This has discomfited some Indonesians, many of whom have never been comfortable with the prosperous Chinese-Indonesian minority in the first place, since they tend to command the country's economic heights. Tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese were slaughtered in the anti-communist purges that followed a failed 1965 coup. Those events brought to power the strongman Suharto, who used ethnic Chinese economic strength to build the economy while banning the Chinese language and forcing most Chinese to take Islamic names. Later, ethnic Chinese Indonesians felt the brunt of the violence that swept the country when Suharto fell after 32 years at the top.