A particularly striking part of “Report from East Java”, which was written by a military intelligence officer in November 1965, where he details the progress of the “crushing actions” against the Communist Party:
In Kediri some of the killings were “joint action”s [E] with the military (sometimes in civiele [D: civilian dress], sometimes officially as military). Killings of this kind may have a boomerang effect, in that they can also be utilized by the PKI itself. The effect upon economic life will also be felt. Small traders are now afraid to sell their wares. Peasant farmers are afraid to go to the rice fields. And many do not want to work on the Plantations, for example on the
tea and sugar plantations, because corpses are spread everywhere.By way of clarification, several events are explained below: In the Paree (Kediri) area there is a village in which the lurah [village headman] and Ansor together took the initiative to protect the [PKI] peasant farmers—who were only taggers-on—by giving them badges as members of Ansor or NU. They were gathered together, and coincidentally, there happened to be an operation by the military and Ansor going on. Seeing many people gathered together, the soldiers and Ansor asked the lurah who all these people were. The lurah, nervous and panicked, responded that they were PKI.
Before he had finished speaking, every one of the approximately 300 people was killed, and their families were not permitted to remove their bodies so that they were buried where they lay. This shocked the people, and within Ansor itself mutual mistrust arose.
Another event occurred in Wates, where approximately 10,000 members of the PKI and its Mass Organizations gathered together. They were going to make a “long-march” [E] to Madiun, destroying factories along the way.
This was discovered by the military, which initiated a “joint-action” [E] together with Ansor. When they were sommeer [sic] [D: called upon] to surrender they refused, and so they were crushed. The victims totaled 1,200.
In an incident in Ponggok, a soldier who was disseminating information was killed by the Pemuda Rakyat [People’s Youth]. In represaille [D: reprisal] the military attacked, killing about 300 people.
The wave of killings is still continuing, and many of those who are being killed are followers who did not know much. Many excesses have emerged, and it could happen that the PKI will join in so that they can attract “public opinion” [E] to their side.
The bolded bit I know off by heart now as it keeps coming into my head for some reason. The sting is in its tail, the last detail that they didn’t allow the families to recover the bodies, in the cultural-religious context it strikes as the most astonishing vicious spite; the dead people don’t know whether they get a proper burial or not, but it’s a kind of twisting of the knife in the people who are left.
No doubt many have seen it already, for those who haven’t the whole “Report”, which is fascinating, can be read here.
Thanks David! I was pretty sure it was from the journal “Indonesia” at Cornell, but was looking for the extra info you provided. I can add this to my bibliography library now. Cheers!
The appalling events of 1965 were the culmination of an undeclared civil war which had been bubbling for at least the previous decade, although in actual fact a lot longer longer, since the foundation of the state.
In a three way split between the Islamists, the Army and the Communists, Sukharno had been playing off each side in a shameless series of manipulations in order to hang on to his shambolic rule. By the early 1960’s the Communists believing themselves to have the upper hand, safe under Sukharno’s failing administration, began to make their move, the same move that the Communists were making throughout Asia at that time.
In central and east Java and in Bali the cadres started taking over land belonging to their ideological opponents. In any circumstances such theft would cause outrage, in land hungry Java and Bali it was exceptionally so, especially as the property owners specifically targeted by the Communists were usually the local Muslim leaders. The Communists were storing up a whole lot of trouble for themselves but believing as they did that they were in the ascendant they were unconcerned, however when their plans backfired they faced terrible retribution.
The retribution when it came was remarkably swift and effective. Led by the Islamists a popular (and it was popular at the time) backlash against the Communists was unleashed, the Army consolidating their position in Jakarta were happy to let the Muslims get on with it. When the Army had finally gained control of the country they abandoned their erstwhile allies, the Islamists, to the political wilderness.
So much is known about the anti-Communist purge of late 1965 what has become shrouded in the mists since then is the scale of the killings. In almost every report you read the death toll is variously put at anything from half a million to three million, I believe these figures to be absurd.
From a purely logistical point of view we are expected to believe that the forces of the Indonesian state, an institution heretofore, or indeed since, not noted for its clinical efficiency managed to carry out one of the biggest holocausts since the end of the Second World War. Not only did they achieve this in the amazingly short period of two to three months but they were then able to wipe out almost all traces of it ever having happened. Beyond a few dozen eye witnesses and mass graves there has come to light remarkably little evidence of what if we are to believe the conventional wisdom was mass slaughter on a truly biblical scale. Such a crime would leave an indelible mark on Java and Bali for generations and yet we find very little trace indeed of it ever having occurred on the enormous scale that is alleged.
In the UK which over a period of six years lost almost half a million citizens to war in 1939-45 to this day there is a huge wealth of personal knowledge about those events, even seventy years later every British family has a story to tell about the war and some relative that died. Every Jewish family on earth can recall members lost to the Holocaust. I have met only two people from Cambodia in my life but both of them were able to recount harrowing tales about their families’ suffering during the years of Pol Pot’s Communist rule.
I have traveled throughout Java and Bali, I have many friends and colleagues from those areas and none of them, not one of them, has any personal or family recollections of those events. They know they occurred, they have heard the stories on TV and read about them in books and newspapers, they are not afraid to discuss the issue but they simply have no personal knowledge about what is allegedly one of the greatest crimes against humanity which took place in their or their parents’ lifetimes in their home places.
I think we need to be a bit more skeptical about the wilder claims surrounding the killings of 1965, that they occurred is beyond doubt, that they were appalling goes without saying but that they matched anything in scale to the figures that are commonly bandied about is fairly obviously not true. Initial reports of mass killings are invariably exaggerated and this seems to have occurred in Indonesia, but the normal ratcheting down effect of calmer investigation did not occur as the whole affair was subsequently hushed up for thirty years (an example of the sort of exaggeration, understandable in the circumstances, appears above, apparently three hundred men were killed in the space of time it took for another man to say they were Communists, what was used, napalm?).
Originally the Indonesian government stated 80,000 Communists or suspected Communists were killed in 1965. Anti-Suharto, pro-Leftist commentators, embarrassed by the fact that it was normally Communists who did the genocides in Asia, multiplied this figure out of all proportion in order to balance the death tolls a bit. The post Suharto government accepted a much higher death toll in some school texts but after protests revised the figure back down to 80,000. I suspect that figure may well be closest to the actual number killed.
“Do I detect some right wing bias here?”
No more bias than anyone else posting here. Right wing? Define “right wing” and I’ll tell you whether it applies to me.
Do I dislike communism? Well I do tend to have a distinct hostility towards genocidal, anti-democratic, murderous political movements which seek to create totalitarian tyrannies, suppress individual liberty and reduce human beings to mere serfs and slaves of a political machine. Yeah, call me old fashioned but I’m funny like that.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when one looks at the horrors inflicted on Asian people by communist monsters like Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot in the period 1960-1980 one can only say that Indonesia miraculously dodged a bullet in 1965. Despite all the well documented faults of Suharto’s regime, a communist Indonesia would been an archipelagic hellhole of unimaginable terror.
I regard the suppression of communism in exactly the same cold and calculated way I would regard the extirpation of Nazis and it is a mystery to me why so many people who have enjoyed the freedoms and welfare of a western, liberal democratic society are so willing to give communists the benefit of the doubt.
Communists in Indonesia in 1965 only got a very small taste of the medicine which they were so happy to dish out to millions of innocent men, women and children around the globe at that time.
The average foot soldier of the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guards would have been as equally ignorant of the finer points of dialectical Marxism as the peasant cadres of the PKI but would have been just as vicious when it came to massacring their ideological opponents.
I return to the key point; if one heard of massacres of Fascists and Nazis in Spain in the 1930’s or Yugoslavia in the 1940’s I’ll wager most people’s reaction would be a fatalistic shrug combined with a degree of schadenfreude that the Nazis had it coming.
Speak of communists being slaughtered (and by the way when it comes to genocidal slaughter the communists put the fascists into the ha’penny place) suddenly everyone gets choked up with emotion at the thought of all those dead Reds.
Explain your hypocrisy and I’ll be prepared to ignore your maudlin “nauseating” shroud waving.
You have now used the terms “celebratory”, “cheer” and “crow” about my posts despite having not the slightest evidence for any such pejorative terms. Indeed the most perfunctory reading of my posts will show such terms as “appalling”, “crime”, “mass slaughter”, “cold and calculating” etc hardly the terms used by a cheerleader.
I take it, timdog, that basic comprehension of plain, written English is something you have a difficulty with and therefore in the absence of such a fundamental skill in political debating you resort instead to name calling and emotionalism.
Try harder.
As quite a few posters here are incapable of dealing with rational debate and instead substitute schoolgirl histrionics for calm logic, let me make my position plain.
I celebrate no man’s death, I crow over nobody’s murder, I do not cheer on mass killing, I grew up in a society were too many people did so for me to indulge in such actions now at my stage in life.
However, let us be clear about it; communism is a dreadful, barbaric ideology whose record in genocidal slaughter and continent wide suppression of liberty and human life and dignity is finally now beyond historical question (despite the best efforts of starry eyed, simple minded westerners who never had to experience the horrors of communism first hand).
If a society is faced with a communist threat it has two options; it can submit and live for several generations under the grimmest oppression imaginable or it can fight back and survive. Many societies took the former option in the latter half of the twentieth century and lived to regret it, some chose to resist. Those who resisted had to take very stern measures indeed but eventually survived and were able to gain a degree of freedom and prosperity compared to those who submitted.
Be under no illusion, resisting an ideology like communism is not easy and involves horrendous actions, but like defeating Nazism it is a necessary evil. There is only one thing worse than the process of extirpating communism and that is allowing communism to win.
I do not crow about such things, I do not celebrate them, I simply accept them as unfortunate facts of life and shameful indictments of the state of the human condition. A friend of mine survived cancer only through the most appalling chemotherapy and invasive surgery, I do not “crow” about his treatment, I do not “celebrate” the surgeons I merely recognize that my friend is alive today and can now rebuild his life.
I love Indonesia, it is my home, my wife is Indonesian as are my children, with all its faults Indonesia is a better country today than it ever would have been under communism. If in doubt the merest glimpse of the lamentable story of communist mass terror throughout Asia will confirm my thesis.
Am I now to sit in judgment on the men who fought against communism all those years ago? Would I, indeed could I, have done what they did? I doubt it, but I sure as hell won’t sit on judgment of them, five decades later from the comfort of a relatively free and imperfectly democratic Indonesia.
To do so would in my view be “nauseating”.
BB sums it up beautifully: However, let us be clear about it; communism is a dreadful, barbaric ideology whose record in genocidal slaughter and continent wide suppression of liberty and human life and dignity is finally now beyond historical question (despite the best efforts of starry eyed, simple minded westerners who never had to experience the horrors of communism first hand).
I am surprised at some of nonsense coming from some of the regular contributors to IM. I normally see much more convincing and considered comment from them. This is classic case of ideology being put ahead of outcomes and people. A common trait amongst the left.
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Thanks for posting… fascinating historical document! what is the citation for this report? where was it published? who is the translator, etc.?