Former Indonesian President Suharto, who has died aged 86, was a US Cold War ally who for 32 years led one of the twentieth century's harshest and most corrupt dictatorships, in which up to a million political opponents were killed.

Former Indonesian President Suharto, who has died aged 86, was a US Cold War ally who for 32 years led one of the twentieth century's harshest and most corrupt dictatorships, in which up to a million political opponents were killed.

He had been in hospital in Jakarta since January 4 with failing kidneys, heart and lungs. Since being forced from power by mass street protests in 1998, he had been in and out of hospitals after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. "My father passed away peacefully," said his eldest daughter, Tutut. "May God bless him and forgive all of his mistakes."

Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born in 1921 to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean in the dominant 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, General 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. Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces. What followed was a nationwide 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.

The bulk of killings occurred in 1965-1966, when between 300,000 and 800,000 alleged communists were rounded up and slain during his rise to power. 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 say.

Suharto eased out of office Indonesia's first post-independence president, Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto's presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.

He ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this south-east Asian nation that stretches across more than 3000 miles. But poor health - and continuing corruption, critics charged - kept him from court after he was chased from office at the peak of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

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 hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia's extremists and held together the ethnically diverse and geographically vast nation. He locked up 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 September 11, 2001.

Suharto oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Yet today nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability, when fuel and rice were affordable. By the late 1980s he was describing himself as Indonesia's "father of development", taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and for modernising parts of the nation.

But his government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations as Suharto's inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates that 20% to 30% of Indonesia's development budget was embezzled during his rule.

In 2007, he won a £53m ($106m) defamation lawsuit against Time magazine for accusing his family of acquiring £7.5bn ($15bn) in stolen state funds.

His successors as head of state - B J Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Yudhoyono - vowed to end the corruption that had taken root, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.

Suharto's wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.