I doubt anyone will be sad to hear that Haji Mohammad Suharto, whose brutal and bloody dictatorship set Indonesia’s development back a generation, whose graft and nepotism turned what could have been a wealthy country into a poor one, is dead.
He ruled Indonesia for thirty-three years, until mass protests drove him to resign in 1998.
Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army’s six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt.Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces and promoted himself to four-star general.
Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region’s bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.
Over the next year, Suharto eased out of office Indonesia’s first post-independence president, Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto’s presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.
Wikipedia briefly notes the assistance provided by the CIA in naming and locating many of those who were “purged”, but doesn’t spend as much time on the support he received from the US as, say, Chomsky.
But he wasn’t just a murdering bastard, he was also a thieving bastard.
Suharto’s economic policies, based on unsecured borrowing by his cronies, dramatically unraveled shortly before he was toppled in May 1998. Indonesia is still recovering from what economists called the worst economic meltdown anywhere in 50 years.
Still, he claimed the mantle of anti-Communism, so the US loved him. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were pleased to green-light his brutalization of East Timor, where his troops “purged” about a third of the population. Apparently he couldn’t kill enough people to satisfy our bloodlust. Or our fear.
Good riddance.
