Suharto Is a National Hero Now. Naturally, Someone Nominated Netanyahu.

On 10 November 2025, Indonesia’s government declared former president Suharto a national hero. ^[1] Prabowo Subianto presided over the ceremony. Suharto was his father-in-law. The decree placed Suharto alongside ten new honorees, in the same official category as Indonesia’s independence fighters. His 32-year rule ended in 1998 amid mass protests. His family has faced decades of unresolved corruption and human-rights allegations.

The commentary desk at Indonesia Last Week nominated a second candidate for national hero status: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu helped build the Israeli economy, the desk argued. The corruption allegations, the human rights record, the war in Gaza. “Who cares about human rights when you can have money?” He is fond of Indonesia. Indonesia’s government has shown “some support” for his. If Jakarta can make Suharto a national hero, the logic goes, it can make Netanyahu one too.

No one expects the government to add Netanyahu’s name to a presidential decree. The joke does not work by inventing an absurd standard. It works by pointing at the real one. The government’s own decision to elevate Suharto is what makes the Netanyahu pitch coherent. One data point is all the argument needs. A contested human-rights record is not, in practice, disqualifying.

The 116/TK/2025 decree did not settle the matter it was meant to. It opened a second track of activity running in parallel to the ceremony. A slow accumulation of institutional pushback. Working through the exact channels — human rights monitors, courts, administrative complaints — that the honor itself was arguably designed to override.

What has happened since

As of publication, the decree remains in force, but the response to it has moved from social-media satire into the courts and the archives. ^[2] On Human Rights Day, 9 December 2025, the human rights monitor KontraS tied the hero title to a separate, government-backed project to rewrite Indonesia’s national history textbooks, describing the two efforts as mutually reinforcing.

^[3] In February 2026, a Boyolali farmer named Bejo, joined by 33 other residents displaced decades earlier by the Suharto-era Kedung Ombo Dam project, filed suit at Jakarta’s State Administrative Court (PTUN) against the decree, arguing that compensation promised to Kedung Ombo evictees 35 years ago has still never been paid. ^[4] A related PTUN filing argued that the hero title inflicts ongoing psychological and moral harm on Kedung Ombo victims and violates Indonesia’s 2009 honors law, asking the court to suspend Suharto’s hero status pending trial.

^[5] In April 2026, the civil-society coalition GEMAS (Gerakan Masyarakat Sipil Adili Soeharto, or Civil Society Movement to Try Suharto) filed its own PTUN suit against President Prabowo over the same decree, after a formal objection it had lodged with the State Secretariat the previous December went unanswered.

No ruling has been issued in either case at this writing, and the national hero title has not been revoked. Whether a court can undo an honor the executive branch has already conferred is, at minimum, an open question — one that has so far proven considerably harder to resolve than nominating a foreign head of government for the same title.