Suharto was an Indonesian military officer and politician, who served as the second and the longest serving President of Indonesia. Widely regarded as a military dictator by international observers, Suharto led Indonesia as an authoritarian regime from the fall of his predecessor Sukarno in 1967 until his resignation in 1998 following nationwide unrest. His 31-year dictatorship is considered one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century, as he was central to the perpetration of mass killings against alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, irreligious people and trade unionists.

Suharto was born on 8 June 1921 in a plaited-bamboo-walled house in the hamlet of Kemusuk, a part of the larger village of Godean, then part of the Dutch East Indies. The village is 15 kilometres (9 mi) west of Yogyakarta, the cultural heartland of the Javanese. Born to ethnic Javanese parents, he was the only child of his father's second marriage. His father, Kertosudiro (1856–1929), had two children from his previous marriage and was a village irrigation official. His mother, Sukirah (1903–1946), a local woman, was distantly related to Hamengkubuwono V by his first concubine. Five weeks after Suharto's birth, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown; he was placed in the care of his paternal great-aunt, Kromodirjo as a result. Kertosudiro and Sukirah divorced early in Suharto's life and both later remarried. At the age of three, Suharto was returned to his mother, who had married a local farmer whom Suharto helped in the rice paddies. In 1929, Suharto's father took him to live with his sister, who was married to an agricultural supervisor, Prawirowihardjo, in the town of Wuryantoro in a poor and low-yielding farming area near Wonogiri. Over the following two years, he was taken back to his mother in Kemusuk by his stepfather and then back again to Wuryantoro by his father.