Indonesia's Suharto dies
The former dictator, a U.S. Cold War ally who ruled ruthlessly for 32 years, was 86.
JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Former President Suharto, an army general who rose to power in Indonesia with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruled for 32 years over an era of rapid economic growth and extraordinary graft, died today in Indonesia. He was 86.
Suharto's unyielding opposition to communism won him the backing of the United States during the height of the Cold War, although he was one of the most brutal and corrupt rulers of that era. He governed the world's fourth-most-populous nation with a combination of paternalism and ruthlessness from 1965 until he was ousted in the spring of 1998.
Like many Javanese, Suharto went by only one name. He had been in poor health for years after suffering several strokes and other ailments. He was rushed to the hospital Jan. 4 with anemia and low blood pressure.
As Suharto drifted in and out of consciousness, his family gave doctors permission to take him off life support whenever they saw fit.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general, called on Indonesians to stop arguing about whether the government should more aggressively pursue criminal and civil cases pending against Suharto.
"Despite some shortcomings, we still need to show him the respect and gratitude he deserves," the president said.
Suharto expanded Indonesia's territory by force and guile, annexing the territories of Papua and East Timor and brutally suppressing the independence movement in the province of Aceh in a conflict that lasted 27 years.
The estimates of the number of people killed by Suharto's regime "vary from 300,000 to 2 million, but the exact number nobody knows," said Asmara Nababan, former secretary general of Indonesia's Human Rights Commission. "It created a big wound in society, and even today it is not completely gone."
His military regime incarcerated hundreds of thousands of political prisoners for years without trial. Many critics of his rule simply vanished.
But long before Suharto's death, Indonesians were working to build a democracy from the rubble of his regime, which collapsed in 1998 amid nationwide protests and riots sparked by an economic meltdown across the region.
Under a carefully managed compromise, the Indonesian military retained its dominance over politics behind the scenes in exchange for allowing democratic reforms.
