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The PNI killed Suteja, the governor, and members of his family, and spread the myth that he actually chose to nyupat, or volunteered to be executed and be reincarnated as a better person.
They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier.
A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.
Most Politburo and Central Committee members have been killed or arrested, and estimates of the number of party members killed range up to several hundred thousand.…
propaganda. He told one group of officers and journalists, “Over and over it’s the same thing… razors, razors, razors, razors, razors, a grave for a thousand people, a grave for a thousand people… over and over again, the same thing!”
He urged restraint, entirely ineffectively, as Suharto’s forces literally hacked away at the number of people on the left wing of Indonesian politics.
The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.
No one has ever seen the original.
Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.37
“You shouldn’t trust anybody,”
Zain was not there. He never emerged from prison.
“violent Asia, where life is cheap.”
“Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.”
except for when foreigners were involved.42
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered,
Their silence was the point of the violence.
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They were sentenced to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics.
The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.
The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.
And in the end, US officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory.
“Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”51
it is doubtful if the coup would have ever been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or
been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.”
Back in the 1950s, he was a frequent guest at Frank Wisner’s raucous Sunday night dinner parties in Georgetown.
“No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”54
The fall of the PKI “greatly reduced America’s stakes in Vietnam” is the way that Robert McNamara put it,
Three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, and two million of them were civilians.
But one aspect often escapes attention, and it’s a program with echoes of Guatemala in 1953, Iraq in 1963, and Indonesia in 1965.
A Cuban exile named Felix Rodriguez fought at the Bay of Pigs invasion; then, he joined the CIA and led the operation that hunted down and executed Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967; when finished there, he went to Vietnam to work in the super-secret Phoenix Program.8
At least, they found justification for staying out of the way as communists were annihilated, as they often had before.
This didn’t happen. Because they didn’t sign, they had their passports revoked and lost their citizenship—which is to say, they lost their country.
Gde would only hear this full story when he was able to return to Indonesia thirty years later.
The Cuban exiles were wealthy and reckless, driving impressive cars around the country.
Within three months they carried out Operation Cleanup, or Operación Limpieza, which kidnapped, tortured, and executed thirty prominent left-wing figures in March 1966,
It’s believed the events of 1965–66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.20 In 1965, two men with direct knowledge of US activities in Indonesia arrived in Guatemala City. Historians who study violence in Latin America believe that 1966 in Guatemala was the first time the region suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.21
“The savage Indonesian reactionaries will ultimately face the harsh judgment of history.”28
Just weeks previously, the world’s largest unarmed communist party had held considerable influence in the huge country across the South China Sea. Mao and Zhou Enlai had encouraged the Indonesian leftists to arm the people.29 It did not. Then overnight, hidden right-wing elements emerged to kill them all and turn a left-leaning anti-imperialist nation into an ally of Washington. It would be the perfect propaganda tale to invent, if it were not all true.
Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation.
In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing
in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.
comprising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world.
“the only credible political power in Indonesia.” And David Rockefeller made some very encouraging final remarks: “I have talked with a good many people over the course of the last couple days and I think I have found universal enthusiasm.”33
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and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves.38
By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement was in disarray, if not destroyed.
the only path to revolution was protracted guerrilla struggle.
the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.”
“a murderer like [Indonesian Foreign Minister] Adam Malik could even become President of the UN General Assembly.”
