BEIJING - Bowing to public anger and street violence, Indonesia's attorney general put former President Suharto under house arrest yesterday and vowed to charge him with embezzlement in the next two months.
"This is to ensure the questioning continues," said Yusyar Yahya, a spokesman for Attorney General Marzuki Darusman. The government has ordered Suharto not to leave his home in a lush, wealthy neighborhood in downtown Jakarta.
For the retired five-star general who ruled Indonesia for more than three decades, yesterday's announcement marked further humiliation as he fights charges of embezzlement of millions of dollars from charitable foundations controlled by his family.
Suharto, 78, has said he did nothing wrong. His attorneys claim he is not able to answer questions from government investigators because of a stroke he suffered in 1999.
A popular movement led by students ousted Suharto - like many Indonesians, he has one name - from power on May 21, 1998, after the Indonesian economy collapsed during the Asian economic crisis and laid bare the system of institutionalized corruption over which the Suharto clan had ruled.
The significance of his house arrest remained a matter of debate yesterday. Authorities placed Suharto under city arrest a couple of months ago. So, to some, the house arrest decree seemed just a technical tightening of an earlier restriction.
Many observers saw it as a political gesture by Darusman to calm angry students who have been protesting near Suharto's home demanding his prosecution. Crowds of students burned five military vehicles Friday in apparent retaliation for a military raid on the campus of the University of Indonesia the day before.
"It's just reacting to this pressure from the student demonstrations," said Bambang Harymurti, editor in chief of Tempo, one of Indonesia's most aggressive news weeklies, which was shut down in 1994 and reopened after Suharto was forced from office.
Political solution
"I think [Darusman] is still looking for a political solution to this problem. It's more a matter of letting the steam out."
Others were hopeful that the house arrest decree might lead to an indictment and trial for the former strongman who held Indonesia's vast and disparate archipelago together for 32 years.
