Suharto

Suharto ruled Indonesia for more than three decades, from 1967 to 1998, after an army career that began under Dutch colonial rule. His rise was accompanied by the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists in 1965–66, and his "New Order" regime combined rapid economic growth with military domination, heavy repression, the occupation of East Timor and corruption on a vast scale. He remains one of the most divisive figures in Indonesian history.

Suharto, who like many Javanese used a single name, was born on 8 June 1921 in Kemusuk, a hamlet west of Yogyakarta in the Dutch East Indies. His parents divorced early and he was passed between relatives, finding stability with an uncle by marriage in Wuryantoro. Unlike the nationalist leaders of his generation he had little contact with Europeans or with politics. In 1940 he enlisted in the Dutch colonial army, and after the Japanese conquest of 1942 he joined a Japanese-sponsored police force and then the PETA militia, rising to company commander.

When Sukarno proclaimed independence in August 1945, Suharto joined the new republican army and fought the returning Dutch in the Indonesian National Revolution. On 1 March 1949 his troops briefly retook Yogyakarta. After independence he fought regional rebellions and commanded the Diponegoro Division in Central Java from 1956 to 1959, until an army inquiry into smuggling led to his transfer. He nevertheless rose again, heading the new Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) from 1961 and leading the 1962 campaign to take western New Guinea from the Dutch.

Before dawn on 1 October 1965 a group calling itself the 30 September Movement killed six generals in Jakarta. Suharto, whom the plotters had not targeted, took command, retook the capital within a day and blamed the Communist Party (PKI). The responsibility for the attempted coup is still disputed. The army, with civilian religious groups and backed by the United States and other Western powers, then led a campaign of mass killing against communists and leftists across the country; most estimates put the dead at between 500,000 and over a million, and as many as 1.5 million people were imprisoned at some point. In March 1966 Suharto obtained a decree from Sukarno giving him sweeping authority, banned the PKI and purged the president's supporters. Parliament named him acting president in March 1967 and president in March 1968.

Suharto's government, guided by US-trained economists, brought inflation down from about 660% in 1966 to 19% by 1969 and opened the country to foreign investment. Over three decades poverty fell sharply, life expectancy and school enrolment rose, and Indonesia became self-sufficient in rice by 1984. Power, however, rested on the army, which held posts at every level of government, on the Golkar electoral machine and on tightly controlled assemblies that re-elected Suharto unopposed five times. Critics, students and journalists were jailed or silenced, and laws suppressed Chinese-Indonesian culture.

In December 1975 Suharto ordered the invasion of Portuguese Timor, which Indonesia annexed in 1976. Estimates of conflict-related deaths there during Indonesian rule range from about 90,800 to 213,600. Meanwhile his children and business allies built vast fortunes through monopolies and state contracts; Transparency International later estimated that he and his family had taken between US$15 and 35 billion.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 devastated the economy. In May 1998 security forces shot four students in Jakarta, riots killed over 1,000 people, and ethnic Chinese were particular targets. Abandoned by his allies, Suharto resigned on 21 May 1998, handing power to his vice-president, B. J. Habibie. Prosecutors charged him with corruption, but courts found him too ill to stand trial. He died in Jakarta on 27 January 2008 and was given a state funeral. Many Indonesians remember his era as stable and prosperous, and in 2025 he was declared a National Hero, a decision that drew protests.

Our 1960 map shows newly independent Indonesia before Suharto took power, and the 1985 and 1994 maps show it during his presidency, when Indonesia held East Timor, today independent Timor-Leste.