Dispatches: Thoughts of a Dictator

Thursday, June. 14, 2001

It's hard to say exactly what is passing through the mind of former Indonesian President Suharto as he lies in his hospital bed after surgeons fitted him with a permanent pacemaker. The former army general has already had a serious stroke and, at 80 (his birthday is June 8), must have contemplated his mortality often before. But it probably isn't too farfetched to imagine a fleeting, grim smile passing across his usually impassive face as he watches the news on the television hanging over his bed. Why? Because the current President, Abdurrahman Wahid, has just reshuffled his cabinet yet again in a desperate attempt to stave off almost certain impeachment by the country's top legislative body in August. And Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri's reaction to the shake-up? A laugh, according to the local press.

And then Suharto would have heard the newsreader reel off what has become a routine list of killings across the archipelago: in Aceh, in the Moluccas, in Kalimanatan province. Even in Jakarta itself where a mob recently beat to death a man they suspected of stealing a television, one of 1000 such vigilante killings Indonesia will suffer this year.

It is now almost three years since Suharto was forced to resign -- three years of economic collapse, riots, environmental disaster and steadily increasing political chaos. Surely, Suharto must have allowed himself the thought that, if only they had listened to him, if they had let him stay on in office, everything would have been fine. (Suharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years until his removal in 1998). He would have ensured a stable succession. He would have managed the economic crisis. He would have cracked down hard on the separatists. There would have been no breakdown in law and order.

When Suharto was President, criminals were afraid. And with good reason: in the early 1990s, an estimated 3,500 "suspected criminals" died in a massive police operation. Possibly, Suharto may be recalling a famous phrase uttered by the man he toppled from power, Sukarno, Megawati's father. "Without me," Sukarno once famously told his fellow countrymen, "you are all just monkeys in the dark."

But whatever little satisfaction there might be from the idea that after Suharto dies, things could well get even worse, with much of Indonesia descending into unfettered chaos as any semblance of government authority disintegrates, it couldn't last long. Instead, the former dictator's thoughts probably turned to his six children, who will have to live with whatever emerges finally from the ruin of his "New Order" Indonesia. One son, Hutomo Mandala Putra (nicknamed "Tommy"), has been in hiding for six months following an arrest warrant issued after a probe into his business affairs. And investigators are burrowing away steadily, seeking answers to questions about the source of the vast wealth accumulated by Suharto's other children. That must frighten the old man badly, for all the continued influence attributed to him and his family by the Jakarta rumor mills.

After all, it was Suharto's persistent refusal to rein in the excesses of those same children that was instrumental in his downfall. And whatever else he is, Suharto is a political realist. He knows that once he dies, whatever protection he could still afford them will soon die with him.

The country he ruled for 32 years in ruins, his family threatened, and death looming. Dark thoughts indeed!

Simon Elegant is TIME's roving Southeast Asia correspondent