Indonesia - Former President Suharto is dead

AFP via translation | January 27, 2007

[HAL9000]

via translation -

ALERT - Death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto

JAKARTA - Former President Suharto, who has held an iron fist in Indonesia for 32 years, died Sunday in Jakarta at the age of 86, announced a senior official of the police.

[JasonC]

Much better than communist tyranny. There was slaughter when he came in, but it was largely the right people and because it was needed. There wasn't after. I'm not saying give the man a parade, but he won his Vietnam war, and we didn't win ours. And losing emphatically was worse.

[Ptarmigan]

Suharto was brutal, but he made Indonesia a better place. He was no saint, but Indonesia was largely stable. He made it an Asian Tiger, like what Park Chung-hee did to South Korea.

The biggest irony of all is the biggest anti-Communist killers are communists themselves. Stalin purged many Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. In Indonesia, the so-called mass killings of millions of communists (PKI-Indonesia's Commuist Party) in 1965 was carried out by communists themselves to cover up their own communism, especially in Bali.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia

[Ptarmigan]

True. Communism has killed a lot more.

[blindsided]

Hardly a good man, and I hope the tyrant Suharto rots in wherever dark place he is now. I had Christian relatives in Indonesia who were persecuted for simply dissenting with his government, and so I’d hardly call him a hero. I still have friends here (now US citizens) who are afraid to speak his name. The man was an Islamic despot who, along with his family, made people disappear if they so much as raised a finger in protest to his rule. Defeated Communism? To some extent, but (like many countries) he replaced it with a tyranny of his own. He kept a vast majority of the Indonesian population poor beyond belief, while he and his friends hoarded the riches accumulated through cronyism, nepotism, and exploitation. All made possible under his iron dictatorship. Hardly the mark of a benevolent ruler. Thank God for the USA, which maintains checks and balances to ensure such treacherous rule doesn’t hit our shores. We tend to take such freedoms for granted.

I was in Java in 1976, the early 80s and 96-to-early-98 — during which time people were TERRIFIED to even mention his name. Completely oppressive, militant rule. Go to Jakarta now and talk to some of the people there; most are still obscenely poor but now enjoy the gift of free speech. Speak with any missionary or expatriate who’s been there for a while and you’ll get the same observation. The horrific treatment of Indonesia’s native peoples in remote areas like Aceh or East Timor were not tall tales. As a conservative myself, I’d hardly call any of it liberal media spin.

I guess we can agree to disagree here on the supposed “stellar” character of Suharto. Sure, he was friendly with the US (in exchange for huge benefits of course), but he was quite the monster to his own people. From outside looking in, it’s an easy thing to miss. Just look at what’s going on in China...

[PotatoHeadMick]

“The man was an Islamic despot”

Nonsense.

I live in Jakarta.

[blindsided]

Because his oppressive rule didn’t affect you directly, the facts confirming his dictator-like rule are no longer valid. Wish I lived in the fantasy world you do, friend. Dealt with him and his horrid children, have you? Lovely.

[RightWhale]

He was dead in yesterday’s threads, too.

[PotatoHeadMick]

I didn’t say he wasn’t a dictator, I said your assertion that he was an Islamist dictator is nonsense because it is nonsense, try not to make nonsensical statements and people won’t point out you’re talking nonsense.

[blindsided]

Ah, fair enough, with the emphasis on “Islamic.” True, he wasn’t really a real follower of the Islamic faith. Most believed (correctly) he affiliated himself with the religion to assert control over the populous. Good catch.