Word: suharto
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...Taring Padi's prime mission is to campaign through art for wage hikes for workers, land rights for indigenous peoples and fairer deals for farmers. Since its establishment after the revolution that swept President Suharto from power in 1998, Taring Padi (the name means "Fangs of the Rice Plant") has produced thousands of banners and posters, mostly by hand. Until the group cobbled together enough money to buy a printing press recently, all works were etched into wood and covered with ink, then manually stamped onto cloth or paper...
...There is no sense of regime change with Suharto's death. He had been out of power, and practically out of sight, living quietly in a leafy residential neighborhood in central Jakarta, for nearly 10 years. But he was not a forgotten man - when he should have been. That says much about who he was and what he stood for. Suharto was the very avatar of the philosophy of economic development first, and political progress later (if at all) - a model of governance that was once the rule in much of Asia. During his nearly 33 years in power, Suharto...
...Suharto was not forgotten for another reason: the attempts at political reform since he left power have not produced a tangible improvement in the daily lives of Indonesians. Corruption, cronyism, a lack of transparency and accountability - they are all still around. Indonesia has been reborn as a young democracy, but because Suharto did not establish durable civic institutions, that democracy is messy enough for many Indonesians to pine for his old New Order...
...Suharto's eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, who was a member of her father's last Cabinet, said after his death: "If he committed mistakes, we hope all are willing to forgive him." But no one has the right to forgive Suharto other than his victims - and God. There needed to be some reckoning for Suharto, not necessarily for the sake of justice or revenge, but because a young democracy like Indonesia needs to have a sense of what is right and what is wrong. Because Suharto did both good and evil, that distinction has been blurred. His regime...
...eerily practiced, beatific smile, a secular philosophy that tamped down religious extremism, and an anticommunist bent that made him a key cold war ally for the U.S. Yet army general Suharto was also a brutal dictator who purged hundreds of thousands of critics as Indonesia's ruler from 1967 to 1998. He was forced to step down in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, but the controversy over his reign continued. Indonesia's new government launched inquiries into the corruption. Suharto sued TIME after it published its own 1999 investigation into his ill-gotten gains. He won his lawsuit...