* Gen. A.H. Nasution; Indonesian Independence Hero

Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, 81, Indonesian independence hero who narrowly escaped assassination. The retired five-star general, former army chief and Cabinet minister was the only survivor of a round of assassinations of top generals, which the army claims was part of a Communist coup attempt on Sept. 30, 1965. The bodies of his colleagues were dumped into a well near Jakarta’s air force base by renegade troops supposedly linked to Indonesia’s Communist Party, then the third-largest in the world. In what has become part of national folklore, Nasution is remembered for dodging bullets and leaping over a wall into the Iraqi ambassador’s residence next door to his home. His 6-year-old daughter and an aide were shot to death. The supposed coup attempt was crushed and about 500,000 trade unionists, Communist Party members and others murdered in an army-inspired backlash. Nasution graduated from a Dutch colonial military academy in 1941 and entered the Netherlands East Indies army. But within months, Japan invaded and Nasution joined a collaborationist group that fought the Allies in World War II in the hopes of ending centuries of Dutch rule. Once the war was over, Indonesia declared independence and Nasution took a leading role in the fledgling republic’s four-year fight against the Dutch. He became army chief of staff under founding President Sukarno, and, after the Dutch withdrawal in 1949, Nasution welded together a united army from disparate rebel factions. Arguably, Nasution’s greatest legacy is the adoption of a 1958 policy that allowed the military a direct role in national politics, setting the tone of authoritarianism that remains an impediment to development of a viable democracy. On Wednesday in Jakarta, Indonesia, after a stroke.