Obituray: President Suharto of Indonesia.

A decade after was he pushed from power former President Suharto's footprint on Indonesia has remained so strong that the world's fourth-most populous (226 million) country struggles to deal with it consequences.

How much good did he do? How much harm? And how to deal with a legacy of brutality and corruption which some still want to deny.

Suharto ruled for 32 years. He boosted growth and kept a lid on communal violence. But he left in his wake a brutal Army, crippled economy, a neutered political system, and dysfunctional national institutions.

"Suharto ran Indonesia like a mafia don," says Jeffrey Winters, professor of political economy at Northwestern University, Chicago. "Everything turned on the don, all business went through the don, the don was the source of security, and he destroyed everything, Parliament, the rule of law, the intellectual community, and turned the police and military into his personal instruments."

Not everyone agrees.

"Yes, there was corruption. Yes, he gave favours to his family and his friends. But there was real growth and real progress," said Lee Kuan Yew, longtime autocratic prime minister of neighbouring Singapore after visiting Suharto in hospital last month.

Suharto came to power in 1965, crushing what was officially described as a Beijing-backed communist coup. Communism seemed a powerful threat to Western nations in those days. In an atmosphere of apprehension many Western countries - not least Australia and New Zealand being so close to Indonesia's great size - much preferred it being an independent nation to a communist one.

But it is estimated as many as 500,000 Indonesians suspected of being communists or sympathisers died in an Army-inspired bloodbath in the months after he took power. Over the next three decades, Suharto's Army continued to kill - on student campuses, in the rebellious provinces of Aceh and Papua, and in East Timor - where about 200,000 died from war and famine, as well as in "mysterious shootings" of criminals.

Elsewhere in the sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands much of his rule was relatively peaceful, but stability often came at the cost of repression of dissent. Thousands of political prisoners were kept in labour camps on Buru Island, including members of the intelligentsia.

Independent observers have said violations of human rights were common. But Suharto never faced any charges for crimes against humanity. He denied the charges of corruption, and partly because of claims of poor health he was not prosecuted.

By the time he stepped down, amid the social and economic chaos of 1998, many Indonesians summed up his era as KKN, a local acronym for Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism.

Source: NZHerald