Former Indonesian leader Suharto, 86

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Former Indonesian President Suharto, a Cold War ally of the United States whose brutal military regime killed hundreds of thousands of left-wing political opponents, will be buried with the highest state honors today at the family mausoleum.

Although he oversaw some of the worst bloodshed of the 20th century, Mr. Suharto, who died yesterday at 86, is credited with developing the economy of this Southeast Asian archipelago, which stretches across more than 3,000 miles.

Mr. Suharto had been in and out of hospitals after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. He died of multiple-organ failure after more than three weeks on life support at a hospital in the capital, Jakarta.

He was toppled by mass street protests in 1998 at the peak of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. His departure from office opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people, and he withdrew from public life, rarely leaving his Jakarta villa.

Mr. Suharto ruled with a totalitarian dominance in which soldiers were stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority.

The bulk of killings occurred in 1965 and 1966, when alleged communists were rounded up and slain during his rise to power. Estimates for the death toll range from a government figure of 78,000 to one million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history.

Over the next three decades, 300,000 more people were killed, disappeared or starved in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua, human-rights groups and the United Nations say.

Mr. Suharto's five successors as head of state all vowed to end the graft that took root under his regime, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.

With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than try those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Mr. Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.

Some noted that he also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability, when fuel and rice were affordable.

Critics say Mr. Suharto squandered Indonesia's vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the nation's wealth to benefit his cronies, foreign corporations and family like a Mafia don.

Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, said the graft effectively robbed "Indonesia of some of the most golden decades and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle-class country."

Like many Indonesians, Mr. Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.

When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Mr. Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.

Absolute power came in September 1965, when the army's six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances. Mr. Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces.

What followed was a nationwide purge of suspected leftists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later.