Our father, the dictator: Suharto’s children hope to rehabilitate family name

When your father’s been linked to a few hundred thousand deaths and owed the state a few trillion rupiah, doing a clean-up job on his rep isn’t easy

Still, Suharto’s children are up for the challenge. They want the Indonesian dictator recognised as a national hero and hope his name can get them elected

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Indonesian military strongman General Mohamed Suharto in 1967. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:00pm, 16 Jun 2019Updated: 3:41pm, 17 Jun 2019

Restoring the reputation of the late Indonesian dictator Suharto was never going to be easy. After all, the man who ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades left a legacy that requires some explaining. Like the anti-communist purge that killed up to a million people in the 1960s, the shootings of thousands of people in the 1980s, and the kidnappings and mysterious deaths of students and government critics in the 1990s. And that’s before you broach the subject of the few trillion rupiah his foundation owes the state and his moniker of “world’s greatest-ever kleptocrat”.

Still, as daunting an exercise in public relations as that sounds, it hasn’t stopped his children from doing their best to win back the public’s favour. Not only are they hoping to get their father recognised as a bona fide national hero, but they also want to leverage his legacy to boost their own political careers in the country’s brave new democratic era.

Hoping to make the most of a rusted-on supporter base for the dictator’s former Golkar political party, Suharto’s children have in recent weeks taken to social media to polish his reputation.

And, perhaps as should be expected, they have at times been accused of twisting the truth.

For example, his eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, known as Tutut Suharto, last week said Suharto had taught her about the “essence of a healthy democracy”. Sceptics were swift to point out the irony of the claim, given that the military leader had seized power in 1966. He used an executive order called Supersemar to remove Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, giving him power to “restore order by any means” in the wake of a CIA-backed anti-communist purge in 1965, which killed between 500,000 and one million people.