Breaking news via CNN: Indonesia's iron ruler dies.
As we all know, Suharto was another of the 20th Century class of scumbag dictators supported by Western imperialists. Like Augusto Pinochet, Suharto managed to escape prosecution for his crimes by claiming ill health. I'm sure the same mercy was extended to his victims.
I'll try to edit this to put in a bit more information. For now, I just wanted to get the diary up. As far as an obit goes, the above CNN link is pretty good. More information can be found at Wikipedia.
Edit:
Suharto's Indonesia plays an important role in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. As Klein documents in her book, Indonesia was the testing ground for Disaster Capitalism where the modern tactics of violent repression and capitalist takeover were first implemented. At the behest of his Western supporters, Suharto targeted for violent suppression communists, leftists, and anyone else in the population who dared resist the corporate takeover of their country.
From Klein's book:
Since the Second World War, the country [Indonesia] had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth, and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals. While Sukarno was a nationalist, not a Communist, he worked closely with the Communist Party, which had 3 million active members. The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno's rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities."
After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country's leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto's hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his "shooting lists," as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on t heir progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesia left had been annihilated. One of the people involved in the operation was Robert J. Martens, who worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. "It really was a big help to the army," he told the journalist Kathy Kadane twenty-five years later. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad [my emphasis]. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
As is standard in The Shock Doctrine, after the repression came the Western-trained economists. In this case, the Berkeley Mafia, trained and funded by the Ford Foundation.
Throughout Suharto's 30 year rule, he would alternatively shun or fawn over the Berkeley Mafia, telling them to go away in good times so that he, his family, and his cronies could rig the economy in their favor, and then calling them back--along with the IMF and World Bank--whenever things got bad. Meanwhile, the repression continued. Suharto's rule cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. Perhaps even millions. It had a great effect on Suharto's wealth though. Recent estimates put his family's holdings around fifteen billion dollars.