SBY stops Suharto investigation

Indonesian President SBY has stopped the investigation of former president Suharto. The 30 year old dictator is in hospital with intestinal problems and his age, plus closeness to high ranking members of the government mean he was always likely to get a pardon.

You make your bed, you have to lay in it. If Indonesians want to believe Suharto is a great man and all the people he killed were ‘trouble makers’, all the money he stole from Indonesia, ‘his salary’, then go ahead. I believe that while he eliminated competitors for his own gain, his family became super wealthy. The fact that rice and petrol used to be cheap, and the US dollar did not dominate the rupiah as it does today, owe more to a dictators stranglehold, than good economics.

Compare Indonesia with the former Soviet Union. People were equally afraid of the government and frequently disappeared. After the fall of Communism, the economy went to hell, crime and nasty things came out of the woodwork. Many people said they liked things the way they were, but that is not an endorsement of Communism, its just says “life before sucked, but it sucked less than now.” I prefer a situation where life might suck for a while, but you have a hope of changing it for the better, rather than sitting in hell like a pig in shit.