VINCENT BEVINS | 3:32 PM ET A trove of recently released documents confirms that Washington’s role in the country’s 1965 massacre was part of a bigger Cold War strategy. In Indonesia in October 1965, General Suharto responded to the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking military officers by accusing the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing [...]
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 [...]
October 18, 20178:47 PM ET By the end of November 1965, U.S. officials were well aware that mass murders were underway. At this point, roughly two months into an Indonesian military campaign that would ultimately kill at least half a million people, U.S. Embassy staff privately expressed no shock in reporting that thousands had already been [...]
October 18, 2017 4:54 AM | Krithika Varagur JAKARTA, INDONESIA — On Tuesday, nearly 30,000 pages of declassified recordsfrom the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta between 1964 and 1968 were published in a collaboration between the National Declassification Center (a body within the National Archives) and the nonprofit National Security Archive, located at George Washington University. The period includes the [...]
Stephen Wright, Associated Press | Jakarta — Oct 17, 2017, 12:27 PM ET Declassified files have revealed new details of U.S. government knowledge and support of an Indonesian army extermination campaign that killed several hundred thousand civilians during anti-communist hysteria in the mid-1960s. The thousands of files from the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta covering 1963-66 were [...]
By South-East Asia correspondent Adam Harvey | Thu at 7:16pm In November 1965, the Indonesian Army warned a Dutch official in Sumatra that his locally-hired cook was about to be arrested on suspicion of being a communist. The Dutchman stood his ground. "Not till after lunch," said the man of principle. "I've got a big party planned." The [...]
A great deal of confusion and misinformation remains about the period 1965-66; a crucial period in Indonesian history that has left deep scars on the nation. On 16 and 17 September 2017 a group of activists and victims organised a seminar to discuss this history. The main organiser was the Forum 1965, an umbrella association of [...]
HANS DAVID TAMPUBOLON | THE JAKARTA POST Jakarta | Thu, February 2, 2017 | 10:17 am A somber drawing of the 1965 genocide won the hearts of the judges of the 2017 Adinegoro Journalistic Award. The drawing, titled 1965 victims, depicts two graves lying silently side by side. The grave on the left is identified with a military [...]
Jan Pronk* Early April this year media in the Netherlands reported about a mass revenge action by Dutch military on 24 July 1949, killing 60 civilians in Prambon Wetan, a village in East Java. This news came after widely published articles, during recent years, about similar killings of villagers, clearly non-combatants, in Rawagede, a village in [...]
