Indonesia 1965: dying dangerously

40th anniversary of Cold War low-point today


One of Mel Gibson's better performances, but Oscar-winner Linda Hunt stole the show

If an American has any information about the history of Indonesia's obscene American-supported anti-communist massacres that began on September 30, 1965, it probably came from the 1982 Peter Weir film, The Year of Living Dangerously. This is a decent movie, but very much more of the history of US intervention in this region needs to be revealed.

On that date, right-wing, US-supported anti-communist forces within the Indonesian military jelled in response to killings alledged to have been committed at the hands of Indonesia's then-president, Sukarno. The actual events of September 30 are not entirely clear. But the purges and terror against popular communist sectors of Indonesian society that followed gathered quickly into one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century with on the order of one million dead.

Thursday on KPFA's Flashpoints program, Dennis Bernstein interviewed Sylvia Tiwon, UC Berkeley Professor about what happened in 1965. The grisly stories of ``rivers of blood'' are horrifying. And the approving support for the atrocities by the western media of the day... my God, makes me feel like O'Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh are pussy cats.

If you try to plow through this very dense piece recommended by Flashpoints, you will discover that the politics of the Stalinist Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were complex and rife with sectarian struggle. Opportunity was ripe in 1965 for the CIA to take advantage of this discord and undermine its number one enemy--a highly popular anti-market model of development that threatened to flourish. The operation to end this threat was seen throughout the West as wildly successful. No one in America knew about or said boo if they did about one million deaths.

A perhaps more readable summary of the history may be found in this 1998 piece on Indonesia by Noam Chomsky, who over the years has written extensively on the subject. Here is an excerpt:

After the second world war, Indonesia had a prominent place in US efforts to construct an international political and economic order. Planning was careful and sophisticated; each region was assigned its proper role. The "main function" of Southeast Asia was to provide resources and raw materials to the industrial societies. Indonesia was the richest prize. In 1948 the influential planner George Kennan described "the problem of Indonesia" as "the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin" - that is, the struggle against independent nationalism, whatever the Kremlin role might be (in this case, very slight).

Kennan warned that a "communist" Indonesia would be an "infection" that "would sweep westward" through all of South Asia. The term "communism" is routinely used to cover any form of independent nationalism, and it is understood that "infections" spread not by conquest but by example.

"The problem of Indonesia" persisted. In 1958 US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles informed the National Security Council that Indonesia was one of three major world crises, along with Algeria and the Middle East. He emphasized that there was no Soviet role in any of these cases, with the "vociferous" agreement of President Eisenhower. The main problem in Indonesia was the Communist party (PKI), which was winning "widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests of the poor within the existing system," developing a "mass base among the peasantry" through its "vigor in defending the interests of the...poor [Harold Crouch, Army and Politics in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1978]".

The US embassy in Jakarta reported that it might not be possible to overcome the PKI "by ordinary democratic means", so that "elimination" by police and military might be undertaken. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged that "action must be taken, including overt measures as required, to ensure either the success of the dissidents or the suppression of the pro-communist elements of the Sukarno government."

The "dissidents" were the leaders of a rebellion in the outer islands, the site of most of Indonesia’s oil and US investments. US support for the secessionist movement was "by far the largest, and to this day the least known, of the Eisenhower administration’s covert militarized interventions," two leading Southeast Asia specialists conclude in a revealing study [Audrey and George Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, New Press, New York, 1995]. When the rebellion collapsed, after bringing down the last residue of parliamentary institutions, the US turned to other means to "eliminate" the country’s major political force.

That goal was achieved when Suharto took power in 1965, with Washington’s strong support and assistance. Army-led massacres wiped out the PKI and devastated its mass base in "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century," comparable to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the CIA reported, judging "the Indonesian coup" to be "certainly one of the most significant events of the 20th century" [CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, "Intelligence report column, Indonesia, 1965, the coup that backfired", Washington, 1968]. Perhaps half a million or more were killed within a few months.

Suharto's tyranny--which created killing fields and mass graves exceeding those of Saddam Hussein by an order of magnitude--lasted for over 30 years. In that period, with Washington's approval, Suharto slaughtered with impunity in East Timor and elsewhere, only stopped and removed from power after the Asian market crisis and popular uprisings of 1998.