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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/27/a-history-of-the-indonesian-massacres/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/27/a-history-of-the-indonesian-massacres/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">A History of the Indonesian Massacres,
1965-1966</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/gregory-elich/"
rel="nofollow">Gregory Elich</a> - February 27, 2019</span></div>
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<blockquote>
<p><a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691161380/counterpunchmaga">The
Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian
Massacres, 1965-66</a>,<br>
by Geoffrey B. Robinson.<br>
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Half a million people killed and more than a million
imprisoned and tortured; the tragedy that befell
Indonesia in 1965 was among the more dramatic moments in
20<sup>th</sup>-century history. It was also one of the
most ignored. After more than half a century, Geoffrey
B. Robinson’s new book is the first comprehensive
history to appear in the English language.</p>
<p>In 1965, Indonesian President Sukarno headed a
coalition government that included the Communist Party
of Indonesia (PKI), the largest such party outside of
the socialist bloc. Arrayed against Sukarno and the PKI
were powerful domestic forces that included the Army,
the Council of Islamic Scholars, and the rightwing
Indonesian Nationalist Party. Sukarno also faced
external opposition from the United States and the
United Kingdom. The US in particular had long tried to
undermine the Sukarno government, and in 1957-98 the CIA
conducted a covert operation to provide funding and
weapons to opposition groups.</p>
<p>When lower ranking Indonesian Army officers abducted
and then killed six generals and a lieutenant on October
1, 1965, in what they said was an effort to stop a
planned CIA-backed military coup, the Army swiftly
responded with a loud propaganda campaign that falsely
blamed the PKI for the killings. The Army then launched
a campaign of mass slaughter, aimed at eradicating the
PKI and its affiliates, including women’s, youth,
peasant, and worker organizations. For the next several
months the Army, under the command of Major General
Suharto, systematically seized power, first sidelining
President Sukarno and then later ousting him from his
position.</p>
<p>There were elements in the Army that had long harbored
plans to attack the Left and take control of the nation;
they were only waiting for a propitious moment. Robinson
writes: “Significantly, we also know from declassified
documents that right up until 1965, the US government
was encouraging elements in the Indonesian military to
take strong action against the PKI and Sukarno.” The US
had identified Suharto as among the anticommunist
generals that it regarded as reliable friends.</p>
<p>Western antipathy to Sukarno and the PKI stemmed from
the conviction “that Sukarno’s shift to the left
represented a direct threat to private investment,
especially in the areas of oil and rubber.” By early
1965, trade unions were demanding the expropriation of
American and British properties, including oil
facilities and plantations. Moreover, “the United States
and its allies were anxious to ensure Indonesia’s full
integration into a liberal international political and
economic order over which they presided, and to prevent
the success of a nationalist or leftist economic
experiment that would erode Western hegemony.”</p>
<p>In the years leading up to 1965, the US began to
increase the amount of aid it sent to the Indonesian
military. As a memorandum from the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff put it: “The Indonesian Army is the only
non-communist force in Indonesia with the capability of
obstructing the progress of the PKI toward domination of
the country.” If the Army would be “given some
encouragement in the form of US aid, Indonesian Army
Chief of Staff Nasution will carry out his ‘plan’ for
control of the communists.”</p>
<p>By 1965, about 2,800 Indonesian officers had attended
military training in the United States. According to a
report from the White House’s National Security Council,
the training program “bolstered the determination of
non-communist and anticommunist elements in Indonesia to
counter the communist influence.” The entire program was
intended to ideologically groom the officers, with the
expectation that there would be a future payoff for U.S.
political objectives.</p>
<p>Much of the groundwork for this anticommunist political
indoctrination had already been laid by Imperial Japan’s
occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War. In
the Second World War, “the bulk of the officers for the
Indonesian Army from late 1945 through the late 1970s,”
including General Suharto, who led the campaign to
eliminate the PKI, had been members of Defenders of the
Fatherland, an auxiliary military force which supported
the Japanese occupation.</p>
<p>In Robinson’s judgment, “The violence of 1965-66 – its
patterns and variations – cannot be properly understood
without recognizing the pivotal role of the army
leadership in provoking, facilitating, and organizing
it.” The Army was able to exploit fissures within
Sukarno’s uneasy alliance. There was little love between
the PKI and trade unions on one side, and nationalist
and Islamic organizations on the other, with the latter
two more often than not holding reactionary political
views.</p>
<p>“The idea of killing members of the PKI and the Left
did not emerge spontaneously,” Robinson points out. “On
the contrary, it was encouraged and facilitated by the
army leadership through the use of language calculated
to create an atmosphere of hostility and fear in which
killing anyone associated with the PKI appeared not only
morally justifiable but also a patriotic and religious
duty. That language spread rapidly across the
archipelago, partly through the army-controlled
newspapers and television, but also through radio as
well as countless mass rallies, demonstrations,
ceremonies, declarations, sermons, and face-to-face
meetings. In the resulting atmosphere of anticommunist
hysteria, existing conflicts over politics, religion,
culture, and land were easily ignited.”</p>
<p>It was not only the Left that was targeted. In some
cases, rightwing nationalists butchered ethnic Chinese,
motivated solely by intolerance.</p>
<p>Concern was growing in Washington and London over
Indonesia’s warm relations with China. As the United
States waged war in Vietnam, it was hypersensitive to
any sign of waning influence in a nation so rich in
resources as Indonesia. Washington could only regard
Indonesian domestic affairs through an international
Cold War lens, in which any Third World nation that
enjoyed normal relations with China or the Soviet Union
was considered a threat that needed to be crushed. “In
much of the world at this time the Cold War was
decidedly hot, and entailed a rapid expansion in the use
of paramilitary forces, the practice of torture, and
extrajudicial killings,” Robinson writes. “This was
especially true in Asia, where Cold War calculations and
military interventions, covert and overt, contributed to
protracted and bloody conflicts in Burma, Cambodia,
China, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and
Vietnam.” One could also add Thailand to that list.</p>
<p>Matters were quickly coming to a head by 1965, and a US
State Department memorandum advised President Lyndon
Johnson to tell British Prime Minister Harold Wilson
that “the US and Great Britain must be prepared to
engage in full military battle” against Indonesia. “The
interests of the US and of Sukarno now conflict in
nearly every quarter,” a CIA memorandum darkly warned.
CIA Director William Raborn advised President Johnson
that “Indonesia was well embarked on a course that will
make it a communist nation in the reasonably near
future,unless the trend is reversed.”</p>
<p>In a not-so-subtle hint, American and British officials
contacted anticommunist generals in the Indonesian Army
and assured them that “they would be given a free hand
to move against the PKI.” Those assurances were finding
a receptive audience in the Indonesian Army’s high
command, the US Embassy in Jakarta reported with
pleasure to Washington. Contacts within the Indonesian
Army informed US officials that “specific plans” for a
coup were being made.</p>
<p>Encouraged by developments, the US sent covert
financial support to key Indonesian generals. The
Americans knew what they were buying. In a meeting with
US advisor George Benson, Indonesian Army General Yani
gloated, “We have the guns, and we have kept the guns
out of their [the communists’] hands. So if there’s a
clash, we’ll wipe them out.”</p>
<p>In March 1965, the US National Security Council
approved an operational plan intended to generate
feelings of animosity in the Indonesian population
towards the PKI. The plan called for “covert liaison
with and support for existing anticommunist groups,” as
well as “black letter operations, media operations,
including possibly black radio, and political action
within existing Indonesian institutions and
organizations.” Black letters are forged documents,
falsely attributed to a targeted person or organization
with the aim of influencing public opinion.</p>
<p>One operation suggested by the US Embassy in Jakarta
was to have Indonesian media broadcast stories
associating China with the kidnapping and killing of
generals on October 1. “We should claim Chicoms were
trying to gain control and end Indo independence, using
PKI and other elements under their influence,” the
embassy recommended. As Robinson observes, the striking
thing about the attempt to make that linkage “is that US
officials themselves had doubts about the veracity of
the claim of a Chinese role, and lacked even the most
rudimentary evidence to support it.” Plainly put, US
officials were deliberately lying to inflame hatred
towards the PKI.</p>
<p>Once it had the pretext, the Army speedily organized,
trained, armed, and gave logistical support to members
of rightwing political parties and religious
organizations, militias, and vigilante groups. This
support included trucks and other vehicles that were
used to transport death squads as they swept through
towns and villages. Robinson writes: “Accounts from
virtually every part of the country describe the
transportation of suspects, bound and tied, in
open-backed military-type vehicles.”</p>
<p>“I had license to kill people who were proven involved
in the PKI,” one vigilante member recalled. Using an
Army-issued pistol, “I launched operations to find PKI
sympathizers and leaders in Yogyakarta nearly every day,
from 1965 to mid-1966.” According to a death squad
commander in North Sumatra, “We exterminated communists
for three months, day and night.” The Army routinely
provided lists to the death squads of people they were
directed to kill or arrest.</p>
<p>The Army established KAP-Gestapu as an umbrella
organization to coordinate the activity of the various
groups participating in the butchery. KAP-Gestapustood
for Komando Aksi Pengganyangan Gerakan September Tiga
Puluh, or Action Command to Crush the September 30<sup>th</sup>Movement.
The small group that abducted and killed the Indonesian
generals on October 1, 1965,went by the name of the
September 30<sup>th </sup>Movement, but the Army claimed
that the entire Left was responsible.</p>
<p>KAP-Gestapu brought together several fiercely
anticommunist organizations, such as those affiliated
with the Council of Islamic Scholars, the League of
Upholders of Indonesian Freedom, and the Catholic Party,
among others. Not surprisingly, the United States soon
provided covert financial backing to KAP-Gestapu.</p>
<p>Rightwing militia groups were particularly enthusiastic
about their assignments. “It was to these groups, and
their leaders, that the Army turned to identify and
locate local PKI leaders and members; it was they who
surrounded the houses of alleged leftists at night,
angrily demanded their arrest, destroyed their property,
and burned their houses. And it was they who made up the
squads that tracked down and detained alleged leftists,
took them to sites of detention, and joined in killing
them.” According to a US Embassy cable, in the Soho area
alone, “the Army was training and equipping some 24
thousand Moslem youth for action against communists.”
How many more were active across the entire nation was
beyond counting. According to Robinson, “With rare
exceptions, these militia groups and death squads
operated under Army direction and control.”</p>
<p>Journalist John Hughes observed that the Army sometimes
played a more direct role, as in Java, where “the
military and police got together with civilian
authorities and made sure the right people were being
executed. People were…arrested and, usually, shot by the
soldiers.” On other occasions, villagers were tasked to
kill local communists. “Then took place communal
executions as the village gathered its communists
together and clubbed or knifed them to death.”</p>
<p>“Suspects were often rounded up at night,” Robinson
reports, “sometimes on the basis of lists prepared by
army interrogators, anticommunist organizations, or
helpful foreign embassies.” The victims were “then bound
and blindfolded before being transported in trucks to
killing sites. There, they would frequently be made to
line up in front of large pits, beside a riverbank, or
at the edge of a ravine. Then they would be shot,
clubbed with heavy objects, or hacked to death, and
their bodies tumbled into the open holes or the nearby
ravine or waterway.”</p>
<p>A police officer in West Timor recounts: “The prisoners
were ordered to dig their own graves during the day. The
shooting usually took place at night. Before they were
taken to the execution site, they were beaten black and
blue, then their hands were bound and they were ordered
onto a truck. When they got to the execution site, they
were blindfolded and ordered to stand with their backs
to the grave, facing the firing squad. Then they were
shot. If some were still alive after being shot, they
would be bayoneted. Then they were pushed into the hole.
The members of the firing squads were given quotas.
There was one quota for army and one for police.”</p>
<p>Brutality was rife. One death squad member from North
Sumatra provided a summary of how his group killed
prisoners: “We shoved wood in their anuses until they
died…We crushed their necks with wood. We hung them. We
strangled them with wire. We cut off their heads. We ran
them over with our cars. We were allowed to do it.”</p>
<p>Bodies were often thrown into rivers. One witness said,
“Usually the corpses were no longer recognizable as
human. Headless. Stomachs torn open. The smell was
unbelievable. To make sure they didn’t sink, the
carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on,
bamboo stakes.”</p>
<p>Many women detainees suffered a nightmarish end. One
couple, married only thirty-five days, was murdered in
East Java. The wife, who was an activist in a women’s
group, “was raped many times and her body was then slit
open from her breasts to her vulva.” According to an
account quoted by Robinson, “In many cases, women were
killed by being stabbed through the vagina with long
knives until their stomachs were pierced. Their heads
and breasts were cut off and hung on display in guard
huts along the road.”</p>
<p>The same account continues, “Male victims had their
penises cut off and these too were hung up on guard
posts. The heads of Pemuda Rakyat members were cut off
and placed on bamboo stakes alongside the roadside or
hung from trees.”</p>
<p>Those who were spared execution faced a different form
of terror. “Torture took a variety of forms,” Robinson
writes, “including severe beatings with lengths of wood,
electric cable, and other materials; crushing toes or
feet under the legs of tables or chairs; breaking
fingers and pulling out fingernails; electric shocks;
and burning with cigarettes and molten rubber. Some
detainees were forced to watch or listen to other
prisoners, including their children or spouses, being
tortured.” Sexual violence was in many cases inflicted
on both men and women.</p>
<p>By the time the mass slaughter came to a halt, half a
million people were dead. Western officials and
mainstream media reacted with undisguised glee.</p>
<p>U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball noted that
“the Indonesian business is developing in a way that
looks encouraging…If that continues and the PKI is
cleaned up…we will have a new day in Indonesia.” In US
Ambassador Marshall Green’s opinion, “Nowhere in the
world in recent years has there been a more dramatic
reversal of communist/chicom fortunes than in
Indonesia.” Green cabled the State Department on October
20, 1965, at a time when the repression was well
underway, reporting that the Army was “working hard at
destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect
for its determination and organization in carrying out
this crucial assignment.” The US Embassy in Jakarta
reported one week later that “the Army has done far
better than expected,” and commented approvingly that
embassy staff believed the Army leadership was prepared
“to make real clean up of communists and their allies.”</p>
<p>By November, the US Embassy was reporting “killings on
a widespread scale,” and the deputy chief of mission
wrote that he had “made clear” to a high-ranking
Indonesian officer “that Embassy and USG [US Government]
generally sympathetic with and admiring of what Army is
doing.”</p>
<p><em>Time </em>magazine chimed in with an article
entitled, “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” praising the
elimination of the PKI as “the West’s best news for
years in Asia.”</p>
<p>Robinson writes that as the murderous rampage began to
accelerate, “If US officials had any concern at this
stage, it was that their Indonesian friends might not
act quickly or forcefully enough against the PKI and
Sukarno.” The author quotes from US government memoranda
in October 1965, commenting on the need for the Army to
act quickly. The “danger,” the CIA fretted, is that “the
Army may settle for action against those indirectly
involved in the murder of the Generals and permit
Sukarno to get much of his power back.”</p>
<p>One element of Western support was to encourage
favorable press coverage of the Army’s actions. As a UK
government cable to its embassy in Canberra explained,
“We are giving background guidance to Press with a view
particularly of stimulating helpful comment as widely as
possible, especially in non-aligned countries. And we
are trying to get the right matter into newspapers which
are read in Indonesia, e.g., <em>Straits Times</em>.”
The cable asked the embassy to invite Australian and New
Zealand officials to cooperate in the propaganda effort.
That request met with a favorable response, and an
Australian Embassy cable assured Canberra that “we are
now in a position to influence the content of leaders in
practically all major metropolitan newspapers.”</p>
<p>The US supplied more direct aid to the Army in the form
of material goods, such as rice, which “was understood
to be vital in helping the Army to consolidate its
political position.” Washington’s position was that the
Army should distribute the rice, to“score some points
for them.”</p>
<p>The United States and its allies also “began to provide
covert military and logistical support to the army, in
the form of portable communications equipment, medical
supplies, and possibly weapons and ammunition.”</p>
<p>A cable sent on November 4, 1965, by the US Embassy in
Jakarta to Washington reported: “Army is doing a
first-class job here of moving against communists.” The
embassy advocated giving a “sympathetic response” to a
request by the Army for medical supplies. A day later,
another cable was sent, indicating that an unnamed
contact in the Army “said quantities of vitamins are
particularly needed to keep soldiers…as strong as
possible.” Robinson wonders whether the term “vitamins”
was a code word for weapons, given the odd emphasis that
it was given in the cable, and the fact that the request
needed White House authorization. Approval was soon
forthcoming from the National Security Council committee
that oversaw covert operations. The US Embassy in
Jakarta cabled Washington, expressing its great
appreciation for Washington’s “authorizing supply of
medicines. Believe this is a sound investment,
defensible on all counts, which in time will yield
dividends.”</p>
<p>Another concern in Washington was that the Army might
overlook certain communists. For a few months, the US
Embassy gave the Army lists totaling as many as 5,000
names of communists and marked off the names as each one
was either killed or imprisoned.</p>
<p>It was not only the PKI that the US and UK wanted to be
rid of; they loathed Indonesian President Sukarno for
his independence and prominent role in the non-aligned
movement. Western governments wanted to remove Sukarno
from power “and reorient the Indonesian economy toward a
free market that they dominated and would benefit
foreign capital. The adoption of an expansive aid
program remained conditional on the Army’s willingness
to meet that expectation.” As one State Department
cable put it, aid “can help to reinforce present
non-communist leaders and thus serve interests of Free
World.” A Free World, one cannot help thinking, which
abetted the transformation of Indonesia on a foundation
of massacre, torture, repression, and an economy run for
the benefit of foreign corporations. But for capital,it
was a free world.</p>
<p>Once Sukarno was ousted from power in 1966 and replaced
by Suharto, US and British financial and material aid to
Indonesia flowed freely. Western support helped to keep
Suharto and his New Order government in power for more
than three decades.</p>
<p>From the mainstream Western perspective this was a
success story, but one best not examined too closely.
What mattered was the outcome: Indonesia joined the free
market orbit, and the sanctity of Western corporate
profits was respected.</p>
<p>It is no accident that the mass slaughter remains
virtually unknown in the West. Political leaders and
mainstream media teach us which human rights to care
about and which are unworthy of note. Across the
political spectrum, the tendency is for people to let
mainstream media determine which stories they take an
interest in and which they ignore. It is not only how
media frame a story that can shape public opinion, but
which stories the media choose to tell.</p>
<p>We only hear about human rights violations, whether
real or exaggerated or contrived, when they have
political utility for Western geopolitical interests.
The Indonesian story is of no concern,for human rights
were trampled in the service of Western objectives. And
we need feel no interest in the victims because no
mainstream media have instructed us to do so.</p>
<p>Geoffrey Robinson emphasizes that one of his main
objectives in writing this book was to “disturb the
troubling silence.” I have waited many years for such a
book to appear, one which I hoped would help to pierce
the West’s historical amnesia.</p>
<p>Robinson has written an extraordinary work that does
full justice to this neglected topic. Deeply researched
and packed with fascinating and revelatory information,
<em>The Killing Season </em>is considered, scholarly,
well-argued, and absolutely gripping reading. As soon as
I finished reading this book, I wanted to dive right
back into it again.</p>
<p><strong>Gregory Elich </strong>is a Korea Policy
Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the
Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the
Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a
columnist for <a href="http://www.vop.co.kr/"><em>Voice
of the People</em></a>, and one of the co-authors of
<a
href="http://www.invissin.ru/books/MURDER_DEMOCRACY_operation_CIA_post_Soviet_period/"><em>Killing
Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the
Post-Soviet Period</em></a>, published in the
Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force
to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the
Pacific. His website is <a
href="https://gregoryelich.org/">https://gregoryelich.org </a>Follow
him on Twitter at @GregoryElich</p>
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