Politics essay final

Guided Democracy – President Sukarno's policy which abandoned democratic elections in favour of a system based on discussion and consensus decision making after the village model of a council of the elders making decisions for the community guided by the village Headman
Zanden J. & Marks D. (2011) an economic history of Indonesia 1800 – 2010 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge,
Robinson, G., 'The economic foundation of political conflict in Bali, 1950 -65', Indonesia No. 54 'Perspectives on Bali' (October 1992) pp 59 – 93.
Robinson (ibid)
Ricklefs, M.C., Lockhart, B., Lau, A., Reyes P., Aung-Thwin, M., 'A New History of Southeast Asia' (2010) Palgrave Macmillan p. 380.
Abangan/santri – Javanese social distinction between Santri who were more likely to be urban dwelling conservatively orthodox Muslims and the Abangan or agrarian labourersand peasants. Before and during the Guided Democracy period, these two categories polarised along political lines with the Santri becoming vehemently anti-Communist and the Abangan supporting the PKI.
PRRI – the army led resistance movement based mostly in Sumatra.
Roosa, J. (2006) Pretext for Mass Murder. Madison Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press pp 177-191
Cribb, R. 'Unresolved problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66' Asian Survey, Vol.42 (July/August 2002) p.553,
NAKASOM – acronym for Nasionalisme/Agama(religion)/Komunisme; a policy adopted by Sukarno during Guided Democracy to attempt to shore up the balance between and appease the three major parties.
NEKOLIM – Neo-colonialisme/Kolonialisme/Imperialisme
Wertheim, W.F, 'Suharto and the Untung Coup – the Missing Link' Journal of Contemporary Asia 1, No. 1 (1970) pp 50 – 57.
Anderson, B. & McVey R. 'A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia' Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asia program, 1971
Simanowitz, S. 'Suharto's bloodiest secrets' News Internationalist 15.12.2010. www.newint.org
. McDonnell, J. Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer. The Diplomat, 23/01/2014
Bunnell, F. 'American 'Low Posture' Policy toward Indonesia in the months leading up to the 1965 coup', Indonesia, No. 50, 25th anniversary edition (October 1990) pp 29 – 60.
That it was achieved is undoubtedly the case. Mary Zurbuchan recounts that in 2001, in Temanggan near Jogyakarta the YPKP (Foundation for the Research into the 1965/66 Massacres), the remains of twenty individuals who had been murdered during the violence were taken from an anonymous mass grave to be buried at a multi-faith service. The funeral procession was stopped, the coffins broken open and the bones scattered by members of the Muslim anti-communist Forum Ukuwah Islamiya Kaloran, who then demanded of the local legislature that they ban tha YPKP lest it start a communist revival.
Zurbuchan, M.S. 'History, Memory and the '1965' incident in Indonesia' Asian Survey, Vol. 42 (July/August 2002) pp 564 - 581



Student ID: 551809

Name: Magda Biran-Taylor

Course Title: Government and Politics of modern South East Asia

Course Code: 15PPOC247-A15/16

Tutor: Dr. Michael Buehler

Assignment No.: AS1 Part 1

Assignment Title: 'The inevitability or non-inevitability of the 1965 – '66 mass
Killings in Indonesia'

Word Count: 5,257












MBT
12/12/2015



Introduction

Following the coup of 30th September 1965 in Jakarta and the counter coup, led by the army, at the beginning of October, approximately 500,000 Indonesians were slaughtered and at least as many again tortured and imprisoned in a purge which served to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party (the PKI). My question regarding these events is this: was the violence that accomplished the destruction of Indonesia's Communist Party inevitable given the political situation and why, some 50 years later, has the scale of the killings of '65-'66, never been satisfactorily explained. As to the first part of my question, I will argue that, although it could be said that the Indonesian economic and political situation, in the latter half of 1965, had reached a crisis point, the appalling violence which characterised the purge of the PKI was, to a great extent orchestrated and therefore not inevitable. However, in my opinion, the ideology supporting this was not entirely home-grown and that external forces may also be somewhat culpable. Why have the killings of 1965-66 all but faded from view? At the ground level, the ensuing state-sanctioned demonization of the PKI and communism served as a foundation for Suharto's repressive New Order. The increasingly authoritarian and militaristic regime maintained the spectre of communism as the ultimate evil which made the reluctance of most Indonesians to discuss or question their experiences and laid themselves open to accusations of being PKI sympathisers totally understandable. However, I will also suggest that another reason for the silence is one of political expediency.

The economic situation leading up to 1965

With the start of Guided Democracy in 1957, there began a policy of nationalisation of foreign enterprises. Significantly, the Dutch owned enterprises were taken over by the military, thus increasing their already growing power both financially and within the political sphere. During the 1950s, Sukarno's government had instituted the Benteng programme, designed to promote indigenous entrepreneurs. The role of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, long time key players in the economy, was the drastically reduced as a result of Presidential Regulation No. 10 passed in November 1959, which forbade Chinese and other foreign nationals from trading in rural areas. At that time, there were approximately 86,700 foreign owned businesses registered in Indonesia of which probably 90% were Chinese. Regulation 10 caused local unrest including considerable anti-Chinese feeling, some of it violent, and, as a consequence, many ethnic Chinese chose to return to the mainland, taking with them a huge skills base of entrepreneurial talent. Partly as a consequence of this and also because of lack of skills, the drive towards indigenous entrepreneurship largely failed and Sukarno's policy of economic nationalism, rather than growing a financially secure new nation, virtually destroyed the productive capacity of what had anyway been a struggling economic sector. The following table demonstrates the economic stagnation that started from 1957 onwards as particularly the GDP per capita demonstrates.

Indonesian Sectoral real GDP growth (annual average percent) 1949 - 1966

Sector
1949 -1966
1949 - 1957
1957 - 1966




Agriculture
2.5
2.4
2.7
Manufacturing
5.1
10.9
0.3
Oil and Gas
8.4
12.9
4.5
Trade
3.8
5.9
2.1
Transport
2.4
7.3
-1.7
Government
0.4
6.8
-4.9
Other Services
3.0
4.5
1.8
Total services
3.0
5.5
0.9




Total GDP
3.5
5.5
1.8
Non-oil and gas GDP
2.2
4.3
0.4




GDP per capita
1.0
2.9
-0.6
Zanden and Marks (2011: 169, Table 8.2)

It is clear, even from a cursory analysis of these figures, that the Indonesian economy overall was, at the best, stagnating during these years, and that, in some important categories (manufacturing, transport and the government sector) GDP was in minus figures. Most importantly, an overall but unweighted GDP per capita decline of -0.6% would indicate major lack of economic prosperity in a country whose population growth had risen from 3,347,000 per year between 1950 and 1955 to 4,280,000 per year between 1960 and 1965,.

Following the economic decline led to, in the late 1950s and early 1960's, a period of hyperinflation. This had a particularly vicious effect on the price of rice. In Bali, for instance, where a series of poor local harvests compounded the problem, it was necessary to import rice. The supply chain of this imported rice was subject to distributive bottlenecks and illicit speculation. As a consequence of these factors and the economic downturn in 1957, the price of a kilo of rice rose in Bali from Rp. 3.50 to Rp. 7.50. By 1964 it has risen to Rp. 130 per kilo. When we consider that, in 1962, the official minimum wage in a Balinese canning factory was Rp. 8.50 per day, it is clear that the lives of the ordinary workers, seventeen years after Independence was declared was far from fulfilling expectations. It is clear that the government's policy of rice purchasing and distribution favoured town dwelling consumers in that the distribution chain was shorter and therefore there were fewer opportunities for illicit speculation. Robinson argues that this became a deliberate policy in an attempt to avoid the political difficulties that might ensue if the urban sector became alienated.

During the early 1960s, the Indonesian government instituted a series of National Land Reforms. These mandated the redistribution of agricultural land and changes in the terms of harvest sharing agreements. The intention was to stimulate increases in production by small, independent producers and to restore equitable relations of production in the agricultural countryside. Under these new statutes, in the most heavily populated rural areas, each family had a right to a maximum holding of 5 hectares of wet rice land (Sarah): in less heavily populated areas larger plots would be allocated per family. People, who already owned more than the new regulations allowed, would have the excess redistributed by the State and if this land was being rented, then priority would be given to those cultivating it. If, subsequently, land was rented, then harvest distribution would be allocated on a basis of equal shares between tenant and landlord on wet rice land and 33:66 on dry cultivation: thus favouring the tenant rather than the owner, as had previously been the case. In theory, these reforms had the potential for significant gains by large numbers of hitherto needy people. However, the fact that, in spite of only being entitled to an equal or minor harvest share, the owners were still responsible for production costs and that the final decision on exact harvest share could be decided by the local Bupati, opened the potential for significant political conflict at the local level. By 1963, the PKI were demanding more land reform and in areas of Bali and Java, army units moved to counter unilateral land seizures by BTI (Barisan Tani Indonesi) peasants. However, it is clear to see how these proactive measures by the PKI and the BTI were attractive to the landless labourers and, as a result, peasant militancy became a threat to landowners, particularly in heavily populated Java. Therefore it could be said that the land reforms, certainly in Java and Bali polarised the society along class lines




Political situation leading up to 1965

Since the introduction of Guided Democracy in 1957, which, without abolishing the role of the parties in Indonesian politics, considerably reduced it, the rivalry between the two implacable enemies, the army and the PKI by 1965, had reached an incendiary point. Ricklefs et al have described Guided Democracy as 'a curious combination of the Fascist modes of the Japanese Occupation, Soviet style Social Realism and folksy Indonesian symbolism'. Certainly, it meant that sovereign authority was with the President while the Cabinet was given an advisory function and was joined by the Supreme Advisory Council, which represented the various functional groups throughout society: the peasantry, military, intelligentsia etc. Essentially, Guided Democracy was a logical development of the Internationalist and Socialist views Sukarno had espoused during the fight for independence from the Dutch. As an ideology, it relied heavily on the guiding principles of Gotong-Royong (a metaphorical concept drawn from the mutual co-operation which, in theory, made village life throughout Indonesia successful) and Musyawarah (a process of decision making dependent on consultation and consensus rather than democracy). However, in reality, at government level, this meant that political parties opposed Sukarno at risk of political freedom. Sukarno's wish to return Indonesia to the immediacy of revolutionary politics and his increasingly anti-capitalist policies together with the rapidly growing numbers of the PKI meant its influence was perceived to be increasingly powerful by both the military and the conservative Islamist parties. The PKI used their growing strength to hound their political opponents particularly in Java, where political oppositions polarised along abangan/santri lines.

By 1956, there had been growing political disunity in Indonesia. People had hoped for a bright future and prosperity after the fight for independence and seemed to be locked into a stagnant economy, which was subject to increasing levels of corruption and graft as black marketeering and smuggling increased. There was strong feeling in the Outer islands that the government was becoming more leftist – this was certainly justified – and more Java- centric and from 1956 onwards these feelings led to a series of regional rebellions, culminating, in 1958 with the rebellion of the PRRI ( Pemerintah Revolusioner Republic Indonesia)led by dissatisfied army officers. This rebellion was quickly crushed in the urban areas by the hugely superior forces of the state that arrested many of the ring leaders and bombed strategic points in Sumatra. However, leaders who escaped capture retreated to the countryside where a guerrilla war continued until 1961. I will address the role of the United States and the CIA in particular later in the essay, but it is interesting to note that the US government under Eisenhower and via the offices of the CIA, along with Taiwan, Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines and South Korea covertly backed the rebel forces of the PRRI during the most of this conflict, providing strategic advice and arms. This was followed by an abrupt volte face by the American government after the shooting down of a CAI plane on a bombing mission over Ambon on 18th May 1958 and the Indonesian army's swift response to the rebellion.

In my opinion, it is essential to have a grasp of the economic and political affairs which immediately preceded the coups and subsequent killings of '65 – '66 in Indonesia. While in no way trying to diminish the atrocities committed at this time, it is clear from the history that internal strife, accentuated by deepening poverty and economic chaos, had been endemic in Indonesia for some years. To take Bali as an example, at least 3,000 Balinese had been killed during the War of Independence, 1000 of whom had been fighting for the Dutch. The resulting internal discord led to a spate of politically motivated killings during 1950 – '51. Between 1953 and '56, murderous gangs, many of them a residue of the civil militias encouraged under the Japanese occupation, undertook politically motivated killings. In the early 1960s, direct local political confrontations as well as conflict over land reform led to sporadic arson attacks, beatings and killings. There is not the space here to analyse the causes and results of these incidents but I include the bare facts to support my contention that Indonesia was no stranger to eruptions of local violence; however the scale and organisation of the 1965- 1966 anti-communist purge was on a totally different level and although not totally avoidable, given the prevailing conditions, deliberately allowed to develop into near genocide for overt political reasons.


September 30th – October 3rd 1965

By September 1965, Indonesian political polarisation had reached an extreme. Guided Democracy had become a regime of 'double speak'where everyone paid lip service to NAKASOM, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Indonesia was soon to go one of three ways depending on which of the elites – Islamic, Communist or conservative develop mentalist - managed to take power. 'The only certainty was that people were lying' (Cribb) and this inevitably spread rumour, suspicion and fear. The economy continued its decline and Indonesia had become one of the poorest countries in the world, on a level with states in sub -Saharan Africa. Sukarno, in a desperate attempt to re-focus public opinion, started a rhetoric against 'new-colonialists'/outside forces and Imperialists (NEKOLIM) but by then people, who had embraced independence and hope for a better life, had started to look for a scapegoat.

In the early hours of October 1st, General Yani, the commander of the army and five of his staff generals were kidnapped from their homes in the Jakarta suburbs. Three were killed during the kidnapping and their bodies and the remaining three captives taken to some waste ground on the edge of the Halim Airforce Base. There, the remaining three were executed and all six bodies hidden in a disused well. The main target, General Nasution, had escaped during the raid on his house. Later the same night, 2000 troops occupied Lampangan Merdeka (Merdeka Park) and three sides of Merdeka Square. At 07.00 on 1st October Lieutenant Colonel Untung broadcast to the nation announcing that he and his followers had the President under their protection and taken control of Jakarta in an attempt to foil a coup planned by the 'Generals' Council' and the CIA to oust Sukarno on 5th October which happened to be Armed Forces Day. During the course of the day on 1st October, the coup, led by the 30th September Movement (as the occupying forces called themselves) collapsed and by 19.00 General Suharto, the commander of the army's Strategic Reserve, who had not been targeted by the kidnappers, had taken control. At 21.00, Suharto broadcast that he was now in control and would ensure that the forces behind the attempted coup would be destroyed. On 3rd October the bodies of the murdered Generals were found in the disused well and on 5th October they were buried in a state funeral.

On the same day as the funeral, as the leading Generals met with Suharto and took the decision to crush the PKI, the army released a 130 page document which directly accused the PKI of masterminding the attempted coup. Crowds of civilians were mobilised by army personnel to spread anti-PKI propaganda and the press, which by now was totally under Suharto's control, printed lurid stories of the captured Generals being tortured, mutilated and castrated by ecstatic PKI sympathisers before their bodies were thrown down the well.
Suharto had, as it were, lit the blue touch paper: within hours, anti-PKI mobs were on the rampage in Jakarta attacking and torching any property that was even loosely connected with the PKI. Within weeks, fuelled by violent anti-PKI propaganda, the purge spread through Central and East Java and on to Bali and Sumatra. To this day, figures are unclear, but a rough estimate would be that between 500,000 and 1 million people were murdered during the ensuing six months with possibly half as many again being tortured and/or imprisoned. In Bali alone, 80,000 were killed, at the time representing 5% of the island's population.

This mass murder was mostly ignored. The Indonesian newspapers, under the control of Suharto, did not report it and foreign correspondents were either kept out of the country or confined to 'safe' areas of Jakarta. In the later official recounts of the curtailment of the PKI, the deaths are not mentioned. To quote Roosa, 'the 'official reports' of the destruction of the PKI" appears to have been accomplished through bloodless, administrative measure; suspects were arrested, interrogated to determine their guilt or innocence, classified into three different categories according to their degree of involvement with the movement and then imprisoned.' (Roosa p.23). According to Suharto any killings that did happen – and even he could not deny that some had – had nothing to do with the army but were the result of local political factions settling old scores. However, the country-wide trauma engendered by the Suharto regime's demonization of the PKI and massacres meant that, for thirty years, these matters were rarely discussed in Indonesia.

Responsibility (Suharto and the military regime)

The repressive Suharto New Order Regime in its turn fell in 1998 and since then, academics both inside and outside Indonesia have started to investigate the spectre of the 1965 – 66 killings. It seems to me too easy to explain what happened by saying that, given the chaotic state of Indonesia both socially and economically in 1965, once Suharto had set the wheels in motion by declaring the PKI responsible for the 30th September movement, the killings were inevitable. Probably, some violence was to be expected but not on the scale that then occurred and not within the specific time scale. I would suggest that Suharto and the military authorities should bear much of the responsibility and that it is clear and becoming clearer as more American sources are declassified, that the USA, through the agency of the CIA, was also heavily involved.

There is an argument to be made that would have Suharto the puppet master behind the 30th September movement itself but my interest lies more in the orchestration of the killings that followed his assumption of command on 1st October. From the start, his apparently well-oiled propaganda machine went into action, inventing an acronym 'Gestupo' for the PKI (Roosa 29). It would be ingenuous to suggest that the word had the same potency in 1960s Indonesia as it did in Europe twenty years after the end of the Second World War, but the intention is clear. Repeated radio broadcasts by the military, headed by Suharto accused the 'Gestupo' of everything from digging pits for mass burials, circulating lists of those to be killed first when they staged their apparently 'imminent' attempt to take over the country and collecting instruments of torture. McVey and Anderson, in their preliminary analysis of 1970, point out that the army's mass national arrest campaign did not get under way for three weeks after the attempted coup; long enough for it to be unlikely that there was any real danger of a country-wide putsch by the PKI. However, during these three weeks, Suharto's propaganda machine was using the perceived PKI continuing threat plus their apparent brutality to engender a state of national emergency great enough to justify him taking military control and to subvert the nationalist populist ideals of Sukarno, whom he replaced as President in March 1968.
It would also appear that the killings were not, in the most part, random and uncontrolled but did not begin until the arrival in a given area of the army's Special Forces. This is corroborated by Roosa, who points out that the timing of violence in different regions
coincided with the arrival of the Special Forces (Roosa 29). In Bali, where the killings were to be at their most violent, there was relative calm during October and November 1965 and all the local PKI leaders were alive when the Special Forces arrived on 2nd December, who then organised and carried out their executions on 16th December in the village of Kapal (Roosa 29). Suharto, in a rare public statement on the killings in 1971 stated that "Thousands fell victim in the provinces because the people acted on their own, and because of nasty prejudices between social groups that had been nurtured for years by very narrow political practices." (Roosa 24). What he failed to discuss were the existence of local anti-communist militias who although, not officially part of the military, were supplied with weapons, vehicles and guarantees of security by them. Conveniently for the new regime, these militias could disappear back into society once their tasks were complete (although certainly in and around Ubud in the early 1980s, people remembered who they were and feared them.) Roosa concludes that, contrary to the propaganda sometimes sourced and certainly tolerated by Suharto's New Order, frenzied village killings were not the norm. In fact, the army took people away, usually at night, and executed them systematically. Stevan Simanowitz, in an article in News internationalist quotes a Balinese villager, Nyoman Ramin who was 20 when the killings took place:
"The men were made to sit right here," indicates a piece of open land "with their hands tied and their legs dangling inside the grave. I was watching from over there by the temple. A soldier walked slowly around behind the prisoners, shooting each of them in the back of the head"
There were large scale massacres but these were committed secretly by both the army and the militias and the evidence was disposed of in unmarked mass graves. The existence of the militias also allowed the army to deny responsibility for anything other than the controlled and, in their view, legitimate killing of PKI traitors and enemies of the state.


Responsibility (the USA)

In the early part of 1964, anti-American sentiment in Indonesia escalated as Sukarno's policies moved further towards the left. On the 31st December 1964, Indonesia quit the United Nations accusing it of becoming dominated by reactionary old established forces and on 1st January, Sukarno sent his Foreign Minister to Beijing, cementing his alliance with China in an attempt to promote his plan for a counter-group to the United Nations, the Conference of New Emerging Forces (CONEFO). The PKI was pressuring the beleaguered President to allow the 'organised workers and peasants' to be trained in armed warfare and the Army was struggling to maintain unity as Chief of Staff, Yani and other members of the General Staff had just joined General Nasution, the Minister for Defence, in a Council of the Generals (see P. 7), making contingency plans for dealing with the PKI threat. Militant PKI -led anti American demonstrations meant the US Embassy in Jakarta had sent home all but essential staff and closed its consulates and the Indonesian government was threatening to nationalise US business interests. On the international scene, the Cold War was at its height. In 1965, the first American ground troops landed in Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) were very fresh in the international and particularly the American political memory. The fact, therefore, that Indonesia was home to the largest non-ruling Communist party in the world with a President who seemed to be moving further to the political left and becoming ever more anti-American, meant that the U.S. government, although to an extent preoccupied with events further north, was none the less anxious about and involved with the growing tension in Indonesia, the protection of whose 'immense mineral potential' (Roosa 15) according to Richard Nixon in 1965 justified the bombing of North Vietnam.

To what extent Washington and the CIA were involved in the counter coup of 1st October against the 30th September Movement is a matter too complex for the scope of this essay. However, there seems to be incontrovertible evidence that, from the early stages of the anti-communist purge, they were supporting Suharto and that they were aware of the broad scope of what was happening in Indonesia. We know that the US Embassy in Jakarta communicated covertly with Suharto and Nasution until November '65 when the killings were well underway, via the auspices of a veteran military attaché and the Deputy Chief of Station for the CIA, Joe Lazarsky. There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest the CIA contributed to the military led media campaign designed to demonise the PKI. Former ambassador Marshall Green attested to the supply of communications equipment to the army and again, in November '65, Washington acceded to General Sukendro's request for supplies of medicine, communications equipment and small arms. There can be no doubt that Washington understood the request as General Sukendro clearly stated the small arms were "to arm Moslem and nationalist youth in Central Java for use against the PKI". Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the documentary film of the killings 'The Act of Killing' also states that, while researching material for the film, he interviewed two ex-CIA agents who admitted compiling lists of names of known PKI sympathisers which they then passed to the Indonesian army, receiving copies back with names crossed out. It is hardly surprising therefore that Deputy Chief of Mission, Galbraith, on 4th November 1965 'made it clear that the embassy and the United States Government were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing'. It would seem there is little doubt that the USA through the covert offices of the CIA was at least complicit in the killings. In January 1966, Robert Kennedy said,
"We have spoken out against inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have been not only perpetrators but victims?"
Sadly, it seems not.

Conclusion

As noted earlier in the essay, by 1965, Indonesia's economic collapse and political polarisation had brought the country to crisis point. However, to say that the killings that ensued through the six months after the 30th September coup were a cathartic reaction to this situation is, arguably, too simplistic an argument. Through the whole of Indonesia's history post independent, rebellions and crises had sparked violence but nothing had approached the levels of brutality and bloodshed seen in the 1965 – 66 killings. Although obviously, far deeper analysis than this essay allows for is necessary, I would contend that Suharto, took the opportunity presented by the 30th September coup to unleash a sophisticated plan consisting of widespread and virulent anti-communist propaganda coupled with a campaign which included executions by well organised military death squads in parallel with a state sanctioned wave of killing by civilian militias. It may well be that, under this legitimised cloak of violence, old scores were settled and old enmities played out but Suharto's main objective was to destroy and demonise the Indonesian Communist Party not just at the time but for the foreseeable future and lay the foundations for a New Order military dictatorship and he was totally ruthless regarding the massive 'collateral' damage that occurred for this aim to be achieved. Without Suharto's strategy, I would argue that civil unrest would have been on a far less extreme scale and that therefore the mass killings were not inevitable.

The scope of this essay only allows for a glimpse into the role of the government of the United States and the CIA in the killings. However, there would seem to be enough surface evidence to suggest that the strength of anti-communist feeling in America extant during the Cold War allied to the fear of Southeast Asian nations falling under the Communist banner led to a draconian policy of containment where Indonesia was concerned. Again, without CIA support and advice, the killings may not have reached the catastrophic levels that they did. However, while the Washington of 1965 'adduced every human rights violation in the Soviet bloc as evidence of the iniquity of the Cold War enemy, it ignored, justified or even abetted atrocities committed by governments allied with the United States.' (Roosa 16). There is far more work to do here, and I present this essay in an attempt to open a discourse I hope to pursue as to the inevitability of the killings in Indonesia in 1965 – 66.



Bibliography

Anderson B. & McVey R., 'A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1st, 1965 Coup in Indonesia',
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia program.

Bunnell, P. 'American 'Low Posture' Policy towards Indonesia in the months
Leading up to the 1965 coup' Indoneisa No. 50, 25th Anniversary
Edition (October 1990) pp 29 -60.

Cribb. R. 'Unresolved problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965 – 66'
Asian Survey, Vol. 42 (July/August 2002) p. 553.

McDonnell, J. 'Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer' The Diplomat, 23.01.2014

Ricklefs M.C., Lockhart B., Lau, A., Reyes P., Aung-Thwin M., 'A new History of Southeast
Asia' Palgrave Macmillan
(2010) p.380

Robinson G. 'The Dark side of Paradise – Political Violence in Bali'. (1995)
Cornell

Robinson G. 'The Economic foundation of political conflict in Bali, 1950 – 65'
Indonesia No. 54 'Perspectives on Bali' (October 1992) pp 59-93.

Roosa, J. 'Pretext for Mass Murder' Madison Wis : University of Wisconsin
Press pp 177 -191

Simanowitz, S. 'Suharto's bloodiest secrets' News Internationalist 15.12.2010
www. newint.org

Wertheim, W.F. 'Suharto and the Untung coup – the missing link'. Journal of
Contemporary Asia 1, No.1 (1970) pp 50-57.

Zanden J., and Marks D. 'An Economic History of Indonesia – 1800 to 2010' Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Zurbuchen, M.S. 'History, Memory and the '1965' incident in Indonesia' Asian
Survey, Vol. 42 (July/August 2002) pp. 564 – 581.





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