When Indonesia won independence from the Dutch, Achmed Sukarno became the country?s first president in 1945. Twenty years later, when Indonesian communists tried to overthrow the president and his government, the Army?s chief of staff, General Mohamed Suharto, suppressed the coup. From then on, Suharto took ever more control of government operations until on February 22, 1967, President Sukarno relinquished all executive powers to Suharto, saving only his title.
Once ?elected? president in 1968, Suharto, and his version of a democratic government, stayed in power until March 1998. During Suharto?s three decades of power, anyone who was a communist (along with anyone suspected of being a communist) was either killed, tortured or detained. Suharto also suppressed freedom of the press, politics and speech.
In 1975 he invaded East Timor, annihilating roughly one-third of the population there before the country regained its independence in 2000. Suharto was also intolerant of anything ?Chinese,? which he associated with communist, and he enjoyed U.S. support in his campaign to suppress communist sympathies. During his presidency, Suharto?s family embezzled billions of dollars and controlled vast amounts of land and buildings, all through corrupt means. Two years after he?d left office, opponents placed Suharto under house arrest, only to have the courts rule that he was medically unfit to stand trial. Only his son ?Tommy? ended up with a prison sentence: 15 years for ordering the killing a judge who had found Tommy guilty of a land scam two years earlier.