By Seth Mydans
Published: October 31, 2007
Nearly 10 years after the tumult of his ouster, the old dictator spends his days alone in his sitting room, one friend says, inviting few visitors, making no public statements, eating carefully to avoid hurting his stomach.
As he did during his 32 years as Indonesia's president, Suharto, 86, often offers an enigmatic smile when asked a pointed question, the friend says, but now it is sometimes a smile of bafflement as his mind slips away.
These are the impressions of Retnowati Abdulgani-Knapp, the author of a recent sympathetic biography who continues to visit Suharto in the modest home to which he retreated in May 1998 and has rarely left since.
The crowds chanting, "Hang Suharto!" have long since disappeared, the nation has hurried ahead without him, and fewer people really care what happens to the man who once towered over them.
It is a strange, muted fate for a deposed strongman, neither fleeing nor being vigorously pursued, a quiet, defeated presence in a quiet neighborhood in the middle of the bustling city.
"To me, it's self-punishment because he's doing that of his own will," said Abdulgani-Knapp, though it was not clear what might be causing him remorse.
"Why does he stay in that house all the time?" she asked. "He just wants to be alone to punish himself to prepare himself for the next life, I really believe so."
But there is still the question of money.
In September the United Nations and the World Bank put Suharto at the top of a new list of the world's most audacious embezzlers. They quoted an estimate by Transparency International that he stole $15 billion to $35 billion in state assets while in power.
Whatever the actual sum, in a decade of legal fits and starts Indonesia has recovered none of it. In fact, bombarded by doctors' notes saying he is too sick to attend hearings, the courts seem almost relieved not to have to push too hard.
A criminal case against him was dropped in 2000, after doctors reported that his mind had been weakened by a series of strokes. (Commentators note that he becomes well again when there is a family wedding or birthday party to attend.)
Now he is facing a civil suit that charges him with embezzling $1.5 billion from a charitable foundation he created. That case is stumbling forward, but, to nobody's real surprise, crucial financial documents have disappeared from the attorney general's office and cannot be found, according to local news reports.
In what might seem an unexpected twist, the only legal victory so far involving Suharto's wealth went his way. In September he was awarded one trillion rupiah, or $109 million, in a libel suit against Time Asia magazine for a 1999 article that said he and his family had amassed a fortune of around $15 billion. The magazine is appealing the verdict.
The government's half-hearted pursuit of Suharto says a good deal about the aura he has maintained even as his political and financial power has disappeared.
Many of those who hold that power today were once beholden to him, the patron without whose blessing it was impossible to rise high in politics, business, the military or public life.
"Of course, he did a lot of great things for Indonesia and most of the people who are now in power basically grew up under him," said Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a political scientist. "There is still personally enormous respect toward Suharto, at least among the establishment, and still a strong resistance to see him hauled in front of a court."
Given that lingering stature, the weekly magazine Tempo said the attempts to put him on trial were "like a dog barking at an elephant."
Powerful figures still pay their respects at his residence on his birthday and at the end of the holy month of Ramadan - some perhaps out of curiosity, but others out of deference.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was a rising general in Suharto's military-dominated government, still refers to him as "my senior" and visited him in the hospital in 2005 when he had severe gastrointestinal bleeding.
Many of those who grew wealthy through their connections with him remain among the country's richest people. These include his six children, who still control major enterprises that were counted as part of the Suharto wealth.
One son, Hutomo Mandala Putra, known as Tommy, 44, has been convicted of a crime - arranging the murder of a judge who had ruled against him in a corruption case. What is notable about the 15-year sentence he received was that he served just one-third of it and was set free last year.
Suharto himself, on the other hand, seems to have placed himself under a sort of voluntary house arrest, said Abdulgani-Knapp, whose book is titled "Soeharto: The Life and Legacy of Indonesia's Second President."
"Can you imagine, it's like an internal prison," she said. "That's what he does the whole day. He just stays in one room, behind the room where he dines. He never eats with anybody except on Saturday, when I understand a few of his children visit him."
They watch his diet carefully, she said, "but sometimes, when he wants to eat something good, they let him."
If indeed Suharto is punishing himself, he has never voiced public remorse for the deeds that have darkened his legacy - the corruption, the repressive militarized rule or the deaths of at least half a million people in a mass bloodletting when he took power in 1965.
His regret, as Abdulgani-Knapp describes it, is that he misread the public mood and overstayed his welcome in office.
His surprise resignation followed an economic collapse, then huge riots in which hundreds of people were killed, then a student uprising, and finally rejection by the military and his own cabinet.
"I used to tell him, 'Bapak, you should have followed your instinct and stepped down earlier,' " she said, using an Indonesian term of respect. "And he smiled and said, 'You are right.' This is something he regretted."
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