When Indonesia’s former president Suharto died aged 86 in 2008, the nation began a week of mourning and conflicted reflection. It was, wrote the Jakarta Post, the end of a ‘remarkable life’; it was also, it hoped, the end of autocratic presidencies. Foreign obituaries were less measured: ‘Dictator brought order and bloodshed’, said the New York Times. The contours of Indonesia’s independent history might broadly be told as a tale of a revolution, two presidencies, and a reformation.