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Suharto: 'One of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th
century'
When General Suharto came to power in 1965 he overthrew the
grandfather of journalist Chris Kline, who explains here why he
will not mourn the death of Indonesia's dictator
By Chris Kline
04/02/08 "The
Independent" --
-- When I was five or six, the Indonesian dictator Suharto,
who died last week, came to Rome for a state visit. My
Indonesian mother and I were summoned to the embassy to pay
homage.
But when it came time for photographs, and Suharto picked me up,
I shouted for him to put me down, and began punching him while
he awkwardly kept smiling. I called out that he was a “uomo
cattivo”, a bad man. Millions of Indonesians who thought the
same would never have dared to say so aloud.
Why did Suharto permit this? Because I am the American grandson
of the founder of modern Indonesia, Sukarno. General Suharto
(both men, like many Indonesians, are known by only one name)
overthrew him in a blood-soaked coup in 1965, covertly aided and
enthusiastically abetted by the US, Britain and Australia.
I was just two when Suharto unleashed his “New Order”, living in
Europe with my American father, Frank Latimore, and my
Indonesian mother, Rukmini Sukarno. He was a Hollywood and
Broadway actor, she was a European opera diva. We were far from
Indonesia, home to a fifth of the world’s natural resources,
which my grandfather led to independence after a long liberation
struggle against colonial rule by the Netherlands. But we were
not free from Suharto’s dictatorship.
Much of my family that hadn’t been purged after the coup
remained in Indonesia, where Suharto held them hostage. Some in
the family changed sides willingly, but for the sake of
“national unity”, and out of fear of retaliation, the rest of us
had to play along, even if we lived in exile. It was
particularly loathsome for my mother, haunted all her life by
the fate of her cousin, Brigadier General Sabur, who was slowly
hacked to death in one of Suharto’s dungeons.
So I will not mourn Suharto. His death is some small measure of
justice, far too late, for all those he killed during nearly 32
years as the absolute dictator of the world’s fourth most
populous nation, and largest Muslim country. And until he fell
in 1998, Suharto enjoyed Western support.
Sukarno, a fiery nationalist, was one of the key architects of
the Non-Aligned Movement. The Cold War was at its height, the US
was escalating its role in Vietnam, and the “domino theory” held
sway. Indonesia’s Communist Party, the PKI, then the third
largest in the world, openly declared it would arm itself as a
rival force to the Indonesian military. Sukarno, rightly or
wrongly, was regarded as a crypto-Marxist who would empower the
PKI further. He told America and Britain to “go to hell”;
clearly his days were numbered.
The military and intelligence attachés in the US and British
embassies were sending helpful death lists to the Indonesian
high command when Suharto struck. In the midst of the mass
executions, the British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, sent a
chilling telegram to London, saying: “I have never concealed
from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be
an essential preliminary to effective change.”
Time magazine described the horrors Gilchrist so calmly
endorsed: “The killings have been on such a scale the disposal
of corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in east Java
and northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of
decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers
and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies.” At
least 500,000 Indonesians died violently in the months following
the takeover, but studies suggest the figure might have been
between a million and two million.
A decade later, again with a green light from Washington, London
and Canberra, as many as 230,000 more people, or a third of the
civilian population of East Timor, died when Suharto invaded the
former Portuguese colony. Australia monitored busy Indonesian
military radio traffic in the build-up, but said nothing. As
Suharto’s marines and paratroopers conquered the territory, a
satisfied CIA internal communiqué stated: “Without continued
heavy US logistical, military support the Indonesians might not
have been able to pull it off.”
The man who has just died in Jakarta is one of the greatest mass
murderers of the 20th century, but he was never indicted by the
International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. Throughout,
Suharto received all the weaponry his brutal military wanted.
Britain sold him Scorpion armoured vehicles and Spartan troop
carriers after a “thorough assessment” that they would not be
used for “internal repression”, according to the then Defence
Secretary, Michael Heseltine. Curious, then, how they turned up
on the streets to hold back angry crowds demanding change.
Suharto’s advocates claim he modernised Indonesia and returned
the country to the community of nations. Indonesia is now
praised as the third-largest democracy on the planet, which has
resisted Islamist radicalisation. But what of the estimated
$15bn to $30bn Suharto plundered, while 49 million of his people
survive on less than $2 a day, deprived of primary education and
basic medical care? If Indonesia has moved forward at all, it is
despite Suharto, not because of him.
I have visited many countries as a foreign correspondent for CNN
and Fox, but all my life I have been excluded from Indonesia,
because of Suharto. Now that he is gone, I will be able to
embrace my own heritage at last. And the man who overthrew my
grandfather will take his place beside Pol Pot, Pinochet,
Milosevic, Stalin, Idi Amin, Mao and all the other great
murderers of their own people.
Chris Kline is an international print and broadcast journalist
© The Independent.co.uk
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