Suharto

Suharto
Personal life
Date and place of birth	8 June 1921 , near Yogyakarta, Dutch East Indies
Parents	Kertosudiro and Sukirah
Claimed religion	Islam
Education	{{{education}}}
Spouse	Siti Hartinah (d. 1996)
Children	Siti Hardiyanti Hastuti, Sigit Harjojudanto, Bambang Trihatmodjo, Siti Hediyati Hariyadi, Hutomo Mandala Putra, Siti Hutami Endang Adiningsih
Date & Place of Death	27 January 2008 (aged 86)
Manner of Death	Sepsis, anaemia, heart failure
Place of burial	Buried in Solo with military honors
Dictatorial career
Country	Indonesia
Military service	Led military purge of Communists; KOSTRAD Commander from 1961-65; Chief of Staff from 1965-67
Highest rank attained	Chief of Staff and later Commander
Political beliefs	Militarist
Political party	Golkar
Date of dictatorship	12 March 1967 (Official Date)
Wars started	Invasion of East Timor
Number of deaths attributed	Post-Coup Purges: 250-750,000 East Timor: Slightly over 85,000 (based on UN report and Cribb )

Suharto (June 8, 1921 - January 27, 2008) was an anti-communist Indonesian military and political leader. He started as a military officer in the Indonesian National Revolution. He came to power following a bloodless coup in 1967, and served as the second President of Indonesia from 1967-1998 during which time he was involved in a number of massacres aimed at eliminating communists in Indonesia. He was forced to resign his presidency in 1998 after mass demonstrations due to his authoritarian and corrupt administration. He passed away on January 27th, 2008.

Suharto was a close ally of the United States during the Cold War. As a result, he became a bête noire of the far left, who compared his crimes to those of Cambodia's Pol Pot--though relative to population size and percent killed, Pol Pot's were over 300 times worse. In the wake of US defeat in the Vietnam War, President Ford saw Indonesia as a vital American ally in Asia needed to preserve America's waning influence in that part of the world.

Genocide in East Timor

In 1975, Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta--as fate would have it, on the very day Indonesia decided to invade the tiny island of East Timor. East Timor was in the midst of a low-level civil war that led to thousands of deaths and to a military takeover by a de facto Socialist dictatorship headed by the left-wing FRETILIN Party. FRETILIN had waged a violent insurgency in East Timor to seize power and to force out Portuguese and later Indonesian "colonialists." Widely perceived as Communist by the outside world, FRETILIN was feared in Washington and financed by Moscow. Before FRETILIN could set up a stable government, Indonesia began preparing for non-violent solutions to the perceived problem of Timorese independence. Indonesian leaders feared that allowing Timorese independence would inspire secessionist movements that could bring about the collapse of Indonesia.

Although FRETILIN was given a chance to avoid war, it rejected it for the sake of martyrdom. In an attempt to negotiate a settlement to the dispute over East Timor's future, the Portuguese Decolonization Commission convened a conference in June 1975 in Macau. Indonesia apparently believed that it could reach a compromise with FRETILIN, and repeatedly attempted to do so. FRETILIN refused to attend the meeting on the grounds that it would never negotiate with the Indonesian regime, and Suharto was apparently shocked by their intransigence. José Manuel Ramos-Horta, the current President of East Timor and a FRETILIN leader, expressed regret for this failure in his 1987 memoirs.

Many claim in retrospect that FRETILIN only sought independence for East Timor, and that the civil war was provoked by a failed coup by right-wing militarists, and not by FRETILIN. Others note that FRETILIN gained power by force and used the military to enforce its edicts, and that 40,000 Timorese fled their homes to escape their repression. Further, during the bloody Indonesian occupation, as many as 49% of all East Timorese civilians violently killed at any given point were murdered by FRETILIN, and not by Indonesia.

Ford and Kissinger believed that the Communists could not be allowed to make any further advances in the post-Vietnam War era, as they had in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Middle East. Ford gave Suharto a green-light to invade East Timor. Ford was unambiguous: "We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have."

A Truth Commission found that 90,800-213,600 Timorese out of more than 700,000 were killed during the 24-year occupation, namely, 17,600-19,600 killings and 73,200 to 194,000 'excess' deaths from hunger and illness, although Indonesian forces were responsible for only about 3/4 of the violent killings.

Indonesia scholar Robert Cribb argues that the toll was significantly exaggerated. He notes that the Church censuses of the population were likely to be far too low, given that less than 50% of the population was Catholic. Further, given the immense incentive the Timorese had to avoid detection by the Indonesians, the 1980 census that counted 555,350 Timorese, although "the most reliable source of all," was probably a minimum rather than a maximum estimate. "It is worth recalling that hundreds of thousands of East Timorese disappeared during the violence of September 1999, only to reappear later," he writes. The 1980 census becomes more improbable in the face of the 1987 census that counted 657,411 Timorese--this would require a growth rate of 2.5% per year, nearly identical to the very high growth rate in East Timor from 1970 to 1975, and a highly unlikely one given the conditions of the brutal occupation, including Indonesian efforts to discourage reproduction. This not only suggests that the 1980 count of 555,350 Timorese is far too low, but that the estimate of 425,000--which would require a 7% growth rate from 1980 to 1987--is inconceivable. With these factors in mind, according to Cribb, there are no more than 150,000 "missing" Timorese. Because Indonesian policies restricted the birth rate by 25-50%, he calculates that 42-65,000 of those "missing" were in fact not born rather than killed. Noting the lack of personal accounts of atrocities or of traumatized Indonesian soldiers, he further adds that East Timor "does not appear--on the basis of news reports and academic accounts--to be a society traumatized by mass death...the circumstance leading up to the Dili massacre of 1991...indicate a society which retained its vigor and indignation in a way which would probably not have been possible if it had been treated as Cambodia was treated under Pol Pot." Even Indonesian military strategy was based on winning the "hearts and minds" of the population, a fact that does not support charges of mass killing. Considering all this data, Cribb argues for a much lower toll of 100,000 or less, with an absolute minimum of 60,000, and a mere tenth of the population dying unnaturally, for the years 1975-80. Based on the findings of the UN, Cribb was actually overestimating the death toll from violence; however, the UN's less precise figures for "excess deaths"--73,200 or more--are either in line with or notably higher than Cribb's.

Based on this, the UN's low of 90,000 seems the most plausible figure, although it includes several thousand killed by FRETELIN.

Far-leftists would later inflate the figure to 150,000, then 200,000, then 250,000, then 300,000, then 400,000--with no regard to basic demographic realities!