By population, Indonesia is the world’s 5th largest country (the USA is 4th). Consisting of 17,500 islands and rich in mineral and agricultural resources, its ancient cultures came under European colonisation in the 17th century. This lasted until the Japanese took over in 1942, during WWII. When that conflict ended, the Dutch colonial masters attempted to reassert their control. After four years of often brutal fighting, the Dutch and their Australian and British allies were forced to concede defeat. The Republic of Indonesia came into being in 1950.

This new post-WWII country was once the home of the world’s third largest working class party, the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI). Formed under a different name by Dutch and indigenous socialists in 1914, the PKI led many anti-colonial uprisings.

In 1917, they attempted to emulate the Russian Revolution, forming workers’ and peasants councils in the major naval centre of Surabaya, which included soldiers and sailors. As a leader of the anti-colonial struggle from 1945-49 its numbers grew to over 3 million members and 17 million sympathisers — a force to be reckoned with.

Enter the U.S. The emergence of Indonesia as a country with no great allegiance to the capitalist heartlands was almost instantly red-flagged in Washington, D.C. According to declassified CIA documents, a policy of destabilising the nationalist government of founding president, Sukarno, was in place by 1953.

The U.S. began disrupting the military, with several anti-government coup attempts by pro-imperialist officers from 1956 onwards. As nationalist forces split apart the unruly archipelago became ungovernable. Finally, on Sept. 30, 1965, the plot was hatched. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had just ramped up his undeclared war in Vietnam, and his administration was determined to avoid another such action.

Six leading army generals were kidnapped and murdered. This was called an attempted coup by many commentators, but it was nothing of the kind. It was merely an elimination of obstacles to the ascendency of Washington’s anointed strongman, Colonel Suharto.

Killing fields begin. Even the CIA calls it “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.”

Immediately after the murders, PKI was falsely blamed for the “coup attempt.” Suharto’s forces began hunting down and killing PKI leaders, members, other leftists, trade unionists, brave village leaders — and their relatives. But they didn’t have good data on who to kill. Now-declassified documents reveal that blacklists were supplied by the U.S. State Department via the ambassador Marshall Green and William Colby, a future CIA director.

By best recent estimates (including one by the Indonesian military) one million people were killed in the period between October 1965 and March 1966. As the 2012 documentary, The Act of Killingshows, no one was held accountable for their role in these six months of genocide. The PKI was destroyed and any surviving leaders remain imprisoned or in exile to this day.

In 1973, to make sure that leftists around the world got the message of the PKI mass killings, the U.S. administration threatened trade unionists and activists in Chile, just before it orchestrated the overthrow of the Allende government. People began to receive small white cards reading “Djakarta se acerca/Jakarta is coming.”

Suharto ruled as a dictator for three decades, running the vast country of more than 200 million people like a feudal estate, handing out rewards to allies and viciously suppressing opponents. Organised workers and peasants protesting the seizure of their lands were regularly murdered by the military, which ran its own businesses and operated as a parallel government.

In 1969, West Papua, still under Dutch colonial dominance, was forced to abandon its bid for independence. Under threat of death, more than 1,000 elders “agreed” to the annexation, largely because the Kennedy White House wanted to keep Indonesia on its side of the Cold War. The United Nations rubber-stamped the fraud. The resistance movement that followed has been under siege ever since because it threatens the profits of the military’s business enterprises. Up to 450,000 Indigenous Papuans have been killed in their ongoing struggle for independence.

In 1975, with the approval of U.S. Pres. Gerald Ford, Suharto’s forces invaded the newly independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. From that day, until East Timor’s people overwhelmingly voted for independence in 1999, one-third of the indigenous population was slaughtered, or starved to death. In 1991, a massacre in East Timor’s capital, Dili, was caught on video and shown around the world.

Is it any wonder the poor of the planet see the word “Washington” and think “serial killer!”

Jakarta Spring. By 1996, the Indonesian people had had enough of the Suharto regime. After a month of political upheaval riots broke out in the capital, Jakarta. These were brutally suppressed, but Suharto was severely weakened. Opposition to his rule was near universal. Both big and small businesses were sick of the corruption and monopolisation of huge sections of the economy by Suharto’s clique. For two years, the top-heavy regime lurched from crisis to crisis. The military split into factions led by various would-be successors to Suharto.

Then, in 1998, anti-Chinese riots, organised by one of the military warlords, backfired spectacularly. Suharto resigned and was succeeded not by one of the generals, but a longtime ally, B.J. Habibie, who surprised everybody in the ruling elite by ending anti-Chinese discrimination, weakening the power of the military, decentralising government and giving the people of East Timor a vote on their future.

The working class in motion. From 1998 to the present, Indonesia’s ruling class has presided over an unstable regime. Breathing space has opened up for the 50 million urban workers to organise. There are many independent unions, not afraid of strikes. There is a national LGBT movement and working class feminists are an integral part of the political scene. Several socialist groups exist, mainly based in the capital, Jakarta.

While recent parliamentary elections changed very little in the People’s Representative Council, for the first time two union candidates were elected in working class districts. The presidential election in July is shaping up as a contest between the populist mayor of Jakarta and a former general whose reputation has been dirtied by revelations of his role in several massacres in the 1980s. But bourgeois democratic elections are not likely to resolve the country’s fundamental instability.

One thing is clear, and that is that the Indonesian population, particularly those who suffered most under Suharto, is suspicious of their government and even more skeptical about Western politicians’ protestations of friendship. They have not forgotten or forgiven imperialist-driven misery.

Send feedback to the author at peter.murray@ozemail.com.au.

 

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