Last days of the general: Suharto's legacy

By Sara Webb

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Former president Suharto's stamp on Indonesia was so strong that a decade after his ouster as its leader, the world's fourth-most populous country is still struggling to deal with his legacy.

Suharto, who died on Sunday, ruled for 32 years. He boosted growth and kept a lid on communal violence, but left in his wake a brutal army, crippled economy, neutered political system, and dysfunctional national institutions.

"Suharto ran Indonesia like a mafia don," said Jeffrey Winters, professor of political economy at Northwestern University, Chicago.

"Everything turned on the don, all business went through the don, the don was the source of security, and he destroyed everything, parliament, the rule of law, the intellectual community, and turned the police and military into his personal instruments."

Not everyone agrees.

"Yes, there was corruption. Yes, he gave favors to his family and his friends. But there was real growth and real progress," Lee Kuan Yew, longtime autocratic prime minister of neighboring Singapore, said after visiting Suharto's hospital bedside on January 13.

"I think the people of Indonesia are lucky. They had a general in charge, had a team of competent administrators including a very good team of economists."

Suharto came to power in 1965, crushing what was officially described as a Beijing-backed communist coup. As many as 500,000 Indonesians suspected of being communists or sympathizers died in an army-inspired bloodbath in the following months.

Over the next three decades, his army continued to kill, on student campuses, in the rebellious provinces of Aceh and Papua, and in East Timor, where about 200,000 died from war and famine, as well as in "mysterious shootings" of criminals.

Elsewhere in the sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands and 226 million people, much of his rule was relatively peaceful, but stability often came at the cost of repression of dissent.

Thousands of political prisoners were kept in labor camps on Buru Island, including Indonesia's best-known author Pramoedya Ananta Toer and other members of the intelligentsia.

Independent analysts and NGOs said violations of human rights were common. But Suharto never faced any charges for crimes against humanity.

By the time he stepped down, amid the social and economic chaos of 1998, many Indonesians summed up his era with the initials KKN, the local acronym for Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism. Transparency International ranked him as the world's top kleptocrat, with a fortune estimated at $15-35 billion.

He denied the charges of corruption, and partly because of claims of poor health he was not prosecuted.

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