Suharto

Suharto (8 June 1921 – 27 January 2008) was an Indonesian military officer and politician who served as the second and longest-serving president of Indonesia, from 1967 to 1998. Born at Kemusuk near Yogyakarta to Javanese Muslim parents, he rose through the army, took power after the events of 1965, and ruled under his "New Order" until the Asian financial crisis forced his resignation in May 1998. ¹

He was born in a plaited-bamboo-walled house in the hamlet of Kemusuk, part of the village of Godean, fifteen kilometres west of Yogyakarta — the English article's infobox gives Bantul, the regency containing Kemusuk. His father, Kertosudiro, was a village irrigation official; his mother, Sukirah, was a local woman distantly related to Hamengkubuwono V. His parents divorced early, and he was raised in turns by his paternal great-aunt, by his mother and stepfather in Kemusuk, and by his father's sister's family at Wuryantoro. While living with a relative at Wonogiri he became acquainted with Darjatmo, a dukun — a practitioner of Javanese mystical arts and faith healing — an experience the article says deeply affected him. He studied at a Muhammadiyah middle school in Yogyakarta until 1938, worked briefly as a bank clerk, and joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army in June 1940. ¹

After the Dutch surrender in 1942 he joined the Japanese-organised police and then the PETA militia, training as a platoon and then company commander. In the Indonesian National Revolution he commanded republican units around Yogyakarta, Magelang and Semarang and rose steadily; by independence he was a respected field commander, and in 1961 he took command of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad). When an attempted coup was launched on 30 September–1 October 1965, Suharto-led troops countered it, and the army then carried out a nationwide anti-communist purge. ¹

In March 1967 the People's Consultative Assembly appointed Suharto acting president, and he was appointed president the following year. His "New Order" built a strong, centralised government dominated by the military. His economic advisers' free-market policies ended the hyperinflation he inherited, and Indonesia then saw rapid industrialisation and sustained growth of around seven per cent a year, improved education and rice self-sufficiency, for which the FAO awarded him the Ceres Medal in 1986; the Assembly named him "Father of Development" in 1982. In 1975 he ordered the invasion of East Timor, followed by a twenty-three-year occupation. Critics, including international observers cited in the article, describe his thirty-one-year rule as one of the most brutal and corrupt dictatorships of the twentieth century, citing the mass killings that brought him to power and the persecution that followed. ¹

By the 1990s his regime's authoritarianism and widespread corruption had fuelled public dissatisfaction, which broke open in the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Under immense pressure he resigned in May 1998, after more than three decades in power. He died at Jakarta on 27 January 2008 and received a state military funeral; the government declared a week of national mourning. His resting place is Astana Giribangun. ¹

After completing the Hajj in 1991, Suharto was given the Islamic name "Mohammad" by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and throughout the 1990s until his death he used the name "Haji Mohammad Suharto". ¹

No source read for this record names a school for Suharto in its text. Wikidata's structured religion claim is Sunni Islam, the Arabic article's infobox gives Islam generically, and the Arabic and Urdu categories file him under Sunni Muslims — one structured family of values and filings, not texts. The English article describes his parents as Javanese Muslims, his childhood acquaintance with a dukun, and his 1991 Hajj and the name he received there; background, childhood environment and a public act are none of them an attestation of a school. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, with the structured value preserved in the data file. ^{1 2 3 4}

He was married to Siti Hartinah from 1947 until her death in 1996, and had six children. ¹

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