President Suharto effectively commanded the political stage in Indonesia from March 1966 - when supreme authority was transferred to him by President Sukarno - until his departure in the face of unprecedented unrest in May 1998.

He exercised power moved by the conviction that he had been entrusted with a historic mission to guide Indonesia along the path of economic development. His conception of his role was essentially Javanese. He saw himself as the incarnation of the traditional Ratu Adil or Just King. Western liberals took a less charitable view of his authoritarian rule and the economic inequity of his development policies, but he gave the physically fragmented and socially diverse republic an extended period of political stability until the economic turmoil in East Asia in the late 1990s shattered its economy and brought about his removal.

Suharto did not exercise power through ostentatious display but through a masterly understanding of human manipulation. He was a ruthless man and a strong leader whose position came from control of the Armed Forces and from an ability to convince loyalists and enemies that he held the Javanese equivalent of the mandate of heaven. Although committed to modernity, his rule was distinguished by medieval qualities, especially in his relationship with political and military retainers and in the enrichment of his family.

Suharto was born in 1921 in the village of Kemusu, near the town of Yogyakarta in Central Java, then part of the Netherlands East Indies. A peasant background, a broken home and little more than an elementary education took him to an apprenticeship in a village bank by 1940. In June that year, he enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Indies Army, rising to the rank of sergeant before the Japanese occupation in 1942.

Under Japanese rule he first joined the police force in Yogyakarta but in 1943 entered the Fatherland Defence Corps (PETA) where after a period of officer training he rose to the rank of company commander.

After the proclamation of Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands by Dr Sukarno, three days after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Suharto joined the precursor of the national army, which over the next four years battled intermittently against the forces of the Dutch colonial authorities. By the time of the transfer of sovereignty, which took place in December 1949, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and had distinguished himself as a brigade commander in action against the Dutch.

With independence, Suharto began a career as a professional soldier but progress was initially slow. It was January 1957 before he was promoted to full colonel, while in 1959 he was removed from command of the Diponegoro Division because of suspected involvement in smuggling.

He spent a year at the Army Staff and Command College in Bandung before he was restored to military grace with promotion to brigadier-general in January 1960. Within two years he was a major-general in command of the forces assigned to liberate the western half of the island of New Guinea (which had not been included in the 1949 transfer of power) from the Dutch.

After a brief period of UN administration, the territory, thenceforward known as Irian Jaya, transferred to Indonesian control in May 1963. In that month Suharto became commander of the Army's Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) in Jakarta - in the event, it was to prove a decisive post.

In the early hours of October 1, 1965, dissident Army units abducted and murdered six senior generals as a prelude to a coup. For reasons which have never been explained adequately, Suharto's name was not on the list of abducted generals, which included the Army Commander and the Armed Forces Chief of Staff. Suharto seized the initiative and acted with skill and purpose in putting down the coup attempt and then in dismantling the structure of politics which had been established and dominated by President Sukarno. The responsibility for the abortive coup was attributed to Indonesia's Communist Party, which had enjoyed the patronage and protection of Sukarno. In March 1966 Suharto swept both away: the Communist Party by unleashing communal blood-letting, Sukarno by a brilliant exercise in political manipulation.

In February 1967, by now Chief of Staff of the Army, Suharto was granted his full powers by Sukarno, and in the following month was named acting President by the provisional People's Consultative Assembly. In March 1968 that assembly confirmed him in office as President for a full term. He was re-elected without opposition in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993 and 1998.

From the outset, Suharto was instrumental in revising many of Indonesia's public priorities. He sought to reverse the declining condition of Indonesia's economy by adopting Western orthodoxies of economic development and attracted the sympathy and support of the US and Japan.

To demonstrate Indonesia's commitment to development and repudiation of Sukarno's flamboyant adventurism, he brought confrontation with Malaysia to a speedy end and then embarked on an unprecedented exercise in regional co-operation within the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean). Sukarno's cordial relations with communist states were cooled, and diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China were suspended.

If Suharto appeared to give up the substance of non-alignment in order to attract the capital and technology of the West, he was no less committed than his ill-fated predecessor to the integrity of the distended archipelago. He showed himself determined not to take any chances over the political integration of the western half of the island of New Guinea which was subject to a so-called act of free choice in 1969.

In December 1975, after some hesitation, he ordered the invasion of the eastern half of the island of Timor to prevent the establishment there of an independent state with a leftist government within the strategic perimeter of Indonesia. It was a brutal occupation and one that would earn Indonesia much disapprobation from the international community in the ensuing 20 years, during which about 200,000 people in that region died in the violence.

Internally, Suharto sought to impose a political order based on popular demobilisation. Political parties were obliged to amalgamate and subordinate their identities, while an organisation of functional groups (Golkar) became the electoral vehicle of a dominating military Establishment. In addition, conscious of the absence of a single cultural tradition binding the socially fissiparous republic, Suharto set out to impose the syncretic formula “Pancasila”. This was a five-point state philosophy, emphasising nationalism, humanism, democracy, social justice and belief in a supreme being, which had been originally devised by Sukarno, as a way of containing Islamic political claims perceived as the greatest threat to national unity.

Despite the material gains made by Indonesia in the late 1980s and 1990s - the annual average income under Suharto had risen from $50 in 1965 to more than $1,000 in 1996 - dissatisfaction with Suharto's quasi-monarchical method of rulership was growing. By the time he was seeking a sixth five-year-term in 1993, the discontent focused on his family's substantial amassed wealth. His daughter and heir-apparent, Tutut, and two of his sons, Tommy and Bambang, between them controlled the major conglomerates involved in airlines, petrochemicals, oil, advertising and the operation of key toll expressways. In his 1989 autobiography, My Thoughts, Words and Deeds, Suharto denied that he had accrued a fortune illegitimately for his family, maintaining everything he had done had been “for the development of the country”. Nevertheless, his wife's habit of siphoning off money earned her the nickname Mrs Ten Per Cent, while wits dubbed the country “The land of the rising son...and daughter”.

Nevertheless, in 1993 the People's Consultative Assembly elected him to his sixth presidential term. In the following year this emboldened him to embark on a crackdown on an increasingly hostile press, which was calling for greater economic and political reform. In addition to pressure from Indonesia's increasingly literate young populace, Suharto also faced discontent from the increasing influence of Islamic politicians.

The first wave of big demonstrations came in 1994, followed by serious riots in 1996, which prompted Suharto to issue an order to the military to “shoot on sight” anyone they caught creating a disturbance. Despite vocal criticism from such emerging opposition figures as the two Muslim leaders Abdurrahman Wahid and Amien Rais, and Megawati Sukarno, the daughter of the leader Suharto had pushed aside in 1965, it was impossible to vote him out of office: Golkar still dominated the Government, which controlled the legal opposition parties. The economic crisis that struck East Asia in 1997 was the precipitating factor in Suharto’s fall. Between August and October that year there was a massive decline in the value of Indonesia’s currency. Unemployment rose, as did the prices of such essentials as petrol and cooking oil. The country’s misery was exacerbated by massive forest fires and drought. It was the worst economic recession the country had experienced for 40 years, and civil disturbances were becoming commonplace.

Seeking an economic rescue programme from the International Monetary Fund, Suharto found himself obliged simultaneously to adopt reforms that he feared would affect adversely members of his family and friends who had long benefited from his distribution of monopolies. This he manifestly failed to do, delivering in January 1998 a totally unrealistic budget which defied the stipulations of the IMF and exacerbated Indonesia’s problems. This drew down on Suharto fierce criticism for his mismanagement of the economy and his blatant encouragement of corruption.

Nevertheless he secured the biddable Golkar’s nomination for his seventh consecutive presidential term, and was elected in March 1998. In reaction, there were student protests which quickly escalated into rioting, much of which was to take on a racial character, with Chinese shops and homes being looted and their occupants raped and murdered. Astonishingly, even at this late stage Suharto continued to prevaricate over reforms, and managed to negotiate concessions from the IMF over the terms of its $46 billion reform package.

But the end was not far away. With the death toll from rioting rising — more than a thousand were estimated to have died in Jakarta alone in the early days of May — Golkar split, its youth wing coming out openly in favour of Suharto’s resignation. Finally, on May 21, with his Cabinet resigning en masse, students occupying the parliament building in Jakarta, and unprecedented criticism of his stewardship from all sides and all levels of society, Suharto announced his resignation, and his deputy, B. J. Habibie, was immediately sworn in as President. By that time only Fidel Castro of Cuba had ruled a country for a longer uninterrupted term.

Within hours of Suharto’s resignation, Indonesians began demanding that the former general and his family return the wealth that they had accumulated. A nine-month state investigation resulted, in May 2000, in Suharto’s arrest on charges of embezzlement of up to $400 million over his 32 years in power. Official and unofficial estimates of the family’s wealth ranged from $15 billion to $45 billion.

But as the country braced itself on August 31 for the biggest criminal trial in its history, a team of doctors, appointed by the court, announced that a series of strokes had left the aging former president physically and mentally incapable of withstanding the rigours of a lengthy trial. To the fury of the public, the trial judges accepted these findings and on September 29 dismissed the charges against Suharto. Demonstrations and riots ensued.

Suharto’s final years were spent in virtual seclusion in his home in central Jakarta where he was said to spend his days watching television and playing with his grandchildren.

Suharto married Siti Hartinah in 1947. She died in 1996. They had three sons and three daughters.

General Suharto, President of Indonesia, 1968-98, was born on June 8, 1921. He died on January 27, 2008, aged 86