Suharto's Legacy

My letter to the Wall Street Journal in response to this opinion piece:

One thing I often see shamefully omitted in discussions of Suharto's legacy is the fact that he presided over one of the worst mass slaughters of the 20th century. As a prominent army general, he staged a coup in 1965 against President Sukarno. In an astonishingly short period of time (with most of the violence occurring in less than a year), Indonesian civilians, incited and supported by the military, began an unprecedented wave of violence that left, according to the CIA, anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 left-wing Indonesians dead. While this massacre may not have exactly been approved by Suharto, he certainly didn't do anything to distance himself from it, much less attempt to curtail it. Praise him for his economic record, perhaps, but in any discussion of his historical legacy, be sure to mention this.