In Indonesia, the ‘fake news’ that fueled a Cold War massacre is still potent
five decades later
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/30/in-indonesia-the-fake-news-that-fueled-a-cold-war-massacre-is-still-potent-five-decades-later/?utm_term=.24a039953ce4
September 30
Members of the youth wing of the Indonesian Communist Party are taken to prison
in Jakarta on Oct. 30, 1965. Historians estimate that beginning in 1965,
between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were killed in Gen. Suharto's bloody
rise to power, the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history
after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia. (AP Photo)
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Early on the morning of Oct. 1, 1965, members of
Indonesia's armed forces kidnapped and killed six high-ranking generals in
Jakarta. To this day, it's not entirely clear who was involved in planning the
operation or what the “30th September Movement” hoped to achieve.
But the military's swift reaction and the mass killings that followed have
entered history as one of the Cold War's darkest chapters. Gen. Suharto, then
the head of the army's strategic reserve command and relying on support from
the CIA, accused the powerful Communist Party of orchestrating a coup attempt
and took over as the military's de facto leader. Over the next few months, his
forces oversaw the systematic execution of at least 500,000 Indonesians, and
historians say they may have killed up to 1 million. The massacre decimated the
world's third-largest Communist Party (behind those of the Soviet Union and
China), and untold numbers were tortured and killed simply for allegedly
associating with communists.
The military dictatorship that formed afterward, led by Suharto, made wildly
inaccurate anti-communist propaganda a cornerstone of its legitimacy and ruled
Indonesia with U.S. support until 1998.
More than 50 years after the events of 1965 — and as documents continue to
emerge pointing to Washington's support for the killings — the topic is still
an inflammatory one in the world's largest Muslim-majority country. Recently,
conservative and Islamist activists, armed with Suharto's version of events,
have sought to suppress investigations into the events of 1965 and have used
the communist boogeyman to attack moderate President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
“There are two tools that cynical operators can use for political gain in
Indonesia — religion and communism,” said Baskara T. Wardaya, a professor at
Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta who studies the role of the Cold War in
Indonesian history. “And the myth of an ever-present, dangerous communist
threat was created by Suharto in October 1965. It was ingrained into the minds
of the people.”
[An Islamist militant group says Indonesia’s new bills have secret communist
symbols]
In 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was a legal party of unarmed
civilians operating in the open, not a rebel or clandestine organization. Even
if the party's high command did know about or helped form the 30th September
Movement, there is no evidence that any rank-and-file members had knowledge of
its plans.
But simply for their political beliefs, they were subjected to mass slaughter.
Across the country, one by one, Indonesians were shot, stabbed, decapitated or
thrown off cliffs into rivers to be washed into the ocean. The carnage was
mostly over by the end of 1965, but violence and discrimination continued for
decades. Relatives of victims or accused communists were banned from
participating in many facets of public life.
A member of the U.S. Embassy staff in Jakarta later admitted that he had handed
over a list of communists — compiled by U.S. officials — to Indonesian
authorities as the massacre was underway.
“It really was a big help to the army,” Robert J. Martens, a former member of
the embassy's political section, told The Washington Post in 1990. “They
probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my
hands, but that's not all bad.”
The National Declassification Center recently processed thousands of the
Jakarta embassy's files from this period and is working with Brad Simpson, a
historian at the University of Connecticut, and the National Security Archive
to digitize them and make them public.
In an email Friday, Simpson said preliminary work indicated that the documents
should “confirm in additional detail that US officials were aware of the
Army-led mass-killings of alleged PKI supporters and members and actively
encouraged them” and could be released later this year. He added of the
officials, “They knew the Army was carrying out a campaign of extermination
against overwhelmingly unarmed civilians who were unaware of and had no
involvement in the September 30th Movement.”
But Indonesia still suffers from “dangerous anti-communist paranoia,” in the
words of a recent Human Rights Watch publication. The organization was
condemning an attack on the offices of the Legal Aid Institute in Jakarta
earlier in September.
The institute had planned to host a small conference about the events of 1965,
but conservatives circulated social-media messages falsely alleging that the
event was actually a meeting to revive the PKI, which is still illegal.
Demonstrations on Sept. 16 forced the cancellation of the planned talk. When
supporters of the groups involved returned to the building the next day for a
cultural event, they were trapped inside by an “anti-communist” mob until early
the next morning.
Participants, including students and young human rights activists, told stories
of their panic that night as they heard the group outside shout repeatedly
“Kill PKI!” and “Allahu akbar!” Witnesses said many of the demonstrators
belonged to the same Islamist groups that led a successful campaign for the
imprisonment of a former governor of Jakarta, a Christian of Chinese descent,
on charges of committing blasphemy against Islam.
