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Indonesia News Digest 4 – January 25-31, 2008

News & issues

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 News & issues

Consumers protest commodity price rise

Jakarta Post - January 26, 2008

Jakarta – Housewives have protested the soaring prices of basic commodities which have left traditional markets and shopping centers empty, nationwide.

Nurin Agustion, a 35-year-old mother of two young children in Pundak Payung, Semarang, said she could only afford 15 kilograms of rice where previously she could get 20. She said she has bought more local fish than meat or chicken and has reduced her usage of cooking oil because of the soaring prices of commodities including meat, palm oil, fruit and vegetables.

"I can not increase my daily budget because my husband's monthly income has not been raised. I have to manage our monthly budget carefully so that we can survive this difficult situation," she told The Jakarta Post.

Traditional markets and shopping centers, including department stores and malls in urban areas in Central Java, have substantially quietened since the 2006 earthquake which shook the province and Yogyakarta.

"Following the quake many rice-belt areas in the two provinces could not meet their rice production targets," National Logistics Agency (Bulog) local office chief Indiarto said.

"This condition has been worsened by the soaring price of soybeans, the raw materials for tempeh and tofu, two primary foods in Java," he said.

Menik, A fishmonger at Depok Beach in Yogyakarta, said her sales had dropped by 50 percent over the past few weeks with the lack of buyers following the soaring prices of basic commodities in the province.

"Before the price increases, my sales were around Rp 1 million a day but recently it has dropped to around Rp 500,000. I could earn on the average of Rp 40,000 a day," she told the Post.

Depok fishermen said they had to increase fish prices by 20 percent due to the soaring price of rare fuels, especially kerosene.

They said the prices could be stabilized if the government guaranteed the distribution of fuel to rural areas in the province.

Darmi, another fish trader, said she could understand the quiet fish market on the beach with the increased prices of all commodities which had weakened people's purchasing power.

Sumarti, a rice vendor at Beringhardjo traditional market in Yogyakarta, said the market was crowded for only a few hours in the morning but then became silent in the afternoons.

The price of C-4 rice rose to from Rp 5,300 to Rp 5,600 per liter, while regular cooking oil rose from Rp 9,000 to almost Rp 12,000 a liter.

The price of wheat flour went from Rp 5,500 to Rp 7,000 per kilogram.

"The price hikes have a lot to do with increased cost of transportation and have been triggered by the soaring prices of rice, eggs, chickens and soybeans," Sumarti said.

The Post correspondent in Batam, Riau Islands, reported that the price of consumption commodities had continued to soar in line with price increases in other provinces, despite the island's status as free-trade zone.

Local trade and industry office chief Achmad Hijazi said the prices of basic commodities in the province were similar to other provinces because all consumption commodities were supplied to the island from regions under government supervision and regulation.

"Local authorities are not allowed to import rice or other basic commodities directly from Vietnam, to maintain the price of basic commodities and protect local products," he said, adding that the soaring prices had affected the livelihoods of low-income earners on the island.

Household stress rises with higher food prices

Jakarta Post - January 26, 2008

Jakarta – Yati and her family have rarely eaten fried food in the last few months. They have not committed themselves to a healthy lifestyle – they just can't afford cooking oil or meat.

"I never buy tempeh anymore because we can't afford it. All we eat is rice and eggs and if we have vegetables we boil them in plain water," the resident of Cipinang Besar in East Jakarta told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

Yati was one of many housewives who attended a rally to protest against rising food prices organized by the Jakarta Residents Forum (FAKTA) in front of the Presidential Palace in Central Jakarta on Thursday.

Basic ingredients have gone up significantly in price since the start of the year. Soybeans recently experienced a massive price hike, driving some 5,000 tempeh and tofu producers to protest.

The price of eggs has almost doubled, with one kilogram increasing from Rp 7,000 (USD 74 cents) to Rp 12,000. The price of cooking oil has also jumped from Rp 4,000 to Rp 11,000 in the past five years.

Yati, a mother of three, said she found it hard to buy her family's everyday needs.

"I'm just so confused. I don't know what else we can go without to save money," she said, adding that one of her children no longer attended school.

Yati's husband works as a laborer, bringing home around Rp 1 million per month.

In Sunter, North Jakarta, Slamat, who is a squatter and works as a bus driver, said he was especially burdened by the rising cost of cooking oil. He said he and many other squatters who live in the area often do not have enough money to buy basic ingredients to cook with. "And now we are finding it much more difficult as cooking oil prices have gone up," he said.

FAKTA head Azas Tigor Nainggolan said the government has not been doing enough to help the city's poor. "Some of these poor people have to go to unimaginable lengths to survive, such as eating old rice," he said.

"The government should be more concerned about this. Perhaps the government could subsidize shopping or give food away, but they are not doing anything at the moment to help ease the suffering of poor people."

Azas said the rising price of food may have other long term consequences, including a nutrition crisis among Jakarta's children. "Young generations in Indonesia may become lazy, simply because they do not have access to healthy meals," he said.

He said the government should do something to help poor people or risk losing their vote in the next election.

"The government should stop protecting the interests of rich people. They already have enough to protect themselves. The government should protect those who need protection – the city's poor," he said. (anw, ewd)

No changes seen after a decade of reform

Jakarta Post - January 31, 2008

Jakarta – The reform movement that started 10 years ago has failed to produce significant changes because of the corrupt political and economic systems inherited from the New Order regime, former campus activists said Wednesday.

Dozens of former campus activists, including noted economists Sjahrir and Rizal Ramli, and Soekotjo Soeparto, a member of the Judicial Commission, attended a one-day forum to mark the 30th anniversary of the Jakarta Student Senate Council (1977-1978).

Sjahrir said the nation's elite were holdovers from the system set into place during the 32-year regime of recently deceased former president Soeharto. He also cited elements of the country's media as retaining entrenched attitudes and biases from that period.

"Who do you think owns those media outlets? Ownership of capital has not changed since 10 years ago," said the member of the Presidential Advisory Board.

"The elite still treat Soeharto well... the media have been saying a lot of good things about him since he died," said Sjahrir, referring to the nation's second president who passed away last week after a three-week hospitalization for multiple organ failure.

Massive student rallies forced Soeharto to step down in 1998 as the country struggled with the economic crisis that hit in mid- 1997.

Despite allegations of corruption and human rights abuses, Soeharto was never been brought to court to face criminal charges. Some parties have now proposed the government grant him national hero status.

Soekotjo, once a coordinator for the student activist movement, said the reform movement has made strides toward reforming the legal system, but the government's lack of commitment had prevented any significant change.

"The court system, in fact, has become the most corrupt governmental institution in the past three years," he said, referring to several survey results, including one conducted by Transparency International Indonesia.

"The government has adopted many new legal policies, including the amendment of the Constitution and the endorsement of new laws," he said. "However, we have yet to see any results because there is no longer a clear orientation and strategy in the reform."

Rizal Ramli, coordinating minister for the economy under president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, told the same forum the government needed to adopt a development strategy that could benefit all levels of society.

"We have to shift from the exclusive development model of the Soeharto era to an inclusive one so all levels of society have the same chance to enjoy the results of reform," he said.

Akbar Tandjung, former head of Golkar Party, the dominant party during Soeharto's reign, told the forum the multi-political party system risked impeding the reform movement that had set it into place.

"We are supposed to have adopted a presidential system of government, but (what I see) now is more like a parliamentary democracy," he said. (lln)

Indonesia lacks quality leadership, says seminar

Jakarta Post - January 25, 2008

Jakarta – After nearly 10 years, democracy in Indonesia has not produced quality leadership at central and regional levels, a seminar concluded Wednesday.

"Quality political parties, capable of producing quality leaders, are essential to create a good democracy in a country," State Secretary Hatta Radjasa announced at a seminar presented and attended by leading political figures.

Hatta said leaders did not necessarily have to be members of a party. "Individual leaders who are not from parties would enrich and challenge Indonesia's political leadership," he said.

After 32 years under an authoritarian regime, Indonesia became a democracy in 1998. Since that time the new democracy has seen four presidents and a grueling fight between dozens of political parties.

Hatta said a political candidate's recruitment and training would be valuable to help political parties build reliable and quality leadership.

He said since Indonesia had adopted democracy into its national political system, it had been challenged to design the "software" and "hardware" of a democracy.

"The culture of society-based democracy is the most suitable form of democracy for this country," said Hatta, who is a National Mandate Party executive.

Hatta said democracy is not only a tool to reach power, but also is a set of humanitarian values held by society, which should be able to drive change.

Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) secretary general Pramono Anung said political parties had relied too much on their political figures' charisma alone. While recruitment of party members remains ineffective, parties will continue to fall short of finding quality leaders and the much-needed circulation of party elite will be absent, Anung said.

To ensure political stability, Pramono suggested that Indonesia limits the number of political parties eligible to contest in elections. "It's not only about reducing the number of political parties, but also about ideology," Anas said.

Indonesian politics has been marked by two mainstream ideologies; nationalism and Islam. Muslim-based parties, however, have never won enough votes to control the parliament. Despite the fact that Muslims make up the majority of Indonesia's population those parties have steadily lost public support in elections. Nationalist-oriented parties meanwhile have managed to woo support from Muslim voters.

Anas Urbaningrum, deputy chairman of the Democrat Party, said recruitment of leaders would require improvement of the election system. (rff)

 Demos, actions, protests...

People take to the streets as prices skyrocket

Detik.com - January 31, 2008

Bagus Kurniawan, Yogyakarta – Hundreds of protesters from the Yogyakarta People's and Worker Alliance (ARPY) held an action in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta on Thursday January 31.

The action started at 10am at the Gadjah Mada University campus roundabout in Bulaksumur. They had only one demand, bring down the price of basic commodities.

The demonstration was organised by a coalition of groups including the National Student League for Democracy (LMND), the Yogyakarta Association of Islamic Students (HMI), the Kinasih Trade Union, the Yogyakarta Non-government Organisation Forum (Forum LSM DIY) and victims of land evictions from the Parangtritis tourist area south of Yogyakarta.

After gathering at the roundabout, they then gave speeches. An open pickup van complete with a sound system was parked in front of the crowd of demonstrators and turned into a stage. The protesters also brought posters with message such as "Basic commodity prices skyrocket the people suffer", "Reduce prices", "Be on guard against the fake reformists" and "Increase workers' wages".

In a speech, action coordinator Tini Dawu said that the increase in the price of basic commodities such as cooking oil, rice, wheat and soybean over the last few months has resulted in additional suffering for the poor. Wages and incomes are already inadequate to support a family.

The government meanwhile prefers to import basic goods such as rice on the grounds that domestic production is no longer adequate to meet demand. Business meanwhile prefers to export crude palm oil on the grounds that the overseas market price is higher. As a consequence the price of cooking oil has increased and ordinary people can no longer afford to buy it.

"We have never received cheap rice for the poor. Imports continue to be opened up so as a result the poor become the victims", shouted Dawu. They also noted that the present government has failed to hold down or address the increase in the price of basic commodities such as rice, cooking oil and corn flour.

Following the speeches, the protesters then held a long-march towards the Agung Building on Jl. Ahmad Yani via Jl. Cik Ditiro, the Gramedia intersection, the Yogyakarta monument, the Yogyakarta Regional House of Representatives building and the Yogyakarta governor's office on Jl. Malioboro. The action did not encounter tight security from police with only one patrol car escorting the demonstrators during the march. (bgs/umi)

[Translated by James Balowski.]

Hundreds of protesters in Medan oppose pardon for Suharto

Detik.com - January 31, 2008

Khairul Ikhwan, Medan – On Thursday afternoon, January 31, hundreds of people from the Try Suharto People's Committee (Koras) held a protest action in front of the North Sumatra Regional House of Representatives building on Jl. Imam Bonjol in Medan. They were calling on the government not to give amnesty to former President Suharto and continue to try the perpetrators of human rights crimes against civilians during the New Order period.

The demonstrators came from 22 different organisations in Medan, the provincial capital of North Sumatra, including the 1965 Committee for the Victims of Human Rights Violations (KKP HAM '65), Formadas, the Indonesian Student Union (SMI), Public Transparency (TP), the Medan Indonesian National Students Movement (GMNI Medan), the National Students Front (FMN), the peasant organising group Agra, the Makassar Legal Aid Foundation (Bakumsu), the North Sumatra women's group Perempuan Mahardhika National Network, the Working People's Association (PRP), the National Students Forum (FMN), the North Sumatra Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras Sumut), the cultural organisation Lentera, Kotib, the Society for Victims of the New Order (Pakorba), the Witness Protection Coalition (KPS), Nusantara Human Rights (HAM Nusantara), the Pro-Democracy Students Movement (Gema Prodem), YLPPHN, Positip, the North Sumatra Indonesian National Labour Front for Struggle (FNPBI Sumut) and the North Sumatra National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas Sumut).

The Protesters, who brought a number of posters and also gave speeches, called on the government to seize all of the assets belonging to Suharto, his family and cronies, because Suharto's wealth is a result of corruption, collusion and nepotism. The also urged the government to set the nation's history straight, particularly the humanitarian tragedy between 1965-1966 which was distorted by the Suharto regime. "Suharto himself is a human rights criminal", said Jasman, one of the participants in the action.

Protesters reminded the government to implement People's Consultative Assembly Decree No. XI/1998, which orders the investigation into corruption, collusion and nepotism involving Soeharto and his cronies, and opposed the government's decision announcing seven days of national morning and for flags to be flown a half mast, because Suharto is not a national hero. (rul/asy)

[Translated by James Balowski.]

More mass actions, avoid parliament and National Monument

Detik.com - January 25, 2008

Maryadi, Jakarta – As was the case earlier this week, on Friday January 25 Jakarta will again be rocked by protest actions. Drivers are advised to avoid locations where demonstrations are taking place so as not to get caught in traffic.

Protests and mass actions will take place at the National Monument roundabout and the House of Representatives (DPR) building. In addition to this, there will also be festivities in other parts of the city.

Time: 8am-8pm
Place: Gor Ragunan
Organised by: Indonesian Traditional Karate Federation
Type: Gashuku, Trail

Time: 8am
Place: PT Tunggal Maju Asri Tangerang
Organised by: Employees
Type: Protest action

Time: 1pm-4pm
Place: National Monument roundabout
Organised by: Association of Indonesian Nutritionists
Type: Solidarity action

Time: 2pm
Place: DPR building
Organised by: Social Movement to Safeguard the People's Money
Type: Protest action

Time: 2pm-5pm
Place: National Monument roundabout
Organised by: Nahdlatul Ulama Anniversary Monthly Committee
Type: Solidarity Action

[Translated by James Balowski.]

 Death of a dictator

Editorial: Suharto, September 1965 and East Timor

The Daily Star - January 31, 2008

Syed Badrul Ahsan – Mahathir Mohamad's assessment of the recently deceased Suharto does not hold up to scrutiny. The former Malaysian prime minister, while paying tribute to the late Indonesian dictator, has informed us all that reports of General Suharto having had any prior knowledge of the 1965 coup in Indonesia are nonsense.

Now place Mahathir's comment beside that of Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafie, once Malaysia's deputy prime minister. In May 1994, addressing a group of South Asian media personalities in Kathmandu as a special guest, Shafie left everyone surprised by his revelation that towards the end of 1964 the Malaysian government, then led by Tunku Abdur Rahman, had made contact with an Indonesian military officer named Suharto about the prospects for a change of regime in Jakarta. He did not elaborate, probably out of a realisation that he had already said more than he needed to.

And then there is the strange case of Colonel Latief, one of the officers involved in the terrible happenings on the night of September 30, 1965. Soon after Suharto was forced from power in 1998, a long-imprisoned Latief expected the new president, B.J. Habibie, to set him free.

Habibie had already released from long confinement a good number of former PKI sympathisers and supporters and military officers General Suharto had put away once he gained power after the chaos that had been given out as an attempt by the communists to seize control in Jakarta. As Latief would recall, he was with General Suharto on September 30.

Plans had already been put in place by Suharto, with Latief and other officers, to kidnap seven generals allegedly plotting a coup against President Achmad Sukarno, produce them before the president and thereby force them to reveal details of the "conspiracy."

Suharto and Latief were, from such a perspective, pro-Sukarno officers, or at least Suharto tried giving that impression. In the event, forces loyal to Suharto kidnapped the seven generals, and six of them were murdered soon after their abduction by Suharto loyalists. Latief, with a number of other officers, was quickly placed in imprisonment. General Suharto then let the world in on the news that the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), which at that point had a membership of 20,000,000 Indonesians, had conspired to kill the generals. It was a lie. It remains a lie.

In point of fact, the PKI, though it enjoyed close links with President Sukarno and his government and certainly harboured ambitions of taking power someday, was not at all involved with the tragic events of September 30, 1965. Like all Indonesians, it was taken by surprise when Suharto and his cohorts seized the state and was positively horrified when the Indonesian army, armed with a list of 5,000 suspected communists provided by the United States embassy in Jakarta, went after its members and supporters.

In the weeks and months that followed September 1965, Suharto and his soldiers let loose a bloodbath, killing as many as 2,000,000 Indonesians and placing 700,000 more in prison without trial. A systematic campaign was undertaken to wipe out the PKI, strip President Sukarno of his authority, and establish friendly links with the West.

In the process, D.N. Aidit, the widely respected leader of the PKI, was kidnapped and murdered. No trace of him or his remains was to be found.

Dr. Subandrio, as foreign minister, the country's respected international face, was arrested, tried for his "role" in the murder of the six generals and sentenced to death in October 1966. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Subandrio was to spend twenty-nine years in jail. When he emerged free (he died in 2004), he still refused to reveal his side of the story and appeared intent on not upsetting Suharto. It was similar, lingering fear that prevented thousands of Indonesians finally able to make their way out of prison from speaking of their experiences in the post-September 1965 period.

With Suharto now dead at the ripe old age of eighty-six, it remains a travesty of justice that the Indonesian judicial system was never able to bring him to trial and punish him for all the crimes committed by his brutal regime. And with brutality came venality.

In thirty two years in power, a period which saw him engineer his re-election by parliament over and over as a matter of routine, Suharto gave free rein to his children and his cronies as they swiftly and brazenly established their hold on the economy. All Indonesians knew of the corruption that Suharto's children indulged in. None of them knew of the means by which the tide could be turned, for the Golkar democracy (and it was fake democracy which ensured that the army and its civilian loyalists, through a political party they called Golkar, would always guarantee Suharto's hold on power) the dictator had put in place was a system that rendered the regime immune to prosecution of any kind. Besides, there was the added measure of Suharto's friends in the West finding in him a strong base for an upholding of their political and economic interests in the country.

The opportunities that opened up for it in September 1965 had been translated into privileges the West was not going to fritter away through asking Suharto to democratise his regime.

You only have to hear what John Pilger has to say in his seminal work, The New Rulers of the World. Months after the military seized power under Suharto, notes the Australian journalist, representatives of Western multinationals, with men from the new Indonesian dispensation in ingratiating attendance, gathered in Europe to stake their claims to Indonesia's natural resources. Of course, it was all couched in soothing language. These firms were all ready to assist Jakarta in harnessing its resources in the interest of its people.

Today, as you survey the scene from this distance in time, you realise only too well whose interests the 1965 coup served. Western firms greedily went into Indonesia to have Indonesian workers make products for buyers in Europe and America. A worker who produced a pair of Nike trainers in a Jakarta factory was paid scandalous wages that equalled no more than the price of the strings used on a single pair of trainers. But the firms in the West were happy and, in Jakarta, Suharto's family was ecstatic with all the money it was funnelling into its coffers through commandeering nearly everything it set its sights on.

This, then, is the legacy that General Suharto leaves behind. And more. It was his regime that left the people of East Timor, today Timor Leste, traumatised for twenty four years following the Indonesian army's conquest and colonisation of the island once the old Portuguese colonial power departed in 1975. The Timorese independence leader Xanana Gusmao was arrested and taken away to Jakarta as soldiers went about disbanding his Fretelin party.

Of the 650,000 Timorese who inhabited the island in December 1975 (for that is when the Indonesian military invaded), 250,000 would lose their lives in their long struggle for freedom and at the hands of Suharto's forces. US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, meeting Suharto on the eve of the Timor invasion, quickly led the general to believe that Washington would look away as his army went into occupying the island.

In 1966, as the bloodbath inaugurated by General Suharto went on, the philosopher Bertrand Russell served a severe indictment on what the regime was engaged in. "In four months," said he, "five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years."

Few will shed tears for Suharto. Those who will, and do, must be counted among those in whom the principle of the dignity of the individual has gone grossly missing. Nothing can be more demeaning for the world we inhabit than the sight of men who scale the peaks soaked in the blood of others, stay on top in defiance of all decency, and then pass into death without morality and the wheels of justice having had them pay for their misdeeds.

[Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.]

Suharto still an enigma in death

Canberra Times - January 31, 2008

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.]

Suharto critics break silence

The Australian - January 30, 2008

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – The old general is in the ground and, in theory, Indonesia is marking seven days of mourning, with flags across the nation being flown at half-mast. But already the scramble to assess Suharto's legacy is producing some rabid results.

Although thousands lined roads in Jakarta and Solo, Central Java, on Monday to farewell the dictator of 32 years, many more are finally saying in the open what was previously kept in the parlour.

And that is that Indonesia's former president was an out-and-out crook, as are his children and the vast network of cronies who profited from his long rule.

Endy Bayuni, managing editor of the English-language Jakarta Post newspaper, put it as strongly as any with an opinion piece yesterday declaring that "Suharto... left the country in just as chaotic a condition as when he took over from Sukarno in 1966".

What's more, Bayuni argued, "he left the nation with a huge debt our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to shoulder – but not his children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren, who have looted the nation's oil, gas and forestry money".

Any such assessment during Suharto's time at the helm would have been not just anathema but treasonous: he dealt with opponents by silencing them.

The great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer spent 14 years in the hard labour camp of Buru Island merely for displeasing the regime, but as historian John Roosa pointed out in a biting obituary this week, Pramoedya could find nothing interesting to write about the man who jailed him.

"For him, Suharto was... a reversion back to Java's colonial-era aristocrats who bullied their subjects for the benefit of European business interests, yet prided themselves on their great cosmic powers, and remained narrow-minded and indifferent to the science and arts of the Europe that had conquered them," Roosa wrote in the Australian-produced journal Inside Indonesia.

Independent Indonesian blogger Treespotter, known for often maudlin analysis of his own society, posted within minutes of Suharto's death on Sunday that the 86-year-old had "symbolised an Asian dream and a lifetime of opportunity for many and yet he took more than we could ever afford to make it happen".

On criticism that media coverage of Suharto's decline and end was deliberately angled to picture him in a good light, media analyst Effendi Ghazali, from the popular television political satire program Republic Mimpi, noted: "Suddenly, everyone had amnesia. In the final days, they were like a choir singing for Suharto."

Commentators noted that the death just hours after Suharto of M. Jusuf Ronodipuro, the soldier who broadcast Indonesia's declaration of independence in 1945, went almost unmarked.

Debate raged yesterday over whether it was too soon to declare Suharto a national hero, with opponents claiming the status would be akin to forgiving him for his transgressions.

In fact, editorialised the national daily Koran Tempo, it was "extremely important" that the civil case over the misappropriation of more than 11.5 trillion rupiah ($1.4 billion), as well as investigations into other allegations against his family, continued.

And human rights lawyer Rafendi Djamin warned in Jakarta that since Suharto had now escaped all possibility of criminal charges, the matter should stand as "a lesson for the Government to settle outstanding cases as quickly as possible, including those suspected of being related to him".

Suharto's children to 'inherit' civil lawsuit

Straits Times (Singapore) - January 30, 2008

Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – An Indonesian court yesterday said a civil lawsuit against former president Suharto will now target his children, amid calls to pursue his family's allegedly ill- gotten wealth.

Mr Suharto's six children are seen to represent the worst excesses of his 32-year rule, building business empires through cronyism and kickbacks.

Their assets in businesses ranging from airlines, hotels and toll roads to TV and radio stations were worth up to US$35 billion (S$50 billion), according to 2004 data from Transparency International, an international non-governmental organisation that aims to curb corruption.

Previous efforts to take Mr Suharto's children to court and recover the state money have fallen short of expectations, as his strong influence lingered even after his ouster in 1998. But now that he is out of the picture, his children have less protection.

Chief among the corruption cases is the ongoing civil lawsuit filed by the government last year to reclaim US$240 million and 185.9 billion rupiah (S$28 million) in state money allegedly misused by Mr Suharto's charity foundation, Supersemar.

According to the prosecution, money raised by the foundation for education scholarships ended up in banks and companies owned by his friends and children.

The South Jakarta district court yesterday postponed a hearing for two weeks as the country is in mourning, but ordered Mr Suharto's lawyers to name an "heir" to represent the case.

The chairman of the Indonesian Chapter of Transparency International, Mr Todung Mulya Lubis, said Mr Suharto's death should free the government of the reluctance of the last three administrations to pursue assets stolen by his family and cronies. "Now that he is dead, the obstacles are gone," he said.

In his eulogy on Monday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had called Mr Suharto a hero and urged the nation to pray for him. But he did not mention "forgiveness", which some interpret as a sign that the legal process against the Suharto family would continue.

"A person can be a respectable figure with a lot of good deeds, but he should still take responsibility for the things he did wrong – in this case his family too," said lawyer Bambang Widjojanto of Indonesian Corruption Watch.

Earlier this month, Attorney-General Hendarman Supanji had proposed an out-of-court settlement, but Mr Suharto's family refused and wanted the case dropped. One of his lawyers, Mr Otto Cornelis Kaligis, yesterday said: "He was never proven guilty in the criminal court, so we urged this case to be closed."

Of the Suharto children, only youngest son Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra has served time. Eldest daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana and second son Bambang Trihatmodjo have been investigated for graft several times but were never charged.

"It is now up to the government to pursue the cases against the family," said Mr Bambang. "But once they do that, there must be strong control over the judicial system to prevent briberies and any irregularities."

Corruption charges

Suharto: He faced a civil lawsuit filed by the government last year for embezzling funds from the Yayasan Supersemar Charitable Foundation. Money raised for scholarships allegedly went to banks and companies belonging to his children and cronies.

He was charged with embezzling US$600 million in public funds in 2000, but never set foot in court due to poor health. That case was dropped when his condition declined in 2006.

Youngest son Hutomo 'Tommy' Mandala Putra: An 18-month sentence for graft was overturned in the Supreme Court, but he was given a 15-year jail sentence in 2002 for ordering the assassination of a Supreme Court judge while on the run. He served five years.

His clove monopoly business in the 1990s is under investigation.

Tobacco firms were forced to buy cloves – for cigarettes – from a board he chaired at marked-up prices, allegedly earning him 1.4 trillion rupiah (S$213 million).

The government is seeking to seize millions of dollars in his now-frozen bank account in BNP Paribas on British tax haven Guernsey island. One of his companies was said to have deposited US$45.6 million in the bank in July 1998, weeks after Mr Suharto stepped down.

Eldest daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana: Prosecutors in 2003 dropped a probe into alleged graft in a deal involving her pipeline company and state-owned oil company Pertamina.

She was investigated in 2004 for allegedly receiving kickbacks over the sale of 100 British armoured vehicles to Indonesia in 1990s, but was never charged.

Second son Bambang Trihatmodjo: He was grilled in 2001 by police over acquisition of assets of a textile company but was never charged.

Half-brother Probosutedjo: He is serving four years in jail for graft involving the use of US$10 million in reforestation funds belonging to the Forestry Ministry.

Suharto's legacy lives on through the military

South China Morning Post - January 30, 2008

Ben Terrall – In the last days of his life, the former Indonesian dictator Suharto, who died at the weekend, was visited in his private Jakarta hospital room by a parade of notables including top Indonesian politicians and ostensible opposition figures. They came to pay homage because Suharto's family and the military he built up with the help of the US and other western governments are still forces to reckon with in Indonesia.

Though he was driven from office after mass uprisings in 1998, Suharto's past crimes and his family's vast empire have not been seriously challenged since the transition to a relatively more democratic government.

According to the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, a new UN/World Bank effort to track global embezzlement of public funds, Suharto is the 20th century's most profitable kleptocrat.

Transparency International, a Berlin-based non-governmental organisation, concluded that Suharto made off with between US$15 billion and US$35 billion. A spokesman for the group said: "All this has been possible under the eyes of the west, which supported Suharto for 30 years."

It provided more than US$130 billion in foreign investment between 1988 and 1996. Suharto and his cronies worked with western oil, mining and other companies to extract huge profits from Indonesia's natural resources.

They profited further from cheap labour kept in line by military repression. For years, Suharto's unregulated hypercapitalism produced what mainstream commentators called an economic miracle. The gains from this were mostly enjoyed by a few, however.

One of those imprisoned in Suharto's US-backed seizure of power in 1965 was Indonesia's greatest novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Pramoedya, who died in 2006, reflected on his 14 years of brutal imprisonment under Suharto in a 1999 interview. He said Suharto's fall "was only formal; his power is still running. What is going on now is a repetition of what we experienced fighting colonialism. Indonesia is the world's largest maritime nation, yet an army runs it".

Indonesia has made democratic progress in the decade since Suharto was forced from power. But his military remains a major block to reform. Efforts to have the armed forces give up their businesses and bring the military fully under civilian control have stalled. Human rights tribunals and investigations have largely collapsed or led to acquittals.

John Miller, of the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, a US-based group, said: "If Indonesia is ever to fully overcome Suharto's legacy, those who carried out his orders, conspired with him, stole on his behalf, and aided and abetted his crimes must be brought to justice."

A complete accounting for the US role in backing the dictator must take place, Mr Miller says. The US should back an international tribunal to prosecute human rights abuses and war crimes in East Timor from 1975 to 1999, and military aid should be withheld until the armed forces are fully under civilian control and respect international human rights standards.

[Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer.]

Rights body to probe Soeharto cases

Jakarta Post - January 30, 2008

Desy Nurhayati, Jakarta – Amid mounting calls for the government to grant Soeharto a hero status, the National Commission on Human Rights said Tuesday it would continue investigations into past atrocities implicating the late former president.

The commission's chairman Ifdhal Kasim said even though Soeharto had died and the criminal charges against him had been halted, it did not mean human rights abuses that occurred during Soeharto's term were closed.

"We will continue our investigation (on the case) and hope to finish it by early March," Ifdhal told Antara.

"Although Soeharto, who was politically responsible for the cases, has died, we can still find his cronies, the ones who organized and executed the abuses," Ifdhal said. "We will probe these people and demand they be held responsible."

He said the investigation would be conducted case-by-case and would be prioritized on five major cases, including the arrest of political activists in Buru island between 1969 and 1979 and the mysterious shootings – known as the Petrus case – in 1981 to 1985.

Other cases include the July 27, 1996 incident in Jakarta involving supporters of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the Tanjung Priok case in 1984 and the case of Military Operation Areas (DOM) in Aceh and Papua from the 1970s to 1990s.

The Buru island incident involved at least 10,000 political prisoners, while the Petrus incident victimized some 5,000 people, who were allegedly criminals.

Petrus occurred in provinces across Java and some areas in Sumatra and Kalimantan. The Tanjung Priok clash left 24 people dead and many others injured. During the DOM incident, hundreds of thousands of people were kidnapped and abused.

Ifdhal said the commission would continue investigations based on reports by previous commissioners. "We will also summon witnesses, including military officials," he said.

Indonesian Military (TNI) chief Gen. Djoko Santoso declared last week TNI was willing to cooperate with the commission to reveal human rights abuses implicating its officials. "We welcome TNI's commitment to cooperate with us, so that there will be no official who refuses to be present during court sessions," Ifdhal said.

Soeharto died on Sunday at the age of 86 and received a state funeral. The Golkar Party faction on Tuesday proposed to grant Soeharto the status of a national hero.

Faction chairman Priyo Budi Santoso said Soeharto was one of the nation's "best figures" who deserved the status because of his dedication. He said the faction would forward its proposal to Golkar chairman Jusuf Kalla, who is also Vice President, for feedback from the government.

Presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng told The Jakarta Post the government had yet to discuss the proposal for the title of hero. Andi said the government did not see the issue as a priority.

"The government's priority is to give back everything that has been the people's right," he said. "But we do not forbid anyone to propose anything, this is a democratic country."

Soeharto's government took 16 years to name founding president Sukarno a national hero.

Observers say funeral reports too much

Jakarta Post - January 29, 2008

Jakarta – The national media are coming under fire for their "exaggerated" coverage of Soeharto's funeral.

Ever since the presidential medical team announced that former president Soeharto died of multiple organ failure Sunday, the domestic media have occupied the public with every single detail of Soeharto's life, from the story of his impoverished childhood to the preparations for his burial, and even gossip about his second son's second wife.

"That is just too much," Effendy Choirie of the National Awakening Party (PKB) faction at the House of Representatives, said Monday. "The print media dedicate so many pages to Soeharto, and the TV and radio air programs on Soeharto from dusk till dawn."

Despite his status as a former president, Soeharto should not be getting this much attention, Effendy added.

Observers in fact began criticizing coverage of Soeharto as excessive even while the five-star general lay hospitalized at Pertamina Hospital. Only the rocketing prices of soybeans were able to steal media attention away from him for a moment.

Effendy bemoaned the fact that media had all but ignored the death of M. Jusuf Ronodipuro, one of the founders of state radio station RRI who passed away Sunday night at age 88.

Jusuf was one of the first persons to read Indonesia's 1945 Proclamation of Independence on the air. He also requested that first president Sukarno make a recording of the proclamation to document the historic event.

Usman Hamid of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) said excessive coverage of Soeharto had squelched the voices of the victims of the 1965 tragedy.

"Some media have followed the stream of the government attitude, which seems to blow the Soeharto phenomenon out of proportion. Their coverage tends to force the public toward forgetting the political victims of his regime," said Usman.

He said that the Soeharto coverage had also distracted journalists from more important issues, such as human rights violations. He cited the example of the murder of activist Munir Said Thalib.

Effendy Ghazali, political communication expert from the University of Indonesia, said that some TV stations were not only focusing too much on broadcasting Soeharto's funeral but were clearly also narrating events in such a way as to endorse a message intended to sway the public in favor of forgiveness for the former president.

"We can see clearly that some programs are fully dedicated to this mission," said Effendi. He emphasized that this phenomenon would have a negative impact on society. "Our people, who already have a short memory, will find it even more difficult to define what is right and what is wrong." (alf)

New Zealand leader says Suharto's human rights record 'appalling'

Deutsche Presse-Agentur - January 29, 2008

Wellington – New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said on Tuesday that former Indonesian President Suharto's human rights record was "appalling" and she would not sign a condolence book for him.

"I haven't signed a book – I have no plans to sign a book," she told a news conference when asked if she would put her signature to a volume of condolences at Indonesia's embassy in Wellington.

She added, "And I think his legacy will be considered to be in three areas: One, his human rights record which was appalling. Secondly, in the course of his tenure as president Indonesia did grow and develop fast, and thirdly during that time ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) developed to be a significant regional organisation which brought peace between countries in South-East Asia. So the legacy is mixed, but from the point of view of human rights it's very clear."

New Zealand's ambassador to Jakarta Philip Gibson represented the country at Suharto's funeral.

Suharto does not deserve 'national hero' title - NGO

Antara News - January 29, 2008

The Indonesian Legal Aid Institute Foundation (YLBHI) said the late former president, Suharto, does not deserve the title of "national hero" because a number of legal cases against him have not been resolved.

"In our view, it will be far from right or proper for the government to reward Suharto with the predicate of 'national hero'," YLBHI chairman Patra M Zen said here on Monday [28 January].

He was commenting on Golkar Party legislator Priyo Budi Santoso's proposal to grant the title of national hero to the former strongman.

"Like Sukarno (Indonesia's first president), Suharto is one of the nation's best sons, who deserve the title of national hero because of their services to the state and nation," Santoso said.

Zen said Suharto was one of the parties in the country who had to account for a number of cases of violence and human right violations that had happened during his regime.

The cases that had so far remained unsettled included the slaying of people accused of involvement in the abortive communist coup in October 1965, the mysterious extra-judicial shooting of people suspected of being hardened criminals, the Tanjung Priok affair, the people who became victims of the 'Military Operations Zone' in Aceh and human right violations in Papua.

Apart from the cases of violence, Suharto was also suspected of having committed corruption and misappropriation of state funds, he said.

Therefore, YLBHI called on the public not to be rash in showing their respect or appreciation for Suharto, Zen said.

1965 victims see no reason for a pardon

Jakarta Post - January 28, 2008

Jakarta – Activists and human rights abuse victims on Sunday refused to join the week-long national mourning for former president Soeharto, saying he did not deserve pardon for his alleged human rights abuses.

Bedjo Untung, chairman of the 1965 Murder Victims Research Foundation (YPKP '65), said in a press conference on Sunday: "I will never do that (hoist the flag half-mast) for a big violator of human rights like Soeharto."

Soeharto died on Sunday at 86 years old after being hospitalized since Jan. 4 for multiple organ failure. Bedjo claimed he was imprisoned by the New Order regime for nine years without trial.

"I was only 17 at that time. They put me in jail because I participated in the Association of Indonesian Student Youth (IPPI), which was a legal organization supported by Indonesian first president Sukarno," he said. He said he was unspeakably tortured during the imprisonment.

Bedjo said he would never forgive Soeharto for what he did in the past. "I am Javanese, people known for their soft attitude, but it's very difficult for me to forgive Soeharto."

Johan Pakasi, a researcher of the 1965 tragedy, echoed Bedjo, saying any attempt to make Soeharto a national hero should be rejected. "We should forbid, for example, using his name as a street name."

He claimed he was jailed for more than 12 years without trial because he was viewed as a defender of Sukarno.

"I believed there are many Indonesians who experienced the same. There were more than three million people killed between 1965 and 1996 and mass graves can be found on any island in Indonesia."

Johan added that the Soeharto regime had also caused suffering to families and relatives of those allegedly linked to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

"They were prohibited from joining political parties or working as civil servants and teachers. They could not even work as preachers or puppeteers and that was simply ridiculous," said Johan, adding that the government should rehabilitate the victims of the 1965 tragedy.

Usman Hamid of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) said the death of Soeharto should not end the government's constitutional obligation to rectify past mistakes. "We can not forgive without knowing what truly happened during his regime," he said.

Despite the passing of Soeharto, Usman said, the investigation of human rights violations during his regime should continue and shouldn't have any affect on investigation and prosecution of others responsible for abuse of authority in the past, including the family members and cronies of the former ruler.

Usman said the principle of justice and the rights of the victims demanded the continuation of the legal process against such persons. "Although the actor in these human rights violations can no longer be punished, our responsibilities to the victims do not immediately end."

Usman urged the government to follow up on the findings of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) about Soeharto's acts and omissions. "Soeharto's death is a wake up call for us to speed up the justice process." (alf)

Soeharto ruled like a king: Experts

Jakarta Post - January 29, 2008

Blontank Poer, Surakarta – Former strongman Soeharto who died Sunday and was buried at a family mausoleum Monday, ruled Indonesia like a Javanese king, experts said.

Sudharmono, a javanologist from the Sebelas Maret University in Surakarta, said Soeharto was acting as a king when he ruled Indonesia from 1966 to 1998. He said this saw Soeharto free to do what he wanted and to give anything he intended to anyone he liked.

"During his reign, he perceived himself as the sole owner of Indonesian territory," Sudharmono said. "He lent the land to the people, who in turn had to pay the rent for the well-being of the king," he said.

Murtidjono, an intellectual from Surakarta, said such an attitude possibly led to his decision to build a family mausoleum on the slope of Mount Lawu, despite his right to be buried at the Kalibata National hero cemetery in South Jakarta.

Murtidjono said the development of the family cemetery followed the royal tradition of building royal cemeteries such as the one in Mangadeg (for Surakarta kings) and in Imogiri (for Yogyakarta kings).

"Soeharto has an obsession to be a king because of his own background from an ordinary family," he said.

By building his own mausoleum, Soeharto might have expected people would flock to his tomb to seek his after-life blessing, Murtidjono said.

He cited the tomb of Indonesia's first president Sukarno in Blitar, East Java, as an example of a private cemetery that has attracted ordinary people to visit the tomb.

This happens, Murtidjono said, because people consider Sukarno as a great man according to the Javanese cosmic teaching. Whether people would seek Soeharto's after-life blessing, would remain to be seen, he said.

A member of the Surakarta royal family who asked for anonymity, said Soeharto's Javanese cosmic beliefs had strongly influenced all of his policies and the decisions he made for his family and the people.

"Soeharto's spiritual life was principally based on the Kejawen Javanese mysticism," the source said Monday. "That was why his critics frequently likened his leadership with Mataram King Amangkurat IV who dismissed rebellious Islamic regents during his reign."

During his life, Soeharto fasted a lot and visited "sacred places" across the archipelago to fill in and maintain his personal spirituality.

The source said Soeharto became like a part of the Surakarta royal family after he bought a royal house, the Kalitan in Surakarta, and after he built the Astana Giribangun family cemetery at a hill near the royal cemetery of Mangadeg.

Indonesia still struggles after Soeharto

Reuters - January 27, 2008

Former president Suharto's stamp on Indonesia was so strong that a decade after his ouster as its leader, the world's fourth-most populous country is still struggling to deal with his legacy.

Suharto, who died on Sunday, ruled for 32 years. He boosted growth and kept a lid on communal violence, but left in his wake a brutal army, crippled economy, neutered political system, and dysfunctional national institutions.

"Suharto ran Indonesia like a mafia don," said Jeffrey Winters, professor of political economy at Northwestern University, Chicago.

"Everything turned on the don, all business went through the don, the don was the source of security, and he destroyed everything, Parliament, the rule of law, the intellectual community, and turned the police and military into his personal instruments."

Not everyone agrees. "Yes, there was corruption. Yes, he gave favours to his family and his friends. But there was real growth and real progress," Lee Kuan Yew, longtime autocratic prime minister of neighbouring Singapore, said after visiting Suharto's hospital bedside on January 13.

"I think the people of Indonesia are lucky. They had a general in charge, had a team of competent administrators including a very good team of economists."

Suharto came to power in 1965, crushing what was officially described as a Beijing-backed communist coup. As many as 500,000 Indonesians suspected of being communists or sympathisers died in an army-inspired bloodbath in the following months.

Over the next three decades, his army continued to kill, on student campuses, in the rebellious provinces of Aceh and Papua, and in East Timor, where about 200,000 died from war and famine, as well as in "mysterious shootings" of criminals.

Elsewhere in the sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands and 226 million people, much of his rule was relatively peaceful, but stability often came at the cost of repression of dissent.

Thousands of political prisoners were kept in labour camps on Buru Island, including Indonesia's best-known author Pramoedya Ananta Toer and other members of the intelligentsia.

Independent analysts and NGOs said violations of human rights were common. But Suharto never faced any charges for crimes against humanity.

By the time he stepped down, amid the social and economic chaos of 1998, many Indonesians summed up his era with the initials KKN, the local acronym for Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism. Transparency International ranked him as the world's top kleptocrat, with a fortune estimated at $15-35 billion.

He denied the charges of corruption, and partly because of claims of poor health he was not prosecuted.

Squandered

Suharto's supporters – and he had plenty in the West and in Asia – pointed to the fact he encouraged foreign investment, boosted economic growth, and raised living standards. He inherited an economic shambles from former president Sukarno, and turned Indonesia into one of Asia's tigers, growing 6-7 per cent a year.

But many of his economic policies proved ill-conceived. He doled out licences and monopolies to his family and friends, stifling competition, and used costly fuel and food subsidies to win the support of the man on the street.

"The growth was enjoyed by the elite, and the benefits were not distributed among the poor," said Wimar Witoelar, a media commentator. "You cannot separate his political and economic legacy. What is the value of economic growth when he killed, or damaged so many people?"

Corruption permeated all levels of society, including the courts and legal system, and became a way of life for many. Indonesia has had only limited success in tackling endemic graft, still cited as a major obstacle to investment.

In Jakarta, sleek skyscrapers towered above slums and open sewers, and millions lived on less than $2 a day, although in the countryside many farmers still remember his rule fondly as a time when they prospered.

When he resigned, the financial system was exposed as a mess. Banks had violated the most basic lending rules, steering huge loans to his cronies, who wouldn't or couldn't pay up.

Given Indonesia's oil, coal, copper and other resources, its growth fell far short of its potential, critics say. "Suharto squandered Indonesia's best years, when it had ample oil and gas, and had very close ties to the United States and the West, with access to developmental funds at very cheap rates," said Winters. "The growth rate should have been much higher."

Subsequent governments have pushed through economic reforms, but Indonesia has taken years to recover. The economy expanded 6.3 per cent in 2007, the fastest pace in 11 years, but still well below the kind of growth enjoyed by China and India.

The oligarchs who prospered under Suharto have bounced back from the 1997-98 financial crisis and once again rank among the country's wealthiest. Some escaped punishment, thanks to corrupt courts, but with Suharto's death that may change.

"It's not just Suharto's children, but the children-in-law and business associates who over the next few months will be far more vulnerable," said Richard Robison, emeritus professor at Murdoch University, Perth.

"The death of Suharto lifts the last protective cloak for these people," who may now face new charges or the more aggressive pursuit of existing cases, he added.

Democracy

Suharto employed his security forces and political machine Golkar to hold together a vast archipelago of assorted religions, languages, and cultures, while squashing serious opposition.

He continued to use communism as a convenient bogeyman, and long after the Cold War ended, Indonesians deemed to have communist links were stigmatised and even denied jobs.

His authoritarian style prevented any democratic development. Opposition parties were crushed and, while the country quickly embraced democracy in Suharto's wake, holding its first direct elections for president in 2004, its political parties remain immature and lacking in clear ideology.

The armed forces, which had a quota of seats in Parliament, have been depoliticised, and are under pressure to get out of business. But Golkar remains a powerful force backed by wealthy businessmen. As for its modern history, Indonesia has yet to conduct the painful self-scrutiny seen in post-Nazi Germany or post-apartheid South Africa. Schools have only recently started to teach an alternative version of the events of 1965-66.

"It's been largely expunged from the history books," said Damien Kingsbury, associate professor at Australia's Deakin University. "It's an indication of the reluctance to recognise the darker elements of Indonesian history."

The media, however, has flourished in the past decade and is now free to report on corruption and injustices, and, as Suharto lay dying in hospital in recent weeks, could cover every tiny, most intimate detail of the condition of an old general who for years ensured they were censored or shut down.

Soeharto takes three mysteries to the grave

Jakarta Post - January 28, 2008

Endy M. Bayuni, Jakarta – How much did Maj. Gen. Soeharto know about the plot to kidnap and murder six of his peers in the Army on the night of September 30, 1965? Did President Sukarno really give Gen. Soeharto sweeping executive powers on March 11, 1966, and if so, what were the exact circumstances that made Sukarno virtually gave up power? What prompted Soeharto to finally call it quits, ending his presidency after 32 years, on the eve of May 21, 1998?

These are three major events in the modern history of Indonesia that involved Soeharto for which some questions remain. The one person who knew the answers was Soeharto himself. Now that he is dead, he will be taking them with him to the grave.

These three dates defined his rise to power, the beginning of his presidency and its end.

Soeharto had apparently been informed about an imminent action by a group of young Army officers to kidnap several generals on that September night of 1965.

One of those officers, Lt. Col. Abdul Latief, visited Soeharto at a hospital in Jakarta to report to him the plan to preempt the "council of generals" from allegedly seizing power from President Sukarno. Soeharto was Chief of the Army's Reserve Strategic Command. His reaction was indifferent, according to accounts by Latief.

With all the top Army leadership slain by the following morning, Soeharto assumed command. He quickly linked the young officers' plot with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Thus began the move to crush the PKI and all its followers that led to the killing of genocidal proportions across Indonesia from the late 1965 to mid-1966.

Sukarno's own power by early 1966 had been weakened by his failure to condemn the PKI for slaying the six generals. By March 1966, the Army under Soeharto controlled much of the nation while Sukarno was reduced to a sitting-duck president. This explains the ease with which Sukarno signed (if he ever did) the famous March 11, 1966, letter that transferred much of his power to the young Army general.

This takes us to the second major unanswered question about Soeharto's presidency.

Three Army generals, at the order of Soeharto, visited Sukarno at the Presidential Palace in nearby Bogor the morning of March 11, 1966. A few hours later, the three came back to report to Soeharto in Jakarta with a letter signed by Sukarno that purportedly gave unlimited powers to Soeharto to restore peace and order.

The exact wording of the letter is a mystery. The original letter is missing. The only document available is a purported transcript of the letter, which is indeed a transfer of executive power from Sukarno to Soeharto. This letter marked the beginning of the end for Sukarno, and paved the way for Soeharto to become full president the following year. Also unclear are the circumstances in which Sukarno signed the letter, if he signed one.

Some analysts speculate there was coercion: the generals had already typed the letter beforehand and Sukarno may have signed it at gunpoint. What is clear is that Soeharto repeatedly had to deny that the event amounted to a coup d'etat.

Fast forward 32 years, precisely to the night before May 21, 1998, when Jakarta was very tense. A week earlier, the capital city was rocked by a riot targeting Chinese shops and businesses.

Indonesia was in a deep economic crisis and students had already taken over the House of Representatives building. They threatened to take to the streets in millions lest he complied with their only demand: his resignation.

The 77-year-old former general faced the toughest challenge of his presidency. Besides the economic crisis, he also faced eroding support not only from the public, but also from his traditional supporters. Golkar, his political party, had abandoned him. Many of his Cabinet members had written to him that they no longer could serve him.

The military under Gen. Wiranto remained loyal. He contacted Muslim scholar Amien Rais, who had offered to lead the student march, and warned him of massive bloodshed if they went ahead with the planned protests that Saturday. Wiranto stood his ground, saying it was his duty to protect the capital.

Soeharto could have called the students' bluff and let Wiranto clean up the mess. After all, this is a former general who justified the killing of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists in 1965-66 on the grounds of the greater good: save the nation from communism. He used violent tactics throughout his presidency to deal with any threat to his leadership.

So what happened in May 1998? Did he just lose his guts? Another unanswered mystery.

Instead, he wrote a letter transferring executive powers to Gen. Wiranto (modeled on the March 1966 letter), and called his vice president B.J. Habibie to say he was resigning the next day.

But the aircraft engineer apparently misread Soeharto's intentions, and presumed that as vice president he would be the next Indonesian leader by default. No one, including Habibie, was aware of Soeharto's letter to Wiranto until much later. Soeharto probably intended that Habibie would resign along with him since they had been elected on the same ticket two months earlier.

Soeharto resigned alone, or rather quit, on May 21, 1998, saying he could no longer continue his rule under the circumstances. Habibie was sworn in as president. Soeharto never spoke to him again.

What was his intention? Did he intend for Wiranto to succeed him rather than Habibie?

While Habibie, Wiranto and a few others involved in the saga of that night have spoken or written books about their part in the evolving situation, Soeharto remained silent to his death. We will never know now what was going through his mind when he decided enough was enough, and who he intended to succeed him.

Mysteries shrouded much of Soeharto's 32-year presidency. Some were revealed in his 1988 semi-autobiography, Soeharto, My Thoughts, Words, and Deeds, but he left many unanswered questions regarding his part in the 1965 putsch and the 1966 transfer of power.

Historians trying to reconstruct this period of Indonesia's modern history will have to speculate and interpret the available facts in filling in some of the gaping holes.

Dictator resigned after riot debacle

Sydney Morning Herald - January 28, 2008

Louise Williams – "I thank the people for their help and support during my leadership of this country and I beg forgiveness for any mistakes and shortcomings."

With these few words Indonesia's president, Soeharto, finally succumbed to public pressure and relinquished the office – and considerable power – he had held for almost half his life.

It was May 21, 1998. The grounds and forecourt of the country's National Parliament building in Jakarta were crammed with exhausted student protesters, the city around them battered and eerily deserted, thin plumes of smoke still rising from the smouldering ruins left by days of riots. But the sky was a rare, vibrant, infinite blue.

There were wild scenes of joy at the news, as troops laid down their weapons on the long, empty super-highway that ran past the parliament gate. At last the dictator had fallen. But this was, for most Indonesians, a truly confusing, wrenching day. Their great leader was a flawed man, but he had dragged their hungry villages out of poverty and pushed them proudly towards a "green revolution" of abundant rice crops and then, modernisation and industrialisation.

By nightfall an undercurrent of uncertainty was rising. Authoritarianism rarely gives way politely to democracy. Indonesia had much instability yet to endure.

In retrospect, there is always a defining moment from which there is no going back. For Soeharto it arrived on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon about nine days earlier. The increasingly unpopular Indonesian president was in Cairo on an official visit. As protests go it could have been just another pinprick for the Soeharto regime; a couple of thousands of students from the elite Trisakti University waving banners with vague calls for reform.

But at 4.50pm a critical decision was made that would change the nation's fate.

Many of the students had already drifted off, a brief scuffle had broken out, but it seemed like the last kick of the day's action. Suddenly the police lines parted and the grinding sound of heavy, black tear gas cannon being rolled forward sent the crowd scattering. But this was a ploy; the tear gas was not fired. Instead, riot troops opened fire, with rubber and live bullets in the middle of a peak-hour traffic jam. Six people were shot dead and many more injured. Enraged crowds soon joined the students, and within hours Jakarta was burning; in two days of chaos and mob rule thousands died trapped in burning buildings.

On the face of it, these were devastating anti-Government protests triggered by popular rage. Certainly, many of Jakarta's 20 million residents relished the liberation of rampaging against their oppressor.

But this was in fact part of a devious political ploy. Within the crowds were agents provocateurs. The really big fires in shopping complexes were started by military intelligence agents, who egged on the crowds.

The plan was for Soeharto's son-in-law, the then general Prabowo Subianto, to foment trouble in Jakarta. Soeharto would fly back in to declare a state of emergency and take credit for restoring order. It failed, and the military role was exposed.

In the following days all kinds of deals were attempted behind closed doors. For a while the military and Soeharto's cronies stood firm, but the ranks of the protesters swelled, bringing even normally conservative stock exchange workers, for example, onto the streets. And the thing about a sinking ship is this: when one rat moves, they all do. And so Soeharto found himself in the humiliating position of being suddenly and publicly abandoned by his inner circle. In the end it was his old friend and ally Hamoko who took on the role of executioner.

As speaker Hamoko announced the parliament would bow to the student demands and begin proceedings to impeach Soeharto. The president was given a choice: resign or be forced to account for his excesses.

A more historical perspective suggests Soeharto was finally brought down primarily because of the dramatic events of the year before. The economy had grown for decades but the Asian economic crisis of 1997 knocked Indonesia flat.

Many Indonesians, and an emboldened underground network of journalists and democracy campaigners, turned a more critical eye on the Soeharto regime. Criticism of Soeharto had long been taboo. Now his rich children and grandchildren were looking more like greedy parasites than members of a great dynasty born to rule. Which is why, when the protests and riots began, it was only the end of the Soeharto era that could restore order.

Suharto - No end to ambition

Sydney Morning Herald - January 28, 2008

Hamish McDonald, Asia-Pacific Editor – For three decades Australian leaders looked to Indonesia as the key to acceptance in South-East Asia, and to one man, Soeharto, as the key to Indonesia.

Soeharto, who died in Jakarta yesterday aged 86, ruled the world's fourth-most-populous nation for 32 years through a mixture of political astuteness, brutality, bribery and a deep affinity with Indonesia's popular cultures.

Often compared to the dalang, or puppetmaster, in the traditional shadow play, Soeharto came to power in what may have been been one of the 20th century's most dramatic and blood-soaked acts of political manipulation, the strings of which are still being unravelled.

He then masterminded the transformation of his basket-case nation into what seemed a paradigm of a newly industrialising economy – before the stage collapsed around him in the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98.

Soeharto was born on June 8, 1921, in a small house of plaited bamboo walls in the hamlet of Kemusu, outside Yogyakarta, the heartland of Javanese culture.

His early life was a disturbed one – his parents separated soon after his birth, and he was shunted between foster parents – explaining the blind spot that made him so protective of his real family later on.

For part of his childhood, he boarded with Wiryatmo, a dukun, or guru, of Javanese mystical arts and faith-healing. The experience left a deep imprint on a man who later clothed sheer power in powerful symbolic language.

After a brief spell with a village bank, he joined the Royal Netherlands Indies Army in 1940, rising to sergeant. The colony was surrendered without a fight to the Japanese in 1942. In 1943 Soeharto volunteered for the Japanese-sponsored Volunteer Army of Defenders of the Homeland, and rose to command a company.

After the Japanese surrender, he joined the independence movement and, as one of the few with military experience, quickly rose to lieutenant-colonel. He commanded the garrison in Yogyakarta, the temporary capital of the republic declared by its first president, Soekarno.

When the war came to a negotiated end in 1949, Soeharto was a seasoned military man with some status in the new republic, and an ambitious wife, Siti Hartinah, known as Madam Tien, daughter of a minor noble in the Mangkunegaran royal house of Solo.

The arranged marriage became an enduring and supportive partnership, but one later to create controversy. In the Javanese upper classes, it was accepted that in hard times a wife might indulge in genteel commerce to augment the family budget, allowing the husband to keep his dignity as a warrior, courtier or administrator. Tien showed a facility for this, a trait carried to her children and grandchildren, to the extent that it became the Achilles heel of Soeharto's presidency.

Aside from a spell helping put down Dutch-backed renegades in Sulawesi, Soeharto spent most of the 1950s as commander of Central Java's Diponegoro Division in Semarang.

Because of meagre official budgets, Soeharto developed links with local ethnic Chinese businessmen to pay his troops. By 1958-59, such army side business was a scandal.

In a crackdown by the army commander, General A.H. Nasution, Soeharto was relieved of his command in October 1959, and packed off to the Army Staff School in Bandung. But it was not quite disgrace. Soeharto was promoted to brigadier-general while in Bandung and, at the end of 1960, made chief of army intelligence. In 1961 he was given additional command of the army's new Strategic Reserve, later known as Kostrad, a ready-reaction air- mobile force.

In January 1962 he was put in charge of Operation Mandala, the military side of the campaign to win western New Guinea, which Soekarno called West Irian, from the Dutch, who were preparing it for separate independence.

In 1965 Soeharto was moved to operational command of Soekarno's next external adventure, Konfrontasi, against the newly formed Malaysia.

But Soeharto was already talking with the enemy: fearful that the campaign would draw the army out of Java and hand control to the 2 million-strong Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, he had authorised a Kostrad intelligence officer, Ali Murtopo, to open contacts with the British and Malaysians.

Throughout 1965 the army and the PKI jostled under the ailing Soekarno. The anti-Western foreign minister, Subandrio, produced a draft note allegedly written by the British ambassador talking of "local army friends" and Soekarno asked the commander of the Indonesian Army, Ahmad Yani, about a "council of generals".

During the night of September 30, 1965, rebel army squads moved through Jakarta, murdering six senior generals, including Yani, and taking over key communications facilities.

At 7.10am a Lieutenant-Colonel Untung, the chief of the presidential bodyguard, announced on radio that a "September 30 Movement" had forestalled a coup by "power-mad generals". It was "an internal army affair", the officer said.

Soeharto, curiously not targeted in the putsch, assumed the army command, isolated Soekarno from the rebel troops, and used Kostrad troops to oust the rebels.

In Central Java, colonels and majors had declared their support for the rebellion in Semarang, Yogyakarta and several other towns. But within days officers loyal to Soeharto regained control of military bases, and the Special Forces (later known as Kopassus) swept through Java in their armoured cars, firing machine-guns at crowds of PKI supporters.

In Jakarta Soeharto turned the annual Armed Forces Day ceremony on October 5 into a state funeral for the slain generals, playing up the viciousness of the killings and alleged mutilation by PKI members.

Then, with encouragement from the army, religious communities came out to eliminate the PKI. For the most part, it was the more devout Muslims across Java. But Hindus in Bali and Catholics around Yogyakarta joined in mass executions that clogged the rivers of the two islands with bodies between October 1965 and March 1966. By the government's own estimate, between 450,000 and 500,000 died. Other estimates range up to 1 million.

In addition, hundreds of thousands were arrested and screened for PKI connections. About 36,000 were held without trial until the late '70s. Many, such as the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, were kept in labour camps on the remote island of Buru. According to the army's later papers, the PKI was behind the coup, manipulating gullible left-wing officers such as Untung through a mysterious "special bureau" that reported only to the party secretary, D.N. Aidit.

This case relied on a confession by the alleged head of the bureau, named Syam, during a staged trial in 1967. But it was never convincingly proved to Western academic specialists, and has been challenged by some Indonesian accounts.

Aidit had vacillated after Untung's move, indicating his surprise. Untung had been one of Soeharto's junior officers in the West Irian campaign and Soeharto was a guest at his wedding.

According to Subandrio, in an account written after his long imprisonment, Untung had told him soon after the coup that Soeharto himself had urged him on, and even assigned him troops. Both Untung and Aidit were shot after they were captured later in 1965, eliminating their key testimony. Although the evidence is far from conclusive, the suspicion grows that Soeharto himself pushed the naive Untung to eliminate rival generals and to blacken the PKI (whose newspaper, taken over by Murtopo's operatives, published an endorsement of Untung).

The West was delighted as Soeharto steadily removed power from the ailing Soekarno and destroyed the PKI. In what the Australian scholar Harold Crouch called a "disguised coup", on March 11, 1966, Soeharto sent a squad of generals to Soekarno, persuading him to formally delegate presidential powers. By 1968 Soeharto had completely taken over from Soekarno, who died a sick, isolated man in 1970.

The new regime was called the "New Order" – and order was soon its hallmark, and his goal was pembangunan, or development. Externally, Soeharto balanced his regime's visceral anti- communism and reliance on Western capital with an ostensible neutrality in foreign policy.

Konfrontasi against Malaysia was dropped and separatist rebellion in West Irian was foiled by a dubious Act of Free Choice in 1969.

The invasion and annexation of Portuguese Timor in 1975 was his only foreign adventure, one that ended ultimately in failure once he left office.

Indonesia's own political parties were corralled into two camps: nationalists and Christian parties into the Indonesian Democratic Party, or PDI, and Muslim parties into the People's Development Party, or PPP. Neither was allowed to develop as an opposition.

Soeharto's operatives drew on a corporatist ideology close to that of early 20th-century fascism in Europe, and built an army- sponsored co-operative movement called Sekber Golkar, a coalition of society's "functional groups", into an official party of secular development.

The Indonesian economy had been revived from the near collapse of 1965-66 by the macro-economic policies of the technocrats known as the Berkeley Mafia under Professor Widjojo Nitisastro, whom Soeharto installed and supported. Within a few years they had put Indonesia on a path of 7 per cent annual economic growth, sustained for 25 years. The proportion of Indonesians in the "very poor" category fell from 52 per cent in the mid-'60s to 7 per cent by 1990.

Soeharto took a direct role in pursuit of rice self-sufficiency, reached by the mid-'80s, extension of basic education to all, and a remarkably successful voluntary family planning program that sharply reduced population growth.

But power and business breaks steadily concentrated into Soeharto's inner circle of family, relatives, favoured generals and some ethnic Chinese businessmen from his Semarang days, notably Liem Siu Liong and Bob Hasan.

By the late '80s the first family's rapacity alarmed even long- time military associates, such as General Benny Murdani. The six Soeharto children had come into their own as rent-seeking capitalists, with grandchildren already on the horizon.

This spree yielded an income stream measuring billions of US dollars a year by its heyday in the mid-'90s, though much of it was probably recycled back into pay-offs, military subsidies and campaign funding.

Soeharto relied increasingly on violence to remove perceived threats, using a greatly expanded Kopassus (Special Commando Force) as an assassination tool.

In the '80s the targets were 5000 perceived criminals, taken out in a wave of "mysterious killings" for which Soeharto later took the credit in his ghosted autobiography.

In the '90s the red beret troops targeted student activists in the cities and separatists in Aceh, and tried to set off communal bloodshed in parts of East Java with "ninja" killings of Muslim faith healers.

What became the regime's biggest worry was the Islamisation of Indonesian society, in response to rapid economic growth and corporate capitalism. Early on in the regime, Islamic groups had been anti-communist allies of the army but Soeharto himself had promoted Kebatinan – the animistic, mystical faith of the "nominal" Muslims – who made up the majority of his fellow Javanese.

By 1991 Soeharto had decided to tap Islamisation for his own political ends. He set up the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (installing his protege, the science minister B.J. Habibie, as its head), made the pilgrimage to Mecca (coming back as Haji Mohammed Soeharto), and favouring a "green" group of overtly devout officers in the armed forces.

In 1996 the death of his wife seemed to remove much of the deftness from Soeharto's handling of national affairs but no one was strong enough to confront him.

Then the Asian financial crisis cut off the foreign funds that sustained Indonesia's industrial growth. By 1998 mass lay-offs of urban workers had created a volatile security situation, as students tested military control in several cities.

In the midst of this, Soeharto attempted a "business-as-usual" manipulated election for another five-year term, stacking parliament and then the cabinet with family and cronies.

It was his crowning folly. After days of protests and rioting in Jakarta, the resignation of key ministers forced him to hand over power to his new vice-president, B.J. Habibie, on May 21.

Soeharto retreated to his private residence in Jakarta's Cendana Street. Increasingly he relied on the testimony of doctors about his physical and mental inability to face trial on charges of illegally amassing money during his presidency, while his youngest son, Hutomo Mandala Putra, known as Tommy, and his crony Bob Hasan both went to jail.

Nothing grows under the banyan tree, the Indonesians say. As Soeharto's spooky shadow faded, the shoots of a distinctive Indonesian democracy have started to emerge.

[Hamish McDonald was the Herald's correspondent in Jakarta from 1975 to 1978 and wrote Suharto's Indonesia (Fontana/Collins 1980).]

Suharto - The old soldier dies

Jakarta Post Editorial - January 28, 2008

Indonesia has gone into mourning with the passing away of former president Soeharto on Sunday. He was 86. The nation's second president, he led the world's fourth most populous country for 32 years.

When you rule a country as huge, diverse and complex as Indonesia for as long as 32 years, there are bound to be controversies.

Inevitably, the nation has mixed feelings about the former Army general, evidenced by the way it has followed his struggle against illness in the years since he stepped down from office in 1998.

In a sense, Soeharto's death represents a double loss for Indonesia. We have lost a great leader who did so much in his time, including bringing political stability and economic prosperity to an otherwise impoverished nation. But we have also missed the opportunity to hold him responsible for the deaths and torture of thousands of people, and for the legacy of violent and corrupt political culture he left behind.

Ever since his retirement from public life in 1998, Soeharto managed to avoid setting foot in court to account for his deeds, whether the issue at hand was corruption or human rights abuses. He had his chances to come clean, but his family and team of expensive lawyers decided otherwise.

He could have ended his life known as the hero he really was. Instead, he will be remembered by those who lived through his iron-fisted rule as both a hero and a villain. Let later historians decide on his proper place in the history of modern Indonesia.

Soeharto will be credited as the man who saved Indonesia from communism. His rise to power in 1966 was the result of years of power struggles between the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the Indonesian Army. He emerged clean and strong out of the chaos that ensued after the abortive coup on September 30, 1965, against then president Sukarno, which the military blamed on the PKI.

Soeharto will also be remembered as the man who restored political stability from the chaos that characterized Sukarno's last years in power.

The mass killing of suspected communists and sympathizers between 1965 and 1966 was a dark page in the history of Indonesia. While there are many people willing to say the killings took place, they were never officially documented. Soeharto and his Army friends led a bloody campaign to crush the communist forces. In the absence of any reliable record-keeping, estimates of number of dead range between 200,000 and three million. Even the lowest estimate would have qualified as a genocidal killing.

The political stability that came at such a high price to a large extent paid off, in terms of economic development. He brought inflation under control in 1966, and thus began a long and almost uninterrupted period of economic growth through the 1970s, aided by the oil money, that ran well into the 1990s.

He won international accolades for introducing universal education, inexpensive and accessible health care, and for bringing food self-sufficiency into Indonesia. If his predecessor Sukarno was called the "Father of the Revolution", Soeharto was the "Father of Development".

But the "Smiling General", as the title of his biography in the 1960s aptly named him, was ultimately nothing but a dictator. There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator, although he may have been close to being one.

Soeharto suppressed freedom and democracy in the name of development. He invaded East Timor (with the consent of the United States and Australia), and his regime was responsible for recurring human right atrocities in East Timor, Aceh and Papua.

And then there is the corruption, first practiced by his cronies and children, that later became so chronic and systemic that it spun out of control and unraveled just about every economic gain he had painfully made since 1966. The endemic corruption meant the 1997 Asian financial crisis hurt Indonesia much more than its neighbors, turning it into a political crisis that eventually forced Soeharto to step down in May 1998.

One good outcome of that unhappy episode nearly a decade ago was the ushering in of political and economic reforms and democracy in Indonesia.

Soeharto's failure to use the remaining years of his life to come clean is highly lamentable. Here is a man who could have explained his role in the 1965 coup attempt and the ensuing mass killings, detailed the unusual circumstances of his transfer of power from Sukarno, explained some of the controversial decisions he made (his autobiography missed out on a few of those), and illustrated the rationale behind his decision to quit in May 1998.

Ever a mysterious Javanese leader, he will take with him to the grave many of the answers that our historians need to write about a large passage of Indonesia's modern history.

There is an old saying that says, "an old soldier never dies, he just fades away". Soeharto faded away and then he died. Good-bye, Pak Harto.

Our model dictator

The Guardian - January 28, 2008

The death of Suharto is a reminder of the west's ignoble role in propping up a murderous regime

John Pilger – In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," says one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical."

This was Gareth Evans, Australia's then foreign minister. The other man was Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, who died yesterday. The year was 1989, and the two were making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that would allow Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was "zillions of dollars".

Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub, and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the foreign affairs committee of Australia's parliament reported that "at least 200,000" had died under Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of the population. Yet East Timor's horror, foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was a sequel. "No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre." He was referring to Suharto's seizure of power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.

To understand the significance of Suharto is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer – "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him. For three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British- supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles.

A Foreign Office speciality was smearing witnesses to the bombing of East Timorese villages by British-supplied Hawk aircraft – until Robin Cook was forced to admit it was true. Almost a billion pounds in export credit guarantees financed the sale of the Hawks, paid for by the British taxpayer while the arms industry reaped the profit.

Only the Australians were more obsequious. "We know your people love you," the prime minister Bob Hawke told the dictator to his face. His successor, Paul Keating, regarded the tyrant as a father figure. Paul Kelly, a prominent Murdoch retainer, led a group of major newspaper editors to Jakarta, to fawn before the mass murderer even though they all knew his grisly record.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover in 1965-6 as "the model operation" for the US-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, BBC south-east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time... There was a deal, you see."

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia". In November 1967 the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened". Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil".

Shortly before the death of Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was the minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons, I interviewed him, and asked: "Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"

"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head." "I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed." "Yeah?" "Doesn't that concern extend to humans?" "Curiously not."

Editorial: A president of his region and times

The Australian - January 28, 2008

Despite his many failings, Australia has reason to be thankful for the steadying hand former Indonesian president Suharto brought to the world's most populous Muslim nation, immediately to our north. That he was able to create even a semblance of national unity in what was, when he took office, an economically ravaged collection of disparate islands is in many ways miraculous. Although justifiably criticised for the brutality of many of his actions and the family corruption that flourished, particularly in his later years in office, Suharto was above all a product of the region and the times.

It is fitting that, in his dying days, Suharto was visited by his contemporary Asian hard men, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. President Suharto can be rightfully regarded as the man who rescued Indonesia from despair, turned back the tide of communism and put his country on the uncertain road to democracy. As The Australian's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, has written, Suharto was an authentic giant of Southeast Asian history and a big figure even in global terms.

There is, of course, much to be said against Suharto. Over three decades of his New Order regime, he utilised the military to impose a central government over an unlikely nation. Millions of people were killed in brutal crackdowns on communists and Chinese Indonesians. A transmigration policy, through which millions of people have been resettled from overcrowded Java to less populated, mineral-rich regions, including West Papua, caused great upheaval and suffering.

There were widespread human rights abuses, especially but not only in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua, and pervasive corruption, which extended throughout his government and was most evident in the extravagance of his own family.

After losing power after 32 years, Suharto was accused by graft watchdog Transparency International in 2004 of embezzling up to $US35 billion while he was in office. The Suharto regime had a terrible record of environmental management, and to his country's enduring detriment, Suharto showed a misguided determination to prevent the development of the autonomous institutions needed to manage the increasingly complex society Indonesia became as it grew in prosperity. These institutions included an independent judiciary, a free press and representative political bodies. In fact, Suharto worked to undermine and prevent the evolution of the judiciary, the media and the parliament. When financial crisis struck Asia in 1997, followed by political crisis in 1998, Indonesian institutions were too fragile to cope, ultimately costing Suharto the presidency.

For all his failings, Suharto had many significant achievements. As Australia's former ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woollcott has written, strident criticism, especially from the political Left, of Suharto as a brutal, corrupt military dictator ruling an expansionist Indonesia has always been exaggerated. Mr Woolcott contends Suharto was certainly authoritarian and relied on the armed forces for support, but he was also pragmatic, secular and opposed to Islamic extremism.

When Suharto took control of Indonesia in 1965, the country was in crisis, unable to feed itself and with inflation running at 500 per cent. Under Suharto's predecessor, president Sukarno, many in the country were starving, there was great political instability and great regional tensions. Indonesia was embroiled in a dangerous military confrontation with Malaysia, which saw Indonesian and Australian troops clash in Borneo.

Suharto rose to power after defeating a botched pro-communist coup attempt against Sukarno. He was assigned emergency powers on March 11, 1966 through a presidential decree by Sukarno before becoming president the following year. Once in office, he set about turning the country's fortunes around while consolidating his own power and that of the New Order regime he had set up. As Sheridan has written, it is difficult to imagine what Australia might have been like had Indonesia become a communist nation in the mid-1960s. Everything we know of Southeast Asian development and success would have been absent from history, replaced by tyranny and social failure on a massive scale.

Suharto saved his nation from devastation, imposing a semblance of order on what Mr Woolcott has described as a chain of 13,600 islands, stretching the distance from Broome in Western Australia to Christchurch in New Zealand, with a population of about 230 million people composed of about 300 ethnic groups and speaking about 250 distinct languages. Creating a sense of nation in such circumstances is in itself an extraordinary achievement.

Despite the corruption claims against him, the esteem with which Suharto continued to be held up until his death was demonstrated by the blanket coverage given in newspapers and on television networks to Suharto's failing health since he was first hospitalised on January 4.

As with all leaders, Suharto's legacy must be viewed in the context in which he had to govern. A former Dutch colony, Indonesia is still a very young country. Under Suharto's watch, it fared much better in making the transition to democracy than many former colonies, particularly in Africa.

Alongside Indonesia's social upheaval during the Suharto years was great economic progress. When he took power, per capita income was $US74 and 70 per cent of Indonesia's population lived below the UN poverty line. About half of all primary school-age children went to school. At the end of Suharto's presidency, the number of people below the poverty line had been reduced to 14 per cent, per capita income was almost $US1000, creating a large middle class, and 96 per cent of primary school-aged children were in school.

While critics claim Suharto was the lucky beneficiary of the natural prosperity of the period, there are plenty of examples of governments unable to capitalise on regional economic good fortune of the time. Suharto's economic reforms, which became a textbook study for defeating inflation, were achieved with the aid of well-educated external advisers, who became known as the Berkeley Mafia.

Suharto recognised that an important key to stability was to maintain religious tolerance. This alone was of tremendous strategic benefit for Australia. As such, religious tolerance is a central plank of Suharto's regional peace dividend. Just as far from being expansionist, as some critics claim, the main thrust of Suharto's foreign policy after 1966 was to regain the confidence of the West and of Indonesia's neighbours, especially Singapore and Malaysia, following Sukarno's erratic anti-Western policy and his Konfrontasi against Malaysia.

Under Suharto, modern Indonesia got to where it is today, a peaceful, religiously moderate, democratic nation. In the process, Australia's relationship with Indonesia has matured from one of great suspicion to close ties. Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating believed the Suharto regime represented "the single most beneficial strategic development to have affected Australia and its region in the past 30 years".

According to Mr Woolcott, the close personal relations developed by Mr Keating, and by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, helped greatly to alleviate tensions over East Timor and led to close co- operation over APEC. The bond between Australia and Indonesia were strengthened greatly under the Howard government, despite tensions over the granting of autonomy to East Timor. Australia continues to give great support to help improve Indonesia's infrastructure and develop the institutions necessary for a fully functioning democracy.

Against the terrible political situation that exists through much of the Pacific, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia provides great cause for optimism.

The Asian financial crises not only cost Suharto his presidency but also knocked Indonesia off its tremendous growth path. The country has yet to recapture the dynamic growth now being experienced by China and India. But it is logical that Indonesia will eventually be carried along in China and India's wake. The demands of growth, such as the desire for nuclear power stations, will naturally cause tensions between Australia and Indonesia. But the greater contact and trust that has been built between the two nations, something that was largely unthinkable in 1965, is one of the great legacies of Suharto's rule.

Opinion: Suharto as I knew him

The Australian - January 28, 2008

Richard Woolcott – The death of Suharto in Jakarta last night, at the age of 86, will give rise to different evaluations of his contribution to Indonesia, to the Southeast Asian region and to Australian-Indonesian relations.

I first met Suharto when I visited Indonesia with prime minister William McMahon in 1972. I last met him in 1997 as chairman of the Australia-Indonesia Institute.

In the intervening quarter of a century I had the opportunity over numerous meetings to assess the man, his leadership qualities and his contribution to his country and to our shared neighbourhood.

I always found Suharto polite and congenial. While cautious about expressing views until he had reflected on a situation and shaped them in his own mind, and regarded by many as taciturn, I found that once he knew you, he was friendly, relaxed and willing to listen. He also articulated his own views clearly, especially his vision for Indonesia. In conversations he smiled frequently. In fact he was known in Merdeka Palace circles as the "smiling general".

Behind that engaging smile there was, however, a firm resolve. Paul Keating once said to him at a meeting on November 15, 1997, that he had told some other APEC leaders that he, Suharto, "was as tough as old boots". He was. He stood by his friends and stuck firmly to his views once they were formed.

Suharto was not an intellectual but he was shrewd and knew what he did not know. Knowing little about an economy that was in chaos in 1965, he chose civilian Berkeley University-educated economists (widely known as the Berkeley Mafia) to rescue the economy. These key economic ministers included Professor Widjojo, Ali Wardhana, Professor Sadli and Emil Salim.

Suharto was also reliable. If he said he would do something, it would be carried out. As Singapore's former prime minister and present minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew described him, Suharto was "a man of his word". Lee also recognised the major contribution Suharto made to regional stability in Southeast Asia during the 1970s and 80s.

Suharto, like most Javanese, played his cards close to his chest. I recall once having a private discussion with the governor of Central Java, Soepardjo, who had become a good friend. It was shortly before the 1996 presidential election. I asked Soepardjo who he thought was most likely to be nominated by Suharto as his vice-president. I always remember his reply.

"Dick," he said, "as you know, the president and I have been comrades in arms. I have been a trusted friend for many years. I am the governor of the president's province, the most populous province in Indonesia, Central Java. I spent an hour with the Bapak yesterday. It was an empat mata (four eyes only) meeting. We discussed the current state of politics. Yet I left that meeting with no idea who he might nominate in just a few days' time. I know him as well as anybody but I could read nothing in his expression."

It is hardly surprising that Suharto was sometimes misunderstood by Australian leaders.

In January 1976 I accompanied foreign minister Andrew Peacock on a call on the president. Peacock said he wanted to raise with Suharto the possibility of a UN force in East Timor following Indonesia's invasion the previous month.

I advised him against doing so on the grounds that it would not be prudent to present an important new idea to the president without some prior notification, preferably through his colleague, the Indonesian foreign minister. Peacock ignored this advice as, of course, he was entitled to do and towards the end of the conversation he made this proposal to the president. Suharto's face was an impassive mask. When Peacock finished, he simply nodded.

In the car after the call, Peacock said: "You see, he agreed." "No," I replied. "Suharto's nod was not a nod indicating assent. It was a Javanese nod, which simply means I have heard what you have said." A few days later, the proposal for a UN force was officially rejected.

Probably because of his army training, Suharto was somewhat hierarchical and conscious of status. For example, he declined, as head of state of Indonesia, to receive Sir Ninian Stephen when he wanted to visit Indonesia in 1986. Suharto acknowledged Queen Elizabeth II as Australia's head of state, not the governor- general. In Suharto's eyes, Sir Ninian was her representative.

Suharto, like many Javanese, was attracted to mysticism. One of his confidants and spiritual advisers was Sudjono Humardani. Before taking a major decision Suharto would often meditate with Sudjono, occasionally at a special cave on the Dieng Plateau to which, incidentally, he took Gough Whitlam in a rare gesture in 1974.

Strident criticism, especially from the political Left, of Suharto as a brutal, corrupt military dictator ruling an expansionist Indonesia has always been exaggerated.

Suharto was certainly authoritarian and relied on the armed forces for support. He was also pragmatic, secular and opposed to Islamic extremism. I was surprised to find when I arrived in Jakarta as our ambassador in 1975 that there were a disproportionate five Christians in the cabinet.

On a farewell call shortly before my return to Australia in 1978, Suharto asked me to remind Australian ministers that the threat to his government and to Indonesia's stability came not from any recrudescence of the Indonesian Communist Party but from Islamic fundamentalism, especially if it were to secure external support.

One of Suharto's main contributions to Indonesian stability was in fact to maintain religious tolerance which has, regrettably, broken down since he was ousted.

Far from being expansionist, the whole thrust of Suharto's foreign policy after 1966 was to regain the confidence of the West and of his neighbours, especially Singapore and Malaysia, following Sukarno's erratic anti-Western policy and his Konfrontasi against the establishment of Malaysia.

He saw Indonesia as the successor state to Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. Indonesia had always acknowledged Portuguese sovereignty over East Timor.

It was only after the breakdown of Portuguese decolonisation policy in 1974-75 and when the prospect emerged of a left wing, independent but aid-dependent mini-state within the Indonesian archipelago, at the height of the Cold War, that he agreed to his military advisers' firm recommendations that the colony must be incorporated, if necessary by force.

In the light of the civil war that had erupted and Portugal's abandonment of its colony in 1975, he first authorised covert Indonesian involvement and then the invasion on December 6. His motivation was not territorial expansion. It was national security.

In other circumstances his clear preference was for the peaceful political integration of East Timor when it was decolonised.

In 1964, when I visited Indonesia from Singapore, where I was Australian commissioner, I could sense the coming social explosion that brought the then little known Major General Suharto to power. At that time, 70 per cent of Indonesia's population lived below the UN poverty line. Per capita income was only $US74. Less than 50 per cent of primary school-age children were in school.

Thirty years later, those living below the poverty line had been reduced to 14 per cent. Per capita income had risen to $US997 (a more than 13-fold increase) and a large middle class had developed. Ninety-six per cent of primary school-aged children were in school.

World Bank projections in 1995 (since overtaken by the unpredicted East Asian financial crisis in 1997) suggested Indonesia would be the world's fifth-largest economy by 2020.

Indonesia's stability and economic progress between 1975 and 1995 were indeed remarkable. No other developing country achieved comparable progress. Much of the credit for this transformation should be given to Suharto and his key civilian economic ministers.

At the same time Indonesia had translated its progress into increased regional and international stature.

There was, of course, the dark side to his long presidency. Suharto demonstrated four principal flaws. First, he identified Indonesia's progress and stability with his own continuing leadership. He stayed too long. Had he stepped down in 1992 or even in 1997, history would, I believe, record his presidency more favourably than it now might.

But he made no proper arrangements for an orderly succession, such as Tunku Abdul Rahman had made in Malaysia and Lee in Singapore.

Second, he was unresponsive to concerns about human rights. He acquiesced in the removal of those who stood in the way of what he considered was best for Indonesia or who were publicly opposed to his policies. He also tolerated abuses of human rights by the armed forces, especially in East Timor, Aceh and Papua.

Third, he abandoned his earlier policy of gradual political liberalisation in favour of trying to consolidate his own power. This inhibited his ability to respond to legitimate popular aspirations and to manage growing pressures for change, especially in the 90s.

Suharto was not by nature a democrat. He saw democracy, especially in a developing country, as divisive and wasteful of talent. He had seen the first attempt fail under Sukarno. He believed that at Indonesia's stage of development the most appropriate form of government for a country of such size and diversity was a strong centralised administration. Otherwise national unity could not be maintained.

Democracy only worked, and even then not always efficiently, in Western societies with generally high levels of prosperity and education. He did not regard Indian democracy as likely to prove effective. History is therefore likely to record that one of Suharto's major failures was that he did not nourish the institutions Indonesia would need in the future: namely an independent judiciary, a free press and, especially, representative political institutions. In fact, he undermined and prevented the evolution along these lines of the judiciary, the media and the parliament. When the economic crisis struck in 1997 and the political crisis in 1998, Indonesian institutions were too fragile to cope, a situation that prevails to this day and for which Suharto must take most of the responsibility.

Fourth, corruption, cronyism and nepotism increased substantially in the latter stages of his presidency. In particular, he permitted his children to enrich themselves grossly by intruding into virtually all lucrative contracts and monopolies. This situation worsened after the death of his wife, Ibu Tien, in April 1996. A degree of restraint probably departed with her.

Turning to bilateral relations, Suharto was genuinely interested in Australia. I returned with him for his last visit for informal talks in Townsville in April 1975 with Whitlam. Suharto's positive approach to trade liberalisation and to Asia-Pacific economic co-operation was to be of great value to Australia.

When I called on him in April 1989 as Bob Hawke's special envoy to advance the idea of an Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, he was cautious but supportive. His subsequent support was critical in securing the agreement of the other ASEAN countries to this major Australian initiative.

Later, in November 1994, as the host for the APEC leaders' meeting in Bogor, encouraged by prime minister Keating, Suharto again showed decisive leadership, as the president of one of the world's major developing countries, in committing Indonesia – and because of its influence – the other countries of Southeast Asia to the free trade agenda embodied in the Bogor Declaration and to a more open international trading system.

The Agreement on Mutual Security signed on December 18, 1995, was another area in which Suharto showed leadership in a way that was helpful to Australia and to regional security. It was a confidence-building measure and demonstrated to both the Australian and Indonesian communities that we had a shared interest in the security of our region. It was an important evolution of Hawke's belief that Australia must find its security "with and not against Indonesia".

It is a matter for regret that due to the mutual mishandling in Jakarta and Canberra of aspects of Timor policy in 1999, prime minister John Howard chose to describe the AMS as "irrelevant", which led regrettably toits abrogation by an angry president BJHabibie.

This is an unfortunate episode because, both in Opposition in 1995 and later in office, the Howard government had strongly supported this agreement. It has since been replaced by a new agreement drafted by the Howard government.

Suharto's presidency spanned nine Australian prime ministers, from Robert Menzies to Howard. In November 1975, I conveyed a personal message from Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister to Suharto, stating that if elected he wished to develop the same close personal relationship with Suharto that Whitlam had built up. Suharto had a sense of humour and while he welcomed Fraser's attitude, he commented with a wry smile: "Many people in your country think of Indonesia as unstable. Malcolm Fraser will be the sixth Australian prime minister with whom I have dealt!"

Managing a chain of 13,600 islands, stretching the distance from Broome in Western Australia to Christchurch in New Zealand, with a population of about 230 million people composed of about 300 ethnic groups and speaking about 250 distinct languages, is by any standard a massive political challenge. It is one of the reasons why Australian prime ministers from Holt to Howard were impressed by Suharto's leadership.

I suspect that although there were important flaws in his presidency, Suharto's 32-year rule will be judged more objectively by future historians than it is likely to be now, especially in Australia.

[Richard Woolcott has probably spent more time over the past 40 years with Suharto than any other senior Australian official. He was invited by The Australian to contribute this comment.]

Farewell to Jakarta's man of steel

The Australian - January 28, 2008

Greg Sheridan's Blog – Indonesia's Suharto was an authentic giant of Asia, a nation-builder, a dictator, a changer of history.

He was also, for Australia, the most important and beneficial Asian leader in the entire period after World War II. This was once a widely held view among senior Australian policy-makers. Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating frequently averred there was no country in the world more important to Australia than Indonesia.

He also, in interviews with me and many other forums, declared that Suharto's rise to power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s was the most fortunate strategic development for Australia since the end of World War II. This was not only a Labor view. When Tim Fischer was deputy prime minister, he nominated Suharto as the man of the 20th century.

Keating and Fischer may have spoken with some characteristic overstatement, but the impulse behind their remarks was certainly right. Suharto was a prime mover of history and his rule was of immeasurable benefit to Australia.

The messiness and tragedy of Suharto's last years in office make this an uncomfortable and unpopular judgment now. It is true, nonetheless. It is hard to take the proper measure of Suharto.

The positives, too easily forgotten, are enormous. When Suharto took control of Indonesia in 1965, he defeated a botched pro- communist coup attempt.

Indonesia was then a broken backed country on the brink of famine and disintegration. Inflation was running at 500 per cent. It had one of the largest communist parties in the world, at a time of dangerous communist expansion.

Its erratic leader, Sukarno, whom Suharto gradually deposed, had instructed Jakarta's malnourished residents to solve the city's vermin problem and their own hunger by eating the huge population of rats.

Indonesia was embroiled in a tense and dangerous military confrontation with Malaysia, in which Indonesian and Australian troops clashed in Borneo.

Suharto turned all this around, while consolidating his own power and the New Order regime he set up.

He turned over the running of the Indonesian economy to the so- called Berkley Mafia of Western-educated technocrat economists. They did a brilliant job. The period 1965 to 1968 in Indonesia became a textbook case of how to bring hyper-inflation under control. Suharto reoriented Indonesian foreign policy on to a stable and pro-Western path. He was crucial in the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 and the overall stability of Southeast Asia. Later he was critical to every positive achievement of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co- operation forum.

Australia's successful APEC diplomacy, especially under Keating, would have been impossible without Suharto.

The broader regional stability Suharto brought about was of incomparable importance to Australia. It is difficult to imagine what Australia might have been like had Indonesia become a communist nation in the mid-1960s.

Everything we know of Southeast Asian development and success would have been absent from history, and tyranny and social failure on a massive scale would have replaced it.

Australia's defence budget over three decades might have been three or four times as high as it was. We could have developed as a fearful, isolated and perhaps even militaristic society. This is all speculation, but a communist Indonesia would have fundamentally changed Australian history.

After stabilising Indonesia's economy, Suharto's team set about developing it. The great agencies of development, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, regarded Indonesia in the 1970s and 80s as a model of the effective uses of international aid.

Millions of people were freed from poverty; Indonesia became self-sufficient in rice; a sizeable manufacturing economy grew up. Most important of all, a middle class came into being.

There was, especially from the late 1980s, an important liberalising streak in Indonesia and the emergence of a genuine civil society.

Although Indonesia was never a democracy under Suharto, there was a wide degree of permissible discussion, by Southeast Asian standards a fairly liberal press, and many of the procedures of social consultation that characterise a democracy.

These trends continued up until about 1993 and if Suharto had retired and gone into retirement at that year's presidential election, or if illness had claimed him around then, he would now be hailed as one of the most successful nation builders the world has seen. But, like so many others, he stayed too long.

It was not the least of the ironies of Suharto's demise that he was brought down by the middle class his economic liberalisation had created, especially the university students, in many cases the sons and daughters of officials in his own government.

The positives in Suharto's rule are easily forgotten, but the negatives were huge and undeniable as well. The most important negative was a consistently poor record on human rights.

In the mass anti-communist killings of 1965, it is still not clear exactly what role the army played nor indeed precisely how much control Suharto, still struggling with Sukarno, had.

The savage and mostly Muslim initiated anti-communist violence was a cover for many unrelated violent actions. The army certainly wanted to suppress the communists, whom it believed had orchestrated the 1965 coup attempt, but the army was not responsible for much of the killing.

The worst, but by no means the only, human rights excess under Suharto occurred in East Timor, during and after its incorporation into Indonesia in 1975.

Suharto's rule had many other flaws. He was a strong president but a weak father. Although Suharto himself lived modestly, he allowed his greedy children many state monopolies, which meant they could extract vast monopoly rents from the Indonesian economy. More than anything, it was the corruption of Suharto's family that turned Indonesian opinion against him.

He also failed dismally in planning a proper succession strategy. He even appointed the eccentric BJ Habibie as vice-president partly because he thought no one would want him as president. This was related to a broader failure of his regime to develop state institutions with a significant grip on the society.

As Suharto became older, his rule became more personalised so that while a civil society did develop, Indonesian institutions remained anaemic and feeble.

Worst of all, perhaps, from about 1993, certainly by 1994, Suharto himself had turned definitively away from the liberalisation he had gradually allowed in the several previous years. In 1994, a pivotal year, he closed down the prestigious Tempo magazine, and some others, in a sure sign of regime insecurity and clumsiness.

But there was infinite irony, and much tragedy, in the crisis that finally brought Suharto down. In 1965, he had brought the Indonesian economy back almost from death by following orthodox Western economic advice.

In the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis, it was Suharto's willingness to put Indonesia on an IMF reform path, which, more than anything, was the immediate cause of his regime's collapse, whereas Mahathir Mohamad, in neighbouring Malaysia, defied the counter-productive IMF advice and prospered.

It was not, as some analysts thought, an unwillingness on Suharto's part to embrace the pain of the IMF reforms that did him in, but the foolishness and unreality of the IMF's prescriptions for Indonesia and the consequences of Suharto's genuine efforts to implement them.

The greatest testament to Suharto, however, is modern Indonesia. That Indonesia moved from more than three decades of Suharto's rule to the relatively stable and economically growing democracy it is today is of course a tribute to the Indonesian people.

It is also a tribute to the Indonesia that Suharto created, a modern, complex, diverse society with capable leaders and an intelligent outlook on the world.

There was good and bad in Suharto, good and bad in what he did. Undoubtedly, in producing a stable Indonesia, and therefore a stable Southeast Asia, Suharto bequeathed an inestimable gift to Australia.

Suharto: unassuming general, ruthless dictator

Agence France Presse - January 27, 2008

Bhimanto Suwastoyo, Jakarta – Indonesia's Suharto, who died Sunday aged 86, was a ruthless dictator whose success presiding over huge economic progress was overshadowed by a legacy of bloodshed, human rights abuses and corruption on a colossal scale.

Personally unassuming, he ruled the world's most populous Muslim nation with an iron fist for over three decades, crushing dissent as he racked up power.

His death came more than three weeks after he was admitted to hospital with heart, lung and kidney problems, although he had surprised his doctors by his resilience.

"Father has returned to God," his eldest daughter, Siti Hariyanti Rukmana, told reporters outside. "We ask that if he had any faults, please forgive them... may he be absolved of all his mistakes."

Suharto's tenure was marked by repression, from the killings of at least half a million communists and their sympathisers after the abortive coup that saw him seize power in 1966, to invading East Timor and quelling separatist movements in Aceh and Papua.

Although he steered this sprawling archipelago nation through an economic boom, making it notably self-sufficient in rice, billions of dollars ended up in the hands of friends and relatives as cronyism and corruption ran riot.

"We could not have expected a leader for Indonesia worse than Suharto. But he was no Pol Pot," said Asmara Nababan, head of the Centre for Democracy and Human Rights here.

"The regime committed serious crimes," he said, "not only against civil and political rights but also against economic, social and cultural rights."

Suharto was forced to step down in 1998 as protests surged and blood again spilled onto the streets, but his shadow remained. Efforts to put him on trial for human rights atrocities or corruption fell apart through lack of will or because of his poor health.

Born into a farming family on Java island on June 8, 1921, at a time when Indonesia was ruled by the Dutch, Suharto joined the Royal Netherlands Indies Army, rising to sergeant.

When Japanese forces occupied Indonesia in 1942 he joined a Japanese-backed independence militia and, after independence, the nascent armed forces.

Suharto seized power in the violent aftermath of a botched coup blamed on the Indonesian communist party, and presided over a bloodletting that saw at least half a million people killed and millions thrown into jail. He banned the party, assumed the presidency in 1968, and set about bringing the country out of its economic doldrums.

Under his rule the nation shifted from a dependency on oil and gas exports to focus on exporting manufactured products and textiles.

Economic progress was undermined however by a regime that invested far too much power in Suharto, resulting in cronyism during his rule and a weak state after his fall, according to political analyst Dewi Fortuna Anwar.

"On paper all the institutions of the modern state existed, but in reality the state wasn't based on the rule of law but was in support of the regime."

Anies Baswedan, the rector of Indonesia's Paramadina University, said that while Suharto set up the basis for economic development, "on the other hand he completely failed to develop good political foundations for this country to prosper in the long run."

Suharto's autocratic rule, reliance on the army and intolerance of dissent, coupled with the crude business tactics of his six children, began to take a toll on the public mood.

By the time he ran for a seventh five-year term as president in March 1998 – the sole candidate, as usual – student protesters were being abducted and tortured and the Asian financial crisis was wreaking havoc on the economy.

Students thronged the streets, riots ended in bloodshed, the International Monetary Fund left in despair as Suharto rebuffed proposals for reforms, and ministers refused to join a new crisis cabinet. Finally, even the armed forces told him it was time to go.

He retreated to his family residence in the capital's upmarket district of Menteng, rarely accepting visitors, venturing out for occasional family events and being treated in hospital many t imes, including at least two strokes.

He always denied allegations he had siphoned off state assets and that his family were worth as much as 35 billion dollars, and the four governments that succeeded him moved only half-heartedly to probe the origins of the cash.

A criminal trial over corruption was abandoned in 2006 for health reasons, and a civil suit seeking 1.4 billion dollars was still ongoing at his death.

Still, Suharto had to watch his children's vast business empire dismantled piece by piece under public pressure, while his favourite youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, was jailed for masterminding the murder of a judge who had convicted him of corruption – although he was freed early from jail.

Last year Suharto was awarded more than 100 million dollars after a libel case against Time magazine, whose lawyers are appealing the decision.

Suharto is due to be buried next to his wife of 48 years, Siti Suhartinah, who died of a heart attack in 1996, at the family mausoleum outside the royal Central Java city of Solo.

Former Indonesian dictator Suharto dies

Associated Press - January 27, 2008

Anthony Deutsch, Jakarta – Suharto, the US Cold War ally who led one of the 20th century's most brutal dictatorships over 32 years that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86.

The former leader and army general had been ailing in a hospital in the capital, Jakarta, since January 4 when he was admitted with failing kidneys, heart and lungs. Doctors prolonged his life through dialysis and a ventilator, but he stopped breathing on his own overnight before slipping into a coma Sunday.

He was declared dead at 1:10 p.m. when his heart stopped. The cause of death was multiple-organ failure, Chief Presidential Dr. Marjo Subiandono said.

"My father passed away peacefully," sobbed Suharto's eldest daughter, Tutut. "May God bless him and forgive all of his mistakes."

A week of national mourning was declared by the office of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was to oversee a state funeral after Suharto's body had been flown by a fleet of seven Air Force planes to be put in the family mausoleum.

In a televised address, Yudhoyono called on "the people of Indonesia to pay their last respects to one of Indonesia's best sons and national leader who has done very great service to his beloved nation."

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, Suharto'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 3,000 miles.

Since being forced from power, he had been in and out of hospitals 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 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 corruption that took root under Suharto, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.

With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.

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.

Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean, in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.

When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.

His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army's then-commander, Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army contracts.

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.

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.

Even Suharto's critics agree his hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia's extremists. He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the Sept. 11 attacks on the US

Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto – nicknamed the "Berkeley mafia" after their American university, the University of California, Berkeley – transformed Indonesia's economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.

By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia's "father of development," taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and modernizing parts of the nation.

But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations as Suharto's inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates 20 percent to 30 percent of Indonesia's development budget was embezzled during his rule.

Even today, Suharto's children and aging associates have considerable sway over the country's business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have been fruitless.

Suharto's youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, was released from prison in 2006 after serving a third of a 15-year sentence for ordering the assassination of a Supreme Court judge. Another son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, joined the Forbes list of wealthiest Indonesians in 2007, with $200 million from his stake in the conglomerate Mediacom.

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.

State prosecutors accused Suharto of embezzling about $600 million via a complex web of foundations under his control, but he never saw the inside of a courtroom. In September 2000, judges ruled he was too ill to stand trial, though many people believed the decision really stemmed from the lingering influence of the former dictator and his family.

In 2007, Suharto won a $106 million defamation lawsuit against Time magazine for accusing the family of acquiring $15 billion in stolen state funds.

The former dictator told the news magazine Gatra in a rare interview in November 2007 that he would donate the bulk of any legal windfall to the needy, while he dismissed corruption accusations as "empty talk."

Suharto's wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.

The lasting legacy of Suharto

BBC News - January 27, 2008

Jonathan Head, Bangkok – If Suharto had the kind of pumped-up ego we usually associate with powerful politicians, he never let it show. In fact he rarely betrayed any emotion.

In stark contrast to his fiery and extrovert predecessor Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, Suharto exuded a sense of calm detachment, his face an enigmatic mask that gave away little.

He kept himself aloof from foreigners and Indonesians alike, almost never granting interviews, only addressing the public sparingly in set-piece speeches which he delivered in a monotone mumble with all the charisma of a junior civil servant.

He left no statues of himself, no parks or roads were named after him, and only on special occasions did you see his face up on billboards, although in the last years of his rule it did appear on the largest-denomination banknote.

Indonesians often found it difficult to pin down what they felt about the man who had towered over their lives for so long.

For most he remained an opaque, distant figure. They certainly feared him. He preferred indirect methods to disable his opponents, but was prepared at times to unleash terrifying violence to defend his so-called New Order regime.

Slaughter

The bloodshed which accompanied his rise to power, after a mysterious coup attempt in 1965 which he blamed on Indonesia's then-powerful Communist Party, was on a scale matched only in Cambodia in this region.

Within the space of a few months at least half a million people were slaughtered in anti-communist pogroms that, at the very least, Suharto and the military tacitly encouraged.

The trauma of that period scars Indonesia to this day, and was a key tool in Suharto's armoury. The spectre of a communist revival was used time and again, right up to the end of his rule, to discredit dissidents, even though the party was completely destroyed in the 1960s.

In the wake of those killings, 200,000 people were detained, half of who remained in prison for more than a decade, most without trial. They included some of Indonesia's best-known artists and intellectuals.

But it was his ability to manipulate the fear left over from the 1960s which was Suharto's key talent. He created a network of intelligence agencies whose job it was to sniff out any dissent before it could gain momentum.

Two million people were officially tainted with left wing associations right through to the 1990s – that might just mean having had a grandparent connected in some way with the old Communist Party. Such a taint could bar you from a government job, or a place at university.

His intelligence agencies proved adept at provoking incidents that gave them a pretext to crush incipient opposition, or at persuading opponents to switch sides. The student movement was crushed in the 1970s, Islamic activists were either co-opted or jailed in a series of show trials in the 1980s, and independent media outlets were crippled in the mid-1990s.

Economic growth

Suharto had an unrivalled political cunning, an unerring instinct for wrong-footing possible rivals.

But he also carried with him the mindset formed by his small-town upbringing, and believed the mass of the rural poor should be disconnected from politics, and focus only on improving their lives.

His preferred title was revealing – Bapak Pembangunan, meaning "father of development".

His approach to ruling the country was as a stern but benevolent father, who enjoyed dispensing folksy advice and assistance to awe-struck farmers, but would brook no criticism. It was an approach that delivered impressive stability and development, but at a price.

When he took over in 1966 the economy was in ruins, inflation out of control, and abject poverty was everywhere. For the next three decades he steered Indonesia through a period of almost unbroken economic growth, improving its infrastructure, its agricultural and industrial output, and the living standards of most Indonesians.

But the oppressive political climate stifled intellectual development, and smothered attempts to address Indonesia's many ethnic and religious disputes, which then erupted after Suharto's downfall with great loss of life.

Suharto was also lucky. His accession to power coincided with the escalation of the Vietnam War, when the United States was desperate for reliable allies in the region and willing to turn a blind eye to his human rights record.

It also coincided with the first oil boom, which poured riches into the government's coffers. This only fuelled the culture of patronage and corruption which was endemic in Suharto's paternalistic style of government.

It was one of his great blind spots, a corrosive drag on his economic achievements he never seemed to recognise. He was notably weak in confronting the conflicts of interest surrounding his six children, who became spectacularly rich during the boom years of the 1980s and 90s.

Suharto himself lived modestly, but he surrounded himself with people who did not, and who flagrantly abused their access to him to become even richer.

Obscure retirement

Was he a great Asian leader? The many thousands of victims of his brutal purges would surely say no, and yet most Indonesians probably accepted his rule as largely beneficial right up to his last few years in power.

He enjoyed great respect in the rest of the region as a leader who had led Indonesia away from chaos and confrontation with its neighbours.

Had he felt able to step down a few years earlier, his reputation in his country would have been assured. Suharto's retirement was a cause for celebration for many

As his New Order began to show its age in the 1990s, there was much fevered speculation over how violent Suharto's departure would be, whether it would be as bad as Indonesia's only other experience of a power transfer in the mid-1960s.

Many saw Indonesia as another Yugoslavia, an unwieldy sprawl of islands and ethnic groups that was doomed to fall apart once Suharto's vice-like hold on power was loosened.

Yet, when finally confronted with overwhelming opposition in May 1998, he did not, as many feared, use the military to defend his regime, but instead accepted his defeat, and stepped back into obscure retirement.

After a shaky few years, Indonesia has developed into one of Asia's most lively democracies, and is enjoying strong economic growth again.

One look at nearby Burma, a country with some striking similarities, is enough to know how bad things could have been in Indonesia under different leadership.

Suharto, former Indonesian dictator, dies at 86

New York Times - January 28, 2008

Marilyn Berger – Suharto of Indonesia, whose 32-year dictatorship was one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century, died Sunday in Jakarta. He was 86.

Mr. Suharto had been hospitalized on January 4 with heart, lung and kidney problems, according to medical officials of Pertamina Hospital in Jakarta. His condition worsened dramatically over the weekend and he lost consciousness and stopped breathing on his own, they said.

A statement issued by the chief presidential doctor, Marjo Subiandono, said he was declared dead at 1:10 p.m. The cause of death was given as multi-organ failure.

Mr. Suharto was driven from office in 1998 by widespread rioting, economic paralysis and political chaos. His rule was not without accomplishment; he led Indonesia to stability and nurtured economic growth. But these successes were ultimately overshadowed by his pervasive and large-scale corruption; repressive, militarized rule; and a convulsion of mass bloodletting when he seized power in the late 1960s that took at least 500,000 lives.

As the leader of one of the world's most populous countries, Mr. Suharto and his family became notorious for controlling state enterprises and taking kickbacks for government contracts, for siphoning money from state charities and for committing gross violations of human rights.

Yet Mr. Suharto remained virtually untouchable to the end, even as his successors in a new democratic system repudiated his rule. He was never charged with the killings committed under his command, and managed to escape criminal prosecution for embezzling millions of dollars, possibly billions, by having himself declared mentally incapable to stand trial. A civil suit against him was pending at his death.

After he was forced from office, he tried to give the appearance of a frail and humiliated former potentate, but he could be seen jogging and swinging a golf club at his home in the center of Jakarta. His health deteriorated in his final years and he became something of a recluse.

In his last days, a parade of the country's power elite visited the hospital to pay their respects.

Mr. Suharto – who like many Indonesians used only one name – stepped down on May 21, 1998, just two months after arranging to have himself elected to a seventh five-year term. He departed with an apology to the nation. "I am sorry for my mistakes," he said. But his quiet statement came only after the deaths of 500 student protesters, an event that shocked the people into a consensus that the president must go.

When demonstrators occupied the Parliament building, once-docile legislators finally called on the president to resign.

Like his predecessor, Sukarno, Mr. Suharto worked to forge national unity in a fractious country of 200 million people comprising 300 ethnic groups speaking 250 languages and inhabiting more than 17,000 islands spread over a 3,500-mile archipelago.

Sukarno had also fallen from power in a wave of violence, one that swept the country in 1965 after an attack that was officially portrayed as an abortive leftist coup. Mr. Suharto, one of the few senior military officers to escape execution on the first day of that uprising, moved decisively against the insurgents and effectively took control of the country.

Mr. Suharto dealt gingerly with Sukarno, a founding father of the nation who still had support within the army. Sukarno was kept as a figurehead while Mr. Suharto, a relatively little known major general, waited three years to officially succeed him, in 1968.

In the following years, governing through consensus, traditional mysticism, military repression and authoritarian control, President Suharto restored order to the country and presided over an era of substantial development.

Many Indonesians benefited from his programs, but none more so than members of his family, who became billionaires many times over. Last year, he topped a new list of world leaders who had stolen from state coffers. The list, by the United Nations and the World Bank, cited an estimate that he had embezzled $15 billion to $35 billion.

Enigmatic and magical

Mr. Suharto was an unlikely character to play such a major role in his country's destiny. He was a private person, and although he wielded complete power, he spoke in gentle tones, smiled sweetly to friend and foe and presented himself as a man of humble origins, shy, retiring and enigmatic. Short and thick set, he almost invariably dressed in a Western business suit or a safari jacket once he gave up his military uniform, and a black songkok, the flat traditional Indonesian cap.

He rarely took a public stand on any issue. Instead, by waiting to allow a consensus to form, he was usually able to make events evolve the way he wished. He can be better understood in the context of the old forms of Javanese kingship in which the ruler was surrounded by courtiers who tried to divine the royal mind.

Although he was a Muslim, Mr. Suharto seemed imbued with Indonesian traditions of animism and mysticism overlaid with Hindu and Buddhist teachings. In a country given to superstition, where ancient patterns of belief coexist with more modern ideas, he consulted gurus and dukuns, spiritual advisers and soothsayers who were believed to be in touch with natural forces.

Whether it was those forces or his timing, good fortune came to him. Just as the United States was becoming embroiled in Vietnam, he stood as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. The United States rewarded him with a foreign aid program that eventually amounted to more than $4 billion a year. In addition, a consortium of Western countries and Japan established an aid program that in 1994 alone totaled almost $5 billion.

In doing so, the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, showed a willingness to overlook the corruption, favoritism and violations of human rights, including the disappearance of opposition politicians, that came to characterize Mr. Suharto's rule.

Many Indonesians, too, supported him, at least while the economy was buoyant. But the Asian economic turmoil in 1997 exposed Indonesia's economy as on the brink of collapse.

The currency lost 30 percent of its value in 1996, a drought made rice scarce, unemployment rose and the widening income gap led to rioting and violence. Mr. Suharto turned to the International Monetary Fund, which agreed to a $43 billion bailout if Indonesia would abide by its terms.

His signing of those terms was seen as a humiliating capitulation, but he equivocated when it came to instituting them. Many saw his hesitation as an effort to protect the fortunes of his family and friends, money widely believed to have been stashed in foreign banks.

Mr. Suharto called for belt-tightening. He raised fuel prices, then revoked the order. He promised bank reform and ended tax breaks, then reversed himself or left wide loopholes.

His failure to come to grips with economic problems brought a wave of student unrest. In May 1998, student rallies spilled from the campuses into the streets and across the archipelago. Hundreds died in fires and clashes with security forces.

Apparently unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation, Mr. Suharto left on a trip to Cairo, but was forced to cut it short in an effort to restore order. The economic crisis was a challenge that he did not seem to know how to handle.

"This is something he cannot shoot, he cannot put in jail, he cannot close down, like our newspaper," said Jusuf Wanandi, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, an Indonesian policy institute.

Anti-communist purges In the 1960s, during the turbulent months following his rise to power, few would have predicted that Mr. Suharto, a peasant turned soldier, would be able to weather crisis after crisis, as he did for 32 years.

The first of those was touched off by long-smoldering resentments between Communists, conservative Muslims and ethnic Chinese that exploded into one of the bloodiest massacres in modern history.

His precise role in the violence is not clear; he managed to keep his name from being directly attached to it. What is clear is that in many areas the army, which he controlled, supplied weapons to and whipped up an aroused population to mutilate and murder people suspected of being Communists, many of them of Chinese ancestry. Estimates of the number of dead have ranged from 500,000 to as many as one million.

Contemporary dispatches reported that the general sent crack troops of the army's Strategic Reserve Command to organize the liquidation of the Communists. Hamish McDonald, a journalist with wide experience in Asia, wrote in his book "Suharto's Indonesia" that General Suharto later dispatched Col. Sarwo Edhi Wibowo with a force of commandos "to encourage the anti-Communist civilians to help with the job." The colonel said, "We gave them two or three days' training, then sent them out to kill the Communists."

Along with presumed Communists, entire families were wiped out and personal scores settled with ethnic Chinese, longtime residents of the country.

Mr. Suharto had blamed the Indonesian Communist Party for what he described as an abortive coup in 1965, though the Communists' exact role in it remains unclear. In that uprising, six senior anti-Communist generals were killed in one evening, and questions have lingered about why Mr. Suharto was one of the few senior officers not marked for assassination. In any event, he became the chief beneficiary of the subsequent crackdown as he moved quickly to consolidate his control.

When Mr. Suharto took over from Sukarno, the country was bankrupt. Inflation was rampant and hunger was commonplace in a country rich in natural resources.

Mr. Suharto ended Sukarno's policy of confrontation with Malaysia and became a force for regional stability by helping to establish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Indonesia rejoined the United Nations, from which it had withdrawn in 1965.

With the help of American-trained economists, Indonesia moved from being the world's largest rice-importing nation to a rice exporter. During the 1970s, oil was a major export and a significant source of foreign exchange. High oil prices allowed considerable economic development, but when Pertamina, the national oil company, was shaken by scandal in the late '70s, the country again neared bankruptcy.

Mr. Suharto brought what became known as the New Order to Indonesia, but at the price of repression. Scholars have estimated that as many as 750,000 people were arrested in the military crackdown after the killing of the generals, and that 55,000 to 100,000 people accused of being Communists may have been held without trial for as long as 14 years.

In the early '80s, 4,000 to 9,000 people were killed by death squads organized by army Special Forces to deal with petty criminals and some political operatives. And, according to Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, a professor emeritus of government at Cornell, 200,000 people of a population of 700,000 died in East Timor in the civil war and famine after Indonesia's invasion and annexation in 1975.

Professor Anderson called Mr. Suharto a "malign dictator with blood on his hands – over the years anywhere from half a million to a million people."

The repressiveness of the Suharto era broke into the headlines during President Ronald Reagan's trip to Asia in 1986, a trip meant to highlight the "winds of freedom" in the region. Just before Mr. Reagan's arrival in Bali, the government expelled a correspondent for The New York Times and barred two Australian journalists after unfavorable reports about the great wealth accumulated by the general and his family.

When he came to power, he refused at first to move into the presidential palace, saying he preferred to live in his own modest house in Jakarta. During his years as president, however, his homes became palatial.

The family business

While he occupied himself with affairs of state or relaxed with a round of golf or a day of fishing, his wife, Siti Hartinah Suharto, known as Madame Tien, handled the family's business affairs. She became the object of quiet criticism, with her detractors calling her "Madame Tien Percent," a reference to what were said to be commissions she received on business deals.

But Madame Tien, who died in 1996, was restrained compared with the six Suharto children. They used their connections to amass as much as $35 billion from their business interests, according to an estimate by Transparency International, a private anticorruption organization. Cartels and monopolies extended the family's reach to paper, cement, plywood, cloves, toll roads, power plants, automobiles and banks.

One daughter, Siti Hadijanti Rukmana, led a corporate group that collected many of the tolls on new highways. A son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, became chairman of a conglomerate of some 90 companies with interests in everything from shipping and insurance to cocoa and timber, hotels, television, automobiles, even condoms. Another son was connected to the state oil monopoly. Whatever favors were not given to the Suharto family went to friends. A respected Indonesian scholar was quoted by The Times as saying: "At least 80 percent of major government projects go in some form to the president's children or friends."

The family has denied that it benefited unfairly from tax breaks and other favors and said government contracts had been subject to competitive bidding, a widely disputed assertion.

Impoverished childhood

Mr. Suharto was born on June 8, 1921, in Kemusu Argamulja, a village west of Yogyakarta in central Java. He was the only child from his father's second marriage, but he had 11 half-brothers and sisters. His father was a village irrigation official, with control over the water for rice growers.

His parents divorced, and he moved from his mother's home to an aunt's, to his father's, to his stepfather's. At one point he was transferred to the household of Daryatmo, a noted guru and dukun, who remained an adviser to Mr. Suharto in his later years.

He was so poor that he once had to change schools because he could not afford the shorts and shoes that were the required uniform. His education ended with junior high school. He found a job in the bank in his village, but resigned after he tore his only set of work clothes in a bicycle accident.

Indonesia was a Dutch colony and with the outbreak of war in 1940, he joined the Royal Netherlands Indies Army, which surrendered to the Japanese three months after Pearl Harbor. Indonesian nationalists began cooperating with the Japanese as a step toward independence, and he joined the Japanese-sponsored Volunteer Army, reaching the rank of commander.

After the Japanese surrender he joined the independence forces, emerging as a lieutenant colonel, steeped in anti-colonialism and anti-Communism.

In 1947 he married Siti Hartinah; they had six children, Siti Hardiyanti Hastuti, Sigit Harjojudanto, Bambang Trihatmodjo, Siti Hediati, Hutomo Mandala Putra and Siti Hutami Endang Adiningsih, who survive, along with 11 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

After attending the army staff and command school, he was made a brigadier general and placed in charge of intelligence. He rose to command the army's new Strategic Reserve Force, the position he held when the six generals were killed in 1965. On that night, he was visiting his youngest child in a hospital, and it was said that that was how he escaped assassination.

Despite the allegations of human-rights abuses and corruption, Mr. Suharto escaped prosecution, evidence of the influence he retained long after he was forced from power. In 2000, the government charged him with having embezzled more than $600 million, but later dropped the charges because he was in ill health. After Time magazine reported that he had stolen up to $15 billion, he sued for defamation, and lost twice in lower courts before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor last year.

In July, prosecutors filed a civil suit, which is still pending, seeking $1.1 billion in damages for embezzling. And in December, an investigation was announced into six cases of human-rights abuses, including the killing of more than half a million people in the '60s.

Because of a stroke and other ailments, he was said to have brain damage and trouble communicating. But in November, after obtaining the verdict against Time, he gave a rare interview to an Indonesian news magazine. Asked about the accusations of corruption, he laughed. "It's all empty talk," he said. "Let them accuse me. The fact is I have never committed corruption."

[Seth Mydans contributed reporting from Solo, Indonesia.]

Pardon, 24-hour trial among Soeharto proposals

Jakarta Post - January 25, 2008

Jakarta – The government must consider various avenues to conclude the legal cases around Soeharto, including a special 24-hour trial, said Presidential Advisory Council member Adnan Buyung Nasution.

Director of the Anti-corruption Study Center at Gadjah Mada University Denny Indrayana and Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) historian Asvi Warman Adam said a court decision was vital to provide a legal and political basis for any possible action on Soeharto.

They said this included a pardon, punitive measure or the restoration of his name.

Denny said it was important for the government to conclude legal processes, especially those related to Soeharto's criminal cases, including human rights violations like killings and kidnappings that occurred during his presidency.

"If the court finds Soeharto guilty, the government can consider giving him a legal, unquestionable pardon. If he is found to be not guilty through this legal process, then his reputation needs to be restored," Denny said.

The idea of a 24-hour trial for Indonesia's second president Soeharto was first suggested by Buyung on Jan. 16.He said the irregular legal step was needed by the government to make a proper decision regarding Soeharto's legal status.

Buyung said if President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pardoned Soeharto without any trial process, he could be impeached. "The most important thing needed for conducting the 24-hour trial is only a strong will from the Attorney General's Office and the Supreme Court," he told tempointeraktif.com.

Denny said the government has three options on Soeharto's legal case. He said to first, drop the legal process and keep the matter in dark obscurity forever. Second, give a pardon without having any clarity about what mistakes Soeharto is accused of; and third, continue the legal process and make a decision based on the court finding. "For me, the best option is the last one," he said.

Denny urged the government to consider Buyung's suggestions, even without Soeharto's presence at the 24-hour trial. "There will be no problem to conduct the trial without Soeharto's presence, because his lawyers can represent him. After all, the Attorney General's Office is ready with their official report for bringing Soeharto to trial," he said.

Asvi said he supported the idea. "If the government pardons Soeharto without any court decision, it will be a very bad precedent for Indonesia's law enforcement," he said.

"The government must have a strong reason for giving the pardon. The only way to prove Soeharto's wrongdoings as have been accused is through trial sessions," he said.

Buyung said there were at least three steps for carrying out the extraordinary trial.

First, the government needs to revoke the 2006 Letter of Case Investigation Cessation for Soeharto's criminal cases. The letter, Buyung said, was not aimed to stop the legal process entirely, but to discontinue trial sessions due to Soeharto's permanent illness.

Second, the government can carry out a trial session without Soeharto's presence. He said this would be different from an in- absentia trial, because the absence of Soeharto was merely due to illness not escape.

During the session, the prosecutor would only need to read Soeharto's official report; and 10 witnesses would be heard and all evidence would be presented in one session. Then, the panel of judges would make a decision based on the evidence and their consciences.

Third, after the trial is concluded, the government can talk about giving a pardon or not. (uwi)

 Aceh

Only two of 10 Aceh parties to be verified for elections

Jakarta Post - January 30, 2008

Nani Afrida, Banda Aceh – Only two out of 10 local political parties in Aceh Nanggroe Darussalam have satisfied requirements to participate in the verification process scheduled for February. The event is in preparation for the direct regional elections to be held across the province next year.

"We expect the eight other parties to immediately complete the requirements in order to accelerate the verification process. Time is of the essence in this matter," Jailani M. Ali, the head of the legal services division of the Aceh Justice and Human Rights Office, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The two prepared parties are the Aceh People's Party (PRA) and GAM (Free Aceh Movement) Party. They have met administrative preconditions, such as handing in letters of approval and documents from their respective regional representatives council, identification letters, statutes and rules of association, and party symbols.

The eight parties which have yet to meet administrative requirements include Gabthat, Serambi Persada Nusantara Serikat, Aliansi Peduli Perempuan, Darussalam, Aceh Meudaulat, Lokal Aceh, Daulat Atjeh and Pemersatu Muslimin Aceh.

The verification process will be conducted in the middle of February. The local justice and human rights office has formed a 20-member verification team for the purpose.

"If all the registered parties have met the administrative requirements, we can evaluate them simultaneously, as it would save funds, time and energy," said Jailani.

In the process, each party chairman, executive leader, secretary and treasurer will be verified according to their identity cards, notification letters from their respective village heads and other administrative requirements.

Should any parties fail to fulfill their administrative requirements, the justice and human rights office will likely conduct a second phase verification process. Jailani did not mention any deadline for the verification process as it was still in the planning stage.

The verification process will be entirely financed by the Aceh- Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency. The total cost of the process is expected to be Rp 540 million (approximately US$60,000).

The allocation of funds for the verification process has not been without controversy. Community figures in Aceh have criticized the process stating that financing for the administration of the verification process should be paid by the provincial budget and not with funds set aside for tsunami survivors.

 West Papua

Yudhoyono backs brutal Papua role

Courier Mail (Australia) - January 29, 2008

Marianne Kearney, Jakarta – Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono yesterday gave extraordinary praise for former dictator Suharto's role in the brutal military operation in Papua which killed thousands of tribesman.

Leading yesterday's state funeral for Suharto in Solo, Mr Yudhoyono called on all Indonesians to remember the achievements of his 32-year rule, which was punctuated by massive human rights abuses.

The President commended Suharto for leading Operation Mandala, the early 1960s military operation aimed at intimidating the local population and pressuring then colonial ruler, The Netherlands, into handing the territory to Indonesia. "In 1962, he led the forces which bravely struggled for West Irian (Papua)," said Mr Yudhoyono.

The operation paved the way for Indonesia to formally take control of the territory in 1969. Human rights groups say up to 100,000 Papuans have died as a result of actions by the Indonesian military and security forces.

Before Operation Mandala, the Dutch had been preparing West Irian for independence. But the US – fearing Indonesia might move further to the left – pressured The Netherlands into allowing West Irian to be put under United Nations control.

The UN ceded the territory to Indonesia and held a much criticised Act of Free Choice in 1969, in which a handful of tribal chiefs were intimidated into voting to join Indonesia.

Mr Yudhoyono's comment is a signal to both Papuans and Australia that the current administration will not tolerate dissent in the province, where the Free Papua Movement has waged a low-level guerilla war since 1969.

A diplomatic tussle between Canberra and Jakarta flared in 2006 when Australia granted political asylum to a boatload of Papuans who said they were fleeing military persecution because of their peaceful support for independence.

Indonesia suspected Australia was covertly supporting independence activists, despite repeated official statements on Canberra's support for Indonesian territorial integrity.

Papua's guerilla movement has kept a low profile over the past few years.

But church groups, activists and students have continued to campaign peacefully for independence or demanded the expulsion of the Indonesian military from the jungle-clad province. Analysts say Jakarta now fears that these activists, especially the overseas campaigners, could garner international sympathy for their cause, just as exiled East Timorese successfully campaigned for independence.

East Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao flew from Dili to Solo yesterday to attend the Suharto funeral.

Mr Gusmao, who led a guerilla struggle against Indonesia's 1975- 99 occupation of East Timor, said Timorese should pay tribute to the man who helped develop their country.

"Thank God, Pak Harto did many things to develop this country over the 24 years, although he also did a lot of terrible things. But we must forgive his sins," he said.

Call for consultation over Jakarta's plan to further split Papua

Radio News Zealand International - January 28, 2008

A religious leader in Indonesia's Papua has called for Jakarta lawmakers to consult with Papuans before going ahead with their plan to split their region into four new provinces.

Last week, Indonesia's House of Representatives endorsed its own plan to create eight new provinces, including adding four provinces to the two in its Papua region.

The move has caused an outcry among many analysts and religious leaders who describe it as part of a "divide and rule" tactic by Jakarta.

Now the House has agreed to delay the split for a few months while the government evaluates whether the new provinces would be of benefit to the local people.

Father Neles Tebay of the Jayapura Catholic Diocese says there must be discussion of how the split relates to Papua's Special Autonomy status.

"A comprehensive evaluation by both the central government and the Papuan people. I think this is the one step that can be taken by both parties. Otherwise it will create more problems in West Papua."

Father Neles Tebay says that as it stands, neither the Papuan People's Assembly and Papuan Legislative Council has given approval for the planned split.

He says that going ahead with that split without that approval would be a violation of Special Autonomy law.

 Human rights/law

Police to probe BIN's role in Munir case

Jakarta Post - January 27, 2008

Jakarta – Police said Saturday they would once again question Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto in relation to the murder of noted activist Munir Said Thalib before questioning former top spy agency officials allegedly linked to the case.

The plan to question the ex-pilot came after he was found guilty by the Supreme Court of the premeditated murder of Munir and was sentenced to 20 years in jail Friday.

On Friday night Pollycarpus was arrested at his home in Pamulang, Tangerang, Banten province, and taken to Cipinang prison in East Jakarta.

National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Sisno Adiwinoto said Pollycarpus' testimony was needed as it may indicate the State Intelligence Agency (BIN) played a part in the murder.

"We will collect new information regarding the possibility of conspiracy in relation to this murder," he told The Jakarta Post.

However, Sisno said a date was yet to be set for Pollycarpus' questioning. "We will give him some time because he may still be shocked by his sentence."

Former deputy BIN chief Muchdi Purwo Prandjono and the agency's current deputy chief M. As'ad are alleged to have played a part in Munir's murder. However, the pair are yet to be named as suspects, despite their links to the case being mentioned in earlier court trials.

In a written statement read out at a court session, BIN agent Budi Santoso said Muchdi knew Pollycarpus and gave him Rp 10 million (approximately US$1,070) for an unknown purpose. BIN leaders have denied being linked to the crime.

As'ad allegedly ordered former Garuda Indonesia president director Indra Setiawan to post Pollycarpus as a security officer on the plane that flew Munir from Jakarta to Amsterdam, according to the statement.

Munir was found dead on board the flight on Sept. 7, 2004. A Dutch autopsy found he was poisoned with arsenic. In its Friday verdict, the Supreme Court said Pollycarpus was the "main actor" in Munir's murder.

Commenting on the verdict, former president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid said Saturday the main actors in the Munir murder case were still at large. "It's pity for Pollycarpus that he was sentenced to 20 years in prison while the real killers are free," he said, as quoted by Antara in Surabaya, East Java.

Gus Dur said a "current minister" was one of the main actors in the murder, but declined to mention a name. He said Santoso had since been assigned to a position abroad so he would be far away from the investigation.

Pollycarpus' lawyers said he was planning to file an appeal against Friday's verdict, which overturned an earlier Supreme Court verdict acquitting him of the murder charges he was facing.

At Cipinang jail, Pollycarpus is occupying a "15x15-meter adapting room" with another 200 prisoners, prison head Haviluddin said.

"He will stay in the room for about one month to adapt to his new situation, before being moved to his permanent cell," Haviluddin told detik.com. (rff)

Indonesian convicted in activist death

Associated Press - January 26, 2008

Anthony Deutsch, Jakarta – Police will question Indonesian intelligence agents for the first time about their alleged involvement in the poisoning death of a top human rights activist after a former pilot was convicted Friday of murder.

The questioning could break years of deadlock over the investigation into the killing of Munir Thalib, who had a reputation for exposing military abuse during the US-backed dictatorship of former President Suharto.

Thalib died of arsenic poisoning on a commercial Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam in September 2004.

A lower court in 2005 convicted Polycarpus Priyanto, an ex-pilot for Garuda, in the killing. The Supreme Court acquitted him 10 months later, drawing international criticism.

But the same court overturned the acquittal Friday based on new evidence and ruled that Priyanto committed premeditated murder, said court spokesman Nurhadi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Priyanto also was convicted of using forged documents to board the plane posing as a security agent. He was sentenced to a total of 20 years in prison. Priyanto was taken to Cipinang Prison in Jakarta late Friday.

US Embassy spokeswoman Susan Stahl welcomed the Supreme Court ruling for "its significance for accountability and the success of the Indonesian judicial system in enforcing the rule of law."

Congress decided last month to withhold $2.7 million in military aid to Indonesia pending a deadline for completing the criminal investigation.

Indonesia's chief police spokesman, Maj. Gen. Sisno Adiwinoto, said suspects at the State Intelligence Agency will be questioned about "their alleged involvement in the killing."

Priyanto's conviction has created "an entry point to go after the masterminds," said Usman Hamid, Thalib's friend and an activist who has campaigned for his killers to be brought to justice.

Thalib's widow, Suciwati, said Priyanto "should have received a life sentence" and urged police to "follow this up by bringing to justice the former leaders of the spy agency."

After his conviction, Priyanto insisted he was a victim of politics. "Everything is a big lie. I was framed," Priyanto told reporters at his home in the capital, Jakarta, as police waited to take him to prison. "This is all about politics. I am a victim."

Thalib's case has been seen as a critical test of Indonesia's ability to break from more than three decades of impunity for regime loyalists and cronies during the rule of now-ailing strongman Suharto.

Historians say up to 800,000 alleged communist sympathizers were killed during his rise to power from 1965 to 1968. His troops killed another 300,000 in military operations against independence movements in Papua, Aceh and East Timor. No one has been punished over the killings.

Transparency International has said Suharto and his family amassed billions of dollars in stolen state funds, allegations they are fighting in court.

Police urged to investigate ex-BIN officers over Munir

Jakarta Post - January 26, 2008

Jakarta – Pressure is mounting on the National Police to launch an investigation into former State Intelligence Agency (BIN) officials for their involvement in the murder of rights activist Munir Said Thalib, after the Supreme Court convicted a former Garuda pilot of the crime.

The Supreme Court handed down Friday a 20-year jail term to Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto in a case review of the premeditated murder of the human rights campaigner, who was poisoned aboard a Garuda Indonesia flight to Amsterdam in September 2004.

National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Sisno Adiwinoto, however, refused to comment on whether the Supreme Court ruling would result in an immediate investigation into top intelligence officials, whose links with Pollycarpus were unveiled during the trial.

"We have taken several measures, but we can not make them public until we receive a copy of the verdict. For us the court ruling has not officially come into effect," Sisno told The Jakarta Post.

The police had previously said that they would only proceed to investigate former deputy BIN chief Muchdi Purwo Prandjono, who according to a BIN agent's written statement read out in court knew Pollycarpus and gave the then Garuda pilot Rp 10 million for an unknown purpose.

Another BIN official mentioned in the Munir murder trial was the agency's second man in command, M. As'ad. Budi said in his statement that As'ad had ordered then Garuda Indonesia president director Indra Setiawan to assign Pollycarpus as a security officer on the plane that flew Munir to Amsterdam.

Asmara Nababan, a human rights activist and former member of the government-sanctioned fact-finding team to help police investigate the murder, said the court verdict should pave the way for a probe into intelligence officials in connection with the case.

"Now that the ruling is out, the police can no longer stall the investigation into BIN officials like Muchdi and As'ad. The verdict has set an ideal momentum for the police to proceed and step up their investigation," Asmara told the Post.

The fact-finding team recommended that the police question a number of BIN officials, saying it found records of telephone conversations between Pollycarpus and a BIN official. The team also demanded that the police disclose the conversations, but to no avail.

BIN chief Syamsir Siregar has said he would not protect any agency officials. (amr)

 Environment/natural disasters

Government needs pro-environment policies: Walhi

Jakarta Post - January 29, 2008

Adianto P. Simamora, Jakarta – Green activists called on the government to use the momentum of the centennial anniversary of National Awakening Day to overhaul its development program along pro-environment lines.

Chalid Muhammad, executive director of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said here Monday that repeated natural disasters such as floods, landslides, droughts, harvest failures and forest fires had worsened the country's poverty rate.

"Our country spends nine months a year managing the calamities of disasters," he said.

Indonesia will commemorate the 100th year of National Awakening Day on May 20. The day marks the time young intellectuals set up Boedi Oetomo, the first national political society in Dutch-ruled Indonesia.

Chalil slammed the government for not making any breakthroughs in reducing ecological disasters. "The leaders seem to forget Indonesia is now in a critical phase of ecological disasters."

He said massive exploitation of natural resources would remain in place in the coming years as many of the government's policies were pro-business.

Chalil referred to the new investment law, which offers tax incentives to investors, and laws on spatial planning and the management of coastal areas and small islands.

Walhi also predicted conservation would continue to be challenged by allowing big-scale plantation firms, mining and oil industries to expand their businesses.

Chalil said the government had issued a new policy allowing investors to manage 100,000 hectares in a province, higher than the previous of only 20,000 ha. The government also provides credit facilities to attract more investors in plantations.

"With such incentives and in addition to the illegal logging, the collapse of our forest will come true," he said.

Walhi has predicted all natural forest located in low-lying areas will be destroyed by 2022.

In the maritime sector, it said the government's revitalization policy aimed at increasing fishery exports would also make the country face a fishing crisis by 2015. "We lost between two and four million tons of fish from poaching per year," Chalil said.

Former coordinating minister for the economy Rizal Ramli said forest deforestation had so far only profited very few people. "In my survey on the deforestation rate in the 1980s, less than 20 people, all linked to former president Soeharto, took benefits from the forest... but many Indonesian people are still poor."

He said the government should shift economic policy from an exclusive system to an inclusive one by involving the public.

Walhi said 90 percent of the country's oil and gas fields were controlled by transnational companies, of which 60 percent went to export. "But more than 37 million Indonesians still lived below the poverty line as of 2007," Chalil said.

To make it worse, he added, more disasters had taken place recently. "We recorded 840 ecological disasters between 2006 and 2007, leaving over 7,303 people dead and 750,000 houses in ruin."

Lapindo mudflow controversy heats up House debate

Jakarta Post - January 25, 2008

Jakarta – Hopes for achieving justice for victims of the devastating mudflow in Sidoarjo regency, East Java, are fading as controversy rages over whether the investigation into the case will continue.

"We expect that the investigation will continue, as requested by prosecutors," National Police chief Gen. Sutanto said Thursday on the sidelines of a hearing with House of Representatives Commission III on legal affairs and human rights.

After rumors that the police had halted the criminal investigation without giving reasons lawmakers accused the police of being not transparent.

Sutanto said the investigation was being handled by the East Java Police and that the National Police couldn't interfere.

However Commission III member Beni K. Harman said "The National Police have the ultimate authority to investigate the matter. But here we have the National Police chief saying he doesn't have the authority to interrupt the investigation in East Java. That's not acceptable."

Beni stressed that the investigation should be done in a transparent and accountable manner.

"The National Police should take over the investigation and expose their findings openly to the public," he said. Similar demands were made by other members of the commission and by Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi) executive director Chalid Muhammad.

Chalid said compensation paid to the mudflow victims did not absolve Lapindo Brantas Inc. – partly owned by the family of chief welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie – of responsibility for the disaster.

"It is for this reason we suggested the National Police chief take over the case," he was quoted as saying by Antara news agency.

He said the National Police should use the full extent of their authority to confiscate original documents as evidence, including real-time charts and geolographs.

The company at the heart of the disaster that first struck on May 29 nearly two years ago, Lapindo Brantas Inc., made some compensation payments after President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered a first phase of compensation at the end of 2007.

However, some people whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed refused the 20 percent compensation they were offered, contending it was hardly enough to start a new life.

At a court session Wednesday, investigators said they had information that, as drilling reached a certain depth, Lapindo failed to install casings, causing the mudflow.

Walhi said he believed that documents and other evidence indicated an error on the part of Lapindo.

Two suits filed by the leading environmental watchdog after the disaster were rejected in 2007 by the Central Jakarta District Court and South Jakarta District Court.

Beni said the police would risk their reputation by not being open about the case.

"And we also know that the company is owned by some really influential people," he said.

A 2007 report on public opinion prepared by the Corruption Eradication Commission, ranked the National Police 26 out of 30 institutions – almost at the bottom – on the basis of integrity. (lva)

 War on corruption

Lampung councillors' allowance under fire

Jakarta Post - January 26, 2008

Oyos Saroso H.N., Bandarlampung – Local activists criticized Bandarlampung city councilors for appearing to give themselves a raise with a budget allocation of an additional Rp 13.6 billion (US$1.4 million) which will be go to providing suitable housing for the municipal legislative body.

As a result of the housing budget decision, which applies to the current fiscal year, city councillors will receive Rp 5 million as a monthly housing allowance while deputies of the council chairman receive Rp 5.5 million per month and the chief councilor Rp 6 million per month.

Chairman of the Anti-corruption Committee (Koak) Ahmad Yulden Erwin said the housing allowance was too high for the small city, because monthly rental fees on the most luxurious houses in Bandarlampung were only around Rp 3 million.

"The housing allowance is too high. This is apparently a new strategy to raise councillors' monthly income and this kind of thing has happened before in other regions, including with the House of Representatives in Jakarta," he said Thursday.

Bandarlampung chief councilor Azwar Yakub said the housing allowance was paid because the municipal legislature had yet to provide official housing accommodation for councillors and administrative staff.

"It has been difficult to find land for the development of an official residence for the city councillors and most councillors haven't been supportive of the proposals we've made for the residences because they're aware they may end up living there for as long as 10 years (two five-year terms)."

Lampung Parliament Watch (LPW) province-level chairman Wahyu Sasongko concurred with the local activists.

He recommended a review of the housing allowance line-item, as the rate at luxury hotels in the city was no more than Rp 15 -20 million annually.

Corrupt legal institutions impede graft reforms: NGOs

Jakarta Post - January 29, 2008

Abdul Khalik, Nusa Dua, Bali – The Indonesian legal system, from police and prosecutors to the judicial system, have all been involved in power abuses and bribery, paralyzing efforts to eradicate corruption accross the country, civil society organizations say.

Gadjah Mada University legal expert Denny Indrayana said Indonesia's stagnant position as "the most corrupt nation in the world" could be explained by the failure of its corrupt legal system to prosecute corrupt politicians and businesspeople.

"The legal system is supposed to uphold the law and punish guilty parties," Denny said at a seminar attended by dozens of non- government organizations from across the country, last week in Sanur, Bali.

"By doing so, it would create justice and have a deterrent effect on crime," he said, "but it has failed to carry out its task, leaving most corruption cases unresolved."

The seminar preceded a five-day UN conference on corruption in Nusa Dua, which began on Monday.

Denny, who also chairs the Center for Anti-Corruption Analysis (Pukat), said law enforcers had only managed to net some of the small fish, leaving many high-profile suspects, comprising high- ranking officials, powerful politicians and businesspeople, at large.

"Corruption cases in legislatures, the State Palace, big conglomerates and the legal system have been left untouched. They only aim at people lacking power and money. Unless they have the guts to prosecute those in power, we can not hope to eradicate corruption in this country," Denny said.

Bambang Widjoyanto of Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) said the "failure of the Supreme Court" as an independent judiciary institution under the leadership of Bagir Manan was because he allowed "external influences and bribery" to determine his court rulings and failed to take action against judges and other court officials implicated or guilty of corruption.

"How can we expect other Indonesian institutions to be clean and transparent if the Supreme Court rejects an audit from the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) on its account of fees paid by people seeking justice," he said.

He said between 2004 and 2006, despite numerous reports of bribery allegedly involving judges, the Supreme Court has made no moves to bring them to justice.

In its recent report, the Supreme Court said that out of 369 complaints it received from the public on alleged misconduct of court officials, only 43 cases were completed, with no judges punished so far.

In 2005, out of 317 complaints from the public, only 40 legal staff were handed administrative sanctions and no judges faced criminal charges or got fired, while in 2006, some 505 complaints resulted in only 51 staff members being handed administrative sanctions.

"How can the Supreme Court have a deterrent effect on bribery and corruption among its own judges and staff if it is not getting tough?" Bambang said.

He and Denny both said the overhaul of mechanisms for the recruitment of public officials for positions in legal institutions, and increased control of civil society were key factors to cut the vicious cycle of corruption in Indonesia.

"The Indonesian corruption phenomena is a full circle. There are corrupt executives, members of legislature and the judicial system," Denny said.

"To break the cycle, the public must be in direct control of the appointment of top judiciary officials," he said. "We should groom clean candidates from universities or civil society organizations, and support them while they run for office."

Former judge Dolores L. Espanol of the Philippines also said that the way to break the corruption cycle must be top-down, with top posts in the judicial system being clean and having the courage to initiate massive corruption eradication programs.

"Leaders with honesty and high integrity are a key element in the eradication of corruption. We have chief justice Puno in the Philippines who we believe can make a difference because he has proven his integrity and has begun to punish corrupt judges. We hope that all will follow suit if we have a good leader," she said.

In Indonesia, however, many have doubted the performance of former state prosecutor Antasari Azhar as the current chief of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), given that his election was influenced by political bargaining in the House of Representatives.

Amin Sunaryadi lost in the election for KPK's top post, despite the fact that he received full support from civil society organizations. "In future we need to be united and demand that a publicly-approved person is elected for such a top job," Bambang said.

'Decentralization intensifies corruption'

Jakarta Post - January 29, 2008

Muhammad Nafik, Nusa Dua, Bali – Indonesia's democratization and decentralization have virtually "opened new avenues for corruption" at the political and administrative levels, said a report released during an international anti-graft conference here Monday.

It said that since the regional autonomy was enforced in 2001, a wave of corruption cases had swept across the country's newly empowered legislative and executive bodies.

"Decentralization opened new avenues for corruption to the local elite, which may earlier have had difficulty getting their 'fair share of the cake' in a tightly centralized Indonesia," it said.

The report was issued by the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center based in Bergen, Norway, as the five-day Second Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption opened in Nusa Dua, Bali.

The report of corruption studies in six countries – Indonesia, Georgia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zambia – was initiated during the first Conference of the States Parties in Jordan in 2006.

It said the implementation of autonomy saw a high number of graft cases prosecuted in regions that spread from regional legislatures to the executive bodies.

The report said there were 265 corruption cases reported in 2006 involving local legislative councils, with suspects facing charges by prosecutor's offices around the country.

"The disclosure of corruption cases on this scale is an unprecedented phenomenon in Indonesia. "It can be said that corruption in Indonesia is systematic, deeply rooted and ranges from petty to very high-level corruption," it said.

The report said democracy and decentralization had certainly led to a reduction in blatant "palace corruption" and had decreased the government's mingling with the private sector, which was flagrant under the late former president Soeharto and his cronies.

Democracy has also increased the degree of transparency and consequently the higher incidence of reported corruption, it added.

"On the other hand, several reports indicate that this has not resulted in an actual decrease of the level of corruption but that corruption has simply been decentralized in parallel at the political and administrative level," it said.

A poll referred to by the World Bank showed the majority of Indonesian households found the level of bribes had remained "more or less the same since the decentralization, although it has slightly improved the delivery of services".

According to a public perception survey conducted by Transparency International Indonesia (TII), the judiciary was among the most corrupt state institutions in the country together with the House of Representatives, police and public prosecutors.

Indonesia is home to the most corrupt politician ever, the international non-governmental organization added.

Government 'losing fight against graft'

Jakarta Post - January 27, 2008

Abdul Khalik, Sanur, Bali – With graft cases continuing to plague state agencies, it shows that the government has not been serious in its efforts to combat corruption, participants at a three-day seminar heard Saturday.

The seminar was held in the lead-up to the five-day State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) conference, which will begin Monday in Nusa Dua, Bali.

"The government and its legal institutions are not serious. Their efforts are just a way they are trying to show the international community Indonesia has done all it can to raise its image," activist Febri Diansyah from Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said in a speech to close the forum.

The report he read to close the seminar was issued by representatives from dozens of Indonesian civil society organizations.

Representatives from the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia and Transparency International Indonesia (TII) were among participants at the conference.

"Indonesia's civil society organizations have agreed to ask state parties at the UNCAC meeting to help Indonesia recover state assets taken abroad, especially those related to (former president) Soeharto," Bambang Tri Kuncoro from the Partnership for Governance Reform said.

Participants at the seminar concluded that up to 78 percent of more than 36,000 graft cases reported by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) since the reform era were yet to be followed up on by related agencies, despite the fact they allegedly caused up to Rp 3,658 trillion in state losses.

Out of thousands of graft cases reported last year, only 82 were solved, with 166 cases solved in 2006. The state allegedly lost Rp 14 trillion due to graft in 2007 and 1.5 trillion in 2006, the report revealed.

The report concluded that the "half-hearted efforts" of the government to fight corruption were also evident in the reluctance of authorities to arrest high-profile suspects.

Out of 175 suspects in cases solved in 2007, only two were high- ranking ministers, while 67 were regents or state company directors and 108 were low-level officials.

The energy and electricity sector topped the list of 82 graft cases resolved in 2007, causing Rp 566 billion in state losses, while the misuse of funds for agriculture and from regional budgets cost the state Rp 217 billion and Rp 155 billion in losses respectively.

Corrupt practices within the judiciary contribute to the continuation of corruption in the country, the report read. As an example, the Attorney General's Office has failed to recover Rp 150 trillion in state funds stolen by suspects in the BLBI (Bank Indonesia Liquidity Assistance) cases, while it has only managed to recover 40 percent of graft-related funds from court cases it has won since 2003.

TII chairman Todung Mulya Lubis said worsening corruption in Indonesia was partly due to the influence of businesses.

"The state and the business sector have both contributed to the worsening state of corruption in Indonesia. Civil society groups should direct their attention toward businesspeople as well as the state when they are campaigning for the eradication of corruption," he told a press briefing after the seminar.

A survey released by Transparency International ranked Indonesia 143 out of 179 countries surveyed last year in terms of corruption. The country had a corruption perception index of 2.3, down from 2.4 in 2006 when it was ranked 130 out of 163 countries.

The survey found that the Indonesian police force was the most corrupt institution in the country, followed by the judiciary, the legislature and political parties.

'Soeharto loyalists thwart war on graft'

Jakarta Post - January 25, 2008

Abdul Khalik, Sanur, Bali – The fight against corruption has slowed over the last four years because forces linked with Soeharto's New Order regime remain in power, a seminar here heard Thursday.

The three-day forum, which began Thursday in Sanur, Bali, is being attended by representatives of civil society organizations including Transparency International Indonesia, Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) and the Partnership for Governance Reform.

It aims to formulate proposed actions for the upcoming conference of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), which will take place in Nusa Dua next week.

"We're running but not getting anywhere. The old forces have repositioned themselves into the democratic process, and are preventing our efforts at corruption eradication as it's against their interests," a political sociologist with National University Singapore, Vedi R. Hadiz, said.

Speaking on the first day of the seminar, he said regional autonomy, which was implemented in 2001, had contributed to spread corruption to "lower levels of society".

The Berlin-based Transparency International ranked Indonesia 143rd out of 179 countries surveyed last year in terms of corruption. The country had a corruption perception index of 2.3, down from 2.4 in 2006 when it was ranked 130th out of 163 countries.

The survey found Indonesians considered the police the most corrupt government institution, followed by the judiciary, legislature and political parties.

In its latest survey, the ICW found that judicial bodies had less success in 2007 in terms of fighting graft, with only 82 cases resolved compared to 161 in 2006.

Corruption cost the state around Rp 25.4 trillion in losses between 2004 and 2007, the group said.

Vedi, who has conducted intensive research into the democratization process and corruption in Southeast Asia, said Soeharto-linked forces had managed to control most state offices, including executive, legislative and judicial bodies, as well as the media industry.

He said the country's 10 years of political reform had failed to prevent New Order regime forces from returning to power, allowing them to block efforts to eradicate corruption.

This has forced the public to rely on civil society organizations for combating corruption, he said.

Vedi said civil society organizations should unite and organize to gain a bigger say in the political process, because corruption in Indonesia could not be solved through technical or legal approaches.

This call received a positive response from other seminar participants. Non-governmental organization activists in attendance agreed to the need to unite and find ways to propel the fight against corruption.

They said that although civil society groups had similar interests in fighting graft, they were divided. "We need to organize ourselves to better combat corruption," Piet Soeprijadi, deputy executive director of the Partnership for Governance, told the forum.

While underlining the key role of civil society in pushing the corruption eradication agenda, Felia Salim of Transparency International Indonesia said the corporate and private sectors could help efforts to eradicate graft through their corporate governance and corporate social responsibility programs.

"Self-monitoring mechanisms are the best tools for companies to prevent corruption, as the current markets will automatically punish those involved in unlawful practices," said Felia, who is also an independent commissioner with state bank BNI.

 Armed forces/defense

Arms procurement dogged by markups

Jakarta Post - January 26, 2008

Abdul Khalik, Sanur, Bali – Political interference, rampant brokerage and kickbacks have caused the price of weapons and other military equipment to skyrocket, officials and experts concluded here Friday.

House of Representatives lawmaker Djoko Susilo told an anti- corruption seminar that procurement within the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the Defense Ministry had not yet been properly scrutinized, creating many opportunities for corruption, irregularities and inefficiency.

"Within the first two years of my tenure, several major cases of corruption, irregularities and mismanagement took place. If we can conduct a thorough scrutiny, we will find more. Yet only a few cases have been prosecuted, and with unsatisfactory results," he said.

The seminar, held by several civil society organizations, precedes the UN Convention Against Corruption conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, which begins Monday.

Another speaker at the seminar, director for procurement at the Defense Ministry Commodore Mukhtar E. Lubis, said while his office was trying to implement a clean and transparent process of procurement, inefficiencies remained due to political considerations and external pressure from many parties, including officials and businesspeople.

"Procurement attracts high-profiles figures and companies as it involves a large amount of taxpayers' money," he said.

Djoko said despite the country's limited budget for arms procurement, many cases indicated that the officials were yet to spend the money on much-needed equipment.

Besides the high-profile graft allegations in the purchase of four Mi-17 helicopters from Russia, believed to have caused US$3.2 million in state losses last year, Djoko pointed out other cases, including the purchase of four Israeli-made unmanned planes through a Filipino company named Kital and the purchase of an Mi-2 from Russia through an unrecognized company that possibly caused another $600,000 in state losses.

"Why should we buy Israeli planes through the Philippines? In the case of the Mi-2, the contract stated that we will purchase 12 brand new Mi-2s worth $11.9 million, and it turned out that we got two second-hand planes for $1.6 million, and the broker has run away," he said.

Djoko said other high-cost practices included the Navy's recent decision to buy bullets from Spain at $1,000 per piece, although a similar type of bullet from Serbia only costs $600 per piece.

He said persistent scrutiny and transparency could save around 30 to 40 percent of credit exports, valued at Rp 6 trillion.

Although the Defense Ministry obtained Rp 36.4 trillion from state budget, it continues to rely on credit export facilities from other countries to cover its equipment needs.

Political influence, Djoko and Lubis agreed, could be seen in the delay in purchasing of Skytruck planes, badly needed by the Navy after it grounded eight of its 30-year-old 22 Nomad surveillance aircraft for safety reasons. A crash involving a Nomad P-833 plane in Aceh last December killed three passengers.

"We don't understand why the Finance Ministry did not approve the purchase while the House, the Defense Ministry and the Navy have approved it. We need those planes. I am afraid that the delay could cost us more," Djoko said.

International relations expert at the University of Indonesia Makmur Keliat warned the government against relying on credit export facilities offered by other countries as it could cost Indonesia more due to the higher interest rates.

Larry Markinson of the US-based Center for Public Integrity said the public should continue to scrutinize and demand transparency in government spending to avoid irregularities and misuses.

Military chief says nation not ready for democracy

Jakarta Post - January 25, 2008

Jakarta – Indonesian Military (TNI) chief Gen. Djoko Santoso said Thursday recent election disputes which turned violent in some regions served notice that the nation was not prepared for democracy.

Djoko told a press conference at the conclusion of a two-day TNI leadership meeting here the military was concerned about the conflicts, which he said could endanger national unity. "It (the conflict) is an indication, a sign, that we... are not ready to practice democracy," he said.

He was referring to ongoing disputes between supporters of candidates in the elections for governor and deputy governor in South Sulawesi and North Maluku. The election disputes have dragged on, despite the Supreme Court's intervention.

While acknowledging that the political implications of the disputes should not concern the military, Djoko said the TNI bore the responsibility to restore peace.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has appointed Army chief operational assistant Maj. Gen. Tanribali Lamo as interim governor of South Sulawesi, a move which pro-democracy activists say signals a return of the military to practical politics.

Tanribali retired from the military just before his induction as interim governor, a position that will require him to restore peace and reconcile the conflicting camps. Yudhoyono himself resigned from the military after he accepted a ministerial post in the Cabinet of President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid. Army chief territorial assistant Maj. Gen. Prijanto is another officer who gave up his military career for a political job as the running mate of Fauzi Bowo in the Jakarta gubernatorial election last year.

A number of retired military generals are also eying gubernatorial or deputy gubernatorial posts in several future regional elections, reminiscent of the New Order period which saw military officers hold key civilian posts.

Djoko's discontent with the democratization process in the country echoes previous statements, including from Vice President Jusuf Kalla.

"It is not surprising to see people elect figures who can maintain discipline and stability. Thus, the chance for those with a military background could be bigger," Kalla was quoted by Antara as saying Wednesday in Mecca, where he is on a minor haj pilgrimage.

Some observers have criticized civilian politicians for suffering an "inferiority complex" when it comes to elections, saying they tend to rely on figures with a military background. (uwi)


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