Suharto - war criminal

War criminal Suharto is dead. Look for the tears from his Western supporters. In their hypocrisy they may recognise he was a dictator, but, they will rationalise, he was "our" dictator.

The man was a mass murderer. In the years 1965 and 1966 he and his army supporters seized power and killed up to one million Indonesians. In the name of anti-communism they killed Chinese people because they were Chinese. This is genocide.

The West was up to its armpits in the blood. The US supplied the names of Communist Party members to Suharto and his cronies. They knew these people would be murdered. American Embassy officials ticked off their names as the army killed them. What did it matter if a few commies were assassinated?

Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt said that “with 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place”.

And how did we describe this genocide? A “cleansing process” said our Embassy in Jakarta.

Ethnic cleansing is a better description.

But the West wanted Suharto in power for its own interests so the mere mass murder of one million people was of no importance to the US or Australia.

And then there is East Timor. During the 23 years of brutal occupation, East Timor’s population fell by a third - about 200,000 dead.

Australia (in particular Gough Whitlam) supported this takeover. It was Malcolm Fraser's Government that gave de jure recognition to the Indonesian regime in East Timor. We even trained Indonesian Army troops, troops which were used in East Timor (and West Papua) to suppress the Indigenous population.

Our Governments have not yet acted on a New South Wales coroner implicating those in high positions in Indonesia in the murder of the Balibo 5. I doubt we will because that would upset the precious relationship with Indonesia’s ruling and corrupt elite, an elite whose present position owes much to Suharto’s dictatorship and mass murder.

In West Papua from 1969 when the UN supported Act of Free Choice (what Orwellian words!) saw Indonesia installed as the new colonial ruler, the Indonesian Army has killed over 100,000 people.

Yet despite all these murders, murders well known to the West, Suharto has received massive support from the US, Britain and Australia in particular.

The ruling elite in these countries not only wants its companies to make quick bucks off the back of the dead. They have also determined that it is in their strategic, economic and political interests to support mass murderers like Suharto.

Indeed, as Iraq and Afghanistan show (once again), when the West thinks it is in their interests to do so they will don the gloves of blood themselves, rather than rely on proxies like Suharto.

Then there is the looting of the Indonesian coffers. Suharto, his family and cronies were corrupt. Transparency International claims that Suharto and his family filched as much as A$40 billion from the country’s coffers.

The criminal case against him for this corruption ended because of his ill health. The civil case will be settled out of court. I wonder who presently in power in Indonesia benefits from these decisions.

International courts have been useless in the fight against this mass murderer, a man clearly guilty of war crimes and genocide.

That’s because the West didn’t want him tried. He was their ally. And further, any action could implicate those who aided and abetted Suharto, like the Australian leaders Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard.

Apparently only those criminals who lose the West’s support (like Saddam Hussein) suffer some sort of retribution. Certainly those from the West who support dictators are never charged. And those Western leaders (like Bush, Blair and Howard) who invade other countries and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are never brought to justice.

Individual terrorism is abhorrent. State terrorism, whether by Suharto or his Western backers, is just as abhorrent.

Near the site of the Bali bombing, a bombing in which 88 Australians were murdered, there are mass graves from 1965 and 1966. There are about 88,000 dead there. Our outrage over Bali should extend to those Suharto murdered. It doesn't.

An uprising in 1998 forced Suharto from power. That revolution was incomplete because it is Suharto’s acolytes who now run the country. Indeed, Golkar, Suharto's party, is the biggest in Indonesia.

Only when the working people of Indonesia are in power, instead of Suharto’s cronies, will Indonesia be free of its murderous past.

Now the dictator is dead. May he rot in hell. If there is one.