|
Today's
Stories
November 5
/ 6, 2005
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Missing
the Bus: When Conscience Bows to Calculation
November 4,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Blood
on the Tundra, Betrayal in the Rotunda: Losing ANWR
Dave Lindorff
A Majority Now Favors Impeachment: If He Lied, He Must Be Tried
Phillip Cryan
Crackdown
in Colombia
Christopher Brauchli
Katrina and Tax Breaks for the Very Rich
William S.
Lind
Exit Strategy: You Can't Stay the Course in a Lost War
Daryl G. Kimball
Of Madmen and Nukes
George Beres
Laurels for Negroponte?
Peter Montague
Why We Can't Prevent Cancer
November 3,
2005
James Petras
The
Libby Affair and the Internal War
Saul Landau
Torn
Families and Shot Down Planes: a Cuba Story
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
An Occurrence at Gretna Bridge
Michael Dickinson
Bang! Bang! You're Deaf! Sonic Weapons Over Palestine
Joshua Frank
Sham Behind Closed Doors
Remi Kanazi
Dancing with Perseverance
Reza Fiyouzat
Taxation or Racketeering?
Website of the Day
CIA Leak Investigation: Bigger Fish, Deeper Water?
November 2,
2005
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Holy
Alito!: Not as Crazy as Scalia, But Just as Bad
Robert Oscar Lopez
Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy
John Walsh
The Philosophy of Mendacity: From Leo Strauss to Scooter Libby
Brian J. Foley
Why Most Americans Don't Care About Gitmo (and Why They Should)
Ramzy Baroud
Rolling Back Syria
M. Junaid Alam
What Moral Values?
Todd Chretien
Judgment Day for the Governator
Bruce K. Gagnon
The Democrats' Slap Happy Day
Website of the Day
Hands Off Dave!
November 1,
2005
Ron Jacobs
An
Interview with Kent State's Dave Airhart
Gary Leupp
The Plame Affair Leads to Rome
John Ross
Days
of the Dead on the Border
Bill Quigley
Why
Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town?
Joseph Nevins
From a Boundary of Death to One of Life
Dave Lindorff
Thinking About Impeachment
Linda S. Heard
Bashing Syria: Another Trojan Horse from the UN?
Heather Gray
Thank You, Mrs. Parks
Michael Dickinson
To Di For: Charlie and Camilla Cross the Pond
Jeffrey St. Clair
Kent State: Wise Up and Back Off
October 31,
2005
Elaine Cassel
Libby's
Lies
Mark Weisbrot
Pop Goes the Bubble: Bernancke and the Fed
Mike Whitney
Carry On, Patrick Fitzgerald
Norman Solomon
After the Libby Indictment, the Press Acquits Itself
Farooq Sulehria
Trading Weapons While Kashmir Burns
Nicole Colson
Scapegoating Immigrants
Madis Senner
Dhafir Sentenced to 22 Years: Another Erosion of Civil Rights
Paul Craig
Roberts
Scooter
and the Neocons
October 29 / 30, 2005
Cockburn /
St. Clair
The
Libby Indictment: Gotterdammerung for the Bushies?
Peter Linebaugh
The
Wedges of Hephaestus
Tim Wise
Framing the Poor: Katrina, Conservative Myth-Making and the Media
John Chuckman
Bushspeak: Dark and Garbled Words
Steven Higgs
Green Hoosiers: Forging a New Democracy in the Heartland
Brian Cloughley
The Fifth Afghan War
M. Shahid Alam
Israel and the Consequences of Uniqueness
Nikki Robinson
Crack Down at Kent State
Ralph Nader
Let the PIRGs Begin!: Student Activism Thrives
Joe DeRaymond
Requiem for Bethlehem Steel?
Joshua Frank
Karl's Great Escape: Did Rove Rat on Scooter?
Laura Santina
Tongue-Tied on Iraq: Why Aren't the Dems Screaming Bloody Murder?
Fred Gardner
Death of an Organizer
Michael Dickinson
Insult Your Country
Ron Jacobs
Autumn in America
Dr. Susan Block
Fear and Sex: a Halloween Greeting
Vanessa S. Jones
Self-Portrait, 1994. Bronte Beach
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Marbet, Gardner, Ford, Albert, Engel, Krieger & St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Red State Update
October 28,
2005
Jared Bernstein
Inflation
Up; Wages Down: Fastest Decline in Wages on Record
Virginia Tilley
Embracing
the Anti-Aparthied Movement in Israel/Palestine
Phil Gasper
The
Race to Execute Tookie Williams
Jennifer Matsui
It's Mardi Graft Time!
Manual Garcia,
Jr.
Is the US Really Against Torture?
Monica Benderman
In the Name of Justice
Jason Leopold
Fitzgerald
Focuses on the Forgeries
Dave Lindorff
Suddenly, Bush Endorses Right of Fair Trials
Otober 27, 2005
Saul Landau
The
Scandal Isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War
Stuart Hodkinson
Bono
and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa" Oh No, They Didn't!
Ingmar Lee
Stop
the Troops!: No Glory or Honor in Iraq
Lila Rajiva
License
to Bill: Gates Does India
Ilan Pappe
The
Last Moment of Hope
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Waiting for Fitzgerald
Michael Donnelly
Look Who's Talking Now: the GOP on Perjury
Ron Jacobs
Escape the Weight of Your Corporate Logo
Cockburn / St. Clair
White House in Meltdown
October 26,
2005
Kathy Kelly
For
Whom They Toll
Gary Leupp
Dialectics
of the Plame Affair
Mike Marqusee
Empire of Denial
Eric Ruder
War Crimes in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Constitutionally Divided Nation
Joshua Frank
Fitzgerald v. the Bushies: Hold Your Elation in Check
J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
The Legacy of Rosa Parks
Website of
the Day
Decent Work in America: the 2005 Work Environment Index
October 25,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
and Syrian Regime Change: Could Somebody Recommend a President?
Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn
Attack on the Palestine Hotel
Conn Hallinan
Sleight of Hand: Iran, India and the US
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Pulling the Court Strings
Jackie Corr
Barbara Bush: Poster Gorgon of the Houston Astros
Robert Day
Talk to Strangers
John Sugg
Judith
Miller and Me
October 24,
2005
Dave Lindorff
Revoke
Judy Miller's Pulitzer
Michael Donnelly
Shades of Iran/contra
Patrick Cockburn
A Nation Stands on Trial
Mike Whitney
Apres Rove
Norman Solomon
Iraq is Not Vietnam, But...
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Palestine
October 22
/ 23, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
When
Divas Collide: Maureen Dowd v. Judy Miller
Billy Sothern
Letter
from the Circle Bar, New Orleans
Saul Landau
Bush, an Assessment
Ralph Nader
An
Open Letter to Bush on Harriet Miers
Behrooz Ghamari
Whose Justice Does Saddam's Trial Serve?
Brian Cloughley
Bush the Strategist: Pyrrhus Without a Victory?
Diana Barahona
Venezuela's National Workers' Union
Fred Gardner
Dershowitzed!
Lee Sustar
What the War on Terror is Really About
Patrick Cockburn
Murder of Saddam Trial Defense Lawyer
Laura Carlsen
Mexico City Seamstresses Recall 1985 Quake
James Petras
China Bashing and the Loss of US Competitiveness
Joshua Frank
Invading Iran: Who is to Stop Them?
Manuel Garcia,
Jr.
Disasters are Us
Michelle Bollinger
When Abortion Was Illegal
Missy Comley
Beattie
CSI: Iraq
Kona Lowell
Intelligent Design: Making High School Fun
Ben Tripp
Tanks for the Memories
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening To This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert and Engel
Website of
the Day
Indictment Watch
October 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
The
Democrats' Abortion Hypocrisy
Winslow T. Wheeler
Paying for Their Mistakes: Incompetence, Deception and the Defense
Budget
Col. Dan Smith
The Destruction of the National Guard
Norman Solomon
Media at Crossroads: 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph
Madis Senner
Abusing Katrina
Michael Donnelly
Richard
Pombo: DeLay in Cowboy Boots
October 20, 2005
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment
Comes to NYC
Ray McGovern
16
Fatal Words: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost
Jeremy Brecher
/
Brendan Smith
Attack Syria? Invade Iran?: By What Constitutional Right?
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Refuses to Recognize Court
Kevin Zeese
Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed?
Ross Eisenbrey
Millions Would Lose Pay and Protections Under Enzi Amendment
Randy Shields
James McMurtry Makes It in Dayton
Justine Davidson
Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture: a Small Victory
After Lucas
Cranach
Judy and Holofernes
Joe Allen
The
Scandalous History of the Red Cross
October 19,
2005
Christopher Reed
Koizumi and the Rape of Nanking
Stephen Soldz
Bush
and Avian Flu: the Excuses Begin to Fly
Chet Richards
War
and Intelligence
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam on Trial
Scott Richard
Lyons
Multicultural
Columbus?
Ralph Nader
An Interview with Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Website of
the Day
Shocking Video: Why Birds May Be Taking Viral Vengeance on Humans
October 18,
2005
Chet Flippo
Merle
Haggard: "Let's Get Out of Iraq"
Ron Jacobs
Dual Devotions: the Catholic Church and the US Flag
Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor
A Tale of Two Cities: From DC to Toledo
Dave Lindorff
Judy Miller: Little Miss Run Amok
Virginia Rodino
A Winter Patriot: Reflections on the Antiwar Movement
Thomas Healy
The Weather in Goshen: Still Radical After All These Years
Ralph Nader
A New New Orleans
Stephen Lendman
The Sorrows of Haiti
Patrick Cockburn
On the Eve of Saddam's Trial: a Divided Iraq
October 17,
2005
Peter Linebaugh
Spinoza
and the Black Limos
Norman Solomon
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
Cockburn /
Sengupta
"If
the Sunnis Don't Like It, That's Their Problem"
Mike Whitney
Miller's Confession: Last Gasp Before Indictments?
Uri Avnery
Iraq Now: What Awaits Samira?
Harold Pinter
Torture & Misery in the Name of Freedom
Website of
the Day
Al Joudi v. Bush
October 15
/ 16, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ayatollahs
of the Apocalypse
Patrick Cockburn
"This Constitution Won't Get Me a Job"
Saul Landau
Two Terrorists and a Lush: Osama, Posada and Bush's Drinking
Neve Gordon
"Beyond Chutzpah": Exposing Grave Moral Distortions
Moshe Adler
Poverty in New York City
Christopher Brauchli
Lynndie England's Burden
Diane Farsetta
The Emperor Doesn't Disclose: the Fight Against Fake News
Sam Husseini
Notes on Current Reporting About Judith Miller
Monica Benderman
From Chaos to Conscience to Peace
Mickey Z.
POW Abuse by US: Nothing New Going On Here
Douglas C.
Smyth
George W. Bush, the Honorius of Our Time
Lee Sustar
Will Delphi Bust the UAW?
Fred Gardner
Cannabinoids Arrive in Realm of Established Fact
Elizabeth Schulte
A Former Panther's Georgia Campaign: an Interview with Elaine
Brown
Joshua Frank
Will the Democrats Save Harriet Miers?
David Vest
Down with Formalism! Up with Values!
Ben Tripp
Epistle II: the Reawakenign
Poets Basement
Engel, Albert, Ford and Louise
Website of
the Weekend
The
Hidden Canyon
October 14,
2005
Farrah Hassen
A
Somber Ramadan in Syria
Ron Jacobs
The
Black Panthers: They Haven't Forgotten; Neither Should We
Sasha Kramer
USAID
and Haiti: the Friendly Face of Imperialism?
Katrina Yeaw
The Student Struggle in Italy
Nicole Colson
Bird Flu: Militarizing Health Care
Raúl Zibechi
Survival and Existence in El Alto
Nikolas Kozloff
Hugo
Chávez and the Politics of Race
Website of the Day
LA Filmmakers Cooperative
October 13, 2005
Jeremy Scahill
Mr.
Bush Goes to Tikrit (Sort Of)
Jeff Birkenstein
A
Thoreau for Our Time: Why Cindy Sheehan Matters
Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher
Harriet Miers: Bush or the Constitution?
Stan Cox
Did You Know This About Iraq?
Anis Memon
The Curious Case of Russ Feingold
Gary Leupp
Miller, Libby and the June Notes
Dave Zirin
A Tribute to August Wilson
Matthew Koehler
America's Endangered Forests
Werther
The
Two-Headed Monster
Website of
the Day
Hurricane Song
October 12, 2005
Omar Waraich
Britain
and the Quake: Mean and Stingy
William Cook
Voices
Behind the Entombment Wall
Phil Gasper
Countdown
to a Legal Lynching
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls
Matt Vidal
Capital, Power and Class
John Gautreaux
New Orleans will Never be the Same
Diana Johnstone
Srebrenica
Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War
Mark Weisbrot
The IMF Has Lost Its Influence
Brian J. Foley
Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety
Website of
the Day
Columbus Day Lies
October 11,
2005
Roger Morris
/ Steve Schmidt
Strategic
Demands of the 21st Century
Lila Rajiva
Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib
Bill Quigley
New
Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again
Paul Craig Roberts
Natural Born Liars
Dave Lindorff
Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Suspect Thy Neighbor
Mitchel Cohen
Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese
Tariq Ali
Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror
Website of
the Day
L'Heure Americaine
October 10,
2005
Cindy and Craig
Corrie
Rachel's
Words Live
Joshua Frank
Washington's War Dems
Gideon Levy
The Beautiful Life Without Arafat
Alan Wallis
The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square
Mickey Z.
In Defense of Liars
CounterPunch News Service
Vermont Independence Convention
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Police State is Closer Than You Think
Website of the Day
Dylan's Chronicles
October 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Rhetoric
and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People
Ralph Nader
Katrina
and the Growls of Greed
Jennifer Van Bergen
New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case
Saul Landau
An Oily Religious Dream
Jeff Halper
Setting Up Abbas
Lenni Brenner
The Millions More Movement and Zionism
Nikolas Kozloff
Bird Flu and Bush
Brian Cloughley
Training Soldiers in Iraq
Alice Slater
A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl?
John Gautreaux
A View from Cajun Country
Fred Gardner
Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Leveethan Approach
M.G. Piety
Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard
Tom Gorman
The Hitchens Doctrine
Mike Whitney
Bunker Days with George
Aseem Shrivastava
Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan
Ben Tripp
Religion, an Epistle
Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Ford
October 7,
2005
Larry Johnson
The
Plame Case: the Real Issues
Will Youmans
Why
Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus
Dave Lindorff
Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design?
Judith Scherr
Haiti's Children's Prison
Russell D. Hoffman
Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle
Jared Bernstein
Katrina and Jobs
Jennifer Van
Bergen
New
American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir
Website of
the Day
FBI Witchhunt
October 6, 2005
P. Sainath
"Take
That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal
Idol Again
Scott Parkin
When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged
Paul Craig
Roberts
Blundering
into Syria
Andréa Schmidt
Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion
Dave Lindorff
Easy
Money in the Big Easy
Joshua Frank
In Defense of Lew Rockwell
M. Junaid Alam
Jackboots at George Mason
Matthew Koehler
Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot
Robert Pollin
Is
the Dollar Still Falling?
October 5,
2005
Heather Gray
Militarization is Not an Answer for
Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines
Robert Jensen
Is
Bush a Racist?
Ramzy Baroud
Bush's Final Choice: America or
the Empire
Col. Dan Smith
Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything
is Bad"
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds Laughs Last
Paul Craig Roberts
Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons
Took Over
Alan Maass
Doing
the Right Wing's Dirty Work
October 4, 2005
Nikolas Kozloff
Shocking the Two Party System:
a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt.
Mike Roselle
Houston,
You've Got a Problem
Joshua Frank
The Scoop on Harriet Miers
John Chuckman
War
Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say
Alan Farago
Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers,
Hurricanes and the Keys
Mickey Z.
An
Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski
Christine & Ethan Rose
Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims
Gary Leupp
An
Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History
Website of the Day
Rodney
Crowell on Bob Dylan
October 3,
2005
Vijay Prashad
Desperation at Holyoke
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
Rice: Gunslinger
Joshua Frank
An Interview with Cindy Sheehan
Seth Sandronsky
The
Hiring Crisis for Black Teens
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Great Green Scare
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November 5 / 6, 2005
40
Years Later
The Mass Killings
in Indonesia
By JOHN ROOSA and JOSEPH
NEVINS
"One of the worst mass murders of the
twentieth century." That was how a CIA publication described
the killings that began forty years ago last month in Indonesia.
It was one of the few statements in the text that was correct.
The 300-page text was devoted to blaming the victims of the killings
-- the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) --
for their own deaths. The PKI had supposedly attempted a coup
d'état and a nationwide uprising called the September
30th Movement (which, for some unknown reason, began on October
1). The mass murder of hundreds of thousands of the party's supporters
over subsequent months was thus a natural, inevitable, and justifiable
reaction on the part of those non-communists who felt threatened
by the party's violent bid for state power. The killings were
part of the "backfire" referred to in the title: Indonesia
1965: The Coup that Backfired. The author of this 1968
report, later revealed to be Helen Louise Hunter, acknowledged
the massive scale of the killings only to dismiss the necessity
for any detailed consideration of them. She concentrated on proving
that the PKI was responsible for the September 30th Movement
while consigning the major issue, the anti-PKI atrocities, to
a brief, offhanded comment. [1]
Hunter's CIA report accurately
expressed the narrative told by the Indonesian army commanders
as they organized the slaughter. That narrative rendered the
September 30th Movement a disorganized, small-scale affair
that lasted about 48 hours and resulted in a grand total of 12
deaths, among them six army generals into the greatest
evil ever to befall Indonesia [2]. The commander of the army,
Major General Suharto, justified his acquisition of emergency
powers in late 1965 and early 1966 by insisting that the September
30th Movement was a devious conspiracy by the PKI to seize state
power and murder all of its enemies. Suharto's martial law regime
detained some 1.5 million people as political prisoners (for
varying lengths of time), and accused them of being "directly
or indirectly involved in the September 30th Movement."
The hundreds of thousands of people shot, stabbed, bludgeoned,
or starved to death were labeled perpetrators, or would-be perpetrators
of atrocities, just as culpable for the murder of the army generals
as the handful of people who were truly guilty.
The September 30th Movement
was Suharto's Reichstag fire: a pretext for destroying the communist
party and seizing state power. As with the February 1933 fire
in the German parliament that Hitler used to create a hysterical,
crisis-filled atmosphere, the September 30th Movement was exaggerated
by Suharto's clique of officers until it assumed the proportions
of a wild, vicious, supernatural monster. The army whipped up
an anti-communist propaganda campaign from the early days of
October 1965: "the PKI" had castrated and tortured
the seven army officers it had abducted in Jakarta, danced naked
and slit the bodies of the army officers with a hundred razor
blades, drawn up hit lists, dug thousands of ditches around the
country to hold countless corpses, stockpiled guns imported from
China, and so on. The army banned many newspapers and put the
rest under army censorship. It was precisely this work of the
army's psychological warfare specialists that created the conditions
in which the mass murder of "the PKI" seemed justified.
The question as to whether
or not the PKI actually organized the September 30th Movement
is important only because the Suharto regime made it important.
Otherwise, it is irrelevant. Even if the PKI had nothing whatsoever
to do with the movement, the army generals would have blamed
the party for it. As it was, they made their case against the
PKI largely on the basis of the transcripts of the interrogations
of those movement participants who hadn't already been summarily
executed. Given that the army used torture as standard operating
procedure for interrogations, the statements of the suspects
cannot be trusted. Hunter's CIA report, primarily based on those
transcripts, is as reliable as an Inquisition text on witchcraft.
The PKI as a whole was clearly
not responsible for the September 30th Movement. The party's
three million members did not participate in it. If they had,
it would not have been such a small-scale affair. The party chairman,
D.N. Aidit, however, does seem to have played a key role. He
was summarily and secretly executed in late 1965, as were two
of the three other core Politburo leaders (Lukman and Njoto),
before they could provide their accounts. The one among them
who survived the initial terror, the general secretary of the
party, Sudisman, admitted in the military's kangaroo court in
1967 that the PKI as an institution knew nothing of the September
30th Movement but that certain leaders were involved in a personal
capacity. If the movement's leaders had been treated as the leaders
of previous revolts against the postcolonial government, they
would have been arrested, put on trial, and sentenced. All the
members of their organizations would not have been imprisoned
or massacred.
With so little public discussion
and so little scholarly research about the 1965-66 mass killings,
they remain poorly understood. Many people outside of Indonesia
believe that the victims were primarily Indonesian Chinese. While
some Indonesian Chinese were among the victims, they were by
no means the majority. The violence targeted members of the PKI
and the various organizations either allied to the party or sympathetic
to it, whatever ethnicity they happened to be: Javanese, Balinese,
Sundanese, etc. It was not a case of ethnic cleansing. Many people
imagine that the killings were committed by frenzied mobs rampaging
through villages and urban neighborhoods. But recent oral history
research suggests that most of the killings were executions of
detainees. [3] Much more research is needed before one can arrive
at definitive conclusions.
President Sukarno, the target
of the PKI's alleged coup attempt, compared the army's murderous
violence against those labeled PKI to a case of someone "burning
down the house to kill a rat." He routinely protested the
army's exaggerations of the September 30th Movement. It was,
he said, nothing more than "a ripple in the wide ocean."
His inability or unwillingness to muster anything more than rhetorical
protests, however, ultimately doomed his rule. In March 1966,
Suharto grabbed the authority to dismiss, appoint, and arrest
cabinet ministers, even while maintaining Sukarno as figurehead
president until March 1967. The great orator who had led the
nationalist struggle against the Dutch, the cosmopolitan visionary
of the Non-Aligned Movement, was outmaneuvered by a taciturn,
uneducated, thuggish, corrupt army general from a Javanese village.
Suharto, a relative nobody
in Indonesian politics, moved against the PKI and Sukarno with
the full support of the U.S. government. Marshall Green, American
ambassador to Indonesia at the time, wrote that the embassy had
"made clear" to the army that Washington was "generally
sympathetic with and admiring" of its actions. [4] U.S.
officials went so far as to express concern in the days following
the September 30th Movement that the army might not do enough
to annihilate the PKI. [5] The U.S. embassy supplied radio equipment,
walkie-talkies, and small arms to Suharto so that his troops
could conduct the nationwide assault on civilians. [6] A diligent
embassy official with a penchant for data collection did his
part by handing the army a list of thousands of names of PKI
members. [7] Such moral and material support was much appreciated
in the Indonesian army. As an aide to the army's chief of staff
informed U.S. embassy officials in October 1965, "This was
just what was needed by way of assurances that we weren't going
to be hit from all angles as we moved to straighten things out
here."[8]
This collaboration between
the U.S. and the top army brass in 1965 was rooted in Washington's
longstanding wish to have privileged and enhanced access to Southeast
Asia's resource wealth. Many in Washington saw Indonesia as the
region's centerpiece. Richard Nixon characterized the country
as "containing the region's richest hoard of natural resources"
and "by far the greatest prize in the South-East Asian area."
[9] Two years earlier, in a 1965 speech in Asia, Nixon had argued
in favor of bombing North Vietnam to protect Indonesia's "immense
mineral potential." [10] But obstacles to the realization
of Washington's geopolitical-economic vision arose when the Sukarno
government emerged upon independence in Indonesia. Sukarno's
domestic and foreign policy was nationalist, nonaligned, and
explicitly anti-imperialist. Moreover, his government had a working
relationship with the powerful PKI, which Washington feared would
eventually win national elections.
Eisenhower's administration
attempted to break up Indonesia and sabotage Sukarno's presidency
by supporting secessionist revolts in 1958.[11] When that criminal
escapade of the Dulles brothers failed, the strategists in Washington
reversed course and began backing the army officers of the central
government. The new strategy was to cultivate anti-communist
officers who could gradually build up the army as a shadow government
capable of replacing President Sukarno and eliminating the PKI
at some future date. The top army generals in Jakarta bided their
time and waited for the opportune moment for what U.S. strategists
called a final "showdown" with the PKI. [12] That moment
came on October 1, 1965.
The destruction of the PKI
and Sukarno's ouster resulted in a dramatic shift in the regional
power equation, leading Time magazine to hail Suharto's
bloody takeover as "The West's best news for years in Asia."
[13] Several years later, the U.S. Navy League's publication
gushed over Indonesia's new role in Southeast Asia as "that
strategic area's unaggressive, but stern, monitor," while
characterizing the country as "one of Asia's most highly
developed nations and endowed by chance with what is probably
the most strategically authoritative geographic location on earth."
[14] Among other things, the euphoria reflected just how lucrative
the changing of the guard in Indonesia would prove to be for
Western business interests.
Suharto's clique of army officers
took power with a long-term economic strategy in mind. They expected
the legitimacy of their new regime would derive from economic
growth and that growth would derive from bringing in Western
investment, exporting natural resources to Western markets, and
begging for Western aid. Suharto's vision for the army was not
in terms of defending the nation against foreign aggression but
defending foreign capital against Indonesians. He personally
intervened in a meeting of cabinet ministers in December 1965
that was discussing the nationalization of the oil companies
Caltex and Stanvac. Soon after the meeting began, he suddenly
arrived by helicopter, entered the chamber, and declared, as
the gleeful U.S. embassy account has it, that the military "would
not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies."
Faced with such a threat, the cabinet indefinitely postponed
the discussion. [15] At the same time, Suharto's army was jailing
and killing union leaders at the facilities of U.S. oil companies
and rubber plantations. [16]
Once Suharto decisively sidelined
Sukarno in March 1966, the floodgates of foreign aid opened up.
The U.S. shipped large quantities of rice and cloth for the explicit
political purpose of shoring up his regime. Falling prices were
meant to convince Indonesians that Suharto's rule was an improvement
over Sukarno's. The regime's ability over the following years
to sustain economic growth via integration with Western capital
provided whatever legitimacy it had. Once that pattern of growth
ended with the capital flight of the 1997 Asian economic crisis,
the regime's legitimacy quickly vanished. Middle class university
students, the fruits of economic growth, played a particularly
important role in forcing Suharto from office. The Suharto regime
lived by foreign capital and died by foreign capital.
By now it is clear that the
much ballyhooed economic growth of the Suharto years was severely
detrimental to the national interest. The country has little
to show for all the natural resources sold on the world market.
Payments on the foreign and domestic debt, part of it being the
odious debt from the Suharto years, swallow up much of the government's
budget. With health care spending at a minimum, epidemic and
preventable diseases are rampant. There is little domestic industrial
production. The forests from which military officers and Suharto
cronies continue to make fortunes are being cut down and burned
up at an alarming rate. The country imports huge quantities of
staple commodities that could be easily produced on a larger
scale in Indonesia, such as sugar, rice, and soybeans. The main
products of the villages now are migrant laborers, or "the
heroes of foreign exchange," to quote from a lighted sign
at the Jakarta airport.
Apart from the pillaging of
Indonesia's resource base, the Suharto regime caused an astounding
level of unnecessary suffering. At his command, the Indonesian
military invaded neighboring East Timor in 1975 after receiving
a green light from President Gerald Ford and his secretary of
state, Henry Kissinger. The result was an occupation that lasted
for almost 24 years and left a death toll of tens of thousands
of East Timorese. Within Indonesia proper, the TNI committed
widespread atrocities during counterinsurgency campaigns in the
resource-rich provinces of West Papua and Aceh, resulting in
tens of thousands of additional fatalities.
With Suharto's forced resignation
in 1998, significant democratic space has opened in Indonesia.
There are competitive national and local elections. Victims of
the "New Order" and their families are able to organize.
There is even an official effort to create a national truth commission
to investigate past atrocities. Nevertheless, the military still
looms large over the country's political system. As such, there
has not been a thorough investigation of any of the countless
massacres that took place in 1965-66. History textbooks still
focus on the September 30th Movement and make no mention of the
massacres. Similarly, no military or political leaders have
been held responsible for the Suharto-era crimes (or those that
have taken place since), thus increasing the likelihood of future
atrocities. This impunity is a source of continuing worry for
Indonesia's civil society and restless regions, as well as poverty-stricken,
now-independent East Timor. It is thus not surprising that the
government of the world's newest country feels compelled to play
down demands for justice by its citizenry and emphasize an empty
reconciliation process with Indonesia. Meanwhile in the United
States, despite political support and billions of dollars in
U.S. weaponry, military training and economic assistance to Jakarta
over the preceding four decades, Washington's role in Indonesia's
killing fields of 1965-66 and subsequent brutality has been effectively
buried, thus enabling the Bush administration's current efforts
to further ties with Indonesia's military, as part of the global
"war on terror." [17] Suharto's removal from office
has not led to radical changes in Indonesia's state and economy.
Sukarno used to indict Dutch
colonialism by saying that Indonesia was "a nation of coolies
and a coolie among nations." Thanks to the Suharto years,
that description remains true. The principles of economic self-sufficiency,
prosperity, and international recognition for which the nationalist
struggle was fought now seem as remote as ever. It is encouraging
that many Indonesians are now recalling Sukarno's fight against
Western imperialism (first the Netherlands and then the U.S.)
after experiencing the misery that Suharto's strategy of collaboration
has wrought. In his "year of living dangerously" speech
in August 1964 a phrase remembered in the West as just
the title of a 1982 movie with Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver
Sukarno spoke about the Indonesian ideal of national independence
struggling to stay afloat in "an ocean of subversion and
intervention from the imperialists and colonialists." Suharto's
U.S.-assisted takeover of state power forty years ago last month
drowned that ideal in blood, but it might just rise again during
the ongoing economic crisis that is endangering the lives of
so many Indonesians.
John Roosa is an assistant professor of history at the
University of British Columbia, and is the author of Pretext
for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup
d'État in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press,
forthcoming in 2006).
Joseph Nevins is an assistant professor of geography
at Vassar College, and is the author of A Not-so-distant Horror:
Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University Press, 2005).
They may be reached at: jonevins@pop.vassar.edu
Notes
1. A former CIA agent who worked
in Southeast Asia, Ralph McGehee, noted in his memoir that the
agency compiled a separate report about the events of 1965, one
that reflected its agents' honest opinions, for its own in-house
readership. McGehee's description of it was heavily censored
by the agency when it vetted an account he first published in
the April 11, 1981 edition of The Nation. Deadly Deceits:
My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square, 1983),
pp. 57-58. Two articles in the agency's internal journal Studies
in Intelligence have been declassified: John T. Pizzicaro,
"The 30 September Movement in Indonesia," (Fall 1969);
Richard Cabot Howland, "The Lessons of the September 30
Affair," (Fall 1970). The latter is available online: http://www.odci.gov/csi/kent_csi/docs/v14i2a02p_0001.htm
2. In Jakarta, the movement's
troops abducted and killed six army generals and a lieutenant
taken by mistake from the house of the seventh who avoided capture.
In the course of these abductions, a five year-old daughter of
a general, a teenaged nephew of another general, and a security
guard were killed. In Central Java, two army colonels were abducted
and killed.
3. John Roosa, Ayu Ratih, and
Hilmar Farid, eds. Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami
Pengalaman Korban 65; Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan [The Year that
Never Ended: Understanding the Experiences of the Victims of
1965; Oral History Essays] (Jakarta: Elsam, 2004). Also consider
the massacre investigated in Chris Hilton's very good documentary
film Shadowplay (2002).
4. Telegram from the Embassy
in Indonesia to Department of State, November 4, 1965, in United
States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1964-1968, vol. 26, p. 354. This FRUS volume
is available online at the National Security Archive website:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/#FRUS
5. Telegram from the Embassy
in Jakarta to Department of State, October 14, 1965. Quoted in
Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence
in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 283.
6. Frederick Bunnell, "American
'Low Posture' Policy Toward Indonesia in the Months Leading up
to the 1965 'Coup'," Indonesia, 50 (October 1990),
p. 59.
7. Kathy Kadane, "Ex-agents
say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians," San Francisco
Examiner, May 20, 1990, available online at http://www.pir.org/kadane.html
8. CIA Report no. 14 to the
White House (from Jakarta), October 14, 1965. Cited in Robinson,
The Dark Side of Paradise, p. 283.
9. Richard Nixon, "Asia
After Viet Nam," Foreign Affairs (October 1967),
p. 111.
10. Quoted in Peter Dale Scott,
"Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the
Overthrow of Sukarno," in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten
Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham (U.K.): Bertrand
Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books, 1975), p. 241.
11. Audrey R. Kahin and George
McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower
and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: The New Press,
1995), p. 1.
12. Bunnell, "American
'Low Posture' Policy," pp. 34, 43, 53-54.
13. Time, July 15, 1966.
Also see Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues
(Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 123-131.
14. Lawrence Griswold, "Garuda
and the Emerald Archipelago: Strategic Indonesia Forges New Ties
with the West," Sea Power (Navy League of the United
States), vol. 16, no. 2 (1973), pp. 20, 25.
15. Telegram 1787 from Jakarta
to State Department, December 16, 1965, cited in Brad Simpson,
"Modernizing Indonesia: U.S.Indonesian Relations, 1961-1967,"
(Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Northwestern University,
2003), p. 343.
16. Hilmar Farid, "Indonesia's
Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion 1965-66,"
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (March 2005).
17. For information on U.S.-Indonesia
military ties, see the website of the East Timor Indonesia Action
Network at http://www.etan.org/
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