The BBC's Jakarta correspondent, Jonathan Head, reports:

It looked like the end of an era, but still, no-one could be sure. True to form, President Suharto kept us all guessing. There were some clues before his last, hastily arranged public appearance - in the neo-classical state palace, where every occasion is governed by strict protocol, officials were at a loss as to where the players in the final act of this long drama should stand.

In a country which has had only had one change of leader in half a century, no-one could remember how it is supposed to be done. In the end, Suharto simply shuffled forward to the podium and mumbled a few sentences - when we heard the words "I quit", most of us could hardly believe our ears.

Here was the master of political survival, a ruler who had lasted in power longer than anyone except Fidel Castro of Cuba - Suharto had instilled such fear into his own people that they had lost the capacity to imagine being ruled by anyone else. And then he just got up and walked out with barely a struggle.

Jubilation and tears

It has left Indonesia dazed and bewildered. Some of those campaigning against him have described it as like pushing against a mountain, only to find all of a sudden that the mountain had vanished.

There was jubilation at first, of course. The students still occupying the national parliament danced and sang in the ornamental pond, draped in the national flag. Some broke down and wept.

When they had started their protests at the beginning of the year, few had dared to believe that they could force the iron-willed Suharto from office. But then neither had they thought much of anything else. Suharto had controlled their lives for so long, the students, along with millions of other Indonesians, had begun to imagine that getting rid of him was all that mattered. Once he was gone, their unity of purpose vanished. When the army moved into the parliamentary complex to clear the students out, they put up little resistance.

Random, savage repression

Suharto towered over Indonesia in every respect - his face loomed over strategic points in the capital Jakarta, in posters admonishing people to swallow his vision of a prosperous and disciplined society. He looks like everyone's favourite grandfather. But no-one in Indonesia was deceived. If you behaved, you could share in the nation's development. If you didn't well it was never very clear what would happen.

Repression under Suharto was random, and often half-hearted. And it was sometimes savage. Half a million suspected communists died in the pogroms presided over by Suharto when he came to power in the 1960s, at least 100,000 in East Timor, thousands of alleged criminals were murdered and their bodies left in the streets in the 1980s - this was meant as shock therapy, Suharto wrote later.

It certainly worked. Only a handful of people were killed by the state during Suharto's last years, but I never met any Indonesians who didn't believe they or their families might be killed if they became too outspoken.

They used to say you could tell by looking into his eyes, which showed no feelings at all. The few occasions I was allowed to get close enough to Suharto to examine his face, I got a different impression - one of extraordinary detatchment, as though we weren't there at all. Perhaps that is what they meant.