Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 5: Human Rights: The Pragmatic Criterion Segment 3/9
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Pauker's pessimism proved unfounded. After an alleged Communist coup attempt on September 30, 1965, and the murder of six Indonesian generals, pro-American General Suharto took charge and launched a bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, were slaughtered. Reflecting on the matter in 1969, Pauker noted that the assassination of the generals "elicited the ruthlessness that I had not anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large numbers of Communist cadres."

The scale of the massacre is unknown. The CIA estimates 250,000 killed. The head of the Indonesia state security system later estimated the toll at over half a million; Amnesty International gave the figure of "many more than one million." Whatever the numbers, no one doubts that there was incredible butchery. Seven-hundred-fifty-thousand more were arrested, according to official figures, many of them kept for years under miserable conditions without trial. President Sukarno was overthrown and the military ruled unchallenged. Meanwhile the country was opened to Western exploitation, hindered only by the rapacity of the rulers.

The US role in these events is uncertain, one reason being the gaps in the documentary record. Gabriel Kolko observes that "U.S. documents for the three months preceding September 30, 1965, and dealing with the convoluted background and intrigues, much less the embassy's and the CIA's roles, have been withheld from public scrutiny. Given the detailed materials available before and after July-September 1965, one can only assume that the release of these papers would embarrass the U.S. government." Ex-CIA officer Ralph McGehee reports that he is familiar with a highly classified CIA report on the agency's role in provoking the destruction of the PKI, and attributes the slaughter to the "C.I.A. [one word deleted] operation." The deletion was imposed by CIA censorship. Peter Dale Scott, who has carried out the most careful attempt to reconstruct the events, suggests that the deleted word is "deception," referring to CIA propaganda that "creates the appropriate situations," in McGehee's uncensored words, for this and other mass murder operations (citing also Chile). McGehee referred specifically to atrocity fabrication by the CIA to lay the basis for violence against the PKI.6

There is no doubt that Washington was aware of the slaughter, and approved. Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled to Ambassador Marshall Green on October 29 that the "campaign against PKI" must continue and that the military, who were orchestrating it, "are [the] only force capable of creating order in Indonesia" and must continue to do so with US help for a "major military campaign against PKI." The US moved quickly to provide aid to the army, but details have not been made public. Cables from the Jakarta Embassy on October 30 and November 4 indicate that deliveries of communications equipment to the Indonesian army were accelerated and the sale of US aircraft approved, while the Deputy Chief of Mission noted that "The embassy and the USG were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing."7

For clarity, we must distinguish several issues. On the one hand, there are questions of historical fact: What took place in Indonesia and Washington in 1965-1966? There are also questions of cultural history: How did the US government, and articulate sectors at home, react to what they took to be the facts? The political history is murky. On the matter of cultural history, however, the public record provides ample evidence. The cultural history is by far the more informative with regard to the implications for the longer term. It is from the reactions that we draw lessons for the future.

There is no serious controversy about Washington's sympathy for "what the army was doing." An analysis by H.W. Brands is of particular interest in this connection.8 Of the more careful studies of the events themselves, his is the most skeptical concerning the US role, which he regards as basically that of a confused observer, with "only a marginal ability to change a very dangerous situation for the better." But he leaves no doubt about Washington's enthusiasm about the turn "for the better" as the slaughter proceeded.

According to Brands's reconstruction of events, by early 1964 the US was engaged in "quiet efforts to encourage action by the army against the PKI," ensuring that when the expected conflict broke out, "the army [would know] it had friends in Washington." The goal of the continuing civic action and military training programs, Secretary of State Dean Rusk commented, was "strengthening anti-Communist elements in Indonesia in the continuing and coming struggle with the PKI." Chief of Staff Nasution, regarded by US Ambassador Howard Jones as "the strongest man in the country," informed Jones in March 1964 that "Madiun would be mild compared with an army crackdown today," referring to the bloody repression of 1948.


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6 McGehee, Nation, April 11, 1981. Also News from Asia Watch, June 21, 1990.

7 Ibid. Rusk cited by Kolko.

8 Brands, "The Limits of Manipulation: How the United States Didn't Topple Sukarno," J. of American History, Dec. 1989.