Peter Rodgers – "Enigma" has had a big workout this week. Around the globe it's been the word of first resort for obituarists, commentators and bloggers having their say on the death of former Indonesian president Suharto.
It's a good choice, too well suited both to the personality of the man and the legacy he leaves.
Just look at the flow of adjectives over the past few days: reserved; shy; taciturn; reclusive; regal; charming; calm; cautious; determined; manipulative; brutal; corrupt the list goes on.
Adding to the challenge of pinning him down, Suharto vacillated between the modern "u" and the older "oe" spelling of his name, sometimes signing himself S'harto.
Indonesia might offer much that is engaging and colourful but the Suharto personality was definitely not part of the mix. It's hard to imagine him having hit it off with, say, Maggie Thatcher or Boris Yeltsin, who both flitted across the political stage during the Suharto presidency.
It's doubtful, too, if there was deep and meaningful discussion about French clocks with Paul Keating. Yet Suharto ruled for a very long time, no mean feat in a country as geographically and ethnically complex as Indonesia. As much as the personality, the legacy is an enigma.
Should we focus on the dramatic revival of the Indonesian economy, the extraordinary transition of the country from the world's largest rice importer to self-sufficiency in this vital commodity, the reduction in the proportion of "very poor" Indonesians from half the population when Suharto came to power in the mid-1960s to less than 10 per cent by 1990, the implementation of effective family planning and the spread of health and education services, and Indonesia's emergence as a mainly cooperative regional power?
Or should we focus on the human cost: the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of "communists" killed as Suharto consolidated his rule; the suppression of personal freedom and the determined manipulation of political processes in the name of stability and development; the brutality inflicted in faraway places such as Aceh and Irian Jaya; the paranoia which drove the ill-judged invasion of East Timor? Should our regret be driven by the reality that much more might have been achieved but for what was later gathered together in the Indonesian acronym "KKN" corruption, collusion and nepotism?
About 30 years ago, as the Jakarta correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, I was asked to write a short obituary on Suharto. He wasn't dying, the paper was just "updating".
A decade into his rule, the pattern was set clearly: positives about order and development overshadowed by acidic negatives about family greed and blindness to the limitations of "regal" rule. With a wife known as "Madame 10 per cent" (the figure would later rise) and six seemingly insatiable children, Suharto was well on his way to becoming the world's most successful kleptocrat. Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International estimated later he and the family eventually siphoned off some $US35 billion ($A39billion) from the Indonesian economy.
The East Asian economic crisis finally destroyed Suharto's presidency. In the aftermath of his resignation in 1998, his driver told an Indonesian journalist that one of the most difficult adjustments for the ex-president was having to stop at Jakarta's traffic lights.
Still, the family wealth bought a top team of doctors and lawyers able to stave off attempts to get him into court to account for the dark side of the Suharto years. His children and grandchildren will need to look over their shoulders for a long time to come.
Fittingly, Suharto's passing prompted several foreign governments to make their own enigmatic contributions. The US ambassador in Jakarta noted, for example, that "there may be some controversy over his legacy". Meanwhile, Alexander Downer, in a league of his own, suggested that Suharto "wasn't a bad thing for Australia in a lot of ways" but he would "have to live with" his record in East Timor. "Live"? Now that's enigma at its very best.
[Peter Rodgers spent six years in Indonesia as a diplomat and a journalist. His reporting on East Timor won the 1979 Graham Perkin Award for the Australian Journalist of the Year.]