Shawn Donnan – Leonardus Benyamin "Benny" Murdani, who died yesterday, was the architect of Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor and from 1983 to 1993 served as first the head of the country's armed forces and then its defence minister.
The retired four-star general was a key figure in the rise of former president Suharto, who visited him in hospital on Saturday. According to human rights activists, he was also responsible for some of the worst atrocities during Suharto rule. Some 200,000 people are thought to have died in East Timor during Jakarta's repressive rule of the former Portuguese colony, which ended in 1999 with a UN-supervised referendum.
But because of his close relationship with Indonesia's current president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Mr Murdani has more recently stood as an example of how, in the years since Mr Suharto's 1998 fall, many of the former regime's leading figures have continued to exert influence in a newly-democratic Indonesia.
Mr Murdani, a Catholic, was born in 1932 in central Java, beginning his military career in the elite commando unit, Kopassus. Although he was close to Indonesia's founding father, Sukarno, making a name for himself during Indonesia's 1962 invasion of then Dutch-controlled west Papua, his rise to the top came when Mr Suharto took power in 1966.
Under Mr Suharto, Mr Murdani planned and led the 1975 invasion of East Timor. In 1984, the year after Suharto appointed him armed forces chief, human rights activists allege he oversaw the killing of some three dozen Muslim activists during an anti-Suharto protest at Jakarta's port, Tanjung Priok.
Eleven soldiers were this month convicted for their involvement in that massacre. Mr Murdani was never charged. "Most Indonesians will remember [Mr Murdani] as someone who was very hostile to the Muslim community and political Islam," said Kusnanto Anggoro, a military analyst.
He was replaced as armed forces chief in 1988 and demoted to the defence ministry, where he served until 1993, after urging Mr Suharto to rein in his children's business activities.