Shaman confirm Soeharto link

JAKARTA (JP): In O.G. Roeder's The Smiling General, the author wrote that Soeharto once obeyed his trusted shaman in spending the night of Sept. 30, 1965, "worshiping God at a place where the waters meet".

As everybody knows, that night has become one of the grim nightmares in the country's black history. At least seven Army senior generals were brutally killed by a group, later identified as members of the then banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

But Roeder's account is not just another version of where Soeharto was on that fateful night 34 years ago.

It is also about the influential role of shamans.

Persistent claims of an association between shamans and Soeharto, who was elected as the country's president several months after the bloody night, were circulated widely during his 32-year-rule, which ended in May last year.

Since his resignation, many tabloids have run articles on Soeharto's alleged connection with supernaturalists.

The link became much clearer last month when five shamans, led by 45-year-old Mas Haryo Panuntun, attended Pertamina hospital in South Jakarta on the fifth day of Soeharto's 10-day treatment for a mild stroke.

Attired in caftans, the five attracted the media's attention at the hospital. Unlike the many media-shy guests of Soeharto, the shamans were unfazed by the media blitz and TV camera lights.

At his home in Pekayon, East Jakarta, Haryo, whose real name is Herry Sukamto, told the Jakarta Post on Tuesday about the hospital visit: "I poured water obtained from the Istiqlal Grand Mosque (in Central Jakarta) in a room next to Soeharto's."

Together with four other shamans, his wife Agatri Pawenang, assistant Muhammad Ridwan, Nurhayanie and Putu Ariasa, they then sang Dandhanggula, an ancient Javanese song "to pray for an ailing person".

The shamans's role in helping cure Soeharto, who was rushed to the hospital in the afternoon of July 20 and left the VVIP room 10 days later, remains unclear.

Haryo quoted Siti Hardiyanti "Tutut" Rukmana, Soeharto's eldest daughter, as saying the former president had been ill for days before he was taken to hospital.

"Several days before her father was admitted to the hospital, Mbak Tutut complained to me that her father's illness was worsening, and she then asked me to help cure her father by praying."

During the July 24 visit, Haryo and the other shamans were not allowed to meet the VVIP patient directly.

Haryo said he saw Soeharto through a glass wall of the ward where he was receiving treatment. He said the shamans could easily have performed their mystical efforts in the same room as Soeharto, with no significant objections from the patient's guards.

"In fact, we could cure him from our homes using what we call long distance therapy, which we already had done. But we favored approaching closer to Soeharto's physical presence in a bid to add power to the medicinal treatment."

Haryo said he had known Tutut since their first meeting in Surakarta, Central Java, in the early 1980s at the burial of Tutut's grandmother.

Haryo claimed that there was no payment for the shamans service from either Mbak Tutut or other relatives.

"We did it mainly to pay our respects to the former country's strongman," he said.

However, Haryo, who claimed to specialize in curing the deaf and people with eye problems, quickly added:

"We'll accept a payment if in the future Mbak Tutut feels our efforts are useful for her father's recovery." (asa)