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Cold Files 005: The Killings That Built a Government. Indonesia, 1965 to 1966
In 1968 the CIA produced a research study titled "Indonesia 1965: The Coup That Backfired." Buried in it is a sentence the historian Geoffrey Robinson quotes at the opening of his 2018 history of the killings:
In terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders of the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.
That is the assessment, written three years after the fact, of the intelligence service of a government that helped make it happen. It changed nothing. Almost nobody read it. Robinson makes the forgetting plain: the World History Project's entry for 1965 records the debut of Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal, and not the deaths of half a million Indonesians.
The night
At around 3am on 1 October 1965, seven squads moved through Jakarta against seven senior army officers. They called themselves the Thirtieth of September Movement, G30S, under Lieutenant Colonel Untung of the presidential guard. Six generals were killed: Ahmad Yani, the army commander, shot at his home, along with R. Suprapto, M. T. Haryono, S. Parman, D. I. Panjaitan and Sutoyo Siswomiharjo. General Abdul Haris Nasution, the intended seventh, went over the wall of his compound into the grounds of the Iraqi ambassador's residence next door and lived. His aide, First Lieutenant Pierre Tendean, was taken in his place and killed. Nasution's five-year-old daughter, Ade Irma Suryani, was shot during the raid on the house and died of her wounds five days later.
The bodies were driven to Lubang Buaya, Crocodile Hole, near Halim air base, and dropped down a disused well. Indonesian accounts give the shaft as three quarters of a metre across and twelve metres deep. Divers pulled the bodies out on 4 October, with Major General Suharto, commander of the army's strategic reserve, watching. The state funeral was held the next day, 5 October, Armed Forces Day.
Within a week the movement was over everywhere, and the story of what happened in that well had been written. It was not true.
The lie, and the report that broke it
The civilian press was closed. Two army papers were left running, Angkatan Bersendjata and Berita Yudha. From 5 October they carried accounts of what the communists had done at Lubang Buaya: that members of Gerwani, the PKI-affiliated women's organisation, had held an orgy at the site, danced naked before the captive generals, gouged out their eyes and razored off their genitals before they died.
None of it happened, and the men who could prove it were working while the stories went to press.
On 4 October Suharto ordered autopsies through the Central Army Hospital. Five doctors did the work, two military and three from the University of Indonesia. The bodies carried gunshot wounds and blunt trauma consistent with rifle butts and with a twelve metre fall down a narrow shaft. There were no wounds to the eyes. There was no genital mutilation. When Benedict Anderson eventually analysed the five reports, his summary was flat: not one showed any sign of torture, and there were no razor or knife marks at all.
Sukarno said so publicly on 12 December 1965, citing the autopsy report, ridiculing the story that Gerwani women had been handed razor blades, and telling Indonesians to use their common sense. He was, by then, a president being dismantled, and nobody was listening. The reports sat unpublicised for twenty two years, until Anderson obtained them and published his analysis in the Cornell journal Indonesia in April 1987, in an article called "How Did the Generals Die?"
The atrocity story that licensed the killing of hundreds of thousands of people was contradicted within days by a forensic report ordered by the man the story served, and never allowed to matter.
It did not spread. It was delivered.
The standard telling is of communal rage getting out of hand. The geography does not support it. The killing began in Aceh in October 1965, reached Central Java late that month, East Java and North Sumatra in November, and Bali only in December.
Bali breaks the spontaneity argument. The island waited two months after the alleged coup and then, from early December 1965, lost some eighty thousand people, roughly one Balinese in twenty five, inside a few months. What changed was that the RPKAD, the army's para-commando regiment under Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, arrived. Their function was not only to kill but to train, arm and licence local militias. On 4 November 1965 the US Embassy reported that RPKAD forces in Central Java were providing Muslim youth with training and arms and would keep them out in front. Where the local command was less aggressive, in West Java and Jakarta, the pattern inverts: less mass killing, far more long-term detention. The variation is the evidence.
In East Java the principal civilian killers were Ansor, the youth movement of Nahdlatul Ulama, and its wing Banser. The US consulate in Surabaya reported the mechanism in plain language. 22 December 1965: the army is quietly releasing nightly ten to fifteen prisoners to Moslems for execution. 28 December: victims are now taken out of populous areas before being killed, and their bodies buried rather than thrown into river. That second sentence tells you both that the rivers had been full and that someone had decided the evidence was becoming visible.
Aceh is the best documented case, because the paperwork survived. In 2010 the historian Jess Melvin obtained thousands of pages of Indonesian military files from an archive in Banda Aceh, the closest thing to a perpetrator record that exists. At midnight on 1 October 1965 the Sumatra inter-regional commander, Ahmad Mokoginta, ordered from Medan that all members of the armed forces resolutely and completely annihilate the counter-revolution to its roots. Melvin counts 1,941 killings recorded in the military's own files there, against a provincial toll she estimates at around 10,000.
Counting
There is no number. There is a fight about the number, and the fight is part of the crime, because the state that did the killing held the archive for thirty years.
A fact finding commission established by Sukarno, not by the army, worked from 27 December 1965 to 6 January 1966 and reported 78,000 killed and 106,000 detained. It visited four regions and wound up while the killing was still going on. One of its members, Oei Tjoe Tat, later put the real figure at five to six hundred thousand. KOPKAMTIB, the army's security command, produced an internal figure of roughly one million, from a report no independent scholar has ever seen. Embassy Jakarta reported on 21 December 1965 that at least 100,000 had been killed in the army organised campaign. On 4 August 1966 Dean Rusk told President Johnson that while the exact figure would never be known, an estimated 300,000 were killed.
Robert Cribb has done the most careful work on the counting problem and is the most honest about its limits. There are no perpetrator records comparable to the Nazi archive, personal testimony is thin, census comparison is inconclusive. What is left, in his phrase, are the educated guesses of a number of variously informed people. He puts the published range at 100,000 to two million, and says most scholars accept between 200,000 and 500,000. Robinson works from an estimated half a million.
Indonesia's population in 1965 was about 101 million. Half a million dead is one Indonesian in two hundred, killed by soldiers and neighbours, in six months.
The camps
The killing is only half the file.
Robinson puts the number detained without charge at around a million, some for more than thirty years. By Indonesia's own count more than a million were held. Roughly a thousand were ever brought to trial.
Detainees were sorted into categories: A for alleged direct involvement, B for party members and members of affiliated organisations, C for sympathisers and family. Almost everyone sent to the Buru Island penal colony was Category B, and the reason should stay with you. They were exiled precisely because there was not enough evidence to charge them. The state could not try them, so it built a colony. More than 12,000 went to Buru from 1969 and were not released until 1979. The best known was the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
The American file
On 17 October 2017 the National Security Archive published 39 documents drawn from nearly 30,000 pages of US Embassy Jakarta files. 23 October 1965: the army had already executed many communists, but this fact must be very closely held. 30 November: many provinces appear to be successfully meeting this problem by executing their PKI prisoners, or by killing them before they are captured, a task in which Moslem youth groups are providing assistance.
The material support is documented in the State Department's record and in Bradley Simpson's work. The 303 Committee approved covert medical supplies on 5 November 1965, and a communications package for the army around 19 November, requested by the US ambassador, an aide to Nasution and General Sukendro, and delivered to Kostrad headquarters. On 2 December Ambassador Marshall Green cabled his concurrence in providing Adam Malik with fifty million rupiah, requested by Malik, for KAP-Gestapu, the civilian anti communist action front.
Then there are the lists. In May 1990 the journalist Kathy Kadane reported that embassy political officer Robert Martens had passed the names of thousands of PKI figures to the Indonesian side. Martens confirmed the act and disputed the framing in a letter to the Washington Post that June: the names were of PKI leaders and senior cadre, they came entirely from the Indonesian communist press, he alone decided to do it, and no classified material was involved.
Be precise about what that establishes. That American officials compiled lists and passed them over is established, by Martens's own admission and by the US government's published record, which includes Green reporting that a sanitised list handed over in December 1965 was in use by Indonesian security authorities. What the lists changed is not, and probably cannot be. The army had its own intelligence and its own momentum, and no researcher has linked a specific killing to a specific American-supplied name. The lists are documented complicity. They are not a documented cause.
Simpson, the most critical major historian of US conduct here, finds no evidence that Washington planned or triggered the events of 30 September. He also finds that in the preceding months the CIA had expanded covert operations aimed at provoking an armed clash between the army and the PKI. Both are in his work, and neither cancels the other.
Sixty years, and nothing
Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission submitted its findings on 20 July 2012, after interviewing 349 witnesses and victims. Its conclusion, in summary: the events were the result of state policy to exterminate members and sympathisers of the PKI. It identified nine categories of crimes against humanity. In November 2012 the Attorney General returned the 840 page report, citing insufficient evidence and the difficulty of investigating events decades old.
In 2015 an International People's Tribunal heard the case in The Hague and delivered judgment on 20 July 2016. It found the Indonesian state responsible for ten gross human rights violations, among them mass killing, enslavement, torture, enforced disappearance, sexual violence, exile and false propaganda, and concluded that the crimes amounted to genocide, directed at specific groups with intent to destroy them in part. It is a citizens' tribunal, and in its own words it has the power of prosecution and no power of enforcement. Indonesia's security minister said the panel was none of their business and that Indonesia had its own system.
Three months earlier the same minister had opened a government symposium in Jakarta. On an apology he was direct: we are not that stupid, do not even think the government will apologise.
On 11 January 2023 President Joko Widodo stood at the state palace and said that with a clear mind and a sincere heart, as the leader of this country, he admitted that gross human rights violations had happened in several incidents and regretted them very much. The 1965 to 1966 killings were listed first of twelve. He did not apologise. The UN human rights office, welcoming the statement, welcomed his acknowledgment and expression of regret. Not his apology.
In May 2016 the survivors' organisation YPKP 65 handed the government a list of 122 mass graves. In November 2017 it reported sixteen more. None has been exhumed, and nobody has ever been prosecuted.
The men who did the killing in Medan were still alive, and when a filmmaker asked them to describe their work they did not deny it. They re-enacted it on camera, in costume, in the style of the American gangster films they loved. That footage became "The Act of Killing." Its companion, "The Look of Silence," followed a man conducting eye examinations on the men who murdered his brother. Both were nominated for Academy Awards. Neither could be released commercially in Indonesia, and both circulated instead through free downloads and unofficial screenings.
A country does not forget half a million people. It is taught not to mention them.
Next in Cold Files: Sri Lanka, 2009. The No Fire Zones, and the state that shelled them.
Sources consulted
Geoffrey Robinson, "The Killing Season," Princeton University Press, 2018
Robert Cribb, "Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966," 2002
CIA research study, "Indonesia 1965: The Coup That Backfired," 1968
Benedict Anderson, "How Did the Generals Die?", Indonesia No. 43, Cornell, 1987
National Security Archive, "U.S. Embassy Tracked Indonesia Mass Murder 1965," 2017
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XXVI
Kathy Kadane, May 1990; Robert Martens, Washington Post, June 1990
Bradley Simpson, "Economists with Guns," Stanford, 2008
Jess Melvin, "The Army and the Indonesian Genocide," Routledge, 2018
Komnas HAM statement, 20 July 2012
International People's Tribunal 1965, Final Report of the Judges, 2016
Human Rights Watch; OHCHR statement, January 2023
Photographs credited inline, via Wikimedia Commons
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