Newly declassified documents reveal the US government knew about the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965 as they occurred and yet failed to act. The US Embassy in Jakarta shared “intimate” knowledge of the violence with Washington, including a list detailing whether known Communist leaders had been arrested or killed. Telegrams described religious orders to civilians “to kill suspected communists,” and how “victims [were] taken out of populous areas before being killed and bodies [were] buried rather than thrown in the river.”
Communists, the military, and Islamic groups were locked in a struggle for power when the Communists were accused of murdering six generals in an attempted coup. Less than two weeks thereafter, the Indonesian army disclosed to the US Embassy that they were planning to overthrow then-President Sukarno. Discussion of the bloodshed that ensued has been nonexistent since.
In a single year, anywhere from 500,000 to 3 million people were killed as suspected Communist sympathizers.
Many survivors were exiled to the Netherlands or Russia, while others are too frightened of retaliation to speak of their experiences. Until 1998, Indonesian youth were shown a 3-hour long documentary about the Communist coup rather than being taught accurate details of the massacre and its aftermath. Thousands were imprisoned and tortured without trial, only to be IDed as former political prisoners upon release. The label was finally taken off identification cards in 2004, but survivors and their families were still prohibited from holding government jobs, enlisting in the military, or joining the police force for another year, while their children could not attend schools or universities. Many have deserted their families in order to escape the stigma.
In 2012, director Joshua Oppenheimer released the Academy Award-nominated documentary film The Act of Killing, in which Indonesian executioners, now elderly men celebrated in their community, reenacted their crimes for the camera. The film is banned in Indonesia, where Lieutenant General Agus Widjojo claims the government does not want to “reopen the wounds.” He says, “We would like to focus on what went wrong as a society that we were able to conduct such violence and such killings in such large numbers in such a short time.”
