---------------------------------------------------------- Visit Indonesia Daily News Online HomePage: http://www.indo-news.com/ and click banner our sponsor ---------------------------------------------------------- From: Greg Butterfield ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Jan. 28, 1999 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- 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.] - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY,NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Didistribusikan tgl. 27 Jan 1999 jam 06:30:14 GMT+1 oleh: Indonesia Daily News Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.Indo-News.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
