Suharto

Suharto ruled Indonesia from 1967 to 1998 after the crushing of an alleged communist coup attempt in September 1965. The army's retaliation, in which Suharto took the leading role, killed an estimated 500,000 to one million Indonesians, mostly members and suspected sympathizers of the Communist Party, in what a CIA assessment later called one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century; historians' estimates vary within that range. His New Order government invaded East Timor in 1975-76 after Portugal's withdrawal, and the occupation that followed killed roughly 100,000 to 200,000 Timorese, close to a third of the territory's population, through violence, hunger and disease. Economically, the New Order delivered real growth, averaging about seven percent a year for around three decades and cutting the share of Indonesians in extreme poverty from roughly 65 percent in the mid-1960s to about 7 percent in 1990. Alongside that growth ran a system of family monopoly and graft so extensive that Transparency International, assessing the world's most corrupt heads of government, ranked Suharto first and estimated that he and his family had embezzled between 15 and 35 billion dollars over his thirty-two years in power. He resigned in May 1998 amid economic collapse and mass protest.