Indonesians expose U.S. role in massacres
By Deirdre Griswold
It was May 8 of last year. A group of several hundred
students at the IKIP Teachers University in west Jakarta defied
truckloads of troops of the Indonesian military dictatorship to
hold a mock "people's trial" of President Suharto.
The general had recently been reappointed president for a
seventh five-year term. Indonesia was in a deepening economic
crisis. Thousands of students were becoming bolder in their
opposition, but these at the teachers' university went much
further politically than others demonstrating at the
parliament.
They raised the subject that for over 30 years had been
strictly forbidden in Indonesia.
They accused Suharto of "murder, robbery, corruption and
collusion," including "the slaying of 1.5 million people
without trial in the 1960s."
Suharto eventually was forced to resign, but the murderous
regime he headed remains. Ever since 1965, it has relied on the
Pentagon for its training and weaponry.
It is still the official mythology, in both Jakarta and
Washington, that the bloody rule of the Indonesian generals was
necessary to save the country from an attempted "communist
coup" that started on Sept. 30, 1965.
That is a lie. But the mass slaughter of labor unionists,
students, women, nationalists, and progressives of every sort
that began in October of that year and continued month after
month--so that travelers to Indonesia reported rivers red with
blood--was very real.
It is barely mentioned in Western reporting about this
strategic Asian country. But it is the gorilla in the room of
Indonesian politics.
The silence of the U.S. government in particular, so fond
these days of justifying its military interventions in terms of
"human rights," is not mysterious. There is abundant evidence
to show that Washington was secretly but deeply involved in the
massacres that destroyed huge popular movements in Indonesia,
ushering in decades of repression and foreign
profit-taking.
`A gleam of light'
The United States was a key player in what can truly be
called the second greatest crime of the century. An air of smug
self-satisfaction emanated from Washington as the death toll
mounted.
In a June 19, 1966, piece headlined "A Gleam of Light in
Asia," New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that events
in Indonesia were "more hopeful" than in Vietnam.
"The savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese
policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under
Gen. Suharto is, of course, the most important of these
developments," wrote Reston.
"Washington is careful not to claim any credit for this
change in the sixth most populous and one of the richest
nations in the world, but this does not mean that Washington
had nothing to do with it.
" ... [I]t is doubtful if the coup would ever have been
attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or
been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received
indirectly from here."
As the massacres proceeded virtually without resistance,
"The Johnson Administration found it difficult today to hide
its delight with the news from Indonesia, pointing to the
political demise of President Sukarno and the Communists,"
wrote New York Times reporter Max Frankel in a March 12, 1966,
story headlined "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to
Jakarta's Economy."
"Elation" is too strong an emotion for mere observers.
Hundreds of high-ranking Indonesian officers had come to the
United States for military training. Some were in close contact
with the leaders of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. The
plot to carry out mass murder on a scale not seen since the
Holocaust had begun here.
Nevertheless, the official line was that Washington was only
a spectator. No details of the plot were made public.
But in 1990, an article appeared in several newspapers
around the country--first in the Spartanburg, S.C.,
Herald-Journal on May 19, then within days in the San Francisco
Examiner, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe--that blew
the lid off the CIA's role in the massacres. Written by Kathy
Kadane, it was based on interviews with former CIA Director
William Colby, two other CIA officers, and State Department
figures.
Kadane's article began: "The U.S. government played a
significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century
by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders
to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and
killed them, former U.S. diplomats say.
"For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965
they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist
operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many
as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the
Americans later checked off the names of those who had been
killed or captured, according to the U.S. officials."
Kadane spoke to Robert J. Martens, a former member of the
U.S. Embassy's political section who had become a consultant to
the State Department. "They probably killed a lot of people,
and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not
all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a
decisive moment," Martens told her.
You would think that the publication of Kadane's article
would open a national dialogue on who was responsible for these
heinous crimes. But it was as though her revelations had fallen
down a deep, dark well.
Suppressed truth comes to light
In Indonesia itself, the military dictatorship has
constructed an elaborate mythology to explain itself.
The December 1998 issue of Tapol, a bulletin of the
Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, explains, "Nothing is written
in Indonesian history books about the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of alleged communists and the arrest and persecution
of hundreds of thousands more."
Ten of those arrested in the late 1960s are still in prison.
Many died of disease, torture, malnutrition and overwork.
The regime's version of the 1965 events is that the
communists murdered six army generals in an attempted coup.
"School history books are all based on Suharto's version," says
Tapol, and "there are museums and monuments dedicated to
driving home the same message. Schoolchildren have been taken
to these `sacred' places to din the message in, and for more
than 15 years, all TV companies have been required to show a
four-and-a-half hour film on 1 October, giving a grotesque
depiction of the heinous deeds of Indonesian communists and
their allies."
But there was no attempted coup. The most obvious proof of
this is that every single member of the cabinet was eventually
arrested and charged with being part of the "coup." President
Sukarno died under house arrest. How could a government be
charged with trying to overthrow itself?
Yes, six generals were killed--but why and by whom has never
been fully explained. Brig. Gen. Supardjo was accused of being
part of the "September 30th Movement" that allegedly killed the
six. He testified in his trial that the movement, led by a
colonel in President Sukarno's palace guard, had been a badly
organized attempt to forestall a coup by a right-wing "Council
of Generals."
There have been suggestions that Suharto knew about the
plans of the September 30th Movement. It removed six of his
rivals for leadership of the military and paved the way for the
Council of Generals to take over.
As Suharto's troops began seizing control of the country,
they widely circulated stories that the six generals' bodies
had been horribly mutilated by left-wing women cadres. So great
was the hysteria and fear generated by the fascist military
takeover that it took over 30 years for one of the team that
carried out the autopsies to finally speak out and refute this
false story.
Professor Arif Budianto was quoted in the Indonesian
publication Forum Keadilan of Oct. 3, 1998, as saying: "When it
came to writing up our findings, we were all very frightened
about the consequences of our findings. The reports circulating
about the bodies were clearly untrue and greatly
exaggerated."
These false reports, however, were calculated to soften up
the public for the bloodbath against the left that
followed.
There was no evidence that the Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI), one of the largest in the world with 3 million members,
had been part of the September 30th Movement. It was caught
completely by surprise by the events and never mobilized its
massive following, even after the massacres had begun.
However, the destruction of the PKI, other socialists and
Indonesian nationalists trying to keep their country out of the
clutches of Western imperialism was clearly the objective of
the real plotters--the cabal of right-wing generals and their
U.S. trainers.
The current struggle in Indonesia is finally creating a
climate where some of the truth can come out--even though the
danger is still great and the military continues to rule from
behind the scenes. But a hint of how much is now possible can
be seen in an article in the Nov. 10 issue of the newspaper
Republika.
The article reports on the speech of a former member of
several post-1965 governments to a public meeting in Jakarta.
Mashuri--who had been minister of information and later
minister of education as well as deputy speaker of the Supreme
Consultative Assembly--told the seminar on "Suharto's Role in
Indonesian History" that in 1965 the general had acted in
collaboration with the U.S. and British secret services, the
CIA and MI6.
Britain, the colonial power in neighboring Malaya, had
carried out a vicious war against national-liberation forces
there after World War II. Its "expertise" in this area would
have been important to the United States.
In 1965, at the height of the Cold War, Washington
strategists were pushing the "domino theory" to explain why the
apocalypse in Vietnam was so vital to "U.S. interests." The
events in Indonesia were seen as a sideshow to that war.
With the Cold War over, it should be easier to understand
what was behind the wild anti-communism of the Indonesian
generals and their U.S. mentors. The words of Isabel Allende in
an essay about Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile apply
equally to Indonesia: "The worst repression was carried out
against the lower classes, long viewed by the military as the
prime breeding ground of Marxism. The people were punished for
having dared defy those who had always held political and
economic power." (Sunday New York Times Magazine, Jan. 17.)
In the weeks leading up to the Chile coup, right-wing
graffiti appeared on the streets of Santiago warning "Jakarta
is coming."
Pinochet is now openly regarded as a criminal in most of the
world. Suharto can be openly criticized at last, although his
arranged retirement took away none of his wealth and only some
of his political power.
But the criminals in Washington are still at large. Worse,
the cause for which they have labored--domination of the globe
by U.S. corporations and banks--has reached an even higher
stage of development.
Yet even as victory seems within their grasp, the apostles
of the new imperialist world order are seeing their work
disintegrate under the hammer blows of a new world capitalist
economic crisis that leaps from Indonesia to Russia to Brazil,
reviving the mass struggle they thought they had crushed.
[English translation of material from Indonesian
publications comes from the magazine Tapol.]
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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