During his 32 years as dictator of the world's most-populous Muslim nation, Suharto always enjoyed the fulsome support of the United States and its close allies, including Australia, despite the odious nature of his regime. It was his reward for aligning Indonesia with western interests at the height of the Cold War, just when many in the US Administration feared it would fall under communist rule. As many as 600,000 Indonesians are estimated to have been slaughtered in the anti-communist crackdown launched by Suharto and his army colleagues in 1965 in response to an attempt to oust the country's first president, Sukarno. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his successors chose to ignore the crimes (and the many others committed by the military and its supporters in the years that followed, such as the illegal annexation of East Timor in 1975) on the basis that the broader interests of the US were best served by having a strong anti-communist bulwark in South-East Asia, albeit one which promised, and delivered, economic growth and development to one of the region's poorest nations.
Australia took the same view as the Americans, and though the demise of the communist threat in the late 1980s made unwavering support of Suharto much less important than it had once been, Australian governments continued to treat him and his government with a deference bordering on the obsequious.
Only after atrocities in East Timor committed by the military became known did Australia finally stand up to the excesses of Indonesia's government, and by then Suharto had already gone a victim of popular unrest stemming from the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
The requirements of international diplomacy ensured the reactions of the Australian and US governments to news of his death were approving too, if couched somewhat in generalities. The most fulsome tributes have come from Singapore's first prime minister and now Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew and former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Praise for Suharto from fellow authoritarian political travellers will not impress many people, but Lee and Mahathir have grounds, as do some politicians in Australia and the United States, to eulogise a man who maintained internal stability and promoted security and trade ties throughout the region, even if the panegyrics inevitably gloss over his record of human rights abuses and political repression.
If Suharto was a man unafraid of using the army to put down political discontent or to quell rebellion and separatism in Indonesia's far-flung and disparate provinces, he was also a shrewd and calculating politician who presented his regime as a choice between two extremes communism and fundamentalist Islam. To advance his political stranglehold, he adopted his predecessor's guiding ideology of Pantajasila: five principals of humanitarianism, national unity, social justice, democracy and religious freedom.
It is not surprising that many of the countries in the region, nervous at the prospect of communists or separatists gaining a foothold in the vast archipelago, saw Suharto as the best means of keeping order, and were prepared to back his efforts with military and economic support and advice. The latter helped in developing an industrial base, improving agriculture and lifting Indonesia out of its grinding poverty, but there were failures as well, including the transmigration of people from crowded Java to outlying islands, and ill-advised projects to drain wetlands for production of oil palm.
Suharto was similarly unsuccessful in ridding the country of corruption and poor governance. Indeed, he allowed the country to become an effective kleptocracy by condoning his children's and his colleagues' corrupt business activities.
And he compounded these mistakes by continuing to allow the army to repress the regime's political opponents and by refusing to countenance parliamentary reforms which might have assuaged public discontent and begun Indonesia's transition to democracy.
That transition began in May 1998 when Suharto finally resigned after the Asian financial crisis exposed the country's fragile social and economic fabric, triggering widespread popular unrest against his rule, and it continued with the election of Megawati Sukarnoputri as president in 2001. Her defeat by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the presidential election of 2004 showed the transition is nearly complete.
However, until Indonesia examines the army's complicity and involvement in the past crimes of Suharto, if necessary by punishing the worst offenders, then the country will be shackled by its past.
To date, there has been a marked reluctance among Indonesians to confront the military's bloody past. That might change with the death of Suharto, indeed, it must if stable democracy is to flourish in Indonesia.