Indonesia’s murderous dictator, Suharto, 86
Posted: Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 2:19 am
JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Former President Suharto, an army general who rose to power in Indonesia with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruled for 32 years over an era of rapid economic growth and extraordinary graft, died Sunday in Indonesia. He was 86.
Like many Javanese, Suharto went by only one name. He had been in poor health for years after suffering several strokes and other ailments. He was rushed to the hospital Jan. 4 with anemia, low blood pressure and other ailments.
Suharto’s unyielding opposition to communism won him the backing of the United States during the height of the Cold War, although he was one of the most brutal and corrupt rulers of that era. He governed the world’s fourth-most-populous nation with a combination of paternalism and ruthlessness from 1965 until he was ousted in the spring of 1998. …
The estimates of the number of people killed by Suharto’s regime “vary from 300,000 to 2 million, but the exact number nobody knows,” said Asmara Nababan, former secretary general of Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission. …
His military regime incarcerated hundreds of thousands of political prisoners for years without trial. Many critics of his rule simply vanished. … Read full obituary
