Suharto, former Indonesian dictator and one of the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century, is dead.

He died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by family, given in his last hours the dignity he denied to nameless thousands killed on his orders: tortured to death, shot in the back, left to rot in open graves, empty forests, or with their head on a stake. Suharto, if anyone ever did, deserved to die alone in a ditch like a dog.

I first learnt of Suharto's crimes while involved in the 1990s campaign to free East Timor from over two decades of blood-soaked Indonesian occupation.

"200,000 East Timorese dead." We used to scrawl these words on walls around the inner city, and, when we got the chance, on the doors of ministerial cars and the Indonesian consulate. 200,000. It was an incomprehensible number. A third of the population of a tiny island, only 500 kilometres off the Australian coast.

What seemed the most incomprehensible though, was that our own government treated this murderer, Suharto, like its dearest friend. Not just the Liberals, Labor as well. From 1975 onwards, justifying the Indonesian rape of East Timor was bipartisan Australian government policy. A cosy consensus. Around it was built the "Jakarta lobby", a band of sick men, led by diplomat Richard Woolcott, who could be relied upon at every massacre by Suharto's military in Indonesia, Timor, Aceh or West Papua to write clipped, pragmatic opinion pieces for the next morning's papers pointing out the extenuating circumstances and explaining why it was in Australia's interests to maintain "stability" by supporting our Indonesian friends. Those whose bodies lay cold on the ground were not our friends, of course. They didn't exist.

What is truly horrific though, is that Timor was a mere encore, a follow-up to the main event.

Though it is well documented by sources from all sides, too few people know about the terrible campaign of mass murder that accompanied Suharto's rise to power, and which cemented and explains his close relationship with those in the highest echelons in Canberra, Washington and London.

This is how Time magazine reported events on 17 December, 1965:

"According to accounts brought out of Indonesia by Western diplomats and independent travellers, communists, red sympathisers and their families are being massacred by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of communists after interrogation in remote rural jails.

"The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been impeded."

In this way one of the broadest and biggest mass democratic movements of the twentieth century was crushed. A secret report by the CIA noted that "Estimates of the number of people killed in Indonesia in the anti-PKI bloodbath after the coup range from 87,000, the official Indonesian Government estimate, to 500,000." They would know. The CIA supplied a list of thousands of Communist Party leaders to Suharto so that he could round them up to be shot.

How did the Australian government respond to this barbarity? In 1966 Prime Minister Harold Holt gave his official nod of approval, declaring: "With 500,000 to 1 million communist sympathisers knocked off...I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place". As Tony Hyland noted in The Age in January, "Holt's comments became a template for weasel words from Australian prime ministers in the three decades Suharto ruled our largest neighbour."

At a presidential banquet in Jakarta in 1983 Bob Hawke ended a fawning speech in which he called Suharto one of "the most respected heads of state...in the world" with the nauseating words: "Your people love you, Mr President." John Howard, ever the sycophant for world leaders with a bloodlust, described Suharto as a "skilled and sensitive national leader".

But it was Paul Keating who basked with the most glee in the mass murderer's sun.

In 1994 Keating claimed that Suharto's rise to power was "the single most beneficial strategic development to have affected Australia and its region in the last 30 years." This was only three years after the infamous Dili Massacre, when 271 people, mostly students, were killed in cold blood as Indonesian troops opened fire on a protest in the Santa Cruz cemetery. Footage of the massacre shocked the world and was the catalyst for the re-emergence of the East Timor solidarity movement. Keating of course, did not see this trifle as reason for undue criticism.

You would think that the passage of time would have quietened down Suharto's apologists among the Australian elite. Especially given that he was overthrown in 1998 by a heroic mass movement of workers, students and the urban poor in Indonesia. After all, it's not like our politicians are afraid of a backdown. The fact that a decent chunk of the establishment, including Liberal hero Robert Menzies, were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler until they were inconveniently forced to go to war with him, has been quietly written out of the history books.

But the Jakarta lobby have displayed no such bashfulness about their support for Suharto. Paul Keating attended his funeral. Richard Woolcott wrote a long piece in The Australian lamenting the "exaggerated" accounts of Suharto's crimes (he is referring to the CIA report above, I presume?). Explaining how "polite and congenial" Suharto was, he assures us history will judge Suharto (and presumably himself) more kindly than we expect.

Gerard Henderson, also writing in The Australian, took up with glee and his characteristic lack of originality the role the Jakarta lobby have refined over several decades: that of the reluctant yet smugly scolding realist. He writes: "Suharto was a prime mover of history and his rule was of immeasurable benefit to Australia. The messiness and tragedy of Suharto's last years in office make this an uncomfortable and unpopular judgment now. It is true, nonetheless." What a tragedy that Gerard's message can be so easily misunderstood as apology for judicial mass murder. A similar cruel judgement was passed on those who pointed out that Hitler built good roads and kept the unions in line.

The joint interests of Suharto and the Australian ruling class

Support for Suharto's bloody regime was not a matter of weak individuals, or a corrupt cabal that infiltrated our diplomatic corps. The reality is that Suharto's bloody methods, his willingness to engage in mass killings and brutally suppress Indonesia's democracy movement were in the direct interests of Australian capitalism.

Suharto's rise to power was welcomed by the West because he was willing to assist in the entrenchment of Western capitalist interests as the dominant force in Indonesia, and thus more broadly in the region. John Pilger, in his excellent documentary The New Rulers of the World, showed how the massacre of the Indonesian communists was closely linked to the organised takeover of Indonesia by Western corporations, with the full co-operation of Suharto, willing pawn of imperialist profiteers.

Suharto's apologists argue that he "developed" the Indonesian economy. The truth is that he won their favour by selling the resources of his country - its copper, gold, oil, timber and massive labour power - to US, British and Australian corporate interests. In exchange, Suharto, his family and a close association of elites amassed tens of billions of dollars. But for the mass of Indonesians, "development" only meant impoverishment. The average worker in Suharto's Indonesia made an average of 40 cents an hour.

Australia backed the 1965 massacre for the same reason it backed the 1975 invasion of East Timor - to ensure "stability". Neither the Indonesian communists nor Fretilin in East Timor were about to introduce workers' power. But they did want national independence - and that was too much for an Australian ruling class which thought "its" region was by right to be divided up by the various European powers and their offshoots. The natives were not, it was agreed by everyone, allowed to get uppity and want to run their affairs themselves.

The politicians who run the capitalist economies of the West like to keep their hands clean. They like to make out that countries like Iraq are a long way away, and the blood that is shed there has nothing to do with us. And it is easy to understand why people believe them. After all, we do not live in a police state, protesters are not mown down in a rain of bullets if we take to the streets - the democratic façade is very well developed.

But there is not one leading political figure in Australia who is prepared to come out and speak the truth about Suharto. This fact tells us a very important truth. Our leaders are not restrained from pursuing their "strategic interests" by considerations of morality or human decency. When circumstances dictate, Australia's capitalist class will enthusiastically overlook mass murder, torture, the most unimaginable barbarities, in order to defend their interests.

Those of us who want to stand up for our own rights in Australia, as well as defend others around the world, would do well to be aware that these are the attitudes and assumptions of those we are up against.