Mourned by some very wealthy people, and given credit for Indonesia's wealth, Suharto is dead.
Suharto was a general in the Indonesian army. He overthrew a communist dictator, Sukarno in '65. As dictator of the extensive archipelago, Suharto was responsible for the killing of at least half a million people.
At the time Suharto took power, communism and its terrorist cousins were a prevalent threat, and it is possible that Suharto felt that what he did was necessary to prevent Indonesia sliding into anarchy. We will never know.
Suharto had a close working relationship with the ALP, obtaining permission to invade Timor from Whitlam and receiving military aid from Keating.
There was prosperity during Suharto's reign, but then Indonesia might have been richer and better had Suharto not been corrupt as well as murderous.
Suharto 'was Indonesia's Pol Pot'
ReplyDeletefrom news.com.au
THE widow of Indonesia's founding president Sukarno says she will never forgive his successor Suharto, likening him to Pol Pot for his repression.
Suharto seized power from Sukarno in 1965-66 and ruled with an iron fist for another three decades.
Suharto was buried today in a state funeral in central Java after a long illness.
"I don't want to lash out at a dead man but I cannot forgive Suharto," said Japanese-born Ratna Sari Dewi Sukarno, Sukarno's third wife.
"He was Indonesia's Pol Pot," she said, referring to the late leader of Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge.
Ms Dewi, a former bar hostess born as Naoko Nemoto, married Sukarno at age 19 in 1962 after he was charmed by her on a state visit to Tokyo.
After Sukarno died under house arrest in 1970, she returned to Japan where she has become a television personality and runs a jewellery and cosmetics business.
Despite Indonesia's economic progress under Suharto, his tenure was marked by repression, from the killings of at least half a million communists and their sympathisers from 1966 to invading East Timor and quelling separatist movements in Aceh and Papua.
Ms Dewi blamed Suharto both for the death of her husband - "the man who declared independence and became Indonesia's first president" - and for the mass killings throughout the country.
"Although he had a soft face, he could be cruel and heartless at the same time," said Ms Dewi, who met Suharto several times.
"You could not tell what he was like on the inside. What he said and what he did were two different things," she said.
Suharto also left a legacy of corruption, bleeding up to $US35 billion ($40bn) out of the Indonesian economy, according to the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International.
"Even today, many Indonesians suffer from that legacy and the income gap continues to widen," Ms Dewi said.
She scolded Suharto for not making court appearances late in his life to answer corruption charges, citing illness.
"He ended his life living among friends," she said. "I think he was a very lucky man."
Suharto was laid to rest with full military honours in his family mausoleum in the town of Matesih in a state funeral attended by many of the world's leading political figures.
Condolences also poured in from around the world.
He died of organ failure yesterday at the age of 86.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave a short speech as close relatives covered his coffin with rose and jasmin petals during the ceremony.
He was buried next to his wife, Siti Suhartinah, who died in 1996.
Hundreds of mourners gathered along the flag-lined road leading to the mausoleum on the main island of Java to pay their respects as his funeral processsion passed.
Terrible cost of growth under Suharto
ReplyDeleteBy Edward Aspinall
THE death of former President Suharto is both a momentous occasion and a non-event for Indonesians.
It's a chance to reflect on the progress Indonesia has made since he was forced from office almost 10 years ago, as well as to confront many areas of unfinished business.
Yet it won't change the country he ruled for 32 years.
Suharto's death also recalls one of the most difficult and contentious foreign policy challenges that Australian governments have confronted over recent decades: how to deal with a large and important neighbour ruled by a non-democratic and military-based regime.
Australian governments faced a dilemma. On the one hand, most leaders from Gough Whitlam onward wanted to bring Australia closer to Asia.
They believed that doing so would help Australia's search for a post-colonial identity and that it was crucial for the country's economic future.
Indonesia was important because of its size, its proximity and its powerful influence in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Australian governments, like those of other Western countries, also saw much to admire in Suharto. They viewed him as a Cold War ally against communism. They liked the stability he brought, his economic policies, and the way that he opened his country up to foreign investment.
Tim Fischer, the former deputy prime minister in the Howard government, went so far as to publicly laud Suharto as "perhaps the world's greatest figure in the latter half of the 20th century".
On the other hand, the Suharto regime was repressive and military-based. Suharto was re-elected every five years by a showcase parliament, most members of which he appointed.
He came to power in 1966, after he put down a coup attempt the previous year which he blamed on the communist party.
Over the next two years, an estimated 500,000 Indonesians accused of being communists or sympathisers died in a series of massacres in which the army played a leading role.
Tens of thousands of leftist political prisoners including Indonesia's best known author Pramoedya Ananta Toer were detained in prison camps until the late 1970s.
Although his regime had many supporters who appreciated the economic growth it brought, it also continued to repress critics throughout the country.
It was especially brutal in provinces like Aceh, Papua and East Timor where there were independence movements. In East Timor, many thousands of people died as a result of war and famine after Suharto's army invaded the territory in 1975.
Elsewhere in the thousands of islands which make up Indonesia, repression was less intense but it also was an ever-present possibility which stifled creativity and gave rise to deadening conformity.
Suharto's domestic critics accused him and his family of amassing a huge fortune, estimated at being up to $US35 billion ($39 billion).
However, nobody knows for sure the extent of his wealth. Much of the money Suharto amassed was not for his personal use but was instead kept in private foundations which he used as slush funds to reward supporters and buy off critics.
East Timor was especially important for many Australians, not least because of the killing of five Australian journalists in 1975 during the Indonesian invasion.
Successive Australian governments resolved this dilemma by putting pragmatism first.
Beginning with Gough Whitlam, they strove to develop close and supportive relationships with Suharto and his government.
The relationship reached its peak when Paul Keating was prime minister. Mr Keating developed a close personal relationship with the Indonesian ruler.
It was said that he succeeded in part because he treated Suharto with deference and respect. In 1995 the two leaders agreed to a security pact: this angered many Australians who saw it as a betrayal of East Timor, but it was no less surprising in Indonesia. It seemed to contradict Indonesia's strong tradition of non-alignment.
Indonesia today has changed almost beyond recognition: it has a democratically-elected government, the political role of the military is much reduced, and dramatic progress has been made in basic political freedoms. But Suharto continues to cast a long shadow, and the legacies of his rule include pervasive corruption and military impunity for past human rights abuses.
Edward Aspinall is a researcher at the Australian National University and editor of the web magazine Inside Indonesia.
What to do when the devil you knew dies
ReplyDeletePiers Akerman
INDONESIAN dictator Suharto’s death has highlighted the challenging moral and diplomatic high-wire act Australian governments conduct in our region.
On the one hand, Suharto was a stabilising force, holding together a nation of 230 million people from 300 ethnic groups speaking several hundred languages and living on a string of more than 13,000 islands.
On the other, he was a brutal and corrupt militaristic authoritarian, who paid scant regard for human rights and was accused of being responsible for the deaths of up to one million of his countrymen.
For more than three decades, from his emergence in 1965 to his downfall in 1998, Australia had to carefully balance its approach, treading a tightrope between encouraging Suharto’s economic success, albeit redolent of corruption which stretched from his family right through the military, and acknowledging human rights abuses that shocked the world.
That Australia managed to do so for more than 30 years is a tribute to the cynical pragmatism of diplomacy.
Former prime minister Paul Keating, who at times enjoyed a relationship with Suharto that appeared almost filial such was his respect for the ageing dictator, went perhaps too far in his subservience to the Indonesian leader but did manage to forge a link with the Indonesian government that was closer than previous governments had achieved.
His successor, John Howard, achieved a more level and even closer relationship with Suharto’s successors, managing to engage the Indonesians on the question of their military occupation of East Timor and agree to Indonesia’s withdrawal from the former Portugese colony.
In their approaches, Labor was more ready to forgive Indonesia and Suharto its gross record of breaches of human rights, though its Left was more condemnatory.
The Coalition was more inclined to encourage the Indonesian leadership through references to Australia’s historic championing of Indonesian independence in the wake of World War II, and particularly in its infancy when Australia moved that the new nation be recognised by the fledgling UN.
While both sides of Australian politics deplored aspects of Suharto’s military rule, to greater or lesser degrees, they both agreed that overall the military strongman was a “good thing” for our region despite the blood on his hands and the ill-gotten billions in his family’s secret bank accounts.
Ignoring the mass arrests, murders and corruption was the price necessary for the undoubted stability the dictator brought to the region.
Human rights activists might choke on the reality, but that’s how it has worked.
Had Australia dug in its heels over the numerous instances of torture, mass relocation or corruption, our relationship with Indonesia would undoubtedly be far more fraught with difficulty than it is.
While there can be no doubt Keating’s warm relationship with Suharto was closer than any previous Australian and Indonesian leaders enjoyed, the horror of the Bali bombings and the aid effort generated by the Boxing Day tsunami bound Australia and Indonesia even more tightly in a relationship that was more respectful and more fully engaging than the personal ties between Keating and the late dictator.
Nevertheless, we must realise that it has been the case that Australia was complicit in encouraging the Suharto regime, as corrupt and brutal as it was, for the greater good of Australia and our region.
And no doubt we will have to back strongmen (and women) in the future when it is in our national interest.
As well-intentioned as we all may wish to be, and this has domestic implications also, it will always be the case that the side of the angels will not always be the side that delivers what is the best for Australia. That’s why we have diplomats who can nod and smile while actually doing nothing, an art at which current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd excels.
There is an old saw which says you have to be cruel to be kind. Critics of the conservative parties might say that the Coalition understands this perfectly - and has little difficulty in inflicting cruelty.
But pragmatists on the Labor side are just as familiar with the saying and have shown from time to time that Labor can deliver pain if it believes political gains will follow.
While historically Labor has shown no reluctance to sup with the neighbourhood’s biggest dictator to prove itself in international matters (despite the muffled cries of outrage from within its own ranks), it will soon have to consider whether it is prepared to take a hard line against its Left on domestic issues such as industrial affairs and indigenous issues.
Signs are the Rudd Government will opt for the softer options at home and abroad.
It’s decision to cut and run from Iraq despite evidence the US surge is winning support and the battle has turned; its decision to wind back aspects of the intervention in the Northern Territory, notably the reintroduction of the permit system which allows back-door apartheid to flourish; and its refusal to stand up to the union movement on wage demands though they would fuel domestic inflation, show its spinelessness.
Tough times produce tough men, like Suharto, Keating and Howard, and we are in for tough times. It’s a pity there is a shortage of tough men to take on the challenge.