Ex-strongman Suharto leaves controversial legacy

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Former strongman Suharto, who died on Sunday, steered Indonesia through three decades of rapid economic growth and stability, only to see much of his work unravel in months as the country was plunged into chaos.

The ex-general was swept out of office on May 21, 1998 amid a savage economic crisis, mass protests and riots in Jakarta that killed 1,200, while his own legacy was tarnished by charges his family had plundered billions of dollars through corrupt deals.

The 86-year-old former president was taken to a Jakarta hospital on January 4 with heart, lung and kidney problems. He suffered from multiple organ failure, doctors said on Sunday.

Ethnic bloodletting, a ruined economy and weak government in the years after Suharto's fall led some Indonesians to yearn for a return to his tough style of leadership. That view faded as Indonesia embraced democracy and recovered, and many could never forgive the graft and human rights abuses of the Suharto era.

Critics say Suharto and his family amassed as much as $45 billion in kickbacks or deals where political influence was a key to who won a contract, charges he denied.

Attempts, some half-hearted, by subsequent governments to prosecute him over corruption charges failed as the courts accepted that he was too ill to stand trial.

Suharto rejected accusations he had stashed wealth overseas. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered Time magazine to pay him more than $100 million in damages in a libel suit over a 1999 cover story that said he and his family had a fortune of around $15 billion. Time has challenged the ruling.

"The fact is I don't even have one cent of savings abroad, don't have accounts at foreign banks, don't have deposits abroad and don't even have any shares in foreign firms, much less hundreds of billions of dollars," Suharto said in a rare interview in late 1998.

Some defenders say Suharto himself was relatively clean, but turned a blind eye to his relatives' abuse of their connections to him to gain lucrative contracts and increasingly egregious deals that included a national car project and Bre-X, a non-existent gold mine.

In any case, Indonesia was consistently ranked one of the most corrupt countries in the world under Suharto, and has had limited success in changing that since his fall.

ANTI-COMMUNIST PURGE

Born on June 8, 1921, Suharto came from a humble background. His father was a minor official in the village of Kemusuk in Central Java.

Suharto joined the Dutch colonial army at 19 as a corporal. During the Japanese 1942-45 occupation, he was an officer in the Japanese-trained "Indonesian army", and afterwards fought with Indonesian guerrillas against the Dutch.

He rose to power after he led the military in 1965 against what was officially called an attempted communist coup. Whether that was true -- and Suharto's role in the events remains controversial -- it was followed by an anti-communist purge in which as many as 500,000 people were killed.

Suharto effectively seized control from the country's first president, Sukarno, in 1966 and was named president the next year. Over the next three decades, he won reluctant admiration for political shrewdness as he played rival groups off against each other and stifled political dissent.

His New Order regime brought multi-ethnic Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, a large measure of unity, backed by a powerful military that crushed any sign of revolt.