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Indonesia's Killing Fields
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One Day, Son, All This Will Be Yours... Suharto pictured with son Tommy,
then 5, in 1968. The Suharto family were among the biggest beneficiaries of
the wave of economic growth presided over by the president following the
bloodbath of 1965-6. (AP
photo/Warbung/stf)
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The West remained silent as Indonesia's army and its civilian militia went
from town to town, rounding up suspected communists and ordering them to
dig their own graves before killing them; sometimes decapitating the bodies
and displaying the skulls. Teachers and other civic leaders were forced to
draw up death lists of influential townsfolk (which many of them did in
order to save themselves and others); while, in the words of a subsequent
British intelligence report, the victims were "often no more than bewildered
peasants who give the wrong answer on a dark night to bloodthirsty
hooligans bent on violence." Eventually -- whipped up by the official
anti-Beijing propaganda -- the mobs turned on masses of apolitical
Indonesians of Chinese origins.
Robert F. Kennedy's was a lone voice when he said, at the height of the
putsch, "We have spoken out against inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the
Nazis and the communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman
slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have been not
perpetrators, but victims?" Most of Washington wasn't going to lose any
sleep over dead Reds; not in 1965, the year U.S. combat troops first
arrived in Viet Nam. Indonesia, after all, was a critical "domino" and had
been saved by Suharto from falling to the Chinese.
Caught in a swirl of social and economic turmoil, President Sukarno -- the
nationalist-minded first president of independent Indonesia -- had governed
by playing the military and the increasingly influential communists off
against each other. It was a center that could not hold, and while the West
looked to its allies in the military to hold the line against further
communist advance in Asia, Beijing rubbed its hands in anticipation of the
PKI delivering Indonesia into Sino-communist orbit.
The exact events surrounding the overthrow of President Sukarno. . . (continued)
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