‘US knew about Indonesia massacres’

JAKARTA: The United States government had intimate knowledge of the Indonesian army’s bloody anti-communist purge in the 1960s, describing the mass killings as a “widespread slaughter”, newly declassified documents have revealed.

The 39 recently declassified US Embassy documents covered the period from 1964 to 1968, at the peak of the Cold War, and uncovered new details about one of the most tumultuous periods in modern Indonesian history.

Historians said up to 500,000 alleged Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) supporters were killed between October 1965 and March 1966 by soldiers and civilian militias, after the army launched a campaign to crush the Indonesian communist party and its leaders following a failed coup.

General Suharto, who put down the coup, blamed PKI and rose to power on the back of the bloodshed, going on to lead the world’s most populous Muslim nation with an iron fist for three decades.

During his rule, the massacres were presented as necessary to rid the country of communism — Indonesia had the world’s thirdbiggest communist party after China and the Soviet Union before the killings.

The declassified documents showed how American officials across the archipelago knew of the massacres, including the complicity of prominent Muslim civil society groups in the killings.

In one telegram sent from the city of Surabaya on Nov 26, 1965 the US consul said the number of reports coming in from East Java were an “indication (of) widespread slaughter”, adding that as many as 15,000 communists might have been murdered in a single massacre. AFP