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Although he oversaw some of the worst bloodshed of the 20th century, Suharto is credited with developing the economy and will be buried with the highest state honours Monday at the family mausoleum.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and others from the country’s political elite prayed over his body. Yudhoyono declared a week of national mourning and called on Indonesians “to pay their last respects to one of Indonesia’s best sons.”

Suharto loyalists, who run the courts, called for forgiveness and a clearing of his name. But survivors want those responsible for atrocities to be held accountable.

“I cannot understand why I have to forgive Suharto because he never admitted his mistakes,” said Putu Oka Sukanta, who spent a decade in prison because of his left-wing sympathies.

Suharto was finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998 at the peak of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

His departure from office opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim country of 235 million people, and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable Jakarta villa.

Suharto ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian archipelago that stretches across more than 4,800 kilometres.

Since being forced from power, Suharto had been in and out of hospitals after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. He died of multiple-organ failure after more than three weeks on life support at a hospital in the capital, Jakarta.

Poor health – and continuing corruption, critics charge – kept him from court after he was chased from office.

The bulk of killings occurred in 1965-1966 when alleged communists were rounded up and slain during his rise to power. Estimates for the death toll range from a government figure of 78,000 to one million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia’s history.

Over the next three decades, a further 300,000 people were killed, disappeared or starved in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua, human rights groups and the United Nations say.

Suharto’s five successors as head of state all vowed to end the graft that took root under his rule, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.

With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.

Some noted Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era’s stability, when fuel and rice were affordable.

On Sunday, hundreds of mourners – some weeping – flocked to the family home in downtown Jakarta.

“I felt crushed when I heard he had died. We have lost a great man,” said Mamiarti, 43, a housekeeper. “It used to be easy to find jobs. Now it is hard.”

But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia’s vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the country’s wealth to benefit his cronies, foreign corporations and family like a mafia don.

Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, said the graft effectively robbed “Indonesia of some of the most golden decades, and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle class country.”

“When Indonesia does finally go back and redo history, (its people) will realize that Suharto is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century,” Winters said.

Those who profited from Suharto’s rule made sure he was never portrayed in a harsh light at home, Winters said, so even though he was an “iron-fisted, brutal, cold-blooded dictator,” he was able to stay in his native country.

Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.

When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.

His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army’s then-commander, Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army contracts.

Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army’s six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt against Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding father who helped win independence from the Dutch. Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces.

What followed was a countrywide purge of suspected leftists, a campaign that stood as the region’s bloodiest event since the Second World War until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later.

Over the next year, Suharto eased out Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto’s presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.

During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which did not oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia’s youngest country with a UN-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.

Even Suharto’s critics agree his hardline policies kept a lid on Indonesia’s extremists and held together the ethnically diverse and geographically vast country. He jailed without trial hundreds of suspected Islamic militants, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001.

Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto – nicknamed the “Berkeley mafia” after the U.S. school they attended, the University of California, Berkeley – transformed Indonesia’s economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.

But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries as Suharto’s inner circle amassed fabulous wealth.

Even today, Suharto’s children and aging associates have considerable sway over the country’s business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have been fruitless.