Monday’s front page of the Toronto Star featured a black-and-white photograph of a man in a military cap. Underneath were the words “Suharto: 1921-2008.†The former Indonesian president died on Sunday at the age of 86 from multiple organ failure. As his health had been deteriorating for some time, there was talk of discontinuing his life support – a kidney dialysis machine and a ventilator – before he fell into a coma from which he never awoke. The “pull or not to pull†debate, however, paled in comparison to the controversies during his more than three decade-long rule of Indonesia and the following ten-year period.
A general in the Indonesian army, Suharto (like many Indonesians he used only one name) took power in 1965 after conducting an anti-Communist purge and deposing then-president Sukarno. During his thirty-two-year leadership Suharto greatly industrialized the country and reduced its poverty. He gained the support of the United States, who saw his “New Order†administration as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, his regime was known for its corruption and brutality. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly real or suspected Communists, were tortured by the police, kept in prison for long periods without trial, made to “disappear,†or killed outright. The Suharto administration’s invasion and annexation of West Papua (Irian Jaya) and East Timor (now an independent nation) and repression of the independence movement in the province of Aceh drew condemnation from international human rights organizations. Though Indonesia was the recipient of aid from the US and other Western countries, much of it went into the pockets of Suharto himself and his family members. There were discussions after his resignation in 1998 about prosecuting him for embezzlement, but he was never formally charged in a court of law.
Suharto was sometimes compared to a leader in a neighbouring country: Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Both were backed by the US government as anti-Communist fighters. The two men were famous as well for siphoning off foreign money destined for the public purse to their own personal coffers - even if Suharto’s wife lacked Imelda’s extensive footwear collection. Yet Suharto and Marcos differed in their ethnic policies. Both Indonesia and the Philippines have Chinese populations who are wealthier than average and who frequently raise the resentment of the native majority as a result. But whereas Marcos favoured the Philippine Chinese minority, Suharto launched an aggressive anti-Chinese program, even forbidding print material with Chinese characters (in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist Jared Diamond tells of going to a Chinese-run store in West Papua and seeing the owner quickly put away a Chinese newspaper at the sight of an Indonesian government agent entering the shop).
Suharto’s treatment of different ethnic groups challenges the simplistic notion of a world made up of Whites on one hand and “people of colour†on the other. Ironically, this vision is shared by two factions who otherwise appear to have nothing in common: White Supremacists and leftists of all racial backgrounds. The latter tend to see non-Whites as victims of European colonialism - or American imperialism - and expect them to band together against the White oppressor. But this was hardly the case in East Timor, even if both that country and Indonesia at one time fell under European powers (Portugal and the Netherlands respectively). Though the West was rightly accused of turning a blind eye to Indonesia’s persecution of the Timorese people, the fact is that most of the human rights violations in Timor were committed not by Europeans or Americans but by Indonesians. East Timorese freedom fighter Constancio Pinto writes in his book East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance that while not perfect, Timor’s former Portuguese overlords were far more humane than the Indonesians who came after them. And contrary to White racists’ idea of a vast anti-White conspiracy by “hordes of colour,†Timorese activist Xanana Gusmao has actually expressed solidarity with the people of Poland and the Baltics – at whose struggles for independence White “progressives†have often scoffed. Nor within Indonesia itself did Suharto love his Chinese subjects as fellow Asians.
Suharto remains a controversial figure in death as in life. At his funeral humble farmers and housekeepers sang his praises. East Timorese president Jose Ramos-Horta urged his countrymen to let bygones be bygones. Yet one of Suharto’s own daughters asked God to forgive her father for any mistakes he had made. Searching under “Suharto†on the Internet one can find articles calling him a brutal dictator and others describing him as the man who revolutionized Indonesia. Perhaps there is truth to both.
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