Farewell to Asia’s greatest kleptocrat

2 February 2008

Eric Ellis says the death of Indonesia’s former dictator may spur attempts to recover the loot accumulated by his family

While much of this was broadcast live on state television, in Bali delegates to a UN conference broke talks to observe a minute’s silence for the 86-year-old tyrant’s passing. Their conference was convened in a luxury hotel — believed to be owned by a Suharto sibling — to debate how to confiscate ill-gotten loot from kleptocrats like, well, General Suharto. Indonesia’s President Yudhoyono was supposed to be the host, except he was in Central Java leading the state funeral. One has to get the presidential priorities right.

Ah yes, you say, but this is the ‘Mysterious East’, where things are rarely as they seem. Perhaps, but grinding poverty is no illusion to the one third of Indonesia’s 240 million citizens the World Bank says earn two dollars a day or less. Suharto’s legacy was a collapsed economy, dysfunctional institutions, a putrid judiciary, radicalised mosques, a nation in advanced state of break-up and a graft culture so deeply embedded that it will take generations to purge.

The ratings agency Moody’s ranks Indonesian debt a woeful three levels below investment grade — but Suharto could steal and kill with industrial efficiency. His militias murdered more than 500,000 of his political opponents after seizing power in 1965, and another 200,000 East Timorese who opposed Jakarta’s rule. Today, Yudhoyono could really use the $35 billion the UN tallied that the ‘Father of Development’ and his rapacious rentier relatives ripped off during their three decades in the Istana Merdeka, Jakarta’s Dutch-colonial confection of a presidential palace. That’s almost as much as the IMF had to raise in 1998, Suharto’s last year in power, to keep Indonesia afloat after he’d trashed the economy; or, put another way, 80 per cent of Yudhoyono’s budget this year.

But Yudhoyono may yet get his hands on some of the loot. Another telling moment of Suharto’s month-long death throes came when Indonesia’s attorney-general visited the bedside of the comatose ex-president. He whispered respects and then had a quiet word with Suharto’s eldest daughter, Siti Hariyanti. He told her the family shouldn’t think that when ‘Bapak’ dies we’re not coming after you, citing a civil case that alleges $1.5 billion was channelled through the central bank to a Suharto-controlled charity. The six children agreed a settlement, only to have their lawyer renege the next day. When Suharto finally slipped the mortal coil, Siti sobbed, ‘We ask that if he had any faults, please forgive them.’