Indonesia’s ex-dictator Suharto dies at 86

During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which didn’t oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia’s youngest country with a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.

Even Suharto’s critics agree his hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia’s extremists. He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto — nicknamed the “Berkeley mafia” after their American university, the University of California, Berkeley — transformed Indonesia’s economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.

By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia’s “father of development,” taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and modernizing parts of the nation.

But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt nations as Suharto’s inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates 20 percent to 30 percent of Indonesia’s development budget was embezzled during his rule.

Family, associates hold sway
Even today, Suharto’s children and aging associates have considerable sway over the country’s business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have been fruitless.

Suharto’s youngest son, Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra, was released from prison in 2006 after serving a third of a 15-year sentence for ordering the assassination of a Supreme Court judge. Another son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, joined the Forbes list of wealthiest Indonesians in 2007, with $200 million from his stake in the conglomerate Mediacom.

Suharto’s economic policies, based on unsecured borrowing by his cronies, dramatically unraveled shortly before he was toppled in May 1998. Indonesia is still recovering from what economists called the worst economic meltdown anywhere in 50 years.

State prosecutors accused Suharto of embezzling about $600 million via a complex web of foundations under his control, but he never saw the inside of a courtroom. In September 2000, judges ruled he was too ill to stand trial, though many people believed the decision really stemmed from the lingering influence of the former dictator and his family.

In 2007, Suharto won a $106 million defamation lawsuit against Time magazine for accusing the family of acquiring $15 billion in stolen state funds.

The former dictator told the news magazine Gatra in a rare interview in November 2007 that he would donate the bulk of any legal windfall to the needy, while he dismissed corruption accusations as “empty talk.”

Suharto’s wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.

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