Word: suharto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indonesia would be an easy diagnosis for a psychiatrist: manic-depressive. In the 18 months since former President Suharto was deposed, the country has lurched repeatedly from giddy euphoria to violent despair and back. But despite the ethnic violence, lynchings and looting in major cities and the carnage in seceding East Timor, this sprawling archipelago of 210 million people has not disintegrated into ungovernability or civil war. Some had predicted the world's next Yugoslavia, but after last week, Indonesia had instead completed its graduation from a military-backed dictatorship to the world's third largest democracy (after India...
...more likely to get away with corruption if you do it by the book. That may be the lesson from the case of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, who on Monday was let off the hook by a government corruption inquiry that found no evidence that he?d diverted state funds into his own charities ? even though it turns out some of those charities were receiving public money and then loaning it to private corporations. But Suharto may be benefiting from the narrow terms laid down for the inquiry initiated by his handpicked successor, President B. J. Habibie. The official probe...
...Absolving Suharto may prove to be the final nail in the coffin of Habibie?s own presidential aspirations. Although the country?s traditional elites may be looking for a way to keep out opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, being seen to do a Gerald Ford on his old boss won?t endear Habibie to a restive public that widely suspects Suharto got rich at their expense for decades. After all, Suharto and his family are a regular fixture on Forbes magazine?s lists of the world?s richest people ? and that?s quite an achievement for a man from an impoverished...
...Indonesia militiamen are continuing to threaten the peacekeepers, and Australian troops on Tuesday arrested 15 "militiamen" who turned out to be members of the Indonesian military?s Kopassus special forces. "Everybody thought all along that the militia were being run by Kopassus units loyal to the former dictator, Suharto," says TIME correspondent William Dowell. "The question now is whether they?ll try to fight on against the Australians, because that would require the support of at least elements of the Indonesian government." A rising nationalist backlash in Indonesia over the East Timor debacle won?t help the prospects for peace...
...decisions have to be negotiated among them," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. Jakarta has effectively admitted that it's lost control of at least some of its own forces in East Timor. The New York Times reports that General Prabowo Subianto, a close ally of the former dictator Suharto and a rival to current military leader General Wiranto, wields considerable influence among officers on the island. That, together with rising nationalist sentiment against international intervention and the Indonesian government that authorized it - as well as the specter of war crimes tribunals shadowing those officers who helped organize the militias...