Indonesia’s former President Suharto, the Cold War military dictator who turned his country into one of the most corrupt, cowed, but stable nations in Asia, died in Jakarta yesterday, provoking a divisive debate about his 32 years of authoritarian rule.

After collapsing three weeks ago and repeatedly fighting back from the edge of death, Suharto, 86, succumbed to multiple organ failure in hospital. The Government declared a week of national mourning and ordered flags to be flown at half mast as arrangements were made for a funeral today at the family mausoleum in the city of Solo.

“Father Suharto has done a great service to the nation,” Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the President, said in a national address. “I invite all the people of Indonesia to pray that the deceased’s good deeds and dedication to the nation be accepted by Allah the almighty.”

Former political opponents of Suharto, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed or locked up between his ascent to power in 1966 and his overthrow by a popular uprising in 1998, lamented that he was never brought to justice for his crimes.

Budiman Sudjatmiko, a left-wing activist who was jailed in the last months of Suharto’s regime, called his death “a tragedy for all the victims of his crimes”. He said: “They will never get justice. Suharto was never held accountable. He was even praised as a hero. Count in his corruption, then he is a perfect criminal – he can be put up there with Pol Pot and Hitler.”

Suharto had hardly been seen in public since his overthrow almost ten years ago, and his death will make little direct difference to the lives of Indonesians. But it marks the end of an era, for SouthEast Asia as a region as well as Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country.

Suharto was foremost among a generation of leaders who employed varying degrees of authoritarianism to transform the fortunes of SouthEast Asia’s impoverished former colonies. Two of the others visited Suharto on his death bed – Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, and Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s semi-retired senior minister. In the early 1990s they were praised for creating a new bloc of economically dynamic “Asian Tigers”. But the Asian financial crisis of 1997 exposed the flaws in their economic methods – nowhere more disastrously than in Suharto’s Indonesia.

He was born in 1921 into a modest village family outside the city of Yogyakarta, and served as an officer in the successful guerrilla resistance to the Dutch army when it attempted to take back its colony after the Second World War. He was little known in 1965 when six of the country’s most senior generals were murdered in a coup attempt against Sukarno, the country’s first President, allegedly by the increasingly powerful Indonesian Communist Party.

As the senior military survivor, General Suharto took control and gave his tacit approval to months of massacres in which an estimated 500,000 people were killed, often by machete, for alleged communist affiliation. Within two years he had edged out Sukarno and had himself named President.

The New Order, as Suharto’s regime was called, presided over steady economic growth. Suharto’s firm grip on the potentially chaotic country and his staunch anticommunism made him the perfect leader as far as the West was concerned. It sold him arms and ignored his human rights abuses, including the invasion of East Timor in 1976.

Suharto’s economic successes relied on the questionable business skills of a small number of cronies – friends and his children who received lucrative concessions and unlimited lending from banks. Allegedly charitable foundations were also used to siphon off public funds. Transparency International, the anticorruption body, reckoned Suharto’s total takings at $35 billion (£17.5 billion), more than Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

Several of the cronies were brought to justice, including Suharto’s youngest son, Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra, who served five years of a 15-year sentence for ordering the murder of a judge. Prosecutors accepted the claims of his lawyers that Suharto was too sick to stand trial.

Richard Lloyd Parry is author of In The Time of Madness, published in 2005, an account of the violence in Indonesia during the 1990s

LONG LIFE IN BRIEF

— Born June 8, 1921 into a family of rice farmers in central Java

— Joined the army when Indonesia gained independence in 1949, becoming a staff officer

— Took control of the army in 1965 after six top generals were murdered in an attempted coup

— Authorised purges, mainly of communist sympathisers, killing hundreds of thousands. Became President in 1966

— Was re-elected unopposed until 1998 when he was pushed out after street protests

— Accused by state prosecutors of embezzling $600 million (£303 million) but never stood trial on grounds of ill health

Source: agencies

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