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Suharto, the autocratic leader who dominated Indonesia for 32 years and died Sunday at age 86 of multiple organ failure, lifted his country out of extreme poverty.

But to many, the former Indonesian president is more likely to be remembered as a stubborn strongman who blocked development of democracy, repressed civil liberties and fostered a business culture tainted by patronage, nepotism and corruption -- a legacy that continues to haunt Southeast Asia's largest country and biggest economy.

Mr. Suharto's achievements -- notably an economy that grew at an average annual rate of 6.5% from 1967 to 1997 -- and his leadership failures make it likely Indonesians will long argue about his era.

Raised in poverty in rural Java, Mr. Suharto was a towering figure in Asia from 1965 -- when the Indonesian army overturned left-leaning President Sukarno --until 1998, when he was driven from power. For most of his tenure, Mr. Suharto was strongly supported by the U.S. and other Western powers, which initially saw him as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and backed him with abundant military and economic aid.

With Mr. Suharto bringing tight control to what had been a volatile nation in the 1950s and 1960s, Washington largely ignored his suppression of political dissent. The U.S. turned a blind eye to Indonesia's 1975 invasion and later annexation of East Timor and its bloody repression of a secessionist insurgency in Aceh province in the 1990s.

Mr. Suharto's death likely marks the end of a post-colonial era of strongman-rule in developing Asia. It's unlikely that an individual can again preside for decades over a major Asian country.

But that doesn't mean most of Asia is firmly on the path to sustainable multiparty democracy in the Western sense. The military coup that overthrew a popularly elected government in Thailand in 2006 shows how a back-step into authoritarian rule is still possible. Southeast Asia today includes countries dominated by a single party, such as Singapore and Malaysia, communist states Vietnam and Laos, and fledgling democracies like post-Suharto Indonesia, Thailand, where the military still plays a key political role, and the Philippines, which also has a history of military intervention and extra-legal leadership changes.

Indonesia Still Struggles

Reclusive and repressive Myanmar is ruled by an institutionalized military junta that brutally suppressed a pro-democracy uprising last year.

Southeast Asia's one lingering strongman is Hun Sen in Cambodia. He's been in charge more than 20 years, initially as a communist leader and then as head of a nominally elected, one-party state.

Factors ranging from poverty to poor education to traditionally autocratic political systems and feudalistic cultural traditions have inhibited evolution of democracy in many countries.

Indeed, Mr. Suharto's successors in Indonesia have struggled to maintain political stability -- a hallmark of his government -- and to promote what his era failed to produce: rule-of-law and a democratic political system that can bind together one of the world's most ethnically diverse, complex countries. An archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia has a population of more than 240 million, about 90% of whom are Muslims.

Indonesia's economy is again growing at the Suharto-era pace. But it is struggling to compete for manufacturing and high tech investment with China and India. Detractors blame Mr. Suharto's failure to build an education system that could turn out engineers, management professionals and tech specialists -- leaving the economy still heavily dependent on exporting oil, gas and other natural resources. Meanwhile, more than 30% of Indonesia's work force remains underemployed, according to the World Bank.

Mr. Suharto died in a Jakarta hospital more than three weeks after he entered it with anaemia and heart problems. In his final weeks, a stream of high-profile visitors, including Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former general, came to see Mr. Suharto, a sign his continuing influence on many in Indonesia's political and military establishment.

"As a human being, like other leaders, certainly he made mistakes and committed wrongdoing, but it would not hurt us to thank him and appreciate his achievements and services to the country," Mr. Yudhoyono said on Jan. 12.

Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a long-time acquaintance also called on Mr. Suharto. "Yes, there was corruption. Yes, he gave favors to his family and his friends,'' Mr. Lee told reporters on Jan. 13 after his visit. "But there was real growth and real progress. I think the people of Indonesia are lucky."

Had Mr. Suharto, a former five-star general, stepped down in the mid-1990s while the economy was booming, he might have exited to general applause. Instead, he failed to groom a successor and held ever more tightly to power, only to be toppled when Asia's 1997-98 financial crisis exposed Indonesia's rickety financial system and a mountain of bad corporate debt.

The economy's collapse also provoked a backlash focused on Mr. Suharto's Achilles heel: the pervasive influence and privileges enjoyed by his family and business cronies, who amassed huge fortunes during his rule.

Perceiving Mr. Suharto as a growing liability, Indonesia's political and economic establishment turned against him. Under intense pressure, Mr. Suharto resigned the presidency on May 21, 1998, after two days of riots in Jakarta.

Court Battles

Today, Mr. Suharto is often vilified, especially by younger Indonesians -- who don't know or care that his economic policies helped create millions of jobs in the past -- and by others who decry his era's human-rights abuses and corruption.

Despite an array of allegations against him, Mr. Suharto, who has suffered from a variety of ailments for several years, has never been convicted of a crime. The former leader was charged in 2000 with embezzling $570 million in state funds, but a judge agreed with his lawyers that he was too ill to face trial. After a 2006 bid to reopen the case failed, prosecutors started a separate civil case against Mr. Suharto, charging that he bilked $440 million from a state-funded academic scholarship fund.

In 2002, Mr. Suharto's youngest son, Hutomo Mandala Putra -- widely known as Tommy -- was convicted of ordering the murder of a Supreme Court judge who had found him guilty in a corruption case. He was released from prison after serving just one-third of a 15-year sentence in a decision critics said reflected the powerful lingering influence of the Suharto family.

Mr. Suharto himself went on the legal offensive to defend his name. Last September, Indonesia's Supreme Court ordered Time magazine to pay $106 million in damages for defaming Mr. Suharto in a 1999 article that alleged his family had amassed $15 billion while he was in power. Time is appealing the ruling.

For most of his long rule, Mr. Suharto, aided by a cadre of technocrats, presided over economic development of a country that was among the world's poorest in 1965, with a per capita GDP lower than India's. Although inefficient and often corrupt state enterprises continued to dominate the economy through the 1980s, Mr. Suharto channeled funds to agriculture and rural development, opened Indonesia's oil and mining industries to foreign investment and attracted billions in loans and aid from foreign governments and the World Bank.

But Mr. Suharto also snuffed out any sign of opposition -- sometimes ruthlessly -- and his failure to respond to growing pressure for political reform, and to curb avaricious relatives and cronies, ultimately brought his downfall. His dominating presence stunted the development of government and civic institutions. Parliament, made up of three mostly toothless "official" political parties, became a rubber stamp. The nominally independent judiciary was brought firmly under Mr. Suharto's control. Indonesia's press, historically a major player in politics, was largely muzzled. Even the powerful military, which helped bring him to power, didn't dare to challenge him in his heyday.

Australian political scientist R.E. Elson, in a 2001 biography, argued that Mr. Suharto came to believe "that the nation needed his guiding and controlling presence and could not be trusted to finding its proper path without him."

That stubbornness doomed him when Indonesia was knocked off its rapid-growth path in late 1997, as the Asian economic crisis crushed the currency and halted access to inflows of private investment and loans. Mr. Suharto promised reforms, but continued to approve costly new projects that would have benefited family members.

In his last years in power, Mr. Suharto increasingly acted more like a feudal Javanese king than a modern leader, comporting himself with an almost regal air. He rarely spoke extemporaneously in public and almost never talked to the press. (A Javanese saying cited in a book presented to Mr. Suharto by his eldest daughter in 1987 says: "Silence is an asset. Whoever has a sharp tongue will suffer. Whoever is silent will accumulate wealth. One who is silent is like a lighthouse.")

Power and Wealth

Mr. Suharto wanted to hear only good news from his officials, according to former associates, and became increasingly out-of-touch with ordinary Indonesians. In his own mind, ''Suharto became Indonesia and Indonesia became Suharto," said prominent Indonesian writer and magazine editor Goenawan Mohamed.

Mr. Suharto's career took him from a farming village to the pinnacle of power and wealth. His parents divorced only weeks after his birth and he was raised mainly by relatives. His father, a minor irrigation official, only sent him to school for a couple of years. "In my childhood," Mr. Suharto wrote in a 1989 autobiography, "I had to endure such suffering which perhaps others could not imagine ... I have become a person who can really think about and feel what hardship means.''

Mr. Suharto's fortunes began to improve when he became a soldier. He joined the Dutch colonial army as a teenager, then the Japanese army that invaded Indonesia in World War II. After the war, he joined Indonesian independence fighters who resisted the return of Dutch rule. He enjoyed a steady, unspectacular rise through the ranks of the new nation's army.

Commander of a key military unit in Jakarta, Mr. Suharto was little known outside the armed forces before Sept. 30, 1965. On that night, a group of leftist colonels murdered six senior generals, ostensibly to protect the left-leaning government of then-President Sukarno, which was balanced precariously between pro-communist and anti-communist groups.

Mr. Suharto wasn't targeted for elimination. The next day, he rallied the army against the attempted putsch; within days his forces had crushed the colonels. In following months, the Indonesia army and vigilantes killed hundreds of thousands of people they labeled as communists. Tens of thousands of suspected leftists were detained without trial; some remained jailed until the 1980s.

A weakened President Sukarno was pressed by the military to relinquish power and in March 1966, at age 44, Gen. Suharto took command in Indonesia. In 1968, a military-dominated national assembly gave him a first five-year term.

Mr. Suharto, who retired from the army in 1976, never faced a popular election, nor any challenge from parliament -- 60% of whose members he appointed -- when it met every five years to name a president.

Unlike the flamboyant Mr. Sukarno, Mr. Suharto wasn't charismatic. Many legislators struggled to stay awake during Mr. Suharto's long speeches. Largely avoiding the limelight, the Indonesian leader preferred to go fishing and doted on his herd of prize livestock -- including cattle and goats -- that roamed his private farm in the foothills south of Jakarta.

Mr. Suharto's main leadership goals boiled down to maintaining political control over Indonesia and delivering concrete economic gains to the population.

In addition to economic and political support from the U.S., Japan and European powers, Mr. Suharto was helped initially by good fortune. The biggest bonanza was the oil shock of 1973-74, which created a windfall of billions of dollars for Indonesia -- then Asia's largest oil exporter. Soaring oil prices gave Mr. Suharto the money to start building thousands of schools and clinics. There were also funds to subsidize fertilizer and pesticides, increasing rice production to reach -- for a time -- self-sufficiency in food.

But the oil gusher had a dark side. It provided the means to vastly increase the number of underemployed civil servants dependent on his patronage and that of other senior aides. There was great waste and corruption. The powerful chief of the state oil company Pertamina, Gen. Ibnu Sutowo, went on a borrow-and-build binge for an array of non-oil businesses including resorts, steel plants and shipping fleets, most of which ultimately failed. Pertamina's binge took Indonesia to the brink of bankruptcy in 1976 after piling up $10 billion of state-guaranteed debt.

To save the day, Mr. Suharto turned to a team of Western-trained economic technocrats known as the "Berkeley Mafia" because many of them had studied at the University of California. They tried to balance Mr. Suharto`s penchant for dispensing market-distorting business deals with strategies intended to unshackle Indonesia's economy and promote more competition, foreign investment and export-driven growth.

For many years, the strategy worked. The government gradually deregulated the state-dominated economy, opening up banking, slashing import tariffs and scrapping most restrictions on foreign ownership. That sparked a business surge and won plaudits. In 1995 alone, the government approved applications for nearly $41 billion in foreign investment, compared with $8 billion two years earlier.

Shunning Reform

But good times were eventually undermined by bad decisions. An overconfident Mr. Suharto began to ignore the technocrats and began making damaging political mistakes. One was closing Indonesia's leading newsweekly Tempo and two other magazines in 1994 for critical reporting on the purchase of a fleet of obsolete former East German warships. Another was his creation of a state-subsidized ''national car" project that let favorite son, Tommy, import autos from South Korea duty-free and sell them.

By the mid-1990s, family members were getting a piece of most every significant new, state-linked business transaction. Mr. Suharto's eldest grandson, for example, was awarded a cost-free concession that would have allowed him to collect a fee on every bottle of beer sold in the tourist resort of Bali. Unprecedented opposition from Bali's tourism industry thwarted that gambit.

As popular anger with his family's greed grew, Mr. Suharto didn't get the message. Any minister, adviser or general who hinted to the leader that his children's business activities were creating unhappiness was tuned out, and sometimes saw his career ended.

Shunning calls for political reform, Mr. Suharto dug in his heels. ''We will not change a system which has proven effective," he declared in June 1996. But it wasn't really a system at all: Instead of relying on the civic institutions that manage most successful countries, Mr. Suharto depended on personal political skills to govern. When they began to fail him, he fell.

To many Indonesians, Mr. Suharto was like a stout banyan tree with many outstretched branches and a thick canopy that provides a big circle of shade. For decades, he proved as durable as the long-lived tree. The problem, Indonesians say, is that nothing else can grow in the banyan tree's shadow. When it dies, there's nothing to replace it.

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