[R-G] Government leaders pay tribute to Indonesia’s former dictator Suharto

[Anthony Fenton]

Government leaders pay tribute to Indonesia’s former dictator Suharto
By Peter Symonds
30 January 2008

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/suha-j30.shtml
The death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto on Sunday at the age  
of 86 has elicited a stream of tributes from world leaders and in the  
international press. There is something both disturbing and ominous  
about praise for a man who was responsible for the murder of at least  
half a million people in the 1965 coup that brought him to power and  
the deaths of another 200,000 following the 1975 Indonesian  
annexation of East Timor.

Suharto’s funeral, with full military honours, took place on Monday  
in the central Javan city of Solo. While he was forced to step down  
in 1998, the regime that Suharto established remains largely intact,  
despite its more recent democratic trappings. Indonesian President  
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, himself a Suharto-era general, presided  
over the lavish ceremony, hailing the dead dictator as “a loyal  
fighter, a true soldier and a respected statesman”.

While no prominent US official attended, a White House spokesman  
announced that President Bush had sent “his condolences to the people  
of Indonesia on the loss of their former president”. Two of South  
East Asia’s longstanding autocrats—former Malaysia Prime Minister  
Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore’s elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew—flew to  
Indonesia to pay their last respects to the military strongman.

Such was the scale of Suharto’s crimes that the media could not  
completely ignore the brutality and corruption of his regime. But the  
coverage has been at pains to emphasise his “positive contribution”  
and urge a “balanced approach” to his legacy. A comment in the Wall  
Street Journal, for instance, hailed Suharto for transforming  
Indonesia from “an economic basket case and a trouble maker in the  
region” under previous President Sukarno into one of Asia’s tiger  
economies. “For all his flaws, Suharto deserves to be remembered as  
one of Asia’s greatest leaders,” it declared.

The most open defence of Suharto’s record has come from the  
Australian establishment. Leaders, past and present and across the  
political spectrum, have recorded their debt of gratitude to the  
former dictator for “stabilising” the country by physically  
eliminating the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and serving as a key  
ally in Asia for more than three decades.

Former Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who attended the  
funeral with Attorney General Robert McClelland, told the Australian  
that he warmly remembered Suharto as an old friend. He dismissed the  
attention given to Suharto’s record on human rights and corruption as  
“missing the point”, adding as an aside that “the only point where  
that’s an issue is on [East] Timor and on the PKI.” If Suharto had  
not been president, Keating declared, “We [Australia] wouldn’t have  
been spending 2 percent of GDP on defence—it would have been more  
like 8 or 9 percent.”

Keating’s remarks echo his comment as prime minister in 1994 when he  
declared that no country was more important to Australia than  
Indonesia. He described the emergence of Suharto’s New Order  
government as “the single most beneficial strategic development to  
have affected Australia and its region in the past 30 years.” The  
following year, the Keating Labor government signed a security treaty  
formalising Canberra’s close military ties with the Indonesian  
dictatorship.

These apologetics are politically telling. For those who lived  
through this period or have studied it, Suharto’s atrocities rank  
among the worst of the century. Just over a year ago, Saddam Hussein  
was found guilty in a rigged trial in US-occupied Iraq and executed  
for crimes that pale beside the bloodletting carried out by Suharto  
in the 1965 coup. The widow of ousted President Sukarno said of  
Suharto’s legacy: “He was Indonesia’s Pol Pot”

For 32 years, the Suharto dictatorship served as the critical  
linchpin for US imperialism and its junior partner, Australia, in  
suppressing revolutionary struggles throughout the region and  
containing the influence of the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s,  
as it was becoming more deeply embroiled in the war in Vietnam,  
Washington was increasingly antagonistic to Indonesia’s President  
Sukarno, a bourgeois nationalist, whose response to deepening social  
unrest at home was to posture, with the PKI’s assistance, as an “anti- 
imperialist” and to present his limited reforms as “socialist” measures.

The ousting of Sukarno was one of the CIA’s success stories. In one  
blow, it entrenched a military regime that was loyal to Washington,  
fiercely anti-communist and ruthless in its suppression of any  
political opposition. The pretext for the Indonesian coup was the  
kidnapping and murder of six top generals on September 30, 1965,  
allegedly at the PKI’s instigation. General Suharto promptly  
established his firm control over Jakarta, sidelined Sukarno and,  
exploiting the deaths of his rivals, whipped up a carefully  
orchestrated campaign of violence against the PKI, its supporters and  
anyone suspected of socialist sympathies.

US diplomats and CIA officers, led by the US ambassador to Indonesia,  
Marshall Green, were intimately involved in the slaughter that  
followed, supplying “shooting lists” of top PKI officials to the  
Indonesian military for interrogation and murder. What was involved  
was the physical destruction of a party with a membership numbering  
in the millions. Lacking enough death squads, the military turned to  
right-wing Muslim organisations, which willingly participated in the  
elimination of a party that was seen as a threat to traditional  
landowners and other vested religious interests.

Reliable estimates put the final death toll at between half a million  
and a million. To cite just one contemporary article, Time magazine  
reported: “The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal  
of corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in northern  
Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh.  
Travellers from these areas tell us small rivers and streams have  
been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation has become  
seriously impeded.”

The Stalinist PKI, which was based on the “peaceful road to  
socialism”, not revolutionary politics, made no attempt to mobilise  
against the military. Its entire orientation was to subordinate the  
working class and peasant masses to Sukarno. Even as the military was  
murdering its members, the PKI leaders insisted that the party should  
do nothing to alienate Sukarno. Sukarno, however, was incapable of  
seriously challenging the US-supported military. After temporising  
for months, he formally handed over power to Suharto in March 1966.

The New Order regime that emerged from the carnage borrowed from the  
corporatist outlook of European fascism. Every aspect of society—from  
government administration, the police and judiciary to the media,  
trade unions and peasant organisations—was subordinated to the state  
and Suharto’s military high command, in particular. All forms of  
dissent were systematically crushed. Hundreds of thousands of PKI  
members and supporters were detained in concentration camps into the  
late 1970s.

Suharto’s much vaunted economic miracle was heavily dependent in the  
first instance on large amounts of American aid, then from the early  
1970s on the increased income produced by the quadrupling of prices  
for Indonesian oil exports. Particularly sensitive to the danger of  
rural unrest, Suharto took some limited steps to subsidise farmers.  
But the country’s staggering social inequality was nowhere more  
evident than in the corporate empire built up by Suharto, his family  
and close business cronies through state monopolies and patronage on  
a vast scale. A UN report last year estimated that Suharto had  
siphoned off $35 billion. In the end, having loyally served his  
purpose as a Cold War ally, Suharto became an obstacle in the era of  
globalised capital to the opening up of the Indonesian economy and  
was summarily cast aside by Washington in the midst of the 1997-98  
Asian financial crisis.

For successive US administrations, the Suharto regime was an  
important ally in Asia. However, for Australian governments, as  
Keating explained, the Indonesian junta remained “the single most  
beneficial strategic development” in the region. Successive prime  
ministers—Labor and Coalition—cultivated the closest of relations  
with the dictator. In 1972, shortly after being elected, the new  
Labor government welcomed Suharto in Canberra on the first of two  
trips to Australia. The following year Prime Minister Gough Whitlam  
declared: “I have found that fundamentally, the Indonesian and  
Australian governments have similar views.”

The Whitlam government along with the Ford administration in  
Washington gave the green light for the 1975 Indonesian invasion of  
the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Having just suffered a  
devastating strategic defeat in Vietnam, the US and Australian  
governments feared that the fledging Timorese independence movement  
was a potential catalyst for unrest in Indonesia and across the  
region. For two decades, successive Australian and US governments  
solidly backed Indonesia’s bloody suppression of Timorese resistance,  
at the cost of 200,000 lives.

One factor in Canberra’s support for the Indonesian invasion was  
always the lucrative oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. Australia  
became the only country in the world to formally recognise  
Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor—in return for a border agreement  
and the lion’s share of the seabed resources. In the wake of the  
turmoil following Suharto’s fall in 1998, the government of Liberal  
Party leader John Howard—determined to preempt rival powers, Portugal  
in particular—made a tactical shift to support Timorese independence.  
Its military interventions in 1999 and 2006 were to install a regime  
favourable to Australian interests and, above all, to retain control  
of the Timor Sea oil and gas.

Australia’s intimate relationship with the Indonesian dictatorship  
and its successors goes well beyond the immediate issue of Timor’s  
energy reserves. Suharto was not only an insurance against political  
instability in Indonesia, and more generally Asia, but also opened  
diplomatic and economic doors in South East Asia for Australian  
governments and corporations.

Even after his political fall from grace in 1998, Suharto continued  
to enjoy the tacit protection of the powers that be, not only in  
Indonesia, but in Washington, Canberra and internationally. He was  
never prosecuted for his bloody crimes against the Indonesian people.  
Attempts to put him on trial on charges of corruption were shelved  
using the pretext of his ill health.

The readiness of governments to embrace the dead dictator signifies  
that the lack of any genuine commitment to democratic rights in the  
political establishments of any of these countries. Their willingness  
to brush aside Suharto’s atrocities and praise the achievements of  
his New Order regime is a chilling warning that mass murder is  
regarded in ruling circles as a legitimate instrument of foreign and  
domestic policy.