Temans,
Hampir semua media massa di Indonesia, menjadi berbalik memuja Soeharto pada
masa sakit sampe matinya. Tapi lihatlah kata Associated Press dibawah ini,
beberapa menit setelah kematiannya:
Salam,
AGAG
Former Indonesian dictator Suharto dies
By ZAKKI HAKIM, Associated Press Writer 11 minutes ago
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Former dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed
Indonesia's communist movement and pushed aside the country's founding father
to usher in 32 years of tough rule that saw up to a million political opponents
killed, died Sunday. He was 86.
Suharto had been ailing in a hospital in the capital since Jan. 4 when he was
admitted with failing kidneys, heart and lungs. Doctors prolonged his life
through dialysis and a ventilator, but his condition dramatically worsened over
the weekend. He stopped breathing and slipped into a coma Sunday.
A statement issued by chief presidential doctor, Marjo Subiandono, said he was
declared dead at 1:10 p.m. The cause of death was given as multi-organ failure.
Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, the U.S. Cold War ally's
departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of
235 million people and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his
comfortable villa on a leafy lane in the capital.
Suharto had ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in
every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian
nation of some 6,000 inhabited islands that stretch across more than 3,000
miles.
Since being forced from power, he had been in and out of hospitals after
strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. Blood transfusions and a
pacemaker prolonged his life, but he suffered from lung, kidney, liver and
heart problems.
Suharto was vilified as one of the world's most brutal rulers and was accused
of overseeing a graft-ridden reign. But poor health — and continuing
corruption, critics charge — kept him from court after he was chased from
office by widespread unrest at the peak of the Asian financial crisis.
The bulk of political killings blamed on Suharto occurred in the 1960s, soon
after he seized power. In later years, some 300,000 people were slain,
disappeared or jailed in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh
and Papua, human rights groups and the United Nations say.
Suharto's successors as head of state — B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid,
Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono — vowed to end corruption
that took root under Suharto, yet it remains endemic at all levels of
Indonesian society.
With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted
its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and
multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently
called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.
Some noted Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made
Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of
Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability,
when fuel and rice were affordable.
But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia's vast natural resources of oil,
timber and gold, siphoning the nation's wealth to benefit his cronies and
family like a mafia don.
Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political economy at Northwestern
University, said the graft effectively robbed "Indonesia of some of the most
golden decades, and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle class
country."
"When Indonesia does finally go back and redo history, (its people) will
realize that Suharto is responsible for some of the worst crimes against
humanity in the 20th century," Winters added.
Those who profited from Suharto's rule made sure he was never portrayed in a
harsh light at home, Winters said, so even though he was an "iron-fisted,
brutal, cold-blooded dictator," he was able to stay in his native country.
Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921,
to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean, in the dominant
Indonesian province of Central Java.
When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose
through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.
His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army's then-commander,
Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army
contracts.
Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army's six top generals were
murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an
abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt.
Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed
forces and promoted himself to four-star general.
Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade
unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World
War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a
decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between
500,000 and 1 million.
Over the next year, Suharto eased out of office Indonesia's first
post-independence president, Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The
legislature rubber-stamped Suharto's presidency and he was re-elected unopposed
six times.
During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington,
which didn't oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974
invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia's
youngest country with a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.
Even Suharto's critics agree his hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia's
extremists. He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial,
some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked
terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.
Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto — nicknamed the
"Berkeley mafia" after their American university, the University of California,
Berkeley — transformed Indonesia's economy and attracted billions of dollars in
foreign investment.
By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia's "father of
development," taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and
modernizing parts of the nation.
But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia
was regularly ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations as Suharto's
inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates 20 percent to 30
percent of Indonesia's development budget was embezzled during his rule.
Even today, Suharto's children and aging associates have considerable sway over
the country's business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have
been fruitless.
Suharto's youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, was released from prison
in 2006 after serving a third of a 15-year sentence for ordering the
assassination of a Supreme Court judge. Another son, Bambang Trihatmodjo,
joined the Forbes list of wealthiest Indonesians in 2007, with $200 million
from his stake in the conglomerate Mediacom.
Suharto's economic policies, based on unsecured borrowing by his cronies,
dramatically unraveled shortly before he was toppled in May 1998. Indonesia is
still recovering from what economists called the worst economic meltdown
anywhere in 50 years.
State prosecutors accused Suharto of embezzling about $600 million via a
complex web of foundations under his control, but he never saw the inside of a
courtroom. In September 2000, judges ruled he was too ill to stand trial,
though many people believed the decision really stemmed from the lingering
influence of the former dictator and his family.
In 2007, Suharto won a $106 million defamation lawsuit against Time magazine
for accusing the family of acquiring $15 billion in stolen state funds.
The former dictator told the news magazine Gatra in a rare interview in
November 2007 that he would donate the bulk of any legal windfall to the needy,
while he dismissed corruption accusations as "empty talk."
Suharto's wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The
couple had three sons and three daughters.
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