Doctors say Suharto's mind had been weakened by a series of strokes. But commentators note that he becomes well when there is a family wedding party to attend.
Nearly 10 years after the tumult of his ouster, the old dictator spends his days alone in his sitting room, 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, 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 neighbourhood 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.
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.
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.
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 $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 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.
Powerful figures still pay their respects at his residence on his birthday and at the end of the holy month of Ramzan — 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.
If indeed Suharto is punishing himself, he has never voiced public remorse for the deeds that have darkened his legacy — the corruption, the repressive militarised rule or the deaths of up to 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.
