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
Selasa, 05 Februari 2008
Stop supporting those Javanese rulers now
Dear All,
Let us not forget that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyno is also a Javanese and those
people from Java always support each other in spite of the trouble they have caused in the past or will cause in the future.
Funny enough they have some good support from the world but not from other regions in Indonesia.
It is high time that the Indonesian archipelago should fall apart and that all the regions can look after themselves.
Papua will then have the best future and Java will fade away because they have nothing.
The world should support Papua.
Stop supporting those Javanese rulers now.
Kind regards
JS
Let us not forget that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyno is also a Javanese and those
people from Java always support each other in spite of the trouble they have caused in the past or will cause in the future.
Funny enough they have some good support from the world but not from other regions in Indonesia.
It is high time that the Indonesian archipelago should fall apart and that all the regions can look after themselves.
Papua will then have the best future and Java will fade away because they have nothing.
The world should support Papua.
Stop supporting those Javanese rulers now.
Kind regards
JS
Senin, 04 Februari 2008
Suharto — the Australian elite’s favourite mass murderer
Justin Randell
1 February 2008
Genocidal mass murderer and former Indonesian dictator Suharto died in hospital in Jakarta on January 27, aged 86, never having faced justice for the millions of people he killed or the billions of dollars he stole during his three decades in power. While Suharto may be gone, the hypocrisy of his rich-country supporters — especially Australia — lives on.
Through a spokesperson, US President George Bush expressed “his condolences to the people of Indonesia on the loss of their former president”, according to the January 28 Washington Post. In the same article, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described Suharto as an “influential leader” who “oversaw a period of significant economic
growth and modernization”.
Read Further here http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/738/38188
1 February 2008
Genocidal mass murderer and former Indonesian dictator Suharto died in hospital in Jakarta on January 27, aged 86, never having faced justice for the millions of people he killed or the billions of dollars he stole during his three decades in power. While Suharto may be gone, the hypocrisy of his rich-country supporters — especially Australia — lives on.
Through a spokesperson, US President George Bush expressed “his condolences to the people of Indonesia on the loss of their former president”, according to the January 28 Washington Post. In the same article, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described Suharto as an “influential leader” who “oversaw a period of significant economic
growth and modernization”.
Read Further here http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/738/38188
Keating is ignorant, says widow of slain journalist
James Madden | February 04, 2008
THE widow of one of the five journalists killed by the Indonesian military at Balibo in 1975 has labelled Paul Keating “ignorant” for attributing the blame for the murders to “irresponsible” Australian news organisations.
The former prime minister claimed on the weekend the five journalists “were encouraged to report from a war zone by their irresponsible proprietors”, and that in the wake of the incident large sections of the Australian media had wilfully misrepresented Indonesia as part of a “get square” agenda prompted by the Balibo killings.
His inflammatory views emerged just days after he provoked widespread outrage by describing journalist Paddy McGuinness in the days after his death as “a liar and a fraud who in journalistic terms … had the morals of an alleycat”.
Yesterday, Shirley Shackleton, widow of journalist Greg Shackleton, one of the five slain newsmen, said Mr Keating’s comments were “ignorant” and “gutless”.
“He has displayed his total ignorance of what journalists do when they go to report on these
situations,” Ms Shackleton said.
News organisations had not been irresponsible in sending their crews to the war zone, she said. “The Balibo Five were simply doing their job, like any good journalists. But someone like Paul Keating wouldn’t have a clue about it - he does his job from the safety of behind a desk.”
John Milkins, son of Balibo victim Gary Cunningham, said Mr Keating’s comments were “very disappointing”.
“I think it shows that he is very much in the camp of old Labor and Gough Whitlam, in terms of being an apologist (for Indonesia), and for trying to discredit news agencies and their role of keeping politicians honest,” he said.
Kevin Rudd also distanced himself yesterday from Mr Keating’s comments, although he admitted he had not read the article in question.
“The events of ‘75 are an absolute disgrace. News organisations are not to blame at all. If Paul said that, I disagree with him, but I haven’t seen what he said,” Mr Rudd said.
Writing for Fairfax newspapers in defence of the reign of former Indonesian president Suharto, Mr Keating said that certain Australian media outlets - most notably the ABC and the Fairfax press - had skewed their coverage of Indonesian affairs as part of a “get square” agenda over Balibo.
“This event (the Balibo murders) was sheeted back to Suharto by journalists of the (Australian) broadsheet press,” he wrote.
“From that moment, in their eyes, Suharto became a cruel and intolerant repressor whose life’s work in saving Indonesia from destruction was to be viewed only through the prism of East Timor.” Mr Keating said media “misrepresentation of the true state of Indonesian social and economic life” had led most Australians to regard Indonesia suspiciously over the past 25 years, despite the fact that “it is evident that Indonesia has been at the fulcrum of our strategic stability”.
THE widow of one of the five journalists killed by the Indonesian military at Balibo in 1975 has labelled Paul Keating “ignorant” for attributing the blame for the murders to “irresponsible” Australian news organisations.
The former prime minister claimed on the weekend the five journalists “were encouraged to report from a war zone by their irresponsible proprietors”, and that in the wake of the incident large sections of the Australian media had wilfully misrepresented Indonesia as part of a “get square” agenda prompted by the Balibo killings.
His inflammatory views emerged just days after he provoked widespread outrage by describing journalist Paddy McGuinness in the days after his death as “a liar and a fraud who in journalistic terms … had the morals of an alleycat”.
Yesterday, Shirley Shackleton, widow of journalist Greg Shackleton, one of the five slain newsmen, said Mr Keating’s comments were “ignorant” and “gutless”.
“He has displayed his total ignorance of what journalists do when they go to report on these
situations,” Ms Shackleton said.
News organisations had not been irresponsible in sending their crews to the war zone, she said. “The Balibo Five were simply doing their job, like any good journalists. But someone like Paul Keating wouldn’t have a clue about it - he does his job from the safety of behind a desk.”
John Milkins, son of Balibo victim Gary Cunningham, said Mr Keating’s comments were “very disappointing”.
“I think it shows that he is very much in the camp of old Labor and Gough Whitlam, in terms of being an apologist (for Indonesia), and for trying to discredit news agencies and their role of keeping politicians honest,” he said.
Kevin Rudd also distanced himself yesterday from Mr Keating’s comments, although he admitted he had not read the article in question.
“The events of ‘75 are an absolute disgrace. News organisations are not to blame at all. If Paul said that, I disagree with him, but I haven’t seen what he said,” Mr Rudd said.
Writing for Fairfax newspapers in defence of the reign of former Indonesian president Suharto, Mr Keating said that certain Australian media outlets - most notably the ABC and the Fairfax press - had skewed their coverage of Indonesian affairs as part of a “get square” agenda over Balibo.
“This event (the Balibo murders) was sheeted back to Suharto by journalists of the (Australian) broadsheet press,” he wrote.
“From that moment, in their eyes, Suharto became a cruel and intolerant repressor whose life’s work in saving Indonesia from destruction was to be viewed only through the prism of East Timor.” Mr Keating said media “misrepresentation of the true state of Indonesian social and economic life” had led most Australians to regard Indonesia suspiciously over the past 25 years, despite the fact that “it is evident that Indonesia has been at the fulcrum of our strategic stability”.
Jumat, 01 Februari 2008
A career soldier who commanded a country: Suharto (8 June 1921- 27 January 2008)
Inside Indonesia
No. 91: Jan-Mar 2008
By John Roosa
Image Taciturn, reserved, reclusive, emotionless, Suharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years as a mystery man, a dictator who presented himself as a faceless, replaceable figure in an apolitical administration. His speeches were dull, forgettable affairs filled with mind-numbing bureaucratese, worn clichés, and pious homilies. There is not a single statement by which he is remembered today. If asked, Indonesians struggle in vain to recall some memorable phrase from him, while even the youth can quote Sukarno, the president he overthrew in 1965. Suharto has left a wordless memory. Rarely interviewed but frequently photographed, he is remembered by a gesture: a smile. It was how he wished to be known: his 1969 authorised biography was titled The Smiling General. It was a Cheshire cat smile, fixed in place, concealing, not expressing his emotional life, prompting puzzlement about the intrigues and violence that were being conjured up in the mind behind it.
Suharto’s parentage is a matter of mystery. In his ‘autobiography’ written by the man most responsible for crafting his public image, G Dwipayana, Suharto claims he was born to a poor peasant family in the village of Kemusuk near Yogyakarta. A magazine owned by his trusted military intelligence czar claimed in 1974 that his father had been an aristocrat. In what was perhaps a pre-planned response, Suharto invited journalists to his office in the presidential palace to explain his lineage and produce witnesses who could vouch that he was the true salt of the earth. Despite his protestations, his genealogy remains suspect. Among Indonesians it is widely rumored that he was the illegitimate child of a Chinese businessman.
A pleasant career
Whatever his origins and childhood experiences, his adulthood was clearly that of a career soldier. He enlisted in the Dutch military in 1940, an event he mentions in his ‘autobiography’ as ‘the key to opening a door to a pleasant walk of life’. The pleasant life of marching and drilling continued under the Japanese occupation when he became a member of that colonial state’s militia. Like all other militiamen, he joined the newly-created Indonesian national army once the Japanese military surrendered in August 1945. There was no question of going back to serve with the Dutch they had already been stripped of all their power and wealth by the Japanese and had suffered the war years in squalid concentration camps.
Because of his military training, Suharto was given a high rank (lieutenant colonel) in the new Indonesian army that organised itself to fight a guerrilla war against the returning Dutch troops. By 1948, he had become the commander of a brigade of troops stationed in and around Yogyakarta, the capital of the Republic. The army’s guerrilla attacks did little to slow the advance of the Dutch troops. Despite having the homefield advantage, Suharto was caught by surprise on 19 December 1948 when Dutch troops invaded Yogyakarta and captured it the same day without facing any resistance. Inexplicably, all four of Suharto’s battalions were outside the city. It was one of theworst setbacks for the Republic: its two highest leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, were captured.
Suharto had a chance to redeem himself when he led an attack on Yogyakarta in March 1949. The attack inflicted only minor damage to the Dutch troops occupying the city and was repulsed within six hours. Suharto and other army commanders, however, claimed that they had temporarily held the city and proven the might of the Republic’s forces to the world. After Suharto took power in 1965 the event was turned into the decisive victory of the war for independence, with a film made about it, Janur Kuning (1979), and a grand monument built in the city (1985).
As a man who served in three different armies within the span of a decade, Suharto wore his political commitments lightly. One of his army colleagues later told a journalist that Suharto said in 1948, ‘My politics are at the end of the bayonet.’ No wonder that Sukarno and his left-leaning defence minister introduced political commissars into the army. Like many soldiers trained under Dutch and Japanese officers, Suharto had no experience in the popular nationalist movement that had struggled against imperialism.
Moving up the ranks
After independence was won in 1949, Suharto rose his way up the ranks: colonel, brigadier general, major general.His one setback came in 1959 when he was removed from the command of the Central Java troops for corruption. But the affair was hushed up and he was quickly rehabilitated. He was given command over the operation to seize West Papua from the Dutch in 1962 an operation that was aborted after a last-minute diplomatic agreement. He was then shifted to Jakarta and given command over the army reserves, Kostrad, in 1963. With an undistinguished record, rudimentary education, and no ability in a foreignlanguage, he was by 1965 a prime candidate for the highest position in the army, serving as the replacement for the army commander, Yani, whenever he traveled abroad.
Suharto had risen to the top of an army that was becoming a kind of parallel government, using its territorial commands, originally designed for defence against foreign invasion, for ruling over civil society. Most of his fellow generals, including the senior-most, A.H. Nasution, were strongly anti-communist and determined to check the rising power of the communist party (PKI) in the early 1960s. To rival the party, they sponsored trade unions, artists’ associations, and newspapers. They met with religious organisations and political parties and assured them that the army would use force if need be against the PKI.
Suharto did not clearly associate himself with either side. A former PKI member of the parliament told me that DN Aidit, the head of the party, believed in early 1965 that Suharto was a ‘democratic’ officer because he had supported the ending of the army’s martial law powers in 1963. But Suharto was also collaborating with the anti-communists in his covert effort to put the brakes on Sukarno’s anti-Malaysia campaign, begun in 1963.
His lucky day
Suharto’s fence-sitting ultimately proved to be what him put into power. When the pro-PKI and pro-Sukarno army officers decided to strike against their rival officers, they assumed Suharto would support them. A group of junior officers organised the kidnapping raids of seven army generals on 1 October 1965. Two of the conspirators were good friends of Suharto’s and one of them told Suharto beforehand about the plot. The abductors, calling themselves the September 30th Movement, wound up killing six generals, among them the army commander Yani. It was Suharto’s lucky day. In Yani’s absence he became army commander. The September 30th Movement had not been masterminded by Suharto but it played into his hands perfectly.
As army commander, Suharto immediately began defying presidential orders and implementing the long-standing agenda of the anti-communist officers, which was to reduce Sukarno to a figurehead president, destroy the PKI, and establish a military dictatorship. Suharto’s anti-communism did not stem from any deep-seated ideological commitment. If the September 30th Movement had succeeded and the communists had gained more power, one can easily imagine the ever-opportunistic Suharto accommodating himself to the new regime. He was such a nondescript, unremarkable officer that many observers believedin the first weeks of October that he was merely following General Nasution’s lead.
The creeping coup d’état
Sidelining President Sukarno turned out not to be too difficult. The grand old man of Indonesian nationalism, the ‘extension of the people’s tongue’, kept voicing protests but did nothing concrete to stop Suharto’s guns. He confirmed Suharto as armycommander, raised his rank, and gave him emergency powers. The coup de grâce of the gradual coup d’état came in March 1966 when Suharto used a vaguely worded order from Sukarno about ‘guaranteeing security’ as a justification for arresting 15 ministers and dismissing Sukarno’s cabinet as if the president ordered his own overthrow.
The destruction of the PKI the precondition for imposing a new military-dominated polity turned out not to be too difficult either. The PKI leadership, in disarray after 1 October, urged its followers not to resist so that President Sukarno could arrange a political resolution to the crisis. But the presidenthad no power over Suharto’s army. Working with civilian
militias, the army organised one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, rounding up over one million people and then secretly executing many of them. Detainees disappeared at night. Mass graves holding uncounted corpses lie unmarked all over Sumatra, Java and Bali.
No document exists proving that Suharto ordered any killing. On the rare occasion when he mentioned the killings in later yearshe blamed them on civilians running amok. Serious investigations into the who, where, when and how questions about the killings reveal that the army was primarily responsible and that Suharto must have at least approved of them if he did not give an explicit oral or written order for them.
Carrots and sticks
In taking power Suharto and his fellow army officers realised that the long-term stability of their rule would depend on their ability to improve living standards.They looked to foreign aid, investment and markets to provide the main stimuli for economic growth. Western capital which had been boycotting Indonesiabecause of Sukarno’s policies found the welcome mat laid out. Suharto personally intervened in late 1965 to stop Sukarno’s minister of industries from nationalising the oil sector. With the army’s terror campaign against unionists at oil wells, rubber plantations, and factories, Western capital was also given a more docile labor force.
One reason for Suharto’s remarkable ability to stay in power for so long lies in his expansion of public sector employment. By the end of his reign, 4.6 million people were on the state payroll, about triple the number in the early 1970s. Millions more were dependents on these salary earners. The security of the monthly paycheck was attractive even if the income was low. Also, some government jobs came with chances to earn more money through corruption. These civil servants and their relatives were the regime’s key base of support, voting and campaigning for the government party Golkar in every election. Those not voting for Golkar were denounced for biting the hand that fed them and stood little chance of earning a promotion.
Suharto’s habitual response to dissent was, to use today’s lexicon, shock and awe. In Papua, he maintained an army of occupation that treated the indigenous population as sub-humans whose loyalty had to be won through violence. For years, the only side of Indonesia that Papuans saw was the army. He was responsible for the tens of thousands of Papuans killed in the counterinsurgency campaign from the late 1960s to 1998. He was also responsible for the war of aggression against East Timor in 1975 and the over 100,000 people there who died because of the warfare in that half-island. He was also responsible for the counterinsurgency campaign (1990-98) designed to terrorise civilians into not supporting the guerrillas, instead of offering the civilians a more positive alternative.
Suharto stubbornly pursued the same strategy even when it was proving to be counterproductive, when the terror inflicted in Papua, East Timor and Aceh was generating more widespread resistance. Only after Suharto’s downfall have Indonesian politicians had the chance to pursue wiser, more humane diplomatic and political resolutions to these wars: President Habibie allowed a UN-administered referendum in East Timor in 1999 and President Yudhoyono concluded a peace treaty with the Acehnese nationalists in 2005. The grand Ponzi scheme collapses
In evaluating Suharto’s rule, the so-called ‘balanced’ approach of many Western scholars has been to criticise Suharto for human rights violations but to praise his economic performance. Those impressed by the annual growth rates of six percent are like gullible investors in a Ponzi scheme convinced that the high returns are irrefutable evidence of success. The economic growth of the Suharto years was largely accomplished by wildly selling off the country’s natural resources. It was a predatory, unsustainable type of growth. The leading sectors were oil and timber. Both were terribly mismanaged because of the corruption. Today Indonesia is an net oil importer and its forests are rapidly disappearing, cut down by loggers or burned up by palm oil plantation owners. The revenues from all those exports were not reinvested in other sectors; they disappeared into the personal bank accounts of the Suharto family, their cronies (such as Bob Hasan), and state officials.
After three decades of economic growth à la Suharto, the Indonesian government was left heavily in debt and the economy left without a domestically-financed industrial base. It is fitting that Suharto, whose minions lauded him as ‘the father of development,’ passed away in the hospital owned by the state oil company (Pertamina) that his family and cronies (such as Ibnu Sutowo) milked with abandon.
Suharto’s regime lived by foreign capital and it died by foreign capital. The liberalisation of the financial sector that the US pushed Indonesia to adopt in the early 1990s resulted in much greater vulnerability to sudden international shifts in the capital flows. Money flooded in to Suharto’s caste of kleptocrats and their phony banks and then suddenly flooded out. The grand Ponzi scheme collapsed with the Asian economic crisis of 1997. The only legitimacy that Suharto had enjoyed was his apparent ability to engineer economic growth. Once that ended the usually compliant middle-class turned on him, unwilling to tolerate his corruption, his greedy children and his obscenely wealthy cronies. The spontaneously formed movement for ‘reformasi’ declared its main enemy to be KKN: Korupsi, Kolusi, and Nepotisme. The Suharto family’s own ‘I Love the Rupiah’ campaign, coming from those who held the most dollars, did not quite have the same cachet.
The family’s extensive stable of paranormals could not save them, neither could their obsequious army generals, not even Lieutenant General Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law who commanded elite troops in Jakarta and was always flush with money from his brother who owned the country’s one steel mill. Suharto resigned on 21 May as Jakarta was still smouldering from the mysterious riots in which stores owned by Indonesian-Chinese were torched.
Mr Minus
Perhaps the best that can be said of Suharto’s 32 year reign is that it could have been worse. He did not opt for the strategy of the Burmese generals and close off the country. Dependent upon foreign capital, he was vulnerable to international pressure. The release of tens of thousands of political prisoners in the late 1970s was largely due to pressure from outside the country. He did not opt to legitimate himself through religion and impose Islamic law. The Indonesian state remained largely secular. He did not promote a cult of personality around himself. When faced with mass protests in 1998, he did not opt to stay in power at all costs.
The late great Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a political prisoner of Suharto’s for 14 years, once wrote that he could not bring himself to write about the Suharto regime. While he wrote many historical novels about pre-colonial Java and the Indonesian nationalist movement, he thought nothing interesting could be said about the man responsible for imprisoning him and banning his books. For him, Suharto was a negativity, what he called a ‘minus x’, a reversion back to Java’s colonial-era aristocrats who bullied their subjects for the benefit of European business interests, yet prided themselves of theirgreat cosmic powers, and remained narrow-minded and indifferent to the science and arts of the Europe that had conquered them. No doubt some will remember Suharto for something positive but as Indonesia struggles to overcome his terrible legacies one wonders whether anyone will be able to consider his title ‘father of development’ as anything other than a cruel joke.
John Roosa (jroosa@interchange.ubc.ca) is a member of Inside Indonesia’s editorial team, and the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (2006).
No. 91: Jan-Mar 2008
By John Roosa
Image Taciturn, reserved, reclusive, emotionless, Suharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years as a mystery man, a dictator who presented himself as a faceless, replaceable figure in an apolitical administration. His speeches were dull, forgettable affairs filled with mind-numbing bureaucratese, worn clichés, and pious homilies. There is not a single statement by which he is remembered today. If asked, Indonesians struggle in vain to recall some memorable phrase from him, while even the youth can quote Sukarno, the president he overthrew in 1965. Suharto has left a wordless memory. Rarely interviewed but frequently photographed, he is remembered by a gesture: a smile. It was how he wished to be known: his 1969 authorised biography was titled The Smiling General. It was a Cheshire cat smile, fixed in place, concealing, not expressing his emotional life, prompting puzzlement about the intrigues and violence that were being conjured up in the mind behind it.
Suharto’s parentage is a matter of mystery. In his ‘autobiography’ written by the man most responsible for crafting his public image, G Dwipayana, Suharto claims he was born to a poor peasant family in the village of Kemusuk near Yogyakarta. A magazine owned by his trusted military intelligence czar claimed in 1974 that his father had been an aristocrat. In what was perhaps a pre-planned response, Suharto invited journalists to his office in the presidential palace to explain his lineage and produce witnesses who could vouch that he was the true salt of the earth. Despite his protestations, his genealogy remains suspect. Among Indonesians it is widely rumored that he was the illegitimate child of a Chinese businessman.
A pleasant career
Whatever his origins and childhood experiences, his adulthood was clearly that of a career soldier. He enlisted in the Dutch military in 1940, an event he mentions in his ‘autobiography’ as ‘the key to opening a door to a pleasant walk of life’. The pleasant life of marching and drilling continued under the Japanese occupation when he became a member of that colonial state’s militia. Like all other militiamen, he joined the newly-created Indonesian national army once the Japanese military surrendered in August 1945. There was no question of going back to serve with the Dutch they had already been stripped of all their power and wealth by the Japanese and had suffered the war years in squalid concentration camps.
Because of his military training, Suharto was given a high rank (lieutenant colonel) in the new Indonesian army that organised itself to fight a guerrilla war against the returning Dutch troops. By 1948, he had become the commander of a brigade of troops stationed in and around Yogyakarta, the capital of the Republic. The army’s guerrilla attacks did little to slow the advance of the Dutch troops. Despite having the homefield advantage, Suharto was caught by surprise on 19 December 1948 when Dutch troops invaded Yogyakarta and captured it the same day without facing any resistance. Inexplicably, all four of Suharto’s battalions were outside the city. It was one of theworst setbacks for the Republic: its two highest leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, were captured.
Suharto had a chance to redeem himself when he led an attack on Yogyakarta in March 1949. The attack inflicted only minor damage to the Dutch troops occupying the city and was repulsed within six hours. Suharto and other army commanders, however, claimed that they had temporarily held the city and proven the might of the Republic’s forces to the world. After Suharto took power in 1965 the event was turned into the decisive victory of the war for independence, with a film made about it, Janur Kuning (1979), and a grand monument built in the city (1985).
As a man who served in three different armies within the span of a decade, Suharto wore his political commitments lightly. One of his army colleagues later told a journalist that Suharto said in 1948, ‘My politics are at the end of the bayonet.’ No wonder that Sukarno and his left-leaning defence minister introduced political commissars into the army. Like many soldiers trained under Dutch and Japanese officers, Suharto had no experience in the popular nationalist movement that had struggled against imperialism.
Moving up the ranks
After independence was won in 1949, Suharto rose his way up the ranks: colonel, brigadier general, major general.His one setback came in 1959 when he was removed from the command of the Central Java troops for corruption. But the affair was hushed up and he was quickly rehabilitated. He was given command over the operation to seize West Papua from the Dutch in 1962 an operation that was aborted after a last-minute diplomatic agreement. He was then shifted to Jakarta and given command over the army reserves, Kostrad, in 1963. With an undistinguished record, rudimentary education, and no ability in a foreignlanguage, he was by 1965 a prime candidate for the highest position in the army, serving as the replacement for the army commander, Yani, whenever he traveled abroad.
Suharto had risen to the top of an army that was becoming a kind of parallel government, using its territorial commands, originally designed for defence against foreign invasion, for ruling over civil society. Most of his fellow generals, including the senior-most, A.H. Nasution, were strongly anti-communist and determined to check the rising power of the communist party (PKI) in the early 1960s. To rival the party, they sponsored trade unions, artists’ associations, and newspapers. They met with religious organisations and political parties and assured them that the army would use force if need be against the PKI.
Suharto did not clearly associate himself with either side. A former PKI member of the parliament told me that DN Aidit, the head of the party, believed in early 1965 that Suharto was a ‘democratic’ officer because he had supported the ending of the army’s martial law powers in 1963. But Suharto was also collaborating with the anti-communists in his covert effort to put the brakes on Sukarno’s anti-Malaysia campaign, begun in 1963.
His lucky day
Suharto’s fence-sitting ultimately proved to be what him put into power. When the pro-PKI and pro-Sukarno army officers decided to strike against their rival officers, they assumed Suharto would support them. A group of junior officers organised the kidnapping raids of seven army generals on 1 October 1965. Two of the conspirators were good friends of Suharto’s and one of them told Suharto beforehand about the plot. The abductors, calling themselves the September 30th Movement, wound up killing six generals, among them the army commander Yani. It was Suharto’s lucky day. In Yani’s absence he became army commander. The September 30th Movement had not been masterminded by Suharto but it played into his hands perfectly.
As army commander, Suharto immediately began defying presidential orders and implementing the long-standing agenda of the anti-communist officers, which was to reduce Sukarno to a figurehead president, destroy the PKI, and establish a military dictatorship. Suharto’s anti-communism did not stem from any deep-seated ideological commitment. If the September 30th Movement had succeeded and the communists had gained more power, one can easily imagine the ever-opportunistic Suharto accommodating himself to the new regime. He was such a nondescript, unremarkable officer that many observers believedin the first weeks of October that he was merely following General Nasution’s lead.
The creeping coup d’état
Sidelining President Sukarno turned out not to be too difficult. The grand old man of Indonesian nationalism, the ‘extension of the people’s tongue’, kept voicing protests but did nothing concrete to stop Suharto’s guns. He confirmed Suharto as armycommander, raised his rank, and gave him emergency powers. The coup de grâce of the gradual coup d’état came in March 1966 when Suharto used a vaguely worded order from Sukarno about ‘guaranteeing security’ as a justification for arresting 15 ministers and dismissing Sukarno’s cabinet as if the president ordered his own overthrow.
The destruction of the PKI the precondition for imposing a new military-dominated polity turned out not to be too difficult either. The PKI leadership, in disarray after 1 October, urged its followers not to resist so that President Sukarno could arrange a political resolution to the crisis. But the presidenthad no power over Suharto’s army. Working with civilian
militias, the army organised one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, rounding up over one million people and then secretly executing many of them. Detainees disappeared at night. Mass graves holding uncounted corpses lie unmarked all over Sumatra, Java and Bali.
No document exists proving that Suharto ordered any killing. On the rare occasion when he mentioned the killings in later yearshe blamed them on civilians running amok. Serious investigations into the who, where, when and how questions about the killings reveal that the army was primarily responsible and that Suharto must have at least approved of them if he did not give an explicit oral or written order for them.
Carrots and sticks
In taking power Suharto and his fellow army officers realised that the long-term stability of their rule would depend on their ability to improve living standards.They looked to foreign aid, investment and markets to provide the main stimuli for economic growth. Western capital which had been boycotting Indonesiabecause of Sukarno’s policies found the welcome mat laid out. Suharto personally intervened in late 1965 to stop Sukarno’s minister of industries from nationalising the oil sector. With the army’s terror campaign against unionists at oil wells, rubber plantations, and factories, Western capital was also given a more docile labor force.
One reason for Suharto’s remarkable ability to stay in power for so long lies in his expansion of public sector employment. By the end of his reign, 4.6 million people were on the state payroll, about triple the number in the early 1970s. Millions more were dependents on these salary earners. The security of the monthly paycheck was attractive even if the income was low. Also, some government jobs came with chances to earn more money through corruption. These civil servants and their relatives were the regime’s key base of support, voting and campaigning for the government party Golkar in every election. Those not voting for Golkar were denounced for biting the hand that fed them and stood little chance of earning a promotion.
Suharto’s habitual response to dissent was, to use today’s lexicon, shock and awe. In Papua, he maintained an army of occupation that treated the indigenous population as sub-humans whose loyalty had to be won through violence. For years, the only side of Indonesia that Papuans saw was the army. He was responsible for the tens of thousands of Papuans killed in the counterinsurgency campaign from the late 1960s to 1998. He was also responsible for the war of aggression against East Timor in 1975 and the over 100,000 people there who died because of the warfare in that half-island. He was also responsible for the counterinsurgency campaign (1990-98) designed to terrorise civilians into not supporting the guerrillas, instead of offering the civilians a more positive alternative.
Suharto stubbornly pursued the same strategy even when it was proving to be counterproductive, when the terror inflicted in Papua, East Timor and Aceh was generating more widespread resistance. Only after Suharto’s downfall have Indonesian politicians had the chance to pursue wiser, more humane diplomatic and political resolutions to these wars: President Habibie allowed a UN-administered referendum in East Timor in 1999 and President Yudhoyono concluded a peace treaty with the Acehnese nationalists in 2005. The grand Ponzi scheme collapses
In evaluating Suharto’s rule, the so-called ‘balanced’ approach of many Western scholars has been to criticise Suharto for human rights violations but to praise his economic performance. Those impressed by the annual growth rates of six percent are like gullible investors in a Ponzi scheme convinced that the high returns are irrefutable evidence of success. The economic growth of the Suharto years was largely accomplished by wildly selling off the country’s natural resources. It was a predatory, unsustainable type of growth. The leading sectors were oil and timber. Both were terribly mismanaged because of the corruption. Today Indonesia is an net oil importer and its forests are rapidly disappearing, cut down by loggers or burned up by palm oil plantation owners. The revenues from all those exports were not reinvested in other sectors; they disappeared into the personal bank accounts of the Suharto family, their cronies (such as Bob Hasan), and state officials.
After three decades of economic growth à la Suharto, the Indonesian government was left heavily in debt and the economy left without a domestically-financed industrial base. It is fitting that Suharto, whose minions lauded him as ‘the father of development,’ passed away in the hospital owned by the state oil company (Pertamina) that his family and cronies (such as Ibnu Sutowo) milked with abandon.
Suharto’s regime lived by foreign capital and it died by foreign capital. The liberalisation of the financial sector that the US pushed Indonesia to adopt in the early 1990s resulted in much greater vulnerability to sudden international shifts in the capital flows. Money flooded in to Suharto’s caste of kleptocrats and their phony banks and then suddenly flooded out. The grand Ponzi scheme collapsed with the Asian economic crisis of 1997. The only legitimacy that Suharto had enjoyed was his apparent ability to engineer economic growth. Once that ended the usually compliant middle-class turned on him, unwilling to tolerate his corruption, his greedy children and his obscenely wealthy cronies. The spontaneously formed movement for ‘reformasi’ declared its main enemy to be KKN: Korupsi, Kolusi, and Nepotisme. The Suharto family’s own ‘I Love the Rupiah’ campaign, coming from those who held the most dollars, did not quite have the same cachet.
The family’s extensive stable of paranormals could not save them, neither could their obsequious army generals, not even Lieutenant General Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law who commanded elite troops in Jakarta and was always flush with money from his brother who owned the country’s one steel mill. Suharto resigned on 21 May as Jakarta was still smouldering from the mysterious riots in which stores owned by Indonesian-Chinese were torched.
Mr Minus
Perhaps the best that can be said of Suharto’s 32 year reign is that it could have been worse. He did not opt for the strategy of the Burmese generals and close off the country. Dependent upon foreign capital, he was vulnerable to international pressure. The release of tens of thousands of political prisoners in the late 1970s was largely due to pressure from outside the country. He did not opt to legitimate himself through religion and impose Islamic law. The Indonesian state remained largely secular. He did not promote a cult of personality around himself. When faced with mass protests in 1998, he did not opt to stay in power at all costs.
The late great Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a political prisoner of Suharto’s for 14 years, once wrote that he could not bring himself to write about the Suharto regime. While he wrote many historical novels about pre-colonial Java and the Indonesian nationalist movement, he thought nothing interesting could be said about the man responsible for imprisoning him and banning his books. For him, Suharto was a negativity, what he called a ‘minus x’, a reversion back to Java’s colonial-era aristocrats who bullied their subjects for the benefit of European business interests, yet prided themselves of theirgreat cosmic powers, and remained narrow-minded and indifferent to the science and arts of the Europe that had conquered them. No doubt some will remember Suharto for something positive but as Indonesia struggles to overcome his terrible legacies one wonders whether anyone will be able to consider his title ‘father of development’ as anything other than a cruel joke.
John Roosa (jroosa@interchange.ubc.ca) is a member of Inside Indonesia’s editorial team, and the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (2006).
Free to mourn or cheer, Indonesians have moved on since Suharto stepped down in 1998
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10608377
The Economist
The death of Suharto
Epitaph on a crook and a tyrant
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Reuters
HE WAS a despot, a cold-war monster cosseted by the West because his most plausible opponents were communists. Behind his pudgily smooth, benign-looking face lay ruthless cruelty. The slaughter as he consolidated his power in the mid-1960s cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Tens of thousands were locked up for years without charge. After the invasion of East Timor in 1975, the Indonesian occupation led to the deaths of perhaps one-third of its people. Meanwhile, he was robbing his own country blind. Perhaps no leader’s family anywhere has ever amassed so much ill-gotten loot. When he was forced to quit at last, the economy was in a tailspin and the stability he had boasted of creating proved an illusion. So it seems all wrong that after Suharto’s death this week, Indonesia declared seven days of national mourning. Television stations (some controlled by his kin) showed laudatory documentaries. The streets were lined with crowds for miles on the way to the hillside family mausoleum he had built, in emulation of the Javanese kings whose successor he seemed to think himself. Other statesmen from the region trooped to his funeral to pay their respects: Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad and even Timor-Leste’s prime minister, Xanana Gusmão.
In Mr Gusmão, from a tiny young nation needing good relations with its neighbour and former coloniser, such magnanimity might be wise. Mr Lee and Dr Mahathir also had reason to honour Mr Suharto, who ended his predecessor’s “confrontation” with Malaysia, nurtured regional unity and, like them, shrugged at the West’s preaching about human rights. Yet for Indonesians themselves to push the boat out so far for the old kleptocrat suggests a failure to come to terms with the scale of his crimes. Yes, their country made huge economic strides under his 32-year rule, thanks to his delegation of much policymaking to competent technocrats, and superficial political calm prevailed. But at a very high cost.
The government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—himself a Suharto-era former general—has been a success in many ways. But it has not fostered a culture of accountability. In 2006, when Mr Suharto seemed to be on his deathbed, it dropped criminal proceedings against him. It then instigated a civil prosecution. But neither Mr Suharto nor any of his family has faced trial for corruption (though his son, Tommy, was jailed on a murder charge). Nor has there been a determined attempt to bring to justice those army officers who oversaw atrocities in East Timor and Irian Jaya (now known as Papua) after Mr Suharto fell, let alone those who committed them while he was still in power.
A different country
Yet, if the bad that Suharto did seems to have been buried with him, this week has also shown how far Indonesia has moved on. It is not in thrall to the former dictator’s memory. A dozen years ago the death of his greedy wife, Tien (known, inevitably as “Madame Tien per cent”), provoked an outpouring of real or synthetic national grief. This week even Suharto-family television channels were soon back to normal programming. Newspapers vigorously debated his legacy. Some may hanker for the old certainties of his rule, but not at the expense of their new freedoms. To make sure those freedoms endure, Indonesia needs to face up to the past, and to make a proper accounting for the murky atrocities and untold thievery of Mr Suharto’s reign. The rosy nostalgic glow bathing his obsequies is no substitute for true reconciliation. As elsewhere, that needs to be built on historical truth, in which no one in power seemed much interested this week.
The Economist
The death of Suharto
Epitaph on a crook and a tyrant
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Reuters
HE WAS a despot, a cold-war monster cosseted by the West because his most plausible opponents were communists. Behind his pudgily smooth, benign-looking face lay ruthless cruelty. The slaughter as he consolidated his power in the mid-1960s cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Tens of thousands were locked up for years without charge. After the invasion of East Timor in 1975, the Indonesian occupation led to the deaths of perhaps one-third of its people. Meanwhile, he was robbing his own country blind. Perhaps no leader’s family anywhere has ever amassed so much ill-gotten loot. When he was forced to quit at last, the economy was in a tailspin and the stability he had boasted of creating proved an illusion. So it seems all wrong that after Suharto’s death this week, Indonesia declared seven days of national mourning. Television stations (some controlled by his kin) showed laudatory documentaries. The streets were lined with crowds for miles on the way to the hillside family mausoleum he had built, in emulation of the Javanese kings whose successor he seemed to think himself. Other statesmen from the region trooped to his funeral to pay their respects: Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad and even Timor-Leste’s prime minister, Xanana Gusmão.
In Mr Gusmão, from a tiny young nation needing good relations with its neighbour and former coloniser, such magnanimity might be wise. Mr Lee and Dr Mahathir also had reason to honour Mr Suharto, who ended his predecessor’s “confrontation” with Malaysia, nurtured regional unity and, like them, shrugged at the West’s preaching about human rights. Yet for Indonesians themselves to push the boat out so far for the old kleptocrat suggests a failure to come to terms with the scale of his crimes. Yes, their country made huge economic strides under his 32-year rule, thanks to his delegation of much policymaking to competent technocrats, and superficial political calm prevailed. But at a very high cost.
The government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—himself a Suharto-era former general—has been a success in many ways. But it has not fostered a culture of accountability. In 2006, when Mr Suharto seemed to be on his deathbed, it dropped criminal proceedings against him. It then instigated a civil prosecution. But neither Mr Suharto nor any of his family has faced trial for corruption (though his son, Tommy, was jailed on a murder charge). Nor has there been a determined attempt to bring to justice those army officers who oversaw atrocities in East Timor and Irian Jaya (now known as Papua) after Mr Suharto fell, let alone those who committed them while he was still in power.
A different country
Yet, if the bad that Suharto did seems to have been buried with him, this week has also shown how far Indonesia has moved on. It is not in thrall to the former dictator’s memory. A dozen years ago the death of his greedy wife, Tien (known, inevitably as “Madame Tien per cent”), provoked an outpouring of real or synthetic national grief. This week even Suharto-family television channels were soon back to normal programming. Newspapers vigorously debated his legacy. Some may hanker for the old certainties of his rule, but not at the expense of their new freedoms. To make sure those freedoms endure, Indonesia needs to face up to the past, and to make a proper accounting for the murky atrocities and untold thievery of Mr Suharto’s reign. The rosy nostalgic glow bathing his obsequies is no substitute for true reconciliation. As elsewhere, that needs to be built on historical truth, in which no one in power seemed much interested this week.
Human Rights Watch: Indonesia: Suharto’s Death a Chance for Victims to Find Justice Government Should Investigate Crimes of Former Dictator’s Regime
(New York, January 27, 2008) – The death of former president Suharto at age 86 provides an opportunity to commemorate the many victims of his oppressive regime, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch said the Indonesian government should make a serious commitment to hold accountable the perpetrators of human rights abuses during his rule. Suharto presided over more than three decades of military dictatorship andsystematic human rights abuses, including media censorship, tight restrictions on freedom of association and assembly, a highly politicized and controlled judiciary, widespread torture, attacks on the rights of minorities, massacres of alleged communists, and numerous war crimes committed in East Timor, Aceh, Papua and the Moluccan islands. He also presided over a famously corrupt regime in which he, his family, and his cronies amassed billions of dollars in illegal wealth – funds which could
have addressed Indonesia’s widespread poverty and social problems.
“Suharto has gotten away with murder – another dictator who’s lived out his life in luxury and escaped justice,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But many of Suharto’s cronies are still around, so the Indonesian government should take the chance to put his many partners in human rights abuse on trial.”
To date, there has been virtually no legal accounting for the widespread abuses committed during Suharto’s rule, or for the violence instigated by pro-Suharto forces in a failed attempt to stave off his 1998 fall from power. Suharto himself never faced trial for human rights abuses. The former dictator spent the last years of his life living in luxury. On account of Suharto’s alleged poor health, in May 2006, prosecutors dropped one case that alleged that he had stolen $600 million from the state’s coffers. “Indonesia’s attorney general never issued an indictment against him for human rights violations,” said Adams. “While there has been a great deal of political reform, repeated failures to hold perpetrators of serious human rights crimes to account have meant that Indonesia still has not come to terms with the worst of Suharto’s legacy.”
Human Rights Watch said that the lack of justice for Suharto’s crimes is directly linked to the continuing impunity enjoyed by Indonesia’s security forces, despite many political reforms and promises to address past abuses. Since 1998, the legal and institutional bases of Suharto’s political repression have been largely removed, and there has been great progress on freedom of association and expression.
One important consequence of this failure is that, although the military no longer formally plays a political role (the military’s “Dwifungsi” or “dual function” ideology relied on by Suharto has been abandoned and is now discredited), the military continues to be territorially and economically entrenched. The military still is not fully answerable to the Ministry of Defense, and much-heralded reforms to end the armed forces’ involvement in business are stalled. The predictable result is conflicts of interest andabuses, as with the May 2007 killing of civilians in Pasuruan, East Java, by marines who had ousted farmers and planted commercial crops on the disputed land. Another consequence is that where there is conflict in Indonesia today, as in Papua, security forces – both military and special police units– still commit abuses and are almost never held accountable.
“Justice is a key missing piece in Indonesia’s reform story,” said Adams. “The failure to touch Suharto shows how far Indonesia still has to go if itis to establish strong, independent prosecutors and courts, and put an end to serious security-force abuses.”
*Background*
Suharto’s sordid legacy dates to the army-backed massacres in 1965 that accompanied his rise to power. A failed coup against President Sukarno in September 1965 claimed the lives of six army generals, but it was the army, led by then-Major General Suharto, that emerged as the paramount power in the aftermath.
Although the events surrounding the coup attempt remain unclear and some participants themselves described it as an internal military affair, thegovernment maintained that the Indonesian Communist Party was exclusively responsible for the coup attempt. From 1965 to 1967, Suharto presided over a bloodbath that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party. Estimates of the number of people killed range from a quarter of a million to more than 1 million. Hundreds of thousands of citizens suspected of having leftistaffiliations, including large numbers of teachers and student activists, were imprisoned. Most of them were never tried, let alone convicted of any offense. Suharto was officially proclaimed president in March 1967.
Under Suharto’s “New Order” regime, Indonesian society became progressively militarized, with the Indonesian armed forces playing an increasingly prominent role as a social and political force. Throughout his rule, Suharto viciously suppressed any sign of anti-government unrest or separatist ambition. Military operations, most notably in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, were characterized by undisciplined and unaccountable troops committing widespread abuses against civilians, including extrajudicial executions, torture, forced disappearances, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and drastic limits on freedom of movement.
In 1975, just nine days after neighboring East Timor declared its independence from Portugal, Suharto ordered Indonesian forces to invade andannex the former colony. Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor was brutal, marked by atrocities such as the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, when at least 270 pro-independence protesters were shot or beaten to death by the military.
“One of the enduring legacies of Suharto’s regime has been the culture that continues to block justice for victims of military abuses even today,” said Adams. “Maybe with Suharto’s passing, this legacy, too, can be brought to an end.”
A rare attempt at accountability for Suharto-era crimes occurred in trials held in 2004 against soldiers accused of participating in the “Tanjung Priok Massacre” in Jakarta two decades earlier. Yet the trials resulted in little justice for the families of the 33 or more civilians shot by government security forces during an anti-government demonstration. Two defendants were acquitted amid reports of political interference and witness intimidation. The remaining 12 defendants had their convictions overturned by an appeals court in June 2005.
have addressed Indonesia’s widespread poverty and social problems.
“Suharto has gotten away with murder – another dictator who’s lived out his life in luxury and escaped justice,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But many of Suharto’s cronies are still around, so the Indonesian government should take the chance to put his many partners in human rights abuse on trial.”
To date, there has been virtually no legal accounting for the widespread abuses committed during Suharto’s rule, or for the violence instigated by pro-Suharto forces in a failed attempt to stave off his 1998 fall from power. Suharto himself never faced trial for human rights abuses. The former dictator spent the last years of his life living in luxury. On account of Suharto’s alleged poor health, in May 2006, prosecutors dropped one case that alleged that he had stolen $600 million from the state’s coffers. “Indonesia’s attorney general never issued an indictment against him for human rights violations,” said Adams. “While there has been a great deal of political reform, repeated failures to hold perpetrators of serious human rights crimes to account have meant that Indonesia still has not come to terms with the worst of Suharto’s legacy.”
Human Rights Watch said that the lack of justice for Suharto’s crimes is directly linked to the continuing impunity enjoyed by Indonesia’s security forces, despite many political reforms and promises to address past abuses. Since 1998, the legal and institutional bases of Suharto’s political repression have been largely removed, and there has been great progress on freedom of association and expression.
One important consequence of this failure is that, although the military no longer formally plays a political role (the military’s “Dwifungsi” or “dual function” ideology relied on by Suharto has been abandoned and is now discredited), the military continues to be territorially and economically entrenched. The military still is not fully answerable to the Ministry of Defense, and much-heralded reforms to end the armed forces’ involvement in business are stalled. The predictable result is conflicts of interest andabuses, as with the May 2007 killing of civilians in Pasuruan, East Java, by marines who had ousted farmers and planted commercial crops on the disputed land. Another consequence is that where there is conflict in Indonesia today, as in Papua, security forces – both military and special police units– still commit abuses and are almost never held accountable.
“Justice is a key missing piece in Indonesia’s reform story,” said Adams. “The failure to touch Suharto shows how far Indonesia still has to go if itis to establish strong, independent prosecutors and courts, and put an end to serious security-force abuses.”
*Background*
Suharto’s sordid legacy dates to the army-backed massacres in 1965 that accompanied his rise to power. A failed coup against President Sukarno in September 1965 claimed the lives of six army generals, but it was the army, led by then-Major General Suharto, that emerged as the paramount power in the aftermath.
Although the events surrounding the coup attempt remain unclear and some participants themselves described it as an internal military affair, thegovernment maintained that the Indonesian Communist Party was exclusively responsible for the coup attempt. From 1965 to 1967, Suharto presided over a bloodbath that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party. Estimates of the number of people killed range from a quarter of a million to more than 1 million. Hundreds of thousands of citizens suspected of having leftistaffiliations, including large numbers of teachers and student activists, were imprisoned. Most of them were never tried, let alone convicted of any offense. Suharto was officially proclaimed president in March 1967.
Under Suharto’s “New Order” regime, Indonesian society became progressively militarized, with the Indonesian armed forces playing an increasingly prominent role as a social and political force. Throughout his rule, Suharto viciously suppressed any sign of anti-government unrest or separatist ambition. Military operations, most notably in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, were characterized by undisciplined and unaccountable troops committing widespread abuses against civilians, including extrajudicial executions, torture, forced disappearances, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and drastic limits on freedom of movement.
In 1975, just nine days after neighboring East Timor declared its independence from Portugal, Suharto ordered Indonesian forces to invade andannex the former colony. Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor was brutal, marked by atrocities such as the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, when at least 270 pro-independence protesters were shot or beaten to death by the military.
“One of the enduring legacies of Suharto’s regime has been the culture that continues to block justice for victims of military abuses even today,” said Adams. “Maybe with Suharto’s passing, this legacy, too, can be brought to an end.”
A rare attempt at accountability for Suharto-era crimes occurred in trials held in 2004 against soldiers accused of participating in the “Tanjung Priok Massacre” in Jakarta two decades earlier. Yet the trials resulted in little justice for the families of the 33 or more civilians shot by government security forces during an anti-government demonstration. Two defendants were acquitted amid reports of political interference and witness intimidation. The remaining 12 defendants had their convictions overturned by an appeals court in June 2005.
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