Opinion: PRO-CON: Can Indonesia move beyond Suharto’s legacy? NO

KANSAS CITY STAR (USA)

http://www.kansascity.com/273/story/464900.html
Posted on Mon, Jan. 28, 2008 10:15 PM

The bloody trail that Suharto blazed after he seized power in 1965 shocks the conscience. Perhaps 100,000 people died in West Papua under Indonesian rule following its fraudulent 1969 annexation of the territory, according to Yale’s Genocide Documentation Project. Between 100,000 and 180,000 died in East Timor as a direct result of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion.

Suharto was no mere thug. Transparency International estimates that Suharto stole perhaps $35 billion, a figure equivalent to the sum of international development assistance to the regime during his 32-year reign. Far from being the “father of Indonesian development,” Suharto’s theft squandered Indonesia’s best chance at balanced development, while political repression enervated civil society and retarded the flowering of democratic institutions in ways that continue to distort economic and political life.

Brad Simpson, history professor, University of Maryland-Baltimore County Comments General Suharto spent his life creating an American version of the evil Dutch East Indies Corporation (VoC) - a Corporate State. In 1961 Suharto organised a pathetic attempt at a military invasion of West Papua, while his Freeport friends in Washington tricked U.S. Pres. Kennedy into writing the “New York Agreement” selling the people of West Papua like cattle to Indonesia.

In 1961 the US Dept. of State said “annexation by Indonesia would simply trade white for brown colonialism”.

After Suharto came to power he gave the colonial minerals to Freeport (1967) & related American corporations; and he put the population of Java to work in factories making the cheap American clothes of the 1970s.

By time America moved its cheap factories to Mexico the people of Java had developed a taste for Colonial Profits of West Papua & other colonies, and too many people liked it.

Posted by: AndrewJ

1/29/2008 5:06 AM