When General Suharto came to power in 1965 he overthrew the grandfather of journalist Chris Kline, who explains here why he will not mourn the death of Indonesia's dictator
Chris Kline as a child with his American father and Indonesian mother
When I was five or six, the Indonesian dictator Suharto, who died last week, came to Rome for a state visit. My Indonesian mother and I were summoned to the embassy to pay homage.
But when it came time for photographs, and Suharto picked me up, I shouted for him to put me down, and began punching him while he awkwardly kept smiling. I called out that he was a “uomo cattivo”, a bad man. Millions of Indonesians who thought the same would never have dared to say so aloud.
Why did Suharto permit this? Because I am the American grandson of the founder of modern Indonesia, Sukarno. General Suharto (both men, like many Indonesians, are known by only one name) overthrew him in a blood-soaked coup in 1965, covertly aided and enthusiastically abetted by the US, Britain and Australia.
I was just two when Suharto unleashed his “New Order”, living in Europe with my American father, Frank Latimore, and my Indonesian mother, Rukmini Sukarno. He was a Hollywood and Broadway actor, she was a European opera diva. We were far from Indonesia, home to a fifth of the world’s natural resources, which my grandfather led to independence after a long liberation struggle against colonial rule by the Netherlands. But we were not free from Suharto’s dictatorship.
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