He also happened to be a close friend of the West, supported and sustained by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, as he presided over the violent deaths of up to a million Indonesians, the invasion, occupation and rape of East Timor, and the embezzlement of up to $30 billion of government funds.
But in an article in today’s Guardian, aptly entitled 'Our Model Dictator', the veteran war correspondent (and East Timor specialist) John Pilger sums up the bloodthirsty nature of the late tyrant’s reign, and his ‘special’ relationship with the West, far better than I could:
“To understand the significance of Suharto is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him. For three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles.”
Go read the full piece here.
Incidentally, note how ‘soft’ much of the coverage of Suharto’s death has been – compared to, say, the death of another brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, a little over a year ago. Can you imagine Saddam’s rule simply being described, rather casually, as “tough”? That’s how an Associated Press article described Suharto’s tyranny in this morning’s Washington Post. I guess, as they say:
"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard!"
1 comment:
You are right to highlight the difference in rhetoric between this and how Saddam was described. And it is interesting the way Saddam has gone from being an evil monster a the time to a consensus stretching now to the Republicans in the US that the invasion was wrong.
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