Robert Cribb and Michele Ford
In the course of little more than five months from late 1965 to early 1966, anti-communist Indonesians killed about half a million of their fellow citizens. Nearly all the victims were associated with Indonesia’s Left, especially with the Communist Party (PKI) that had risen to unprecedented national prominence under President Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. The massacres were presided over and often coordinated or carried out by anti-communist sections of the Indonesian army, but they also engaged wider elements of Indonesian society – both people who had reason to fear communist power and people who wanted to establish clear anti-communist credentials in troubled times.
The killings followed a coup which took place in Jakarta on the morning of 1 October 1965 in which six senior army generals were killed and a revolutionary council was formed, seizing power from Sukarno. For the whole of the New Order period, Indonesian authorities portrayed these events as a communist grab for power, which was to be followed by the wholesale slaughter of their opponents. Sceptics, by contrast, doubted the PKI’s involvement and even wondered whether the coup might have been a ‘black’ operation by conservative forces, intended to compromise the Party. Recent research, especially by John Roosa, who writes for this issue, has shown that the PKI leadership was closely involved in the coup, but that the aims of the operation were far more limited than a seizure of power.
Click here for the full article: Inside Indonesia: The Killings of 1965-66
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