As Indonesia's former dictator lay dying on 8 January, a coterie of the country's great-and-good gathered at his bedside to pay their last respects to a man responsible for more deaths and suffering than any state leader since World War Two with the exception of Pol Pot of Cambodia.
While President Yudhoyono and former President Abdurrahman Wahid, out of respect for an elder statesman, stood at his bedside praying that efforts to restore him to health would be successful, other Indonesians regretted that with his passing, ten years after his fall from power in May 1998, he would never face justice for the countless crimes against humanity perpetrated during his 32-year reign of terror in Indonesia and the death and destruction inflicted on East Timor during the 23-year occupation of that country.
Since being forced to resign by the financial crisis that engulfed Indonesia in 1998, Suharto lived as a recluse in Cendana, the luxurious family home in the Menteng district of Jakarta, basking in the wealth which he, his late wife and his offspring plundered during the years when the military held a tight grip on the country. He even escaped justice for the unparalleled corruption which resulted in his being named the worst head-of-state embezzler in modern times by the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative, a joint venture of the World Bank and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
Born on 8 June 1921 to a family of peasants in the village of Kemusu Argamulya in Central Java and having nothing more than lower secondary school education, Suharto turned at an early age to the military as his vocation. His rise in the ranks of the Indonesian Army occurred at a time when the country was still under civilian rule, following Indonesia's one and only democratic election held in 1955.
Suharto's military career began during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia (1942-1945) when he became a battalion commander in Peta, Defenders of the Fatherland, a Japanese-trained militia. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, he joined the Indonesian army then known as ABRI but now called Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), on the day it was founded on 5 October 1945. In 1957, he became a district commander in the Diponegoro Division (Central Java) with the rank of colonel.
In parallel with his career in the military, he also engaged in financial activities to fund his subordinates and to provide the wherewithal for patronage. In the mid-1950s, he was implicated in a sugar smuggling scandal and other corrupt practices. This earned him a reprimand and removal in disgrace from his Diponegoro post, followed by a course at the Army Staff and Command School in Bandung,. But this did not stand in the way of his subsequent promotion to brigadier-general in January 1960.
After a stint as commander of the unsuccessful Operation Mandala in 1960, aimed at driving the Dutch from West Papua, he was promoted to major-general and appointed commander of the Diponegoro Division. At the height of Indonesia's confrontation with the newly-formed state of Malaysia
in 1963, Suharto was appointed commander of Kostrad, the army's elite command, which later enabled him to play a strategic role in the physical annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party, which by the mid-1960s had become the third largest communist party in the world.
The coup attempt on 30 September 1965 mounted by self-proclaimed procommunist army officers, when six army generals and a lower-ranking officer were kidnapped and murdered, as part of a conflict within the Indonesian army, provided Suharto with the pretext to unleash nationwide reprisals against the Indonesian Communist Party. As the White Terror spread throughout Central and East Java and then to other parts of Indonesia, hundreds of thousands of communists and alleged communists were killed. An estimated 200,000 people were arrested and held for years without charge. By the mid-1970s, some 70,000 were still in detention, of whom 13,000 men had been banished to the remote island of Buru where they were subject to harsh conditions. Hundreds of women prisoners were banished to a prison camp in Central Java called Plantungan. The remoteness of these camps made family visits and food supplies virtually impossible.
No one has ever been held to account for the killings and atrocities that occurred during Suharto's New Order which enabled Suharto to rule Indonesia without opposition for more than thirty years. It was not until after the dictator's downfall that surviving victims were able to speak publicly about the ordeals which they and their families had suffered.
As the anti-communist purge got into full swing in late 1965, Suharto's leading role in the armed forces was formalise with his appointment by President Sukarno as commander of the army on 16 October 1965. Abusing the powers given to him by Sukarno, Suharto issued an order for all PKI members or suspects to be purged from state positions. His grip on the country became further entrenched with the special powers granted to him on 11 March 1966 which was known as Supersemar. The PKI was banned along with associated mass organisations estimated to have a following of some 15 million people.
Meanwhile, the removal of the popular President Sukarno was handled with consummate skill. Suharto showed himself to be the master of Javanese-style slow-but-sure tactics, described by one biographer as a 'protracted Wayang play'. It was not until 12 March 1967 that a heavily purged legislative assembly stripped Sukarno of all his powers and installed Suharto as acting president. Although he had already been in control of the country for three years, it was not until a year later, on 21 March 1968, that Suharto was formally elected to his first five-year term as president. He was re-elected unopposed on six subsequent occasions in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993 and 1998. However, it was his election in 1998 that triggered his downfall as mass demonstrations swept the country and called for his dismissal, making his position untenable.
New Order Violence
Under Suharto's New Order, violence became a regular feature, while the fear of being accused as communists de-politicised all activists as well as the population as a whole, in the interests of security and order. Organisations were set up for each section of the population which were obliged to declare their allegiance to the government and its Pancasila ideology. There were many clampdowns such as the Tanjung Priok affair in West Java in September 1984 when dozens of Muslims outside a mosque were shot dead by the security forces and incidents in Lampung, South Sumatra in 1987 and later on against plantation workers in North Sumatra.
On 28 November 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor in the wake of Portugal's withdrawal from the territory. During the 23 years of occupation, military operations against a well-organised resistance movement resulted in tens of thousand of deaths. According to the East Timorese church, an estimated 60,000 Timorese were killed during the first two months of the invasion. A special commission set up by the UN in 2002, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, concluded that 18,600 Timorese were murdered or disappeared during the Indonesian occupation and between 84,000 and 183,000 more died as a direct result of Indonesia's policies.
From 1976, the people of Aceh, the western-most province of Indonesia, experienced the brutality of unrestrained killings when the region was designated a 'military operations region' (Daerah Operasi Militer) after the establishment of GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) in 1976 which sought to create a separate state. While some of the victims were killed during military conflicts, the vast majority of those who were struck down were unarmed civilians.
In 1965, after Indonesia had taken control of West Papua from the Dutch in 1963, crack troops of the military were sent to the region to crush an independence movement known as the OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, Free Papua Organisation). This resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the following decades, especially after the so-called Act of Free Choice in August 1969 when just over one thousand Papuans took part in the fraudulent Act, sealing the territory's fate as a province of Indonesia. Here too, the territory was designated as a special military area or DOM, giving the military free rein to capture, kill or maim people deemed to be in favour of independence.
In 1983, death squads took to the streets in a so-called anti-crime operation. For six months, death squads went on the rampage, killing alleged criminals or bandits. This resulted in the deaths of an estimated three thousand people. The killings occurred in a number of cities and came to be known as petrus or 'mysterious killings'. The precise number of victims was never established because the Indonesian media was prohibited from reporting the killings. In September 1983, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that the killings were 'set to continue until the authorities have reached their countrywide target reliably put at 4,000 extra-judicial killings'.
Suharto took personal responsibility for these killings in his autobiography, Suharto: Pikiran, Ucapan dan Tindakan Saya (Suharto: My Thoughts, Sayings and Deeds) in which he wrote: 'The newspapers were full of articles about the mysterious deaths of a number of people.... There was nothing mysterious about it at all. Was it right to do nothing? It had to be treated by violence. But this did not mean just going out and shooting people, bang, bang. No. But those who tried to resist, like it or not, had to be shot. Because they resisted, they were shot.'
These killings were a reminder to the population that the authorities continued to have the power and the physical ability to deal with anyone daring to challenge the government.
The Family Firm
During the 32 years of the New Order, the Suharto family made good use of the special privileges they enjoyed to pursue a wide range of business ventures. First to set the pattern was Suharto's wife, Tien (Siti Hartinah) Suharto who became known as Madame Ten Percent, thanks to her involvement in a wide range of business ventures. Together with the tycoon and Suharto crony, Liem Sioe Liong, for instance, she took control of PT Bogasari Mills which was granted a state monopoly for the import, milling and distribution of flour.
She also became the chief patron and beneficiary of Taman Mini (Indonesia in Miniature) Project, a high-profile project covering a large area of land on the outskirts of Jakarta, where the traditions and artefacts of all the provinces of the country were put on display. Set up in 1971 at a cost of $25 million, officials said at the time that these funds could have been better used to fund no fewer than 52 small businesses or seven large universities.
As the wife of the president, she chaired Dharma Wanita, a compulsory civil servants' wives' association which organised the Family Welfare Movement, a cultural movement whose aim was to promote the ideology of Suharto's New Order throughout the country, reaching down to the villages.
Tien Suharto died suddenly on 28 April 1996, reportedly from shock, after witnessing a bitter row between two of her sons.
The six children of Suharto and his wife all became involved in a wide variety of business ventures, benefiting from the many privileges which they enjoyed by virtue of being the sons and daughters of the president. According to TIME-Asia (24 May 1999), the six Suharto children owned between them significant equity in at least 564 companies, covering a range of commodities and businesses from oil and cloves (used in the popular kretek cigarettes) to land, toll roads, airlines, hotels, TV stations and real estate. Foremost among these offspring was Tommy (Hutomo Mandala Putra) Suharto, the youngest of the brood and Suharto's favourite son who, like his five siblings, benefited from the system of patronage set up by Suharto during his 32-year rule. Himself a keen sports-car racer, his many companies included the Lambrighini sports car company and a 75 percent stake in an 18-hole golf course and 22 luxury apartments in Ascot, Britain.
In 2000, Tommy, became the first (and as yet the only) member of the Suharto family to be tried and convicted in a court of law. He was given a 15-year sentence for ordering the murder of a Supreme Court judge who had found him guilty of a land scam and given him an 18-month sentence. But in 2005, in an unprecedented decision, he was released from jail after serving only one third of his sentence. These days, reports about the far-flung riches of Tommy Suharto and the cases against him pending in courts around the world are hardly ever off the front pages of Indonesian newspapers.
In the final years of his life, Suharto was obviously troubled by the persistent references to his greed and corruption. Perhaps thinking that he could clear his name by taking on one of the world's most prestigious news magazines, he decided to sue TIME for an article about his accumulated wealth. He filed a case suing the Asian edition of TIME magazine for defamation for an article it published in May 1999 titled 'Suharto Inc' which reported that he and his family had amassed a fortune of $15 billion. After two lower courts rejected the complaint, Indonesia's Supreme Court reversed the verdict and ordered the magazine, its editor and five staff members to pay Suharto the sum of $111 million. The Indonesian lawyer who acted for TIME, Todung Mulya Lubis, described the verdict as an affront to the principle of press freedom. He said: 'The supporters of Suharto are still within the government, within the parliament, within the judiciary within the business of society. They may not be as strong as in the past but they are still there.' He described the judgment of the Supreme Court as 'a blow for democracy, for the freedom of the press'.
While this charade was underway, an agency set up by the World Bank and the UN, the StAR (Stolen Assets Recovery) initiative, put Suharto at the very top of their list of former heads of state for stealing between $15 billion and $35 billion during his 32-year rule. The figures were based on investigations carried out by Transparency International.
Suharto departed this world without facing justice for his multiple crimes against humanity or for the extremely brutal campaign carried out by his troops in their attempt to crush the resistance movement in East Timor.
Although Suharto stood head and shoulders above other government leaders who ruthlessly repressed their populations, his crimes never gained the world attention accorded to other brutal leaders such as Pinochet or Pol Pot. Even when the massacres of 1965-66 were in full swing, world media coverage was meagre. Scanning British media coverage of those events, after I returned home to London, I found barely a mention of what was going on, and most of the reports I did find described the killings as the consequence of a 'civil war'.
Shortly after returning home in November 1971 following three years of political imprisonment, I happened to be sitting near a group of Amnesty officials who were discussing a report about torture. I asked them whether they would include Indonesia but they appeared to be unaware that torture in Indonesia was a problem. Comparing the press reports I saw about the massacres in Chile when Pinochet took power and reports about the 1965-66 killings, I was shocked by the lack of coverage devoted to Indonesia.
Suharto could count his blessings that, perhaps apart from The Netherlands where Indonesia was a familiar topic, he could, and did, get away with blue murder without much of the world even noticing.