My Take | Forgotten Washington-inspired genocide is back in the headlines

Last month, Indonesian President Joko Widodo acknowledged “gross human rights violations” in his country’s history and vowed to prevent their recurrence. He cited 12 “regrettable” events, including an anti-communist purge in 1965-66. While commendable, it’s morally awkward to put the massacre of half a million to 1 million people on par with the other violations, which while awful, do not really compare.

At the height of the Cold War, the overthrow of then Indonesian president Sukarno, with full US backing, brought an obscure general called Suharto to power, who then went on to launch a bloodbath to wipe out the highly popular and non-violent PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, then the world’s largest outside China and the Soviet Union.

The card-carrying communists and their supporters were more like social democrats in post-war Europe, rather than the far more violent and subversive Chinese, Soviet and Vietnamese communists. Perhaps that was why they were viewed as even more dangerous to the ruling elites in Indonesia as well as American corporate interests and the Washington establishment.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed about 800,000 victims over a four-month period, has been rightly categorised as such. However, except for a few historical scholars, the slaughters in Indonesia, which took place over six months, were rarely described as such. Perhaps in the West, it was OK to kill communists. Since Washington played a direct role in enabling and encouraging the bloodletting, it has been best, even today, to downplay its genocidal nature.

It must be added that for many years, the anti-communist purge had been equated within the Chinese diaspora with pogroms against ethnic Chinese. While there is no doubt that ethnic atrocities were committed, as they did again during the Asian financial crisis that brought down Suharto in 1998, contemporary evidence indicates that claims about Chinese pogroms were exaggerated while the anti-communist extermination was underestimated.

In 2020, former Washington Post journalist Vincent Bevins published The Jakarta Method: Washington’s anti-communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Programme that Shaped Our World. “By the late 1960s,” he wrote, “Indonesia was operating a system of US-sponsored concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.” Bevins was citing The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, a 2018 book by Geoffrey Robinson, a UCLA professor emeritus and former official of Amnesty International and the UN in East Timor.