Suharto: Their Hero, Not Ours

Suharto, President of Indonesia from 1967 to 1998.

Suharto: 

Their Hero, Not Ours

When the Indonesian government recently proposed granting former President Suharto the title of “National Hero,” many on the country’s main island of Java welcomed the idea. To them, Suharto is remembered as the leader who brought stability and development to Indonesia.

But in West Papua — in short, Papua, a territory forcibly annexed by Indonesia in 1969 — the news has reopened an old wound. For Papuans, Suharto’s name does not evoke prosperity but blood, loss, and decades of military occupation. To call him a hero is to honor the very architect of their suffering.

“For us, Suharto’s name means soldiers entering our villages, helicopters circling above, families disappearing without a trace,” said a Papuan priest from Wamena. “How can such a man be called a hero?”

The General Who Never Left Papua

Suharto rose to power after 1965 Coup d'État, inaugurating the so-called New Order, a military-dominated regime that ruled Indonesia for more than three decades. Across the archipelago, he crushed dissent with an iron fist. But in Papua, repression became not just a policy — it became a system.

In 1969, soon after the rigged Act of Free Choice that sealed Papua’s integration into Indonesia, the region was declared a Military Operation Zone (Daerah Operasi Militer or DOM). Under Suharto, Papua was treated as a territory to be subdued.

Villages suspected of aiding the Free Papua Movement (OPM) were burned, civilians killed, women raped, and thousands forced to flee into the forests. “The military made our lives feel like a battlefield,” recalled an elderly catechist from Enarotali. “Even prayer was seen as rebellion.”

Church reports from the 1970s to the 1990s documented systematic abuses — torture, disappearances, public executions, and mass displacement. When Suharto fell in 1998, the machinery of violence he built did not disappear; it merely changed uniforms and language.

The Ghost of DOM and the Wound That Never Heals

For three decades, Papuans lived under the shadow of DOM — with military posts in every village, constant raids, and an atmosphere of inherited fear.

The government called it “security.” The people called it occupation. Soldiers had near-total impunity to “maintain stability.” They could arrest, beat, shoot, and burn entire communities under accusations of being “anti-NKRI” (anti-Indonesian). Thousands fled into the forests, where many died from hunger or disease.

There are no official figures for the dead or missing, but Catholic Church records, the Papuan Council of Churches, and international human rights groups estimate the death toll in the tens of thousands during the Suharto years. Genocide Watch states that since 1969, the Indonesian military has killed up to 500,000 Papuans.

Behind the violence lay a clear economic agenda: resource extraction. In 1967, just months after taking power, Suharto’s government signed a contract with the American company Freeport-McMoRan, granting it rights to exploit one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines — Grasberg. The Indonesian military guaranteed its “security.”

In Suharto’s vocabulary, “development” meant bullets and plunder.

Colonization in the Name of Development

Suharto also expanded Indonesia’s massive transmigration program, resettling millions of people from Java, Madura, and Sulawesi into outer islands, including Papua.

Within a few decades, Papuans had become minorities in their own towns. Markets, government offices, even churches came under migrant control. Indigenous Papuans were pushed out of the economy, education, and politics. Transmigration became a new form of colonization — conquest without open warfare.

At the same time, Papuan culture was suppressed — for example, public nudity, traditionally accepted through the use of the koteka, was banned and deemed ‘backward’ and indecent by authorities. Local languages were deemed primitive; traditional dances turned into tourist attractions; Melanesian symbols branded as separatist.

“Our history was rewritten, our bodies controlled, our spirits broken,” said Theodora, a teacher from Jayapura. “Now they want to call the man who did that a hero?”

Whose Hero?

For some politicians in Jakarta, elevating Suharto to the pantheon of national heroes is an act of “historical reconciliation.” But for many in Indonesia’s peripheric regions — Aceh, Timor-Leste (occupied by Indonesia from 1975–1999), and especially Papua — it is an insult.

Suharto may be remembered in Java as the “Father of Development,” but in Papua he is known as the architect of fear. “If Indonesia wants to heal, it must stop worshiping its oppressors,” said Markus Haluk of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP). “What we need is not image-making, but the truth.”

The Church, Memory, and Structural Repentance

During the New Order years, churches were often the only spaces of refuge. Local pastors and priests documented abuses, sheltered displaced villagers, and prayed quietly when journalists were banned from entering Papua.

Yet the Church was not free from the sin of silence. Many leaders kept quiet — out of fear, or out of loyalty to the nationalist mantra of “NKRI (Republic of Indonesia) unity.”

Today, a new generation of Papuan theologians calls for structural repentance — an acknowledgment that the Church, too, once benefited from the comfort of complicity. They call this movement the Melanesian Pentecost — the birth of a Church rooted in Papuan memory and identity, not in the ideology of the state.

“There is no forgiveness without truth,” said a Papuan pastor from Nabire. “If Suharto becomes a hero, what does that mean for families still searching for their children’s bones?”

A Legacy That Still Haunts

More than twenty years after Suharto’s fall, his shadow still looms over Papua. Military operations continue in the highlands; army posts keep multiplying; silencing persists. Journalists and humanitarian agencies remain restricted. Peaceful demonstrations are labeled treason.

People still live under the same fear — only the commanders’ names have changed. So when the state plans to honor Suharto as a hero, Papuans know the truth: the system has not changed. Indonesia still venerates its perpetrators, not its victims.

Remembering What Was Forgotten

If Indonesia wishes to mature as a nation, it must confront the darkest corners of its own history. True reverence belongs not to generals who crushed dissent, but to the people who survived in silence.

In Papua, Suharto’s name is not confined to history books. It lingers in quiet church hymns, in the forests where families once hid, in the faces of mothers still waiting for their missing children.

For them, the question remains painfully simple:

“He may be their hero — but he will never be ours.”