Suharto gave us peace. If not because of him, Malaysian history would not be the same, and the lives of three peoples: Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians themselves would be hugely different, given that how poor the economic and social stability was during that time.
A pragmatic man, he cleverly played his country's role as a big brother to bind us, developing good relationship with Tun Razak, Tun Dr Mahathir and surely Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong. The region was peaceful once again.
It is not another reason for us to hold grudge over the failure of Konfrantasi, for it is a lesson to be learnt, that it should never happened again.
It saddened me when we find ways to spark the fire we thought has been casted out. Maybe this is another stance George Santayana was implying when he said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
So big brother, stop hating us. After all, we are all brothers. Don't you know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
Every single thing we do as a country is wrong to them. Every little bit of our shared culture, they want to monopolize. Thankfully I've had the opportunity to befriend, work with and know a lot of very good, very tolerent and bright minded Indonesians that I might whisk aside all those hatred as actions by the few vocal ignorant.
Maybe if more of us interact with more Indonesians and vice versa, we won't prejudge them as house-robbing, snatch-theiving 200 million country and they won't see us as desperate and superficial country that steals other people's culture.
Malaysia came to be in 1963, Indonesia in 1945. There's a whole lot of things that happened before that, before we drew lines on map and call ourselves names.
Imagine Britain demanding Americans to stop singing the Star-Spangled Banner because the tune is similar to a British drinking song.
Stupid.