Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66

Based on Wikipedia: Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66

Between October 1965 and March 1966, at least half a million people were killed in Indonesia. Some estimates push the death toll to three million.

The victims were communists, alleged communists, and people who happened to be near communists. They included trade unionists, ethnic Chinese shopkeepers, atheists, women in progressive organizations, and peasants who'd angered local landlords. The Indonesian Army orchestrated the killings, but civilians did much of the actual murdering—neighbors killing neighbors with machetes, drowning victims in rivers, burning entire families in their homes.

A top-secret Central Intelligence Agency report from 1968 put it plainly: these massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the nineteen-thirties, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early nineteen-fifties."

Yet most Indonesians today know almost nothing about what happened. The killings were scrubbed from textbooks, rarely discussed in public, treated as something best forgotten. For three decades, the man who orchestrated them—General Suharto—ruled Indonesia as a dictator, ensuring that silence prevailed.

The Powder Keg

To understand how this happened, you need to understand President Sukarno's impossible balancing act.

Sukarno—Indonesia's founding father, the man who declared independence from the Dutch in 1945—governed through what he called "Guided Democracy." This was essentially authoritarian rule dressed up with consultative mechanisms. His power base rested on an unstable coalition he called "Nasakom," an acronym combining nasionalisme (nationalism), agama (religion), and komunisme (communism).

Think about that for a moment. He was trying to hold together the military, Islamic groups, and communists in one government. These factions hated each other.

The Communist Party of Indonesia, known by its Indonesian acronym PKI, was the third-largest communist party in the world by the early nineteen-sixties. It had around two million full members and controlled labor unions, peasant organizations, and women's groups. Unlike communist parties in many countries, the PKI pursued largely non-violent strategies. They were popular. They won votes. They had a role in government.

But that popularity terrified others. The party pushed for land reform—actually enforcing laws that would redistribute property from landlords to peasants. This scared landowners. It also threatened Islamic clerics, many of whom controlled significant land through religious endowments. When PKI activists began taking "unilateral action" in the countryside—seizing land themselves when the government moved too slowly—clashes erupted between communist peasants and militias backed by landlords.

Meanwhile, Sukarno kept tilting leftward. He required government employees to study Marxist theory alongside his Nasakom principles. He hosted the Bandung Conference in 1955, bringing together recently decolonized nations from Asia and Africa, including communist China and North Vietnam. He met with Zhou Enlai, China's premier, and afterward announced plans to create a "Fifth Force"—a militia he would personally control, equipped with weapons from China.

He declared himself "a friend of the Communists because the Communists are revolutionary people." At a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Cairo in October 1964, he stated his goal openly: push all of Indonesian politics to the left and neutralize the "reactionary" elements in the Army.

The United States was watching all of this with alarm.

The CIA's Interest

Indonesia mattered to the United States during the Cold War. It was the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, strategically located between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and rich in oil and other resources. The prospect of it falling into the communist camp was unacceptable to Washington.

As early as 1958, the U.S. and Britain were working to undermine Sukarno and strengthen anti-communist forces in the Indonesian military. This included covert propaganda campaigns and secret assurances of military and financial support to anti-communist army officers.

President Kennedy approved a program called Territorial Management, which gave the Indonesian Army resources to involve itself in local community development. This was partly about improving the Army's reputation—it had been seen as corrupt during earlier regional conflicts—but it also gave military leaders deep connections in villages across the country. Connections they would later use to organize killings.

The CIA considered assassinating Sukarno. They selected an "asset" for the job. But instead, they produced a pornographic video using an actor who looked like Sukarno and a woman dressed as a Soviet flight attendant, hoping to discredit him. The video was never released because the agency couldn't make it convincing enough.

A CIA memorandum from 1962 stated the consensus at the highest levels of the U.S. and British governments: it would be necessary "to liquidate Sukarno."

The Night of September 30th

On the evening of September 30, 1965, a group of conspirators calling themselves the 30 September Movement kidnapped and executed six of Indonesia's top generals. The movement claimed to be protecting Sukarno from a right-wing "Council of Generals" plotting a coup.

The conspirators occupied Merdeka Square in central Jakarta and the presidential palace. They broadcast incoherent radio messages claiming to have saved the president.

But they made critical mistakes. They failed to secure the east side of the square, where the headquarters of Kostrad—the Army strategic reserve—was located. Major General Suharto commanded Kostrad. When he heard about the takeover, he moved quickly, retaking the square without resistance by the next morning.

President Sukarno refused to support the movement—they had, after all, murdered many of his top generals. Within days, Suharto had control of the capital. The 30 September Movement's forces dispersed without further fighting.

The movement had killed twelve people total. But Suharto would use it to justify the killing of hundreds of thousands.

The Propaganda Campaign

Suharto immediately blamed the PKI for the coup attempt. There was no evidence the party leadership had organized it, and the PKI denied involvement. But that didn't matter.

On October 5th—Armed Forces Day and the day of the murdered generals' state funeral—a massive propaganda campaign began. The Army spread graphic descriptions of how the generals had been tortured, mutilated, and castrated. These descriptions were largely fabricated. Medical examinations showed the generals had been shot, not tortured. But the lurid stories spread.

The Army newspaper published drawings showing communist women from Gerwani—a PKI-affiliated women's organization—dancing naked around the dying generals, slicing their genitals with razors. None of this happened. But the stories inflamed public rage, particularly among conservative Muslims horrified by the sexual imagery.

Suharto presented the attempted coup as a vast communist conspiracy to murder Indonesia's leaders and overthrow the government. Even illiterate peasants in remote villages who'd never heard of the 30 September Movement were now branded as accomplices to mass murder.

Two scholars at Cornell University, Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, pointed out something crucial in a report they wrote in early 1966: three weeks passed between the collapse of the coup attempt and the beginning of the Army's mass arrests. During those three weeks, there was no violence, no communist uprising, no civil war. The PKI wasn't fighting anyone. The threat, such as it was, had already been neutralized.

But Suharto needed a threat. So he manufactured one.

The Killings Begin

The Army arrested top PKI leaders immediately. Some were summarily executed. On October 8th, anti-communist demonstrators in Jakarta—organized by the military—burned down PKI headquarters. Youth groups backed by the Army, including the Indonesian Students' Action Front, staged rallies demanding the party be banned.

In Jakarta and West Java, over ten thousand PKI activists and leaders were arrested, including the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who would spend the next fourteen years in prison.

But arrests weren't enough.

In early October, Suharto sent troops to Central Java, a PKI stronghold. Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo led elite para-commandos into the region. At the same time, Army units whose loyalty was uncertain—particularly those with members sympathetic to the PKI—were purged.

The top PKI leadership was hunted down. Party chairman D.N. Aidit was shot on November 22nd. Njoto, another senior leader, was killed around November 6th. First Deputy Chairman M.H. Lukman was killed shortly after.

Then the civilian massacres began.

The killings started in Jakarta in October, spread to Central and East Java in November and December, then moved to Bali and parts of Sumatra. The Army provided direction, weapons, and lists of names. But much of the actual killing was done by civilians—members of Muslim youth groups, nationalist militias, and ordinary people settling scores with neighbors.

In some areas, the Army directly participated. In others, they armed and organized local militias, then stood back while the murders happened. In villages across Java and Bali, communists and suspected communists were dragged from their homes and killed with machetes, bamboo spears, and clubs. Bodies were thrown into rivers. Mass graves were dug. In Bali, rivers ran red with blood.

The targets included actual PKI members, but also anyone associated with affiliated organizations—labor unions, peasant groups, women's organizations. Ethnic Chinese were targeted because they were seen as sympathetic to communist China. Atheists were killed for lacking religion. Peasants who'd occupied land under the PKI's reform campaigns were murdered by landlords settling scores.

In some villages, people were forced to participate in the killings to prove they weren't communists themselves. Those who refused became suspects.

The Scale

How many people died? Nobody knows for certain.

The most commonly cited estimates are between five hundred thousand and one million. Some researchers believe the number could be as high as two or three million. The Indonesian government has never conducted an official investigation or released credible figures.

The killings were most intense in Central Java, East Java, Bali, and northern Sumatra—areas where the PKI had been strongest. In Bali, a Hindu-majority island where traditional hierarchies had been challenged by communist organizing, the violence was particularly brutal. An estimated five percent of Bali's population was killed.

By March 1966, the worst was over. The PKI had been utterly destroyed as a political force. Surviving members fled to remote areas or hid their identities. The party was formally banned.

President Sukarno, though still nominally in power, was helpless. He protested the killings, saying the Army was "burning down a house to kill a rat." But Suharto controlled the military, and Sukarno's authority evaporated. In March 1967, he was stripped of his powers. Suharto became acting president, then president in 1968.

American Complicity

What did the United States know, and what did it do?

For decades, the CIA denied active involvement. But declassified documents released in 2017 revealed the truth: the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of the mass killings from the beginning and was supportive of the Indonesian Army's actions.

American diplomats in Jakarta sent cables describing the massacres as they unfolded. The U.S. embassy compiled lists of PKI officials—thousands of names—and turned them over to the Indonesian Army, knowing they would be used for arrests and executions.

The U.S. provided weapons, communications equipment, and economic assistance to the Indonesian military during this period. American officials privately described the killings as a positive development. One State Department memo called the massacres "a gleam of light in Asia."

Britain also supported the anti-communist purge. The British government had its own reasons for wanting Sukarno gone: Indonesia was fighting an undeclared war with Malaysia, a Commonwealth federation of former British colonies. British intelligence ran black propaganda operations against the PKI and provided covert support to the Indonesian Army.

Australia's intelligence agencies also participated in anti-communist propaganda campaigns.

None of these governments ordered the killings. But they created conditions that made the massacres possible, provided material support to those carrying them out, and celebrated the results.

The Silence

For more than three decades, Suharto ruled Indonesia. His "New Order" regime was authoritarian, corrupt, and brutally repressive toward any hint of leftist organizing. Anti-communism became the state ideology. The massacres of 1965-66 were treated as a necessary, even heroic, purge of traitors.

Textbooks barely mentioned the killings. When they did, they described them as a response to a communist coup attempt. The victims were not victims—they were villains who got what they deserved.

Survivors and their families lived in fear. Having a relative who'd been killed or imprisoned as a communist meant stigma for generations. Former political prisoners were marked with special stamps on their identity cards, making it nearly impossible to get government jobs or travel freely.

Even after Suharto fell from power in 1998, the silence largely continued. There has been no truth and reconciliation commission, no official investigation, no apology. Mass graves remain unmarked. Perpetrators have never been prosecuted.

Indonesian human rights activists have pushed for acknowledgment and justice, but they face resistance from the military, from Islamic groups that participated in the killings, and from a political culture that still treats anti-communism as a virtue.

Why Did It Happen?

Scholars have struggled to explain why the violence was so extreme, so widespread, so enthusiastic among ordinary civilians.

Part of the answer lies in the genuine tensions that had been building for years. The PKI's growing power and its aggressive land reform campaigns had created real enemies among landlords, religious leaders, and conservative villagers. The propaganda about the murdered generals—false though it was—tapped into existing anxieties about communism, atheism, and social upheaval.

But propaganda alone doesn't turn hundreds of thousands of people into killers.

The Army provided organization, direction, and legitimation. They told people that communists were dangerous, that they needed to be eliminated, that killing them was patriotic. In many areas, the military directly armed and trained local militias, then stood aside while they did the killing.

There was also an element of communal violence—the settling of local scores, the release of pent-up resentments, the opportunity for landlords and village elites to eliminate challenges to their power. In some places, the killings took on the character of ethnic or religious pogroms, with Muslim groups targeting atheists and Chinese Indonesians.

And there was, undoubtedly, the terrifying logic of accusation: in an environment where anyone could be labeled a communist, participating in the killings was a way to prove you weren't one.

The Legacy

The 1965-66 massacres reshaped Indonesia. They eliminated the PKI, which had been a major force in Indonesian politics for decades. They brought Suharto to power and ushered in thirty-two years of authoritarian rule. They aligned Indonesia firmly with the Western bloc during the Cold War.

They also created a culture of fear and silence that persists today. Anti-communist rhetoric remains powerful in Indonesian politics. Accusations of communism are still used to discredit opponents. The military maintains that the killings, while perhaps excessive, were necessary to save the nation.

For the United States and its allies, the massacres were seen as a Cold War victory—proof that communist expansion in Asia could be stopped. The methods used to achieve that victory were quietly ignored.

For the victims and their descendants, there has been no justice, no acknowledgment, no healing. The dead remain uncounted, the graves unmarked, the story untold in Indonesian classrooms.

What happened in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966 was one of the twentieth century's great atrocities—a mass killing comparable in scale to some of history's worst episodes of political violence. Yet it remains among the least known, the least discussed, the least reckoned with.

The silence, like the killings themselves, was a choice.