Mass Killings Under Suharto Recalled
BLITAR, Indonesia - Hiding out in the dense, humid jungle, Markus Talam watched Indonesian soldiers herd manacled prisoners from trucks, line them up, and mow them down with round after round of automatic weapons fire.
It was 1968, and the killings were part of a final offensive by forces under General Suharto to wipe out the communist party and secure his position as leader of Indonesia, now the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
“They gunned them down and dumped their bodies in a mass grave dug by other prisoners. I remember the sound of the guns clearly: tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat . . . over and over again,” said Talam, 68, who was later jailed for 10 years after being named a leftist sympathizer.
Suharto, who died yesterday at a Jakarta hospital, seized control of the military in 1965 and ruled the country for 32 years, suppressing dissent with force and supported by an American government at the height of the Cold War.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power - from 1965 to 1968 - range from a government figure of 78,000 to 1 million cited by US historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia’s history. It was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia’s modern history after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
A frenzy of anticommunist violence stained rivers with blood and littered the countryside with the bodies of teachers, farmers, and others.
“They used to dump the bodies here,” recalled Surien, 70, a woman who lived near a bay used as an execution ground. “People called it the beach of stinking corpses because of the smell.”
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade union members, intellectuals, and schoolteachers, many of whom were executed or sent to remote prisons.
Another 183,000 died due to killings, disappearances, hunger, and illness during Indonesia’s 1975-1999 occupation of East Timor, according to an East Timorese commission sanctioned by the UN. Similar abuses left more than 100,000 dead in West Papua, according to a local human rights group. About 15,000 others died during a 29-year separatist rebellion in Aceh Province. In recent interviews around the city of Blitar, a former communist stronghold, survivors of the atrocities recounted a life on the run, living in caves, being beaten, and seeing beheadings of other captives.
“I am disappointed. I saw great cruelties and am lucky I am not dead,” said Talam, whose simple two-room home overlooks a valley dotted with overgrown mass graves.
Dragging on a clove-cigarette with trembling hands, he described how he was detained by police but escaped. He stumbled across dead bodies in shallow graves and slept in dank caves with hundreds of others, eating what the jungle had to offer for 50 days, until being picked up.
Talam, a former member of a left-wing union for park rangers, said he was tortured and beaten repeatedly during interrogations while detained on remote Buru island, where about 12,000 political prisoners were held, 1,100 miles east of the capital, Jakarta. “Why has no one been put on trial?” he asked. In fact, the dark era remains largely unknown to many Indonesians. Those believed responsible still wield influence in politics and the courts. Details of the communist purge are banned from school books, and the military has blocked efforts by relatives to unearth mass graves.
Near Blitar, a prominent monument and museum honors the crushing of the communist threat, and the Communist Party is still banned in Indonesia today.
There is no official record of the shootings Talam said he witnessed by the Indonesian Army near Blitar, which lies 310 miles east of Jakarta.
Though Suharto was swept from power in a 1998 prodemocracy uprising in this nation of 235 million people, no one has ever been tried for the bloodletting, in part because some of Suharto’s former generals remain in power.
“One of the enduring legacies of Suharto’s regime has been the culture of impunity,” said Brad Adams, the head of Human Rights Watch Asia.
Moreover, public interest in reviving a turbulent past is muted in the largely poor country, where people are more concerned with day-to-day survival, said Putmuinah, 80, a former communist city council member in Blitar.
“The ones who should be held accountable for those crimes are Suharto, his government and his regime,” she said. “Suharto ordered the elimination of communists and left-wing sympathizers.”
Putmuinah hid in a cave south of Blitar before being picked up and detained for 10 years. “They robbed me of the opportunity to raise my seven children,” she said.
“They beheaded many of us because we were members of the union for women,” she added. “I was spared torture because I knew the commander who arrested me.”
© 2008 The Boston Globe
But Suharto was another of US’s chosen one…another monster created by the US of A.
It amazes me how little is written about the Genocide of 1965. It was not purely ethnic. Ethnicity was leveraged as a tool of top-down mass murder.
We know about much less about this CIA massacre than a person in the USSR knew about Stalin’s murders in 1950.
Let that be a measurement of our free press.
Suharto was by far the the greatest mass-murderer in my lifetime.
From 1965 to 1968, he killed one million people, merely for being union members, orgainzers, teachers, writers or others who merely advocated a fair shake for the worker and a society based on compassion rathter than greed. these are the people referred to as “leftists and communists” in the above article. His work would not have been possible without considerable recordkeeping and logistical help fom the CIA - the CIA providing him with carefully complied lists.
Then he invaded East Timor in 1975 and occupied an butalized the timorese - killing 33% of the entire nation. Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton all supported this brutal occupation generously suplying him with arms. Only in 2002, with the desperately poor Timorese capitulating to global corporate interests, was the occupation lifted and their independence granted.
May Suharto and all his US friends burn in hell.
Suharto was a mass murderer aided and abetted by all US administrations from the 60’s through the 90’s. Until all these politician-murderer conspirators are held accountable in international courts, these types of crimes will be repeated by all rulers who can confidently know that their crimes will never be prosecuted. As a society, we are comparable to those German citizens who allowed Nazi crimes to occur unabated.
Another leader that received ‘democratic’ support from the US.
The U.S. supported Suharto, a cruel mass murderer. Figures.
Sukarno; good leader overthrown by deception. Had a heart!
Suharto; NO HEART!
This morning I heard NPR try to give a “balanced” view of Suharto’s life. This afternoon I heard Amy Goodman call him a brutal dictator. Thank goddess for Amy, and I just don’t understand why my community radio station feels the need to offer NPR.
pjd-he will fry, dont worry about that..and his CIA supporters will too. The world just got a little lighter, 21 grams to be exact (21 grams is the weight of your soul or essence, everyone who dies weighs 21 grams less because the soul leaves the body) in suhartos case that 21 grams of essence will never know gods love and will wander endlessly through age after age, and will never know peace. This is his own making, and evil men like him will have the same fate. Their soul might have to reincarnate 30 or more times as a brutilized slaughterhouse animal before it gets back to square one. he is certainly on his way ‘down’ the spiritual realm, as it were.
monster suharto impossible without the even more monstrous anglo-american ruling class, which if it could would slaughter most of the people posting on this site. think of these things the next time you hear the likes of obama going on about his vision of america’s role in the world. he and his owners are the real nihilists.
If the Amerikan people don’t snap out of there daze you can expect this type of behavior soon in a theater near you…..
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1070329053600562261
The genocide that followed the US-backed Suharto coup “broke” Indonesia in so many ways. For a detailed look into the history, I recommend procuring a DVD titled, “Terlena-The Breaking of a Nation.” It gives an excellent account of the events surrounding the change in power. More info is available at:
http://www.asiana-press-agency.com/terlena.html
My apologies for the incorrect URL. It is:
http://www.asiana-press-agency.com/terlena.html
Another one of the guys the US government has protected from the natural consequences of his actions. Stupid move by power mad government. Shotgun Dick is the poster fool for this kind of government.
Not to quibble regarding who’s the bloodiest dictator, but the number of victims of the US military in Cambodia was larger than that of the Khmer Rouge, and the number WE killed in Vietnam was greater still. If bush’s (and Clinton/Obama/McCain’s) permanent war in Iraq is to suceed, even Hitler’s lead will be challanged.
Of course there was no official count”; for the US defense department there is no official count of Iraqi deaths, only US and other invading forces. Go figure.
When in 1956 Suharto was first cited for corruption in Central Java, where he was commanding officer, he was quickly “transfered” to the Indonesian Officer training college. He had been recruited by college’s commander Let. Col. Suwarto, who was also working for the CIA. From there his star swiftly rose until he was able, with not a little help of his friends in Washington, to physically eliminate the Communist party in Indonesia. Time magazine celebrated this in a summer 1966 edition at “The greatest news in Asia in years.’
Good to see that our MSM is still alert to the wrongs of others. In his own country Suharto will be remembered as the bloodiest murderer ever, as well as the biggest thief. He will never rest in peace.
“Suharto, the model killer, and his friends in high places”,
by John Pilger, Jan 28 2008,
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=473
“Accountability for Suharto’s Crimes Must Not Die With Him”,
by East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, ETAN, Jan 28 2008,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7915
I haven’t read either of those articles yet, but know John Pilger well enough to be confident about his article surely being good and important, and expect the ETAN article to be good; I hope. FYI.
Good riddance to a disgusting Dictator. But how many more exist or who are on the rise?