Suharto, who died yesterday at a Jakarta hospital, seized control of the military in 1965 and ruled the country for 32 years, suppressing dissent with force and supported by an American government at the height of the Cold War.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power - from 1965 to 1968 - range from a government figure of 78,000 to 1 million cited by US historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history. It was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
A frenzy of anticommunist violence stained rivers with blood and littered the countryside with the bodies of teachers, farmers, and others.
"They used to dump the bodies here," recalled Surien, 70, a woman who lived near a bay used as an execution ground. "People called it the beach of stinking corpses because of the smell."
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade union members, intellectuals, and schoolteachers, many of whom were executed or sent to remote prisons.
Another 183,000 died due to killings, disappearances, hunger, and illness during Indonesia's 1975-1999 occupation of East Timor, according to an East Timorese commission sanctioned by the UN. Similar abuses left more than 100,000 dead in West Papua, according to a local human rights group. About 15,000 others died during a 29-year separatist rebellion in Aceh Province. In recent interviews around the city of Blitar, a former communist stronghold, survivors of the atrocities recounted a life on the run, living in caves, being beaten, and seeing beheadings of other captives.
"I am disappointed. I saw great cruelties and am lucky I am not dead," said Talam, whose simple two-room home overlooks a valley dotted with overgrown mass graves.
