Suharto crushes Time magazine for telling the truth?

We all know the canard about the propensity of bad things to happen to good people. Well, thanks to fate's eternal perversions, good things often seem to happen to perfectly terrible people, even deposed dictators. Case in point, former Indonesian dictator Suharto will be probably be $100 million richer than he already was because a magazine actually printed the truth.

Time magazine's Indonesian edition lost a $106 million defamation lawsuit by the family of the former dictator for alleging, perfectly truthfully, that the former dictator had embezzled an enormous fortune during his 32 year dictatorship. A spokesman for the Indonesian Supreme Court, which rendered the verdict, declared "the article and photographs hurt the image and pride of the plaintiff as a great retired army general and the former Indonesian president."

Which might be true, but the Indonesian government is seeking to recoup with one hand what it is trying to confiscate from Time with the other. Suharto himself has been charged with a number of crimes related to his record breaking kleptocracy, but the frail 86 year old has kept himself out of criminal court by pleading that he's too ill to stand trial. This excuse will not, apparently, grant him immunity from a civil suit by the government which seeks to recover $440 million in embezzled funds, and a further billion dollars in damages.

It is also worth noting that the Indonesian government, while ostensibly democratic since Suharto was overthrown, is still governed by and large by Suharto's former cronies. Their attempt to recoup stolen money is one thing, but it also tends to explain why Suharto hasn't been charged with offenses relating to the massacres that gained him so much notoriety. After all, the civil suit is simply business, but charging the old man with murder? Not on your life. Since the defamation lawsuit verdict was delivered by the Supreme Court, it's unclear what Time can do to contest the verdict at this point. With any luck, the government will win their case, or Suharto will finally kick the bucked, and his embarrassed family will simply decline to press for the award money.

Or not. Congratulations then, Suharto, on adding another $100 million bucks to your stash of ill gotten loot. It's almost a shame you'll be dropping dead before you can treat us to yet another outrage of this sort. Almost.

Just the tip of the iceberg

Prosecutors in Indonesia have filed a lawsuit against their former dictator, Suharto, seeking to reclaim some $420 million dollars embezzled by the elderly kleptocrat. So what's the problem?

The problem is that $420 million is the tip of the iceberg. As the most infamous of the 20th century's kleptocrats, Suharto's haul of stolen monies reads like a typographical error: over $15 billion dollars, with some estimates going as high as $25 or $30 billion dollars obtained through bribery, the establishment of monopolies and outright embezzlement. This figure elevates Suharto to, perhaps, being the greatest thief in history. Certainly, the amount of money looted by Suharto far surpasses his somewhat more notorious kleptocrat peers like the late Mobutu Sese-Seko of Zaire, the late Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Duvalier dynasty of Haiti.

So why are prosecutors only looking for such a relatively paltry amount? It's alleged that the money has been widely dispersed, both in the forms of economic monopolies on everything from clove cigarettes and fuel at home, to investment properties overseas, nearly all of which are nominally owned by Suharto's brainless playboy son, Tommy Suharto. Much of the money allegedly resides in bank accounts in Switzerland and Austria, countries whose banking laws favor the privacy of the depositor.

It's doubtful that Indonesia will recover so much as a thin dime from the octogenarian dictator, who has been in poor health for years. What's more, much of the stolen money has been so thoroughly laundered through legitimate (or semi-legitimate) business interests inside Indonesia for so long, that recovering the stolen money by appropriating the assets that laundered it could seriously damage the Indonesian economy. So it appears that the $420 million figure may have been reached by attempting to calculate the cash reserves kept by Suharto and his family inside Indonesia itself, which really, is nothing more than pocket money for the world's most successful kleptocrat.

Suharto at death's door?

No matter how powerful a man is, his common destiny with other men is age, infirmity, and death. Reports from Jakarta state that Indonesia's 84 year old former dictator Suharto* has undergone an operation, his fourth in the past calendar year, to remove a 25 inch section of his intestines. Time is obviously not on Suharto's side, and even if he does recover, he's facing a criminal trial on corruption charges.

Suharto's rise to power began in a time honored way after overthrowing the incumbent "President for Life" Sukarno in military coup d'etat in 1965. For the next 33 years, Suharto became the world's most successful kleptocrat, embezzling incredible sums estimated to be as high as $35 billion US dollars. On the domestic front, Suharto famously repressed the independence movement in the former Portuguese colony of Timor Leste ("East Timor"), for which Suharto earned the eternal disapproval of the Noam Chomskys of the world.

Not surprisingly, Suharto had much more to worry about than the finger waggling of crackpot American academics, as his nation was constantly wracked with economic crises, guerilla insurgencies, and ecological disasters that would stretch the governing skills of any dictator, much less one more interested in looting his nation's coffers than than steering the ship of state. Yet through it all, he managed to keep his grip on for over 30 years, an astounding length of time for a dictator in a such a politically unstable region.

Ironically, the daughter of the dictator he had deposed on his way to the top proved instrumental in Suharto's political collapse, but perhaps the sad fact of the matter is that time had passed Suharto by. Once upon a time, Suharto could count on political and economic support from Washington, but with the end of the Cold War, Washington stopped going steady with Jakarta and decided to "just be friends". While this was obviously bad news for Suharto, it was excellent news for Indonesia and East Timor, and you would now be hard pressed to find anyone alive or dead who yearns for the return of one man rule to Indonesia.

Before he dies a feeble and powerless old man, let us take a moment to remember him as one of the richest, most powerful, and most loathesome men to live in the 20th century while he's still alive, shall we?

* Most Indonesians go by a single name - see here for details.