In October 1, 1965 six
Indonesian generals were murdered by a group of junior officers who claimed
that those generals were supporters of CIA who had planned to oust the first
president of the country, Sukarno, and their action was to prevent it. General
Suharto: “a man who had served both the
Dutch colonialists and the Japanese invaders- and his colleagues charged that
the large and influential PKI [Communist Party] was behind the junior officers’
‘coup attempt’, and that behind the party stood Communist China, (P.193).”
This so-called coup was an excuse for Suharto to encourage people, in
particular Moslems, to initiate a Communist killing macabre: “The Indonesian people were stirred up in part by the display of
photographs on television and in the press of the badly decomposed bodies of
the slain generals. The men, the public was told, had been castrated and their
eyes gouged out by Communist women. (The army later made the mistake of
allowing official medical autopsies to be included as evidence in some of the
trials; and the extremely detailed reports of the injuries suffered mentioned
only bullet wounds and some bruises, no eye gougings or castration.),(P.
193,194).” Murdered Indonesians during those years are reported to be
between half to one million. There are accounts of Muslim men banding known
Communists together and mass killing them: “Twenty-five
years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled
comprehensive lists of ‘Communist’ operatives, from top echelons down to
village cadres, and turned over as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian army,
which hunted those persons down and killed them…Robert Martens, a former member
of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: ‘It really
was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I
probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a
time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.’, (P. 194).”
