This year marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66 — one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, carried out under the banner of anti-communism.
More than a million communists, workers, peasants, intellectuals, and their families were butchered, while countless others were jailed, tortured, or disappeared.
This was not a “domestic tragedy” of “Cold War tensions,” as bourgeois historians like to frame it. It was an international counter-revolution — a deliberate strategy by the imperialist powers to crush socialism where it threatened their domination.
By the 1960s, the PKI had become a political force of global significance. With more than three million members and millions more sympathizers among workers and peasants, the PKI was the largest communist party outside the socialist bloc. It was deeply rooted in Indonesia’s anti-colonial struggle, drawing strength from the aspirations of the poor and oppressed.
This reality terrified the Indonesian bourgeoisie and their Western backers. The PKI’s rise threatened imperialist access to Indonesia’s oil, minerals, and markets. For Washington and London, already entrenched in bloody counter-insurgency wars from Malaya to Vietnam, Indonesia had to be “neutralized.” The pretext came with the failed September 30th Movement in 1965.
General Suharto and his clique seized the moment, blaming the PKI for an alleged “coup attempt.” In reality, Suharto’s coup — backed immediately by the U.S. and Britain — was the launching pad for the annihilation of the communist movement.
The massacres of 1965–66 were not spontaneous. They were engineered. The CIA and MI6 armed, financed, and guided the Indonesian military and right-wing militias. Washington supplied lists of thousands of communists and sympathizers to be “eliminated.” (2) British propaganda outlets pumped out lies to demonize the PKI and justify the terror.
This was a campaign of extermination: communist cadres were rounded up and executed, villages burned, bodies dumped in rivers. Women and children were tortured and killed. Prison camps overflowed with tens of thousands, many subjected to years of forced labor.
Western governments applauded. The U.S. described the massacre as “a gleam of light in Asia.” British officials bragged about the “favorable climate” for investment created by the bloodletting. Imperialist corporations — Standard Oil, General Motors, British Petroleum, Unilever — rushed in to feast on the carcass of Indonesia’s shattered socialist movement. (3)
What was destroyed was not only the PKI but also the revolutionary potential of the Indonesian working class. Imperialism had secured its victory in Southeast Asia, and it was bought with rivers of blood.
Why has the Indonesian Holocaust been pushed to the margins of history? Because remembering it undermines the “moral authority” of the imperialist powers. The rulers of the U.S. and Britain want us to believe they stand for “democracy” and “freedom.” But the truth is that their so-called “freedom” is built on the corpses of workers, peasants, and revolutionaries across the globe.
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| Suharto with US Presidents Nixon and Reagan |
On this 60th anniversary, communists and progressives around the world must speak clearly: the Indonesian massacres were a crime against humanity, a crime of imperialism, and a crime against the international working class.
The martyrs of the PKI live on in the struggles of workers and peasants everywhere. Their blood cries out against imperialism, against capitalism, and against every lie used to justify mass murder in the name of “freedom.”
To honor them is not simply to mourn — it is to fight. To fight against the erasure of their memory, against the revisionism that sanitizes imperialist crimes, and against the capitalist system that breeds such massacres.
Sixty years later, the duty of revolutionaries is clear: to remember, to resist, and to carry forward the unfinished struggle for socialism.
Notes:
(1) The Communist Party of Indonesia, the first one established in Asia (1920), reached during the 1960s a significant party strength with approximately 3,000,000 members, especially in the Java region. However, opportunist political choices by its leadership led to the subsequent weakening of the party ties with broader masses. Despite its organisational strength and the extraordinary large number of its members, the CPI didn't avoid the trap that had been set by both its domestic enemies and their imperialist allies.
(2) On May 17, 1990, based on testimonies by personnel who had worked at the US embassy in Jakarta during the 1960s, an article by the States News Service of Washington DC reported that the US embassy had provided Suharto regime lists with over 5,000 names of communists and supporters of the Communist Party.
(3) The role of the imperialists in the Indonesia massacre has been confirmed by professors and researchers. For example, Professor Brad Simpson of Princeton University and author of “Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968”, has said that the U.S and British governments did “everything in their power” to ensure that the Indonesian army would carry out the mass killings. The massacre against the communists in Indonesia was followed by an organised plan for the entry of foreign monopoly capital in the country. According to the documentary “The New Rulers of the World” (2001) by Australian journalist and researcher John Pilger, the dictatorial regime of Suharto proceeded to business deals with known monopoly and banking groups such as General Motors, Daimler-Benz, Chase Manhtattan Bank, Siemens, Standard Oil etc.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
