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Indonesia's former president Suharto, whose legacy of economic development was marred by graft and human rights abuses during his 32 years in power, died on Sunday, aged 86, after suffering multiple organ failure.

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He murdered hundreds of thousands with the blessings of Kissinger and Ford, but his bloody remains will be feted for steeping his people in misery and poverty while destroying his nation's land base in the service of "free market" ideological dogma.

[ 27 January 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by munroe:
He was 86, eh. Well they do say that the good die young.

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Originally posted by munroe:
He was 86, eh. Well they do say that the good die young.

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It's a good thing his name wasn't Allende, Arbenz, Bishop, Guevara, Aristide, Gadaffi, Chavez, Castro or Lumumba. The fascist bastards would've hounded him to hell and back.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

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So gruesome were the subsequent reports of mass slaughter, rape, and deliberate use of starvation that such bluntness fell somewhat out of fashion. The killing of several Australian journalists who had witnessed Indonesia's atrocities, the devastation in the capital city of Dili, and the stubbornness of FRETILIN's hugely outgunned rural resistance made East Timor an embarrassment rather than an advertisement for Jakarta's new order. Kissinger generally attempted to avoid any discussion of his involvement in the extirpation of the Timorese - an ongoing involvement, since he authorized back-door shipments of weapons to those doing the extirpating - and was ably seconded in this by his ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later confided in his memoir A Dangerous Place that, in relative terms, the death toll in East Timor during the initial days of the invasion was "almost the toll of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Moynihan continued:

The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.

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Originally posted by Slumberjack:
He was their bastard.

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So was Somoza,\
But I guess in 1978 the preacher CEO of AMerican empire had a brief moment of illumination on what friends he shuldnt keep.

In any case, its telling that CNN newsfeed on bottom of the screen said briefly that Suharto was a dictator, but hailed as "economic saviour " of Indonesia.

Nothing on a million dead. Nothing on East Timor, or his collosal theft.

[ 27 January 2008: Message edited by: a lonely worker ]

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Suharto

Indonesian dictator whose 30-year rule was built on ruthless repression, cronyism and manipulation of the world's rival superpowers

John Gittings
Monday January 28, 2008
The Guardian

With the death of the former Indonesian president Suharto, at the age of 86, we are reminded that even the most stubborn dictatorship comes to an end. Despite predictions by his ruling clique that he would lead Indonesia into the 21st century, his term of office, which began with bloodshed in 1967, ended equally bloodily in 1998.
Although known as the "smiling general", Suharto had a complex character, which, for most of his lifetime, successfully deflected analysis. He was acclaimed as a man of modest origins who had been impelled to take power out of disgust for the corruption of the last years of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president from its independence from the Netherlands in 1949 until 1967. This myth coexisted for years with the public knowledge that Suharto presided over a regime in which his closest friends controlled huge monopolies and lucrative concessions, while his children acquired assets worth billions of dollars.

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What really astonishes me is we haven't yet seen a blathering Conrad Black written eulogy in the National Post praising the dictator for all he did in the name of the market.

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The United States Sunday hailed former Indonesian president Suharto as a "historic figure" who "achieved remarkable economic development," in a statement released by its embassy here.

"President Suharto led Indonesia for over 30 years, a period during which Indonesia achieved remarkable economic and social development," ambassador Cameron Hume said in the release.

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In Canada, it's worth remembering the shameful role with respect to Suharto's regime played by the Liberal Party, which claims to uphold a humanitarian tradition in its foreign policy.

Back in the 1990s, the strongman in Jakarta was respectfully referred to in our mainstream media as President Suharto. He was touted as a modernizer, a unifier, and an important ally in Canada's quest to expand trade and investment in Southeast Asia.

Canada sold weapons to the dictatorship, which then Liberal Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific Raymond Chan justified on the absurd grounds that they were defensive weapons only.

And so it was that in 1997, when Vancouver hosted the APEC summit, Jean Chretien's Liberal government rolled out the red carpet for the dictator, and dished out the pepper spray and riot squads on the activists who worked to expose Suharto's gross human rights violations and Canada's complicity.

At the University of British Columbia, where one of the main gatherings of the heads of state was held, a security fence was erected, "preemptive" arrests were made against protest organizers like Jaggi Singh, and of course pepper spray was used liberally. According to a public inquiry held after the APEC protests, in the lead up to the summit Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy had debased his office to the point of apologizing to the Indonesian authorities for a Suharto "Wanted" poster that had proliferated around town.

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Canada was the largest western investor in Indonesia at the time of the invasion [of East Timor]. In May 1983, the Centre for Defence Information in Washington, D.C., identified the mortality rate in occupied East Timor to be "the highest death toll of the decade," second only to Cambodia under Pol Pot....

Under the leadership of General Suharto, the Indonesian military is alleged to have used chemical defoliants, military terror, pacification and social engineering to consolidate its occupation of East Timor. These and other horrors are the nightmarish legacy of Indonesia's 25-year illegal occupation of East Timor.

Indonesia's invasion of East Timor violated the same basic proscriptions of the UN Charter as did Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The two cases, while remarkable comparable in this regard, elicited vastly different responses from both Canada and the international community. In response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Canada went to war for the first time in 40 years, and justified its actions with moral appeals to Canadians' collective sense of common decency. Canada acted as it did, we were told, in the interests of upholding democracy and international law. Following Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, Canada could not bring itself to support mildly worded UN resolutions that expressed "grave concern at the loss of life," rejected "the claim that East Timor has been integrated into Indonesia," and called upon the Indonesian military to "withdraw without delay."...

For over five decades Canada refused to recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, yet in July 1976, a mere six months after Indonesia had invaded East Timor, and while Indonesia was in illegal occupation of East Timor, Canada recognized Indonesia's annexation and considered incorporation to be a fait accompli....

In 1978, generally considered to be the most brutal year of the near-genocide in East Timor, Canada's self-declared national newspaper, The Globe & Mail, published only one article on East Timor the entire year. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, successive Canadian governments provided Indonesia with strong diplomatic support at the UN by repeatedly opposing anti-Indonesian resolutions....

In the late 1980s, while the government of Indonesia was carrying out Operation Eradicate, then-external affairs and international trade minister Joe Clark stated that he was "satisfied that human rights abuses had ended in East Timor." In September 1987, Canada voted against putting East Timor back on the UN Human Rights Commission agenda. In the years since, Canada has continued to facilitate increased investment and trade in Indonesia and has provided Indonesia with hundreds of millions in Overseas Development Assistance.

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[ 06 February 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]