Soeharto

“The embodiment of all that is worst in Asian despots of the 20th century. He combines the blood thirstiness of Cambodia’s Pol Pot and the greed of the Phillippines’ Ferdinand Marcos”. [1]

As  The New York Times reported on January, 8, 2008:  “In September, the United Nations and the World Bank put Mr. Suharto at the top of a new list of world leaders who had embezzled the most from state coffers. They quoted an estimate by Transparency International, a private anticorruption organization, that he stole $15 billion to $35 billion in state assets while in power”.

I will not forget when I visited Sultan’s palace at Yogayakarta. We had walked through the palace led by an elderly docent who helped explain some of the history of the place.  He had probably been doing this for tourists for dozens of years. Not a tall man, wore thick glasses, distinguished, soft spoken.  Toward the end of the walk somehow our conversation, in my poor bahasa Indonesia and his better English, turned to the recent poilitcal situation of Indonesia of the day. Soeharto was gone. The country had survived through Habibe, Gus Dur, and now Megawati was President.  We spoke a little about each of them but when we got to Soeharto he simply told me, with a slight disgust in his voice, that ”Soeharto is a mass murderer”.  It was his only comment regarding Soeharto.  I was aware of what had happened to the PKI.  I had not brought it up with him.  Afterward I realized that he would have been a young man during the troubles of 1965. He likely had some stories, maybe known some people, had been touched by those events.

1965, the Year of Living Dangerously, still shrowded in mystery, still running deep as a subtext of Indonesian history.  1965, the beginning of the New Order.

Betrand Russell, in 1966, would comment that “…in four months five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years”.

“In 1965-66 Central and East Java were the main killing fields for US’ Indonesian enemies… The extent of the slaughter throughout Indonesia led to lurid reports  about rivers red with blood. In December 1965, Time reported that Communists and their “entire families” were being killed in such numbers that small rivers and streams “have been literally clogged with bodies”; and that the disposal of the corpses had “created a serious sanitation problem in parts of the country (17/12/65). Similarly, there were horror stories of bodies floating all over the Malacca Strait. and washing up in various places like the canals of Surabaya. As a bloodbath, the Indonesia massacre was certainly one of the worst of the 20th Century, a fact freely admitted by the CIA itself. Most of the killing took place in a matter of a few months, a massively swift, systematic, savage phenomenon”. [2]  

“Second, on the periphery of Indonesia, the state’s repression of self-determination gave rise to another set of massive crimes. The war against the East Timorese is only the best known of these. Indonesian intelligence agents began by coercing the leaders of several groups of conservative and anti-independence East Timorese into signing a ‘request’ (which the Indonesians had dictated) for assistance. Indonesian armed forces then invaded the former Portuguese colony on December 5th, 1975.

In the following four years, the population of East Timor decreased by 200,000 people. They died as a result of direct Indonesian army killings and bombings, but also through forced re-locations and the starvation and disease that followed the invasion. Since then, torture has been a standard operating procedure for Indonesian forces”. [3]

Aceh. “The Suharto regime, after very limited hostilities with GAM in the late 1970’s, turned Aceh into a free-fire zone in 1990. The terror has been fairly constant since then. The only let-up (and that only partial) was in 1998-99 when the nation’s politcal system was in crisis after Suharto’s fall. During that brief reformist pause, the govenrment sanctioned human rights investigation that conservatively estimated that the military had killed 2,000 to 4,000 people from 1990 to 1998″.  [4]

Where are the monuments to these dead?

Complicit in these events was the United States CIA.  In Iran, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iraq you can still find their bloody finger prints.  

We should never forget this.

 [1] Suharto Killer File

[2] Ghosts of Genocie: The CIA, Suharto, and Terrorist Culture

[3] Suharto, war criminal

[4] The Tsunami and Military Rule: Aceh’s Dual Disasters

     CIA Compile death lists for Indonesians

     Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia

  

 

Video from:  101 – East  
Soeharto: Legacy of a Dictator