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Asian newspapers wrote a cold but grateful epitaph for Indonesia's former President Suharto on Monday, giving him credit for keeping the fractious nation intact but regretting that the task cost so much blood.


Across Asia, dailies reacted to the news of the ex-general's death, from organ failure on Sunday, with a critical distance that was lacking from some of its press during his 86 years.


In Southeast Asia, establishment press that had found it difficult to criticise Suharto in life found room in his death to explore the darker side of his 32-year reign, although some chose to do so through the pens of guest commentators.


"Suharto's autocratic rule, over more than three decades, was marked by rampant corruption, cronyism and widespread human rights abuses," Malaysia's New Straits Times said in a front-page commentary alongside the banner headline: "A legacy divided".


In a column in Singapore's pro-government Straits Times, Michael Vatikiotis, of the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, also referred to Suharto's record of cronyism.


"Suharto's three sons and three daughters were given carte blanche to build corporate empires, which in turn foreign investors were required to do business with," Vatikiotis wrote.


Before Suharto was ousted in 1998, regional newspapers commonly portrayed him as a strong, autocratic ruler who had helped to keep the nation -- 230 million people sprawled across a chain of about 17,000 islands -- together and stable.


But his reputation as a unifying force finally began to unravel in the late 1990s, when Indonesia plunged into a violent economic crisis, bubbling with racial violence, resurgent separatist movements and the real threat of regional instability.


TWO FACES OF SUHARTO


A decade later, Asian newspapers see Suharto's legacy in a less flattering light but still recognise what they see as his main achievement: keeping Indonesia intact and open to the world.


As the Philippine Star remarked in a commentary, Suharto had left behind a violent legacy, but also a more developed, Islamic country open to the West and seeking peace with its neighbours.


A few years before Suharto took power, ostensibly by crushing an anti-communist coup attempt in 1965, Indonesia had embarked on a policy of confrontation with its newly independent neighbour, Malaysia, triggering armed conflict across the region.


Even Australia's national daily gave Suharto credit for keeping its most strategically important neighbour intact, though for decades the Australian media was one of his most trenchant critics, at times straining ties between the two countries.


"President Suharto can be rightfully regarded as the man who rescued Indonesia from despair, turned back the tide of communism and put his country on the uncertain road to democracy," the Australian newspaper said in an editorial.


South Korean media also saw two sides to Suharto, crediting his drive to pull Indonesia out of poverty but saying that it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of dissidents.


In Asia's main communist states, China and Vietnam, the death of such an avowed anti-Marxist attracted relatively meagre and sometimes selective coverage: several Vietnamese newspapers omitted reference to Suharto's 1960s crackdown on communists.


28 January 2008
Reuters (Additional reporting by Grant McCool in Hanoi, Michael Perry in Sydney, Melanie Lee in Singapore, Guo Shipeng in Beijing, Raju Gopalakrishnan in Manila and Jack Kim in Seoul; Editing by Katie Nguyen)