Massacre in Indonesia 1965–1966

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The massacres in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966 affected members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and citizens of Chinese origin . The perpetrators were parts of the Indonesian army and specially trained militias under the command of General and later President Suharto .

The systematic mass murder began in October 1965, depending on the estimate, 500,000 to 3 million people fell victim to it. The destruction of the PKI followed an alleged coup attempt by the so-called September 30th movement several weeks earlier, on October 1st, 1965. The communist party was blamed for this in a media campaign and stylized as the nation's main enemy. Large numbers of civilians participated in the killing. The military provided specially organized paramilitary death squads to annihilate the communistsfrom the members of other political and also religious movements together. The global polarization and influence of the conflicting parties in the Cold War on the Indonesian military, especially on the part of the US CIA, played an essential role in the systematic mass murder against the left spectrum in Indonesia .

General Suharto at the funeral of the generals who were killed in the coup attempt that preceded the massacre.

It is now considered certain that the coup allegations against the PKI were false; however, the actual responsibilities are unclear. To date there has been neither a criminal investigation of the events nor independent state investigations. Rather, the events in official Indonesian historiography are viewed as heroic acts that served to protect the country from communism. Accordingly, some of those involved in the murder boast of their deeds up to the present day, while people who were wrongly accused and persecuted back then still bear the stigma of the former “political prisoner”, for example through a stamp on their identity card. They are disadvantaged and discriminated against in various ways in everyday life.

After the extensive destruction of the Communist Party, the dictatorship of General Suharto began in 1966 , who replaced the founder of the state Sukarno and ruled until 1998. The version of the PKI's sole guilt for the coup and the mass murder as “saving the fatherland” formed a kind of founding myth for the Suharto regime and its state ideology of the “New Order” ( Orde Baru ). Therefore, until 1998, any criticism of the official version of the events was forbidden.

history

The occasion was an attempted coup by a previously unknown " September 30th Movement " within the Indonesian army, in which six leading generals were murdered. This attempted coup was blamed on the PKI, which at the time was the third largest communist party in the world with 3.5 million members. Shortly afterwards, the army and paramilitary units began the pogrom, which they called "Musim Parang" (season of the cleaver). After actions in Jakarta , the military initially turned to Central Java (from where parts of the coup plotters came), where civilians, some of them from Islamic organizations, who were locally classified as anti-communist , were called in by the military to provide support . Personal feuds were settled in the process, and local tensions between population groups erupted. The greatest wave of violence ended in late 1965, but it continued in more distant regions, for example in Lombok in early 1966 and in West Kalimantan in October / November 1967 and, for example, in eastern Java until 1968.

There was no significant resistance from the victims or the Communist Party.

The surviving members of the party and their sympathizers were sent to prisons or concentration camps and had to do forced labor. After their release, they were stigmatized with the letters "ET" (Ex-Tapol, Ex-political prisoner) in their passports and discriminated against by denying civil rights and professional bans .

Favorable reactions from western politics and support from the US

The crackdown on the coup and the overthrow of the Communist Party were officially welcomed in the USA and Great Britain, although the extent of the massacre was well known even then. The State Secretary (Deputy United States Under Secretary of State ) U. Alexis Johnson said z. B. 1966: "The pushing back of the communist flood in the great country of Indonesia will probably be seen as one of the most historically significant turning points in Asia in this decade, alongside the Vietnam War ."

Historian Bradley Scott said the US had long been dissatisfied with the situation in Indonesia and with President Sukarno and was unable to openly support General Suharto in the hope that the military would turn against the strong Communist Party in the country. According to Scott, the US government was also well aware of the extent and nature of the massacre and nonetheless continued to provide substantial support to the military. A list of thousands of Communist Party members was sent to Indonesia, which was later portrayed as an act of an individual. Weapons were also delivered. Covert support began in October 1965, according to official documents released, according to Scott.

Aftermath

The events were systematically transfigured in the Orde Baru and are almost unprocessed within Indonesian society. The discrimination against the victims continues to this day. Victims' associations have been fighting for education, rehabilitation and compensation for several years. A report presented in July 2012 by an investigation team to the Indonesian Human Rights Commission recognizes that the acts of violence were committed by the commanders of the security forces at the time.

R. John Hughes , who was on site in Indonesia for the Christian Science Monitor in 1965 , received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for International Coverage for his book on what went on.

The feature film A Year in Hell by Peter Weir (1982) accompanies the events from the end of June 65 until shortly after the coup. Overall, however, as the Guardian journalist John Gittings judged in 1999, the massacre met with little response in the Western media and in scientific studies.

Joshua Oppenheimer processed the statements of the perpetrators and victims into the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence in 2012 and 2014 . Both films have won several international awards.

literature

  • Robert Cribb: The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Studies from Java and Bali. In: Monash Papers on Southeast Asia. No. 21, Center of Southeast Asian Studies Monash University, Robert Cribb, 1990.
  • Robert Cribb: How many deaths? Problems in the statistics of massacre in Indonesia (1965-1966) and East Timor (1975-1980). In: Ingrid Wessel, Georgia Wimhöfer (Ed.): Violence in Indonesia. Abera, Hamburg 2001, pp. 82-98. (Abstract)
  • Robert Cribb: Genocide in Indonesia, 1965-1966. In: Journal of Genocide Research. Volume 3, June 2001, pp. 219-239.
  • John Gittings: The indonesian massacres 1965/66. In: Mark Levene, Penny Roberts: The Massacre in History. Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 247-262.
  • John Hughes: Indonesian Upheaval. David McKay publisher, 1967.
  • John Hughes: The End of Sukarno - A Coup that Misfired: A Purge that Ran Wild. Archipelago Press, 2002.
  • Anett Keller (Ed.): Indonesia 1965 ff. The presence of a mass murder , regiospectra Verlag, Berlin 2015 review
  • Annie Pohlman et al .: The Massacres of 1965-1966. New Interpretations and the Current Debate in Indonesia. Topic from Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs , Volume 32, No. 3, 2013. Article online
  • Geoffrey Basil Robinson : The Killing Season. A History of the Indonesian Massacres 1965-1966. Princeton University Press , 2018 PUP
  • Geoffrey B. Robinson: The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 , Princeton UP 2018
  • John Roosa: Pretext for mass murder, the September 30th Movement and Suharto's coup d'Etat in Indonesia. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
  • Bradley Scott: Economists with guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 , Stanford University Press 2010
  • Harry Thürk , Diethelm Weidemann: Indonesia 65th anatomy of a putsch . 2nd edition. Military publishing house of the German Democratic Republic , Berlin 1977
  • Andreas Ufen: Politics of the Past in Indonesia. The massacres of 1965–1966. GIGA Focus Asia, 3, 2014
  • Baskara T. Wardaya: Making peace with the past. The 1965 tragedy remains a dark spot in Indonesian history. In: Südostasien , 3, 2011, pp. 49–51.
  • Till Florian Tömmel: Bonn, Jakarta and the Cold War. The Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany towards Indonesia from 1952 to 1973 , Berlin / Boston (De Gruyter Oldenbourg) 2018. ISBN 978-3-11-056249-1 . ISBN 978-3-11-056555-3 . ISBN 978-3-11-056263-7
novel
  • Laksmi Pamuntjak : All colors red . Translated from the Indonesian by Martina Heinschke. Ullstein, 2015

Web links

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  1. ^ John Gittings: The indonesian massacres 1965/66. In: Mark Levene, Penny Roberts: The Massacre in History. Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 247-262.
  2. ↑ a b c Anett Keller: Suharto processing in Indonesia: A monstrous crime. In: the daily newspaper . July 26, 2012.
  3. ^ John Gittings: The Indonesian Massacres. 1999.
  4. ^ "The reversal of the Communist tide in the great country of Indonesia [is] an event that will probably rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps the most historic turning-point in Asia of this decade." Quoted from Gittings and there from Gabriel Kolko: Confronting the Third World: US foreign policy 1945–1980. New York 1988, p. 183.
  5. ↑ No country opposed the killings in Indonesia in 1965–1966 ( Memento from January 7, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ), International People's Tribunal IPT 1965, November 13, 2015, lecture by Scott
  6. ^ John Gittings, The Indonesia Massakers 65/66, 1999, Foreign Involvment section
  7. ^ Gittings, loc. cit.