Smiling general Suharto is no longer smiling

Smiling general Suharto is no longer smiling
AGENCE FRENCE PRESSE

JAKARTA, AUGUST 3: Former Indonesian President Suharto is no longer smiling. Now a step away from the court house door, the "smiling general" - as he preferred to be known when he ruled the country with an iron hand for 32 years - was on Thursday formally charged with embezzling $ 155 million of state funds.

The protestations of innocence, which he aired regularly on television when charges of massive corruption were first levelled by reformists who helped topple him in 1998, were absent on Thursday. Nor were the crowd of journalists and TV cameramen outside the fence of his plush mid-town residence treated to the customary smiling wave from the 79-year-old former strongman.

"As law enforcers you have done what you should do in the process of upholding the law," one of Suharto's legal team, Mohamad Assegaf, quoted Suharto as telling the prosecutors.

Already barred from leaving the country for a year, under house arrest for more than two months, Suharto has retreated into silence. His lawyers say that though physically robust he is now suffering from "irreversible brain damage", and that he has trouble communicating and forming words. Not that falling from power has Left him friendless. Admirers sent truckloads of flowers on his last birthday on June 8. Friends then said he spent the day quietly watching cable television - according to one report he has become addicted to the `Discovery' channel and no longer watches the news.

Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who visited Suharto last year, said Suharto remained convinced that the way he governed had been - and still would be - best for Indonesia. Suharto's fortunes changed when his hand-picked successor, B J Habibie was replaced with reformist President Abdurrahman Wahid in October last year.

The Habibie government had dropped the charges against Suharto for lack of evidence. Wahid's government cited new evidence, reopened the case and began pursuing the ageing leader vigorously. The new President softened the blow by saying he would pardon Suharto, but that any trial must go ahead. He also urged Suharto to surrender any "ill gotten gains" to the state, saying it would help him in the eyes of reformists out for his blood.

But the former strongman's eight lawyers are still fighting. They are suing the US magazine Time so far unsuccessfully - for claiming that Suharto and his children are sitting on a fortune of $ 15 billion. The lawyers have also been fighting a losing rearguard battle against the Attorney General's office - disputing every move on legal grounds, and using the "irreverasible brain damage" plea to keep him out of court.

Suharto's half-brother, Probosutejo, and the children whose greed contributed to his downfall, say Suharto will never leave Indonesia, despite the smouldering anger against him. According to former Australia prime minister Keating Suharto still "thinks he was right."

What Suharto thought was right was spelled out in his biography, The Smiling General and a film on the bloody events of 1965 which brought him from near-anonymity as an Army General to the presidency.

Born to a family of farmers in densely-populated central Java on June 8, 1921, Suharto joined the then-Japanese Indonesian Army during World War II. After independence he joined the fledgling Indonesian armed forces, in a career briefly marred by a corruption scandal, and was posted to Dutch New Guinea before it became a part of Indonesia as Irian Jaya. After seizing power in the aftermath of a botched and bloody coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party, he presided over a massive blood letting which Left at least half a million communists killed and millions jailed.

He banned the Communist Party and its teachings, became acting president in 1967 and President the following year, and set about the task of bringing the country out of its economic doldrums. It was is tireless efforts to build up the country's economy that earned him the title "Father of Development".

He made Indonesia, one the world's largest rice importers, self-sufficient in the commodity, and drove the country's economy further away from its dependency on oil and gas export earnings by boosting exports of manufactured products and textiles. But his autocratic rule, heavy reliance on the Army and intolerance of any dissent, which left hundreds of political prisoners behind bars, as well as the enrichment of his cronies and children, began to take its toll.

He quelled a student uprising in 1974 and jailed one of his staunchest supporters, lieutenant general Hartono Rekso Dharsono the following decade. But the business tactics of his six children became cruder and cruder, and their tentacles reached into every sector of the economy as cabinet ministers were ridden over roughshod in awards of contracts. By the time he ran for a seventh five-year term in March of 1998 - as usual the sole, unopposed candidate - student dissent was crushed only by abductions and torture, and the economy was sliding rapidly downhill, dragged by the Asian monetary crisis. By late 1997 what had started as a monetary problem had spiralled into a full-scale crisis of confidence. Students were on the streets, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had despaired and packed its bags as Suharto refused reforms, ministers refused to join a new crisis cabinet and finally even the armed forces told him it was time to go.