Suharto: straight to hell

The former dictator of Indonesia, one of the late 20th century’s genocide-masters, is on his deathbed. Pity he’ll die in a hospital surround by friends and family, but at least the mass murderer will be dead and gone. Half a million were killed after he took power; thousands of the names were provided by the U.S., although even the CIA ultimately considered the results one of the great mass murders of the century. Many thousands more were killed over the decades of his rule. Some estimates reach upwards of a million dead, but no one will ever know the extant of it. Under the rubric of fighting communism, Suharto enriched himself, his family, and cronies like the gangster he was. Plenty of western companies got fat contracts to destroy the local environment and profit off of brutalized work forces. It was a filthy mix indeed.