4. Closing the Books

In 1990-1991, several events elicited some uncharacteristic concern over US-backed Indonesian atrocities. In May 1990, States News Service released a study in Washington by Kathy Kadane, which found that

The U.S. government played a significant role by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say... As many as 5000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to U.S. officials... The lists were a detailed who's-who of the leadership of the party of 3 million members, [foreign service officer Robert] Martens said. They included names of provincial, city and other local PKI committee members, and leaders of the "mass organizations," such as the PKI national labor federation, women's and youth groups.

The names were passed on to the military, which used them as a "shooting list," according to Joseph Lazarsky, deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta at the time, who adds that some were kept for interrogation or "kangaroo courts" because the Indonesians "didn't have enough goon squads to zap them all." Kadane reports that top US Embassy officials acknowledged in interviews that they had approved of the release of the names. William Colby compared the operation to his Phoenix program in Vietnam, in exculpation of his own campaign of political assassination (which Phoenix clearly was, though he denies it).

"No one cared as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered," said Howard Federspiel, then Indonesia expert for State Department intelligence; "No one was getting very worked up about it." "It really was a big help to the army," Martens said. "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."

The story was picked up by a few newspapers, though no one got worked up about it. Just more business as usual; after all, the US Embassy had done much the same in Guatemala a decade earlier, as another useful slaughter was getting underway.²¹

While ruffling some feathers briefly, the report was soon consigned to oblivion. The Newspaper of Record (the New York Times) waited almost two months to take notice, long enough to marshal the required denials. Reporter Michael Wines repeats every government propaganda cliché about the events themselves, however tenuous, as unquestioned fact. Ambassador Green dismisses the Kadane report as "garbage." He and others claim that the US had nothing to do with the list of names, which were of no significance anyway. Wines cites a Martens letter to the Washington Post saying that the names were publicly available in the Indonesian press, but not his amplification of this remark, in which he stressed the importance of handing over the list of names; Martens wrote that he "saw nothing wrong with helping out," and still doesn't, because "the pro-Communist terror leading to the final coup...against the non-Communist army leaders...had prevented systematic collection of data on the Communists" (a fanciful tale, but no matter). Wines says nothing about the Times celebration of the slaughter, or the pride of their leading political commentator on the US role in expediting it.²²

Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post was one of the few in the national press to be troubled by the Kadane revelations. His reaction too is instructive.

After the Kadane story appeared, the Post carried a letter by Indonesian human rights activist Carmel Budiardjo, who pointed out that direct US complicity in the massacre was already known from the cable traffic between the US Embassy in Jakarta and the State Department published by Gabriel Kolko, specifically, the Green-Rusk interchange cited earlier. A month later, Rosenfeld expressed some concern, adding that "in the one account I read" -- namely, Kolko's book -- some doubts are raised about Communist complicity in the alleged coup attempt that served as the pretext for the massacres (note the evasion of the crucial issues, a deft stroke). But, Rosenfeld continued, Kolko's "typical revisionist blame-America-first point of view makes me distrust his conclusions." He expressed the hope that "someone whose politics are more mainstream would sift through the material and provide an independent account." His plea for rescue appears under the heading, "Indonesia 1965: Year of Living Cynically?"

²¹ Kadane, SFE, May 20, 1990. WP, May 21; AP, May 21; Guardian (London), May 22; BG, May 23, 1990. One exception to the general dismissal was the New Yorker, "Talk of the Town," July 2, 1990. Guatemala, ch. 7.7.

²² Wines, NYT, July 12; Martens, letter, WP, June 2, 1990.