October 20, 2017 | Jess Melvin* There is much outrage in the United States that a foreign state might have attempted to influence its 2016 Presidential Election. The release on 17 October of a cache of previously classified telegrams sent from the US Embassy in Jakarta provides new and damning evidence that the US is no stranger [...]
Devina Heriyanto | Jakarta | Fri, October 20, 2017 | 08:05 am Decades have passed and Indonesians are keen to debate what exactly happened on the fateful night of Sept. 30, 1965 and during the months-long communist purge that followed. Last year, an attempt at reconciliation was made by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) with a [...]
18 October 2017 Newly declassified reports reveal that U.S. officials documented the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians by the Indonesian government. Human rights organizations are calling on the United States and Indonesia to declassify more documents regarding the 1965-66 anti-communist purges that took place under the leadership of Suharto, formerly an important ally of [...]
Laksmi Pamuntjak As 250 million Indonesians face up to the 50th anniversary of one of the most crushing episodes of our nation’s history – the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime – the business of confronting the past has reached a new urgency. And it [...]
By JOE COCHRANE | April 17, 2016 JAKARTA, Indonesia — When Putu Oka Sukanta was awakened by knocking on his door late one night in October 1966, he says, he instinctively knew who was there. Indonesian soldiers, police officers and plainclothes intelligence agents took Mr. Sukanta, then a 27-year-old high school teacher and poet, to a military [...]
Margareth S. Aritonang | The Jakarta Post | Jakarta | Wed, January 18, 2017 | 05:07 pm Victims and the families of victims of gross human rights violations gathered at the Judicial Commission building on Wednesday to scrutinize the challenges that have hampered their plea to be heard by the government. After 10 years of staging [...]
by: Bradley Simpson This article was adapted from Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 by Bradley Simpson. © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Used with permission of Stanford University Press, http://sup.org. Published in cloth, paperback, and digital formats. On October 1, 1965, the teletype in the [...]
By Carmel Boediardjo by Tapol Historians have recorded many massacres that occurred during the 20th century but few mention the massacres in Indonesia that took place during 1965-1966, which paved the way for Soeharto to seize power in 1965. For six months from October 1965, the Indonesian military, aided by anti-communist gangs, perpetrated killings on a [...]
When the Indonesian army’s strategic reserve crushed an internal army mutiny on 1st October 1965, the reserve’s leader, General Suharto, seized the opportunity to link the mutiny - which had claimed the lives of six leading Generals - to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). At this point, the PKI was the largest communist party outside the [...]
