old guard is there and we feel it," Sudarsono said. "We realize we are not in full control."

Sweetheart deals

The alleged payoffs are a familiar part of the justice business in Indonesia. In April, a watchdog group, Indonesia Corruption Watch, released a breathtaking report on the country's Supreme Court. Only 3 of 31 justices were found to be free of corruption, and the problem is so blatant that fixers walk up to the cars of defense attorneys as they arrive at the Supreme Court. According to Corruption Watch director Teten Masduki, 80 to 90 percent of all legal officials, including prosecutors, accept bribes. With the attorney general's office stuffed with holdovers from the old regime, Masduki doubts that Suharto can be effectively prosecuted. But the man in charge of doing just that, Attorney General Marzuki Darusman, disagrees, saying he has replaced several prosecutors and built a strong case against Suharto. Darusman's team has focused on presidential decrees that allegedly enabled Suharto's kin and associates to take funds from charitable foundations receiving public money. Through the foundations, the granting of monopolies, and sweetheart deals, the former first family diversified its holdings across the economy, from toll roads in Jakarta and tourist hotels in Bali to chemicals, gasoline, telecommunications, real estate, cloves, and even chicken farming.

According to one private analysis that has never been publicly released, the Suharto family owned significant stakes in at least 678 companies in 1992. The family's wealth is often estimated at $15 billion, though Wahid says it exceeds $35 billion.

Suharto denies any wrongdoing. One of his lawyers, O. C. Kaligis, maintains that the government is scapegoating Suharto to divert attention from its economic mismanagement. Suharto never profited from the charities, Kaligis says; indeed, the lawyer recalls the former president telling him last year, "Why do the papers blaspheme me so often? ... I did my best to improve the nation."

After his strokes, Suharto is said to suffer from amnesia, dementia, and speech difficulties. He doesn't talk much anymore but usually wears a smile. Kaligis says Suharto is incapable of standing trial or answering lengthy questions. A transcript of an April interrogation at No. 8 Cendana shows prosecutors having to break questions into simple parts to elicit a response. "Mr. Suharto can't account for what he's saying," contends Kaligis. "He's not aware of what's happening now."

Darusman regards the Suharto case as central to establishing the rule of law, rooting out corruption, and attracting wary foreign investors. "We need to debunk the myth that he's above the law," he says. "If we don't settle these big cases, any other effort to enforce the law will be taken with great skepticism and cynicism." Some of the biggest skeptics are US and other foreign investors. They are watching the Suharto case closely as a signal of whether Southeast Asia's most populous country – "with a market of 211 million people – "can clean up a court system that has often favored cronies over outsiders. Indonesia may be the region's linchpin, but corruption and political turmoil have hobbled its recovery from the Asian financial crisis of three years ago.

Endgame

Still, the attorney general concedes that a Suharto trial might be suspended, perhaps because of the ex-president's health or if it threatens "the very unity of the country." Instead, legislators could issue a political – though not a legal – verdict on Suharto.

Then there is the money. Darusman says talks with Suharto's eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, began in May. The government's bottom line is the return of "the major part" of the Suharto fortune, he says. Suharto's lawyers deny the existence of negotiations.

Critics, though, are incensed by the prospect of a pardon for Suharto. They are even angrier over the slow pace of investigations of human-rights abuses. From Aceh in the west to Irian Jaya in the east of this archipelago nation, Suharto's military flattened separatist and opposition movements by force. The United Nations and the country's own human rights commission blame Suharto allies in the military for the near destruction last year of East Timor, a province that voted for independence. Overall, the number of people killed, tortured, or imprisoned for their politics during the Suharto years surpasses 1 million – "and may be as high as 4 million, human-rights groups say.

But so far, no major figure from the Suharto years has been convicted – of anything. Just one human-rights trial has been completed, and then only low-ranking soldiers were convicted for a massacre of civilians in Aceh.

To push things along, the United States has sent lawyers with war crimes experience to Jakarta to train prosecutors. But without more international pressure, frustrated officials concede, those cases may never reach trial. "Very few of the prosecutors are enthusiastic about going after the generals. They might even be killed," warns H. S. Dillon, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights.

Darusman is pinning his hopes on creating a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission that will try to set the historical record straight. But the necessary legislation has been stalled, and the idea of a truth commission seems to satisfy no one, least of all former victims.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's leading dissident author, says the government "is playing a game. Suharto violated humanity, but the investigation is only about money."

Meanwhile, pressure to both try and convict Suharto is growing. "Expectations for justice have soared," worries a senior Western diplomat in Jakarta. "The deal seems to be for the Suharto kids to apologize on TV, fork over some money, and live happily ever after. I'm not sure the Indonesian people are ready to accept that."

Indeed, the passage of two years hasn't stilled the fury toward Suharto and his cronies. In normally peaceable Bali, a middle-aged businessman says matter-of-factly, "the people hate Suharto. He should be killed." A Jakarta college student, Immanuel Ebenezer, asks: "You know Lucifer? Suharto is a student of Lucifer." Among Suharto loyalists, of course, the view is more charitable. Says Anton Tabah, an aide, "He's very different from Marcos. He's not going to run away. He's a gentleman." Tabah says that Suharto remains optimistic and unemotional about his predicament. Even through the fog of apparent amnesia, the smiling old man of Cendana Street may comprehend his situation just fine.