Disgraced and vilified, Indonesia's ex-dictator Suharto dies aged 86

Sun Jan 27, 5:31 AM
By The Associated Press
 

JAKARTA - Former dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed Indonesia's communist movement and presided over 32 years of tough, corrupt rule that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died on Sunday. He was 86.

Suharto had been ailing in a hospital in the capital since Jan. 4 when he was admitted with failing kidneys, heart and lungs. Doctors prolonged his life for three weeks through dialysis and a ventilator, but he lost consciousness and stopped breathing on his own overnight before slipping into a coma Sunday.

A statement issued by chief presidential doctor Marjo Subiandono said he was declared dead at 1:10 p.m. local time. The cause of death was given as multi-organ failure. Doctors did not try to revive him when his heart stopped beating because it was too weak, said Dr. Joko Raharjo. "All his children were at his bedside," he said.

The office of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced a week of national mourning, calling for flags to be lowered to half-staff, and the body taken by motorcade to the family home.

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, the U.S. Cold War ally's departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable villa on a leafy lane in the capital.

Suharto had ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian nation of some 6,000 inhabited islands that stretch across more than 4,800 kilometres.

Since being forced from power, he had been in and out of hospital after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. Blood transfusions and a pacemaker prolonged his life, but he suffered from lung, kidney, liver and heart problems. Suharto was vilified as one of the world's most brutal rulers and was accused of overseeing a graft-ridden reign. But poor health - and continuing corruption, critics charge - kept him from court after he was chased from office by widespread unrest at the peak of the Asian financial crisis.

The bulk of political killings blamed on Suharto occurred in the 1960s, soon after he seized power. In later years, some 300,000 people were slain, disappeared or were jailed in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua, human rights groups and the United Nations say. Suharto's successors as head of state - B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - vowed to end

Some noted Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability, when fuel and rice were affordable.

But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia's vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the nation's wealth to benefit his cronies and family like a mafia don. Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, said the graft effectively robbed "Indonesia of some of the most golden decades, and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle class country."

"When Indonesia does finally go back and redo history, (its people) will realize that Suharto is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century," Winters added.

Those who profited from Suharto's rule made sure he was never portrayed in a harsh light at home, Winters said, so even though he was an "iron-fisted, brutal, cold-blooded dictator," he was able to stay in his native country. When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.

During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which didn't oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia's youngest country with a UN-sponsored plebiscite in 1999. Suharto's wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.