Suharto, who in 32 years of au­thoritarian rule of Indonesia turned one of Asia's largest and poorest countries into a fast-growing tiger economy, died in Jakarta on Jan 27, at the age of 86.
Suharto rose from a poor farmer's son to five-star army general, then president, a man of quiet determination who came to believe in his own indispensability, historians say. His strong anti-communism made him a close U.S. ally for much of his rule.
He was forced from office in 1998 when military officers and political allies abandoned him in the face of massive street pro­tests over corruption, repression and a financial panic that stalled the country's advance toward affluence. During his long rule, Indonesians rarely saw him or heard him speak, knowing him mainly as the face in portraits that hung in offices throughout the country.
He died without being held formally to account for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians during anti-commu­nist purges of 1965-66. His claims of ill health, backed by a Su­preme Court ruling, shielded him from prosecution on charges of embezzling almost $600 million during his presidency, Many people in Indonesia express a nostalgia for the Suharto days as a peaceful time when rice was plentiful and beggars few. Economists generally credit him with cutting poverty from almost 60 percent to 15 percent by 1990 in his huge country, an amalgamation of 17,500 islands and 700 ethnic groups and that today has a population of 235 million, the world's fourth-larg­est. "He led Indonesia out of a period of economic chaos into relative prosperity," said Robert Cribb, a historian at Australian National University. On the other hand, Cribb said, he "crippled Indonesia's public life."
Suharto was born June 8, 1921, in a poor village in central Java, then part of the Netherlands East Indies. He was the only child of a farming couple who divorced shortly after he was born.
In 1940, he joined the colonial Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and studied at a Dutch-run military academy. In the military, biographers say, he found the camaraderie, stabil­ity and opportunity that he had lacked as a youth.
In 1942, after Japanese forces invaded and overturned Dutch rule, Suharto joined a Japanese police force and militia. The oc­cupiers' nationalist and milita­rist Bushido philosophy would deeply influence him.
Two days after the Japanese surrender in 1945, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared independence for Indonesia. Hostilities broke out between Indonesian fighters and Dutch for seeking to reassert colonial control. Suharto gained acclaim for his efforts in fighting the Dutch.
The Dutch left in 1949, and Suharto began a long rise in armed forces of the newly independent state, which Sukarno ran as president. By 1965, Sukarno's health was failing, Suharto found himself at the head of the army's elite Strategic Reserve Command.
The general's ascent to presidency began Sept. 30, 1965 the date of a still mysterious alleged coup against Sukarno.
In the official version of events that day, promoted by Suharto and until recently the only version taught to Indonesian school children, junior army officers with ties to the Communist Party of Indonesia, kidnapped andkilled six top generals. That wassaid to be the first stage of a larger plot in which most of party's 3 million members would rise up to seize power and their opponents.
Opposing theories various by blame the generals' killings on Suharto, Sukarno and the CIA. But many historians say the most plausible explanation is that officers allied with the Communist Party kidnapped the politically conservative generals an effort to shift Sukarno's government further toward the communists but that they did not expect the resistance the prisoners put up and ended up killing them.
Whatever the facts, national mayhem ensued, and Suharto assumed command of the army. In the following months, as many as a million communists and putative sympathizers were killed by soldiers, militias and civilians in one of the worst political massacres of the 20th century. Class-ased divisions stoked by a land redistribu­tion policy em­braced            by Sukarno brought out ethnic and sectarian tensions. Muslims killed non-Muslims, plantation owners killed labor union members, and landholders killed peasants.
Although no evidence has sur­faced that Suharto directly or­dered the killings, he is known to have sent the army into some regions where killings took place on a large scale. "He also made it clear that those who killed communists would not be pun­ished," Cribb said. "So suddenly, people who hated communists for some reason realized they had immunity."
As the violence continued, in­flation reached 600 percent. Farm production was disrupted and people in some areas began to starve Suharto assumed formal power as president in March 1966. Signaling a break from Sukarno's policies, he called his rule the New Order. With the violence dying down, he em­barked on an ambitious program to reverse Indonesia's economic decline.
Relying on five U.S.-trained economists — three of them earned doctorates at the University of California—he im­posed new policies aimed at attracting foreign invest­ment. The so-called "Berkeley mafia" advocated a bal­anced budget, market-driven eco­nomics and a lim­ited government role.
Suharto channeled burgeon­ing revenues from Indonesian oil fields into roads, bridges and airports. Growth averaged 7 and 8 percent a year. A family plan­ning program built around the slogan "two is enough" sent the birth rate plummeting.
By 1985, Suharto, whose face appeared on billboards with the title "Father of Development, was able to declare that Indone­sia was self-sufficient in rice, its main staple. Near-universal enrollment for primary school grades was achieved by 1990, In that year, only 15 percent of Indonesians were living below official poverty lines, compared with 60 percent in 1970.
But with rising wealth came a vast parallel economy of patron­age and undeclared assets. Al­though the technocrats were able to institute market reforms, they were unable to rein in the six Suharto children and their fa­ther's business cronies.
Just as Imelda Marcos and her shoe collection came to symbol­ize the greed of the Ferdinand Marcos years in the Philippines, the Suharto children became symbols of the New Order's excesses. Rare was the road project or petrochemical plant deal that did not have a Suharto son or daughter as the local agent.
His wife, Tien, was commonly known as "Madame Ten Percent," for the cut she allegedly demanded from new projects. Bribes often flowed in the form of donations to charitable foundations con­trolled by the Suharto family.
Economist Adam Schwarz calls the New Order's corruption a symptom of an "institutional vacuum." Courts were not in­dependent. Strict curbs on the news media silenced most crit­ics. All but three political par­ties were outlawed, and large political gatherings were banned.
And above it all presided Suharto. He came to see himself as the figurative father ofthe country, said Indonesian histo­rian Taufik Abdullah. He was no Sukarno, a charismatic ladies' man whose speeches stirred passion. Suharto, Abdullah noted, was "like an uncle." Javnese in character, he stressed correct behavior, worked and avoided dramatic displays of emotion. Across a country spanning more than 3,000 miles east to west, Suharto imposed highly centralized government backed by a powerful military. He created new towns and engineered vast internal migrations aimed at easing over population but which also contributed to social strife, Abdullah noted 1975, his armed forces invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, which Indonesia annexed several months later, setting a long guerrilla war.
Suharto's anti-communist rhetoric and clear turn away from Sukarno's polices made him a useful ally for the United States during the Cold War. The United States maintained close relations with the Indonesian military from the 1970s to the early 1990s engaging its officers in training and support programs, despite allegations of human right abuses by the military in provinces such as East Timor and Papua. It was only after the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991 in East Timor that the U.S. cut most military ties. Full ties were not restored until November 2005.
The technocrats' economic program was also welcome in Washington, which responded with large amounts of aid.
To maintain a veneer of democracy, Suharto ran for election before an electoral college every five years. His Golkar party was foreordained to win.
What ultimately brought Suharto down was the weakness of the political system he created and his hubris – “a grossly inflated sense of his own popularity,” Schwarz wrote in his book, “A Nation in Waiting.” The financial panic that swept Indonesia and other Asian countries in 1997 exposed long brewing tensions. Students, workers and members of the middle class, many of them educated and prosperous thanks to Suharto’s innovation, began to protest rising prices, corruption and lack of civil liberties.
By early 1998, the Indonesian currency, the rupiah, was in free fall. Foreign investors fled. Suharto, believing he could weather the storm, ignored the prescriptions of an International Monetary Fund bailout package. In May 1998, security forces shot and killed four student protesters at a Jakarta university, sparking the worst rioting ever seen in the capital. More than 1,000 people were killed.
Shortly before midnight on May 20, 1998, a lone adviser gave Suharto the news that no one, save the adviser, was willing to serve in Suharto’s cabinet. The economic ministers, the politicians, even the generals had deserted him.

The next morning he announced his resignation.

Suharto lived out his days in relative isolation in a house in an upscale Jakarta neighborhood. He is survived by his six children. - The Washington Post.

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