Suharto

Writing in The Conversation, Tim Lindsey, Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law and Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne, argues that the growth-focused framing of Suharto legacy, poverty falling from roughly 45 percent in 1970 to 11 percent in 1996, understates how much of that prosperity flowed to a ruling elite through entrenched corruption, kickbacks and foundations built to reward political loyalty. Lindsey further argues that the growth narrative cannot be separated from the repression that protected it: killers from the 1965 to 1966 anti-communist massacres, in which roughly half a million people died, still enjoy complete impunity, and no one has ever been tried for those killings. On this account the economic record is not a counterweight to the authoritarian record but a product of it.